How To Set Up And Create A Winning Effective Sales Team

Building a great team requires three critical areas. Attitude, Approach and Action. Consider any team, from sports to military to police and fire. Grant Cardone calls this A-Cubed. He'll tell you simple that If the attitude is off, you lose. If the attitude is right, but the approach is off, you lose. It the attitude and the approach is right, but you don't take any or enough action you lose. Attitude, Approach and Action are the success trifecta. Each one holds the other in balance and in check. Pyramids have stability for a reason. Three sides are strong.

The challenge for the sales manager, coach or trainer is how do you build a team that can consistently operate with the right attitude? How do you build a team of players that can all be on the same page and have the same approach? How do you train them to take the right level of action?

No sales team can be effective without a daily sales meeting. As a matter of fact, no good team PERIOD can be fully effective without a daily meeting.

This meeting needs to be used to get focused for the day, get the attitude right and address any problems in the group. Now keep one thing in mind, when I say "address any problems" that does not mean we get negative and turn the meeting into a bitch session about who's doing what and who's not doing what.

Problems that need to be addressed would be issues with in the process that the group might be struggling with. For example, let's say that moral in the group is declining. We need to recharge the attitude in the group and get things going in a positive direction. A poor attitude is virus like in that it will spread and infect the entire group if it's not nipped in the bud quickly.

Look, everyone goes sideways once in a while. It happens. The key is to recognize it and handle it. Take a look at the segment on the right, the one that says:

"Get your head on right and get your game on!"

Would that make a good meeting?

So, you can watch this with your team and then have a discussion about it and start your day off headed in the right direction.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, "Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion." Muhammad Ali

Imagine a bodybuilder who only went to the gym on Friday morning... Imagine a Martial Artist who sparred bi-monthly... what if a surgeon only did what he was taught in Med School and never bothered to improve his technique... consider a cop or solder who never practiced shooting... a basketball player who never practiced his free throw... what if an actor never rehearsed?

Need I say anymore?

If you call yourself a professional sales person, it is your ethical duty to practice, drill and rehearse DAILY.

If you call yourself a professional sales manager than it is your duty to make sure your people and your team has the playbook, knows how to run the play and are able to execute on it. Sending your people out and expecting them to wing it or just figure it out is like sending a solder to battle with an unloaded weapon.

You need to have the right approach to sales and selling in order to be successful and keep your saw sharp at all times.

• Do you have a sales process in place that makes it easy for a buyer to do business with you?
• Do you people fully understand this process and are they willing to take action on it?
• Do you work on your process daily? And not just with a client. Before taking a client!

Learning from experience can be very expensive. More costly than any advertising budget, that's for sure, and yet so many sales organizations choose to train that way and are OK with it because, "that's how it's always been done..."

So here's the thing with selling. It really doesn't have to be just a numbers game. You can control your process. You can't really control another human being, but you can control yourself, how you respond and what you say. If you make your process customer centric, have a playbook laid out and know it like your name, you will be able to handle any selling situation.

What problems do you and your people struggle with daily? Creating a winning team means being able to have a solution to that problem at the ready.

Problems along the Road to the Sale are going to come up. You're going to get stalls, objections, complaints, concerns, all kinds of things. Can you handle them? Do you have a solution to solve the following...

• Just looking
• Not buying today
• What's your best price
• I don't have a lot of time
• What's your cost
• I'm shopping other companies and need your best price
• I got a better deal down the street
• And on and on and on...

To create a winning sales team you need to train your people to be able to handle these very real situations. If you're hesitant about this, may I challenge you when I say, perhaps you're not tuned up enough and need help here too?

Just because you've been doing it a while doesn't mean you excused from keeping your saw sharp. Police officers still go to the range. You have to be a good shot or else you die. Are you and your people getting killed out there?

As with solving problems, closing requires ammunition. In theory and the average rule of thumb is that you it takes 5 attempts to get a yes. The average sales person knows 3 or 4 closes.

So...

You need to KNOW closing. As Grant tells us, the more you KNOW, the less NO you'll hear.

• I need to talk to my...
• I need to think about it
• Too much money
• I'm over budget
• Payment's too high
• I got a better deal down the street
• And so on and so forth...

How do you handle those? Do you have 85 Closes or more in your arsenal at the ready? If not, why not? How long does it take you and your staff to get to "if I could would you?" How much does that cost you in annual revenue?

SUCCESS is a SKILL. Selling is an art and a science all in one. It's something that can be taught and learned. Practice it. Drill it. Understand it. Master it.

What does lack of training cost?

What does lack of training cost in the military? Lives.

What does lack of training cost in professional sports? Games and money.

But see, neither of those elements have that problem. You'll never hear a drill instructor ask the platoon if they feel like jogging today. NEVER! Phil Jackson never checked with his players first before calling a practice session.

How much do you invest in advertising your product and bringing traffic to your place of business? Compare that with what you invest in training your staff to be professional sales people. My guess from the looks of the economy is that ratio might be skewed in the wrong direction.

Drive traffic and let the sales people figure it out when the customers get there.

What sense does that make???

If the NY Giants decided to figure this whole Super Bowl thing out when they got there, the Patriots would have an extra trophy right now.

And so it goes for you. Assuming your willing to take the responsibility to to be a professional sales organization...

For sales training to be most effective it must be:

1) Available 24/7 - Sales training content must be available when sales people need it not just when

2) Sales Motivational - Sales training content that is boring content will be resisted. Sales training must first get the sales team and sales management motivated and excited. Sales people that are not effectively motivated will not achieve sales results regardless of the sales training.

3) Sales Solutions - Sales training must do more than teach a skill must also provide sales people with sales tools to solve problems before, during and after the sale. See our Sales Training Quick Fix Solutions.

4) Sales Training must be All Inclusive - Sales training must included all levels of sales people from the most basic to the most advanced. Most sales training program fail because they focus just on the new sales people and neglect sales training for the other 2/3 of the organization and the management staff.

5) Sales Training Relevant - Sales training must be contain sales training material that is current and relevant to changing times. The sales training material was all created to handle today's better informed customer, more competitive environment and challenging economy.