Sales Efforts: Why CEO's Sales Strategies get Stuck in Neutral?
Presidents, Business Owners and CEO’s all have good intent—In fact we all do what we do because we believe that it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately the choices we make are not always the most effective courses of action. Sales ineffectiveness and pipeline bottlenecks ultimately create a situation where you work harder and longer yet your company fails to gain real traction. This in turn results with the organization being stuck on a sales plateau.
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The Sales Plateau: CEOs and Business Owners also fall Victim to Common Management Traps Opposed to dealing with the real root cause of sales ineffectiveness—which leads to bloated pipelines and complacency in the sales team—Business Owners instead fall victim to a series of common mistakes. This does not occur because management intends to sabotage the company but because many at the top fall prey to several common issues. -Business Owners become conditioned to the excuses given by the sales team for deferring change. They become reserved to the fact that 50%, 60% or 70% efficiency is the best they can achieve. In other words the Business Owner accepts less than optimal effort, yet they are held accountable to 100% of the salaries, commissions, bonuses, benefits, advertising, marketing and other expenses necessary to maintain the sales team.
Business Owners fail to change their sales team’s minds about under-performance as such failing to change the routine of the sales team that has them operating at lower levels than they should be. Business Owners do not realize that in order to get someone to “think” differently, they first must get them to “feel” differently. Business Owners want and desire change, yet fail to uncover their sales team’s incentive to change.
When faced with Lack of Growth the CEO often resorts to the following Self-Destructive Strategies:
Mistake # 1 They impact their margins by adding to their sales team opposed to solidifying their existing team currently under-performing. To add to ineffectiveness, they rely on past lackluster hiring criteria in order to increase the number of feet on the street.
Mistake # 2 They again negatively impact their margins by investing into more advertising and marketing campaigns instead of dealing with the problem of poor qualifying, poor closing skills, and poor follow up on leads previously developed. In effect they spend more to get more leads to have more opportunities to close less business!
Mistake # 3 They rely on the optimism inherent in most sales people or on their gut feel regarding a sales candidate opposed to an objectively created system and structure. The goal is not to rely on hope that new rainmakers will simply appear, again at a significant cost to the company, but to close the gap of inefficiency found in the under-productive sales team. Opposed to implementing their financial future into a proven system, they put their financial futures into the hands of sales people who have consistently proven that their own personal routine is flawed.