Have you empowered your non-sales staff in helping you sell more?
This great article features 6 simple ways to get your non-sales staff adding to your revenue. Here’s 3 of them:
1. Educate your team that selling is everyone’s job.
Too many employees have never made the connection between their role and sales for their company. Not only is it your responsibility to help them connect the dots, but you need to also help them see how increasing sales benefits everyone, creating security, opportunity, and stability for them.So start by explaining this to your team. Share stories of how people in the company helped do just that. Celebrate the successes of non-sales staff who help generate more business. Reinforce this into the culture of your company.
2. Teach your team to “recommend” or “share” their favorites.
Ever wonder why the waiter at a good restaurant share’s his favorite appetizer? After all, why should a total stranger’s opinion matter to what you order?The answer is that it does matter. We are social beings. We care and are influenced by what other people like or do. Social psychologists call this “social proof”.Train your team to recommend a specific product, or service, or solution to any prospect they run into in the course of business.
What’s more, when you frame selling as “recommending” or “sharing”, this dissolves the internal barriers that many non-sales people have with the very idea of sales (and the potential rejection they fear.)
3. Train your team how to spot new sales opportunities.
Every team member in your company should continuously be on the look out for new sales opportunities. We call this activity, “Lead spotting”.What are the signals that hint at a good opportunity? What situations are you best primed to solve for a prospect? What clues indicate urgency, need, and budget?Train your team to ask a few gentle probing questions and then make sure you have given your staff a simple process to hand these leads over to your sales team. This could be a web form they fill out, a lead card they hand to your sales staff, or an email address they send all lead possibilities to.
Train your sales staff to “close the loop” by telling the referring team member what happened with the lead they handed in, this will encourage your staff to be on the lookout for even more sales opportunities.
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