Six Practical Tips To Help Your Sales Team Out Of A Slump
by Richard D'Ambrosio /
Michael Hoffman, president of Igniting Performance, a Dallas based company that specializes in the skills of sales, customer loyalty and leadership, recently discussed how to help your sales team pull out of a slump at a Travel Institute leadership webinar.
Hoffman focused on how people managers can inspire sales people when they’re struggling, and offered practical advice on how to get a team to think about solutions.
1. Be empathic
Empathy is the emotion that is involved in all sales. When someone gets into a slump, and emotions go down, that can have a dramatic impact on them. You’re not responsible for their self-esteem, but you can impact it.
2. Let them tell you what they could do to improve
Leaders need to seek more than tell. If you are doing more of the generating of ideas to get them out of a slump, you need to ask more involvement questions. Give me your observations. How would you approach that?
3. Explore your team’s network
Ask them: “Do you have 25 advocates you could name right now, someone who would go out of their way to promote you? How many times do you contact them each year? How can we get them to promote you?” They should be contacting their inner circle of promoters at least three times a year on a personal level. A note. An e-mail.
4. Try team exercises
I like to have people play the game, “You don’t know Jack.” When we’re too focused on our selling points, we stop listening to our customers and miss the opportunity to find that new issue that we can solve with our services.
5. Teach your team that they can never go deep enough
I like to teach teams to look for their customers’ power phrases, the verbiage that keeps returning from them. When you hear something interesting, ask the customer strong follow up questions like: “Tell me about that? What else?”
6. Focus your team on the actions that matter the most
One of my favorite quotes is “We accomplish what we give our attention to.”