Pandemic Selling Tips They can help you accelerate winning deals

SELLING SOLUTIONS

Pandemic Selling Tips They can help you accelerate winning deals

by Gil Cargill, Sales Acceleration Coach

In spite of the headlines that we see in the news, there are some businesses that are thriving and, as a result, are buying new products, technologies and services. Your dealership can thrive during the pandemic, if your marketing and prospecting efforts find people who are in the industries that are doing well. Following are selling tips to implement during this pandemic period.

Increase your marketing footprint: Every demographically desirable decision-maker and/or influencer in your geographic marketplace should receive a marketing message from you and your team regularly. One of the easiest ways to do this is with cold-emailing. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing the opportunity to compete for business in those thriving accounts and markets.

Hire a Sales Development Rep: A sales development representative is responsible for prospecting for your team. He (or she) will use LinkedIn and its Sales Navigator app to create relationships, cold-emailing to nurture relationships, and the phone to set appointments. These individuals should be measured on the number of sales appointments they set.

Close down your sales prevention department: That’s right. Many dealerships have inadvertently developed a sales prevention department. These are typically internal processes and procedures that require your salespeople to engage in an excessive volume of non-sales tasks. Remember, you only have 173 selling hours available to each individual on your team per calendar month. Don’t reduce the number of sales hours that they have available by inflicting and mandating that the sales team get involved with non-sales tasks.

Practice remote selling: Many prospects don’t want to see salespeople during the pandemic. In many of my client accounts, salespeople are actually being refused access to the parking lot, not to mention the lobby of office buildings! Consequently, your team must get very proficient at utilizing video platforms to meet with their prospects.

The teams that master remote selling will be the teams that succeed during the pandemic. In order to achieve a level of proficiency in remote selling, you should hold practice sessions with your team regularly. Critique the presentation and, most importantly, the poise of the salesperson. I’ve seen a lot of haphazard video presentations recently that are really a “turnoff.”

Remind your team members that behavior that may be acceptable to them could be inadvertently offensive to customers. So, they should behave over video as well as, or perhaps even better than, they would in a face-toface sales meeting. Implement activity objectives: Some people derogatorily consider this concept to be “micro managing,” but I believe that well planned out activity objectives allow the manager to become a true coach. Without activity objectives in place, the sales manager can be nothing more than a cheerleader or a motivator.

With activity objectives, the sales manager can position himself as a partner with your salespeople to help them navigate to their success plateau. Instead of saying “work harder,” a proficient coach will say: “Based on your current proficiency, two more appointments per week will produce the results we need by the end of the year.”

Review all past leads: My experience is that many leads are deemed “dead” long before they should be. If you have a box of old leads or a database of old leads, go back through them ASAP. Ten to one on a dollar, there’s a deal or two sitting in that pile, if not more, and you can benefit from this exercise.

Implement an account retention program: As the number of opportunities in all markets shrink due to the pandemic, your current relationships become more valuable to you and to your competitor. Help your team understand that every one of your key accounts is being solicited by your competition. To a degree, I think it’s healthy to have a little paranoia regarding your existing relationships.

Get after those accounts and implement a 90-day business review cycle with each of them. This business review cycle is nicknamed: “Here’s what we’ve done for you lately.” Also, you should implement a top-to-top marketing program.

Top-to-top marketing is nothing more complicated than the owners of your dealership soliciting a conversation with the highest-level manager/executive at your key customer accounts. These conversations should occur three or four times annually. And the theme of these conversations should be focused on your customer’s strategic focus. In other words, don’t make these sales calls.n

Gil Cargill is a consultant, speaker and trainer, whohas helped thousands of businesses achieve dramatic, permanent improvements in sales productivity. He can be reached at gil@gilcargill.com. Visit www.gilcargill.com.