How To Get Sales Teams To Prospect – in Just 7 Minutes with Wendy Weiss

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Related Links and Resources:

The FREE resource is an eBook "A Practical Guide to Getting Sales Teams to Prospect", go to http://bit.ly/managers-resource 

Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling™, is an author, speaker, sales trainer, and sales coach. She is recognized as one of the leading authorities on lead generation, cold calling and new business development. Her clients include Avon Products, ADP, Sprint and thousands of entrepreneurs throughout the world. Wendy has been featured in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power, Inc, Forbes and various other business and sales publications. She is the author of, Cold Calling for Women: Opening Doors & Closing Sales and The Sales Winner’s Handbook, Essential Scripts and Strategies to Skyrocket Sales Performance.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:37 Wendy’s ideal Client: If you're a business owner and you have a sales team, whether or not you have a Sales Manager. You're sick and tired of going to a sales meeting where your sales team says "nobody's doing anything..we need better leads, we need to do marketing, we need to do social media, we need to get a new website.." and on and on.

2:05 Problem Wendy helps solve: That's the problem that I fix. I work with business owners that have sales teams that are underperforming. We help them build a pipeline of opportunities which is faster, more easily, and more profitably.

2:48 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Wendy: One very concrete indicator is that the sales revenue is down. That's not a feeling or emotion but it can be real. If you're feeling the frustration, if you're feeling really stuck, if you feel like losing your mind when you go to these sales meetings, then we should talk.

3:31 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Wendy and her solution: One of the biggest mistake that I see all the time, business owners says to me "we're going to hire some salespeople" and I say "great, what do you have in place for them?" and replies "Oh, we're going to hire experience people". That is a recipe for disaster. Let's think about this for a minute; when you hire a salesperson, experienced or not experienced, there are all sorts of hard costs that are involved with hiring someone. We got to place ads, somebody has to go through the resumes and interview them. Once they're hired, they need a computer, they need a phone, all sorts of things that they need. Somebody has to supervise them, somebody's got to train them. If they leave, then your insurance cost is going to go up. There are all sorts of cost associated in hiring a salesperson and research shows something like 50% of newly hired salespeople are washed out in a year. That's a lot of money to spend for nothing. It is a much better idea to have a step by step benchmark process in place for your newly hired sales person. And if you got that process and you benchmark it, and you know how it works and what to expect. First of all, you can set expectations for that newly hired sales person and, you can tell fairly quickly if they're going to be successful or not. And, it enables you to coach them or help them, because if they're not hitting the benchmarks, you can coach them.

5:39 Wendy’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): The number one action is ‘learn the skill’; your salespeople need to learn the skill. There's a myth that people are born salespeople; doesn't exist. It's a skill. Even if you hate everything I'm saying today, go to somebody else that can help them.

6:23 Wendy’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): The FREE resource is "A Practical Guide to Getting Sales Teams to Prospect." In the practical guide, I'm giving some very concrete tips about what you need to have in place for a new salesperson, and also how to coach them to be successful. Go to http://bit.ly/managers-resource.

7:01 What is the underpinnings of a successful training for a sales person? We didn't talk about this at all because we don't have a lot of time. My first career was dancing in a ballet company. I believed that everything I learned in life, I learned in ballet class. And what I learned in ballet class is 'warm-up, rehearse, perform'. The problem that most people have is that they jump right into the performance without the warm-up or the rehearsal. That is the framework for training sales people. Warm-up; they have to learn everything they need to know to be successful. Rehearse; they have to practice, they need the muscle memory so that they can just execute automatically. And only then, do they start to perform, do they start to sell.