How to have good evaluation conversations in the sales department?

How to have good evaluation conversations in the sales department?

Many years ago, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a leading technology company at the time, now also one of the largest, started to lose market share very quickly. In the initial phase, the corporation's managers were unable to identify the problem, so they reacted in a fairly standard way. In order to prevent further market share degradation, they started to introduce solutions to, for example, motivate employees to increase the number of customer visits. Unfortunately, an increase in the number of customer visits did not translate into better sales results at all. None of the solutions introduced for this purpose and the attempts to increase sales through the number of visits made did anything.

Eventually, the company decided to look much deeper into the problem. It turned out that the problem was not in the input of the sales representatives, but more in the understanding of the purchasing processes on the customer side, but most of all the problem stemmed from the Managers„ approach to interviewing their employees. Managers were focusing on reporting the quantity rather than the quality of visits, forgetting, for example, the parameter of the ”Customer Purchasing Cycle'.

The busy sales department was not doing a good job of reading customer signals, focusing on the number of visits and not very much on their importance in terms of moving the sales process forward. Managers did not ask the right questions of their subordinates during conversations, did not stimulate the progress of the sales process, did not ask about the customer's readiness to make a transaction. As a result, no one in the company was able to effectively and on an ongoing basis assess either the customer's potential, let alone identify which stage of the „buying cycle” the customer was at. As a result, driven by a lack of relevant data, managers made the wrong decisions, such as focusing on customers who were ultimately not interested in buying the company's services at all.

So what is the „Customer Purchasing Cycle”?

We will consider this in much more depth during the workshop, but in brief it is a set of factors that, as a sum, determine a customer's willingness to purchase goods or services at a given point in time, or in the near, foreseeable future.

Think about how the number of customer visits translates into your actual sales? Do you find yourself in a situation where you keep changing things but achieving the same result and not really why this is happening and how to change it? The key is to have the right evaluation conversations and be able to ask questions that matter and keep a good check on the progress of the sales process.

Imagine how much more profit your company could make if the effectiveness of the sales representatives on your team increased from, say, 30% to 40% customers won vs. customers visited. If you are interested in this issue, this workshop is for you.

Consider with us what elements can influence the „Customer Purchase Cycle” in your area. What elements should you take into account to assess the customer's readiness to buy in the first place, and how to qualitatively evaluate your own sales funnel. In the course of the workshop, we will help you to develop a model of structured conversation patterns within your sales team, such that every conversation held brings you closer to your common goal.