Are You A Confident Sales Leader?
4:03

Are You A Confident Sales Leader?

Your organisation relies on your sales activities to help grow the business. You may be a confident person but how confident are you with the sales processes around you? We asked Sales Leaders what advice they would give to fellow Sales Professionals to help them with their confidence in the sales process. Below are four items to check. Why not download the free sales plan below?  

Sales Directors, Managers and leaders are all expected to be super confident, influential figures within their business. Your organisation relies on you to bring in new business, nurture and retain your existing clients every day. Many articles on the web today discuss what makes a confident sales leader, focussing on attitude and the way sales professionals conduct themselves. This is not another ones of those articles/blogs. Instead, we talk hard facts. You may be confident in yourself, but are you confident in the sales support activities that may not be in your control?

Boost your sales confidence by:

  1. Appreciating your digital footprint - Who you ‘think’ your competitors are, aren’t necessarily your competitors online. You will be competition for space digitally with organisations, products or services that you wouldn’t expect. Ask the question to your agency: who are my real online competitors for keywords and phrases? Sales Leaders that understand their digital presence are often confident with their future strategy.

  2. Truly understanding your marketplace - Are you actively monitoring your competition’s movements? While it is important, you should set your own stall out and concentrating on the competition should not entirely consume you, it is a good way to help position yourself. Competitors are always manoeuvring, finding new ways to obtain market share and creating opportunities. Your competitors’ messaging bears influence on your own. There is a range of effective ways you can monitor your competition, from the simple (and free) to the more involved deep dive research. Knowing you have the competitive edge and thinking ahead with campaign ideas enable Sales Leaders to sleep easier.

  3. Understanding your numbers - It is important to not just have the volume of new contacts to speak with, but they need to convert. Are your enquiries good quality? What are the all-important prospect first touch points through your sales and marketing activities? Have you got a CRM that can help with your deal stage process? With sales automation tools, Sales Leaders can be far more proactive.

  4. Turning your content management plan a real strategy - Are you generating words for words sake or are you writing to the right audience? Is it engaging? Does it contain the relevant keywords? Are you helping your audience to do their job better, rather than just pushing your features and benefits? Understanding what the Content Management Plan is for next 6-12 months give Sales Leaders confidence that they will engage with and consistently nurture the correct audience.                                    

If you scored one out of four, then there is some planning to do. Download this free sales activity plan from HubSpot HERE.

If you are a Sales Leader who scored four out of four, then you are well on your way to becoming super confident and making everyone around you confident too.

Other ways Sales Leaders can increase their confidence is by understanding;

  • Ratios for Inbound versus Outbound
  • Sales & Marketing Budgets
  • Sales Funnel versus Flywheel
  • Data drought or Data overload
  • Sales communications consistency
  • Dropping prospects – Leaky bucket and creating barriers for the prospect
  • Art of cross sell - Not leaving anything on the table
  • Reporting capabilities 

About the Author: The Secret Source team work alongside sales leaders, helping them achieve maximum confidence. 

Written by Nick Carlson