Sales Management Training | Sales Training Program | How To Solve Problems Together With Your Sales
Having trouble selling your solutions? Do you have a hard time getting your sales work force to buy into your plan?
That’s because it’s your plan, not theirs.
Let your sales staff in on the initial planning and get their input throughout. You’ll come up with a solution everybody can own.
Yeah, it takes longer to get to that solution when you talk about it. Would you rather spend the time creating the solution or scrambling to fix all those “solutions” that didn’t work?
If you include your sales staff in the problem-solving process, you get more motivated, confident sales staff. You also get better solutions. Here’s the process:
Define the opportunity. It’s a management cliché, but that doesn’t make it wrong: a problem really is a challenge, and a challenge is an opportunity.
Define the goal. Once you have the opportunity, the goal usually becomes obvious. Make sure. Put it into words everyone understands and agrees with.
Define the actions you need to take. Once you have a clearly defined goal, laying out the steps needed to get there becomes much more manageable.
Create the plan. Who’s going to do what? And, when are they going to have it done? The most important element in any plan is the next step. What do we do next?
Create the evaluation standard. How will we know when we’ve arrived?
Confirm understanding. Before you end a planning session, make sure everyone has the same notions of what you’ve decided. Repeat and paraphrase key points and put it in writing for everyone to review.
Plan the follow-up. Make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do next, and then set a deadline for a progress report.
Your discussions should be as free and open as you can make them. Here are three ways to accomplish this:
Create as many possibilities as you can for input before you start focusing on a single solution: This gives you a pool of ideas to choose from.
Separate the idea from the person who proposed it: You want to discuss plans, not personalities.
If an idea is offered sincerely, take it seriously: Nothing kills creative problem-solving faster than ridicule.
“Resist the temptation to assign the person who came up with the suggestion the task of carrying it out. You want to encourage innovation, remember?”
