Strategies for Building High Performing Sales Teams – Luminary Interview with Yoon Cannon
Sales teams are at the heart of growing your business at every stage from startup to main street to middle market. How do you create the right sales systems? Find top sales talent? Clone yourself?
Steve Dailey from Entrepreneur Excellence interviews Business Growth Expert, Yoon Cannon where we discuss actionable strategies for growing your sales teams, cloning yourself as the CEO, strategic planning and more.
Here’s an overview of the sales team questions Steve asks Yoon Cannon. Scroll below to watch the video of the full interview.
Question 1 02:58
You know I’d like to invite you to share with us some of the common frustrations that you see small business owners bumping into when it comes time to duplicate themselves through other people as the sales engine.
Question 2 07:12
So how do you begin to formulate a selling system that can be translated or taught to somebody else?
What are the important components of that?
Question 3 11:35
So you mentioned Sandler there and and you know we can go out into the, you know onto the internet or into a, you know, on Amazon or into a bookstore and and get just fire host with all kinds of sales, books, techniques, you know, tactics and strategies and all this kind of stuff. Where does that stuff fit in to creating a winning hand off to a new sales team?
Do you do that stuff? Do you adopt it? Do you introduce it?
What’s your feeling about that?
Question 4 15:36
Would you say that bringing in new people to enhance, accelerate, expand our sales efforts, is that, is that a good time to introduce new ideas that we might have been thinking of or is it better to, to just bring people in to what we’ve done and, and what we know is good business and then build the new things in as we go, when is the best time to think about that?
Question 5 25:55
So I know that you’ve got all kinds of formulas and check sheets and things that people might find useful. Tell us how to get more information about how to figure out this sales puzzle and duplicate ourselves in the marketplace
Do You Need Help Growing Your Sales Team?
Whether you’re interviewing for a VP of Sales, a Fractional Chief Sales Officer, a Sales Growth Advisor or you’d just need clarity what the best next steps look like for you to take your company to the next level …
I invite you to book a complimentary discovery call with me here:
Getting new customer leads is exciting, but that enthusiasm can quickly wither when you don’t know how to best convert leads into new clients.
When this becomes the trend for your small business, you immediately ask, “why?” before seeking out solutions to combat your lack of sales from leads, you should be aware of some important sales conversion facts:
Online leads do not automatically translate into sales.
Per Marketo, only 25% of leads ready to buy from you.
1/4 of leads are qualified, meaning approximately 75% aren’t your ideal customer.
Now, don’t let these numbers frighten you. In addition to this, you must understand the psychology behind the lack of leads turning into sales.
The Real Reason Why People Won’t Buy from You
There are four primary reasons why small businesses fail to convert leads online. These sales barriers are as follows:
Trust: People don’t trust themselves, so how do you expect them to trust you immediately upon connecting with your business for the first time? Traffic to your website may not always translate into sales if your leads are reluctant to buy from you. The absence of trust can stem from a lack of proof showing you do what you claim, lack of contact information, a poorly designed website, or non-targeted content.
Authority: If you don’t establish yourself as the authority in your field, through quality content, you will find it quite hard to gain customers, because they may see you as untrustworthy.
Money: If your price doesn’t match the perceived value of your products or services, you are likely to miss out on sales.
Time: If the customers feel that the time is not right, they are likely not to purchase.
Turning Leads into Sales: 4 Key Strategies
There are four solutions for converting online leads, which when used together, can increase your sales conversion rates:
Social Proof
Content Marketing
Sales Qualification Process
Email Marketing Solutions
#1. Develop Trust with Social Proof (Testimonials and Reviews)
Building a reliable brand will ultimately make it easier for you to market your product or services.
One of the best and easiest ways to build trust is through social proof, specifically reviews, and testimonials from your current or previous clients. Social proof will not only confirm that you’re talking the talk, but that you’re walking the walk.
When someone encounters your brand for the first time through your website, you need to: 1) show that you’re an authority, and 2) provide social proof.
Let your current customers sing your praises by encouraging them to write a review or testimonial through email, on Yelp, Facebook, or any other relevant review site. For those “special” reviews, showcase them on your website. Do not worry about getting one or two negative reviews.
This might work to your advantage, in that, they persuade leads to believe that your reviews are reputable. If people see that others are buying your products and enjoying them, they can be persuaded to follow suit.
Invest your time in writing well-researched and helpful blog content and eBooks. If your leads find that you are knowledgeable in your industry and in the various products that you’re selling, then they will believe in your ability to provide quality products.
You can hire marketing agencies to write blog posts for you. Or, you can learn simple shortcuts and time saving templates to train you and/or your marketing assistant to turn your knowledge into written blog articles for your business website.
#3. Utilize a Sales Qualification Process
One of the most crucial strategies for converting leads into sales is to have a qualification process. Lead qualification is the evaluation of the ability of a lead to purchase from you.
The qualification process involves gathering the necessary information about your leads to move them through the sales process. There are three types of leads: Information Qualified Leads (IQL), Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). How each is determined varies from business to business. Once your qualification metrics are defined, only then will you be able to take appropriate action that will convert your leads into sales.
Using a sales qualification process prevents you from coming on too strong and putting off potential clients. It also helps your sales team save valuable time and instead focus it on customers who are ready to buy.
For those leads who have not been identified as “ready to buy” or an SQL, you can nurture them through your sales funnel using email marketing solutions.
#4. Leverage Email Nurturing Solutions
Email nurturing is one of the greatest tools that you can use to convert leads into sales.
It’s all about leveraging marketing automation to follow up and remain in contact with any leads that come through your sales funnel. If you follow up with leads within 5 minutes, you are 9 times more likely to get a sale.
Strategically sending your clients or customer regular emails will drill information about your business and your services or products into their minds. The more they hear from you, the more they are likely to buy. You want to send targeted emails, to targeted email lists, based on where they are in your sales funnel and how they interact with your emails.
These emails can be anything from newsletters to content offers. The purpose of this strategy is to guarantee the right lead is receiving the right email at the right time.
The Bottom Line
Today, even though most marketing efforts are online, customers still need to feel that personal touch. By incorporating these few lead conversion ideas into your business strategy will help to ensure that you not only have thousands of people stopping by your website, but you will have them laying down their money!
QUESTION: What is your favorite strategy that’s been working for you in your business when it comes to converting leads into sales? Share your comments and questions below.
Author Bio: ShaDrena Simon is a digital strategist and inbound marketer for Yokel Local Internet Marketing Inc. You can reach her at: shadrena@yokellocalmarketing.com
If you’re planning to launch to new product, a brand new program or a new service offering in your business you need to have a written launch plan to follow.
But, how do you know you have the right actions plans or the best strategies in your launch plan?
So, wouldn’t you like to know whether you’re on the right path in developing your launch plan?
That’s what we are going to dive into in today’s Q&A episode.
Last week I shared 4 tips in Part 1 to the question submitted by one of my listeners Stacy, who asked … “how do you know whether you have the right action plans to achieve your goals?“
I invited Stacy to share her launch action plan with me, so I could provide a laser coaching episode that would address discoveries I made on her specific launch plan.
And, as I suspected, what I found from reviewing Stacy’s launch plan is the same feedback would benefit many of you who are in the similar stage in your business launching a new program or service.
So, click the play button below and listen to
Part 2 – How to Create the Right Action Plans to Achieve Your Goals
Then, join the conversation.
QUESTION: What is the biggest lesson you learned when you launched a new program or service? Share your comments and questions below.
With all the fan fare of New Year resolutions and everyone talking about setting goals, do you ever wonder if it’s an exercise in futility? After all, why keep setting lofty goals you don’t hit in your business?
I find if you just set goals from a place of wishful thinking it can easily set you up for failure in your business. However, understanding your past can help you discover the right goals for your future and set you up for success.
Here are 9 key questions that will help reveal a better approach to goal setting for your business this year:
1. What were the key goals in your business and life you set out to achieve this past year?
It’s important to have these answers right in front of you here to help you better answer the rest of the questions below. If you can’t rattle off this list quickly, it’s because you probably never wrote it down in the first place. If that’s you … reminder #1 — write down your goals this year 🙂
2. Looking back were these the right achievable stretch goals for you at this season in your life and business?
Donald, a new client I started coaching recently, shared a key outcome goal he wanted me to help him with. His stretch goal this year was to grow his 6 Million Dollar business to a 9 Million Dollar business. Donald shared he struggled to stay focused on his daily to-do list. He thought if he got better at focusing on finishing his projects that alone could add the additional 3 Million in growth.
I disagreed.
In my feedback I shared with Donald that it did not seem like the right goal to pursue for the season of life he was in. He already told me his wife wanted him to be home more for her and their three young daughters. Pursuing the goal of getting more tasks done was directly opposite to his family goal of being home with them more.
It was also not the right goal for the season he was in his business. Donald already had 10 employees. He had resources available to him that he was not fully leveraging. After some discussion Donald realized “getting more things done” was an unwise goal for him to pursue. The better stretch goal for Donald was to focus on teaching his 10 employees how to get Donald’s to do list done.
3. Which goals did you achieve this past year?
What were your wins this year? Celebrate those achievements no matter how small. Think about even those seemingly “small” problems you succeeded in solving. One problem I had a few years ago was that I get way too achy sitting at my desk all day. I asked my husband Tom to rig up my treadmill, so I could ergonomically work on my laptop while I walk. Just celebrating a small win like getting on the treadmill 5 days a week has helped me start each day in a positive direction.
4. What is the biggest factor you would attribute to achieving your goals this year?
Give yourself credit for what you did right. I’m sure you know the wisdom in leveraging your strengths. So, it’s important to take the time to review the strengths you have demonstrated this year. You may even be surprised to discover new strengths that emerged in recent months.
If you can’t come up with at least five strengths ask other people to tell you what they think are your strengths. You can also take a fun strength-finder assessment.
5. What goals did you NOT achieve this year?
If you did not achieve every goal this year — welcome to the club. Make peace with the fact that almost 100% of high achieving entrepreneurs do not accomplish every goal they wrote for the year. At the same time, it’s important to note which goals you didn’t yet achieve and prioritize them higher or lower for this upcoming year.
6. Identify what was out of your control that got in the way of unachieved goals.
While you don’t want to let yourself fall into the blame game, you also don’t want to swing too far the other direction and beat yourself up when you had factors that were out of your control.
For example, a year ago I was excited to roll out plans to launch some brand new programs designed especially for my solopreneur audience. But, then I discovered I had a high toxic level of mercury poisoning. It greatly impaired my vision for five months which Ophthalmologists could not correct. As a result I had to move my launch date goals five to six months later than I originally anticipated.
What about you? What obstacles did you have this past year that were out of your control?
7. What would you do differently, knowing what you know now, to help you achieve those same goals this year?
It is easy to want to hit the ground running as fast you as you can, especially in the New Year. But, if you keep on doing what you did, you’ll keep on getting what you got. As entrepreneurs, it’s critically important to take the time to pause, reflect and evaluate the past twelve months in order to discover how you should best move forward the next twelve months.
8. What valuable lessons did you learn this year?
Here is the opportunity for you to put into practice the famous quote:
Likewise, we can also learn from our successes. Facebook guru Amy Porterfield shared on her podcast show, that she noticed the year she decided to invest in herself through a high level mastermind group program is the year her business truly took off. She attributes the valuable lessons she learned came from being in a mastermind group.
9. What can you do now in your business that you could not do one year ago?
It’s important to measure and acknowledge the progress you’ve made. Seeing progress feeds further progress. Employee engagement experts agree that employee productivity is in direct proportion to the level of progress employees felt they were making in their work. As entrepreneurs, we should apply this same productivity principle to our own businesses.
Write down a list of all the areas you have made measurable progress. Maybe a year ago you did not know how to generate leads on LinkedIn, and now you do. Or perhaps a year ago your business did not have the cash flow to hire a marketing assistant, but now you do.
Before you start making new goals for the New Year be sure to assess the old goals you set last year. I invite you to carve out a block of time in your calendar this week or perhaps even right now to take action on answering these 9 questions thoughtfully. Abraham Lincoln once said,
“If you keep on doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep on getting what you’re getting. If you want to get something different, then you need to do something different”
Profound quote isn’t it? …. So, of course, the translation to your business is, if you want to achieve different results by this time next year, you need to take a different approach from how you’ve currently been doing things in your business.
This is the key reason why it is critical for you to do a strategic plan each year for your business regardless if you are a Fortune 500 company, a small family run business, or even a solopreneur. Your strategic plan is your written road map that will help keep you from falling into the same ineffective patterns of behavior and from repeating out dated systems that are no longer worth your time and investment.
Better than that, your strategic plan is your road map that keeps you focused on what things you will now commit to doing differently this year — designed to getting you greater results than ever before.
You know, every time I share the opening quote with business owners and Entrepreneurs I find that 100% of them agree with the truth of this principle. But, you know what? I find that less than 10% of the small business owner audiences I speak to actually have a strategic plan each year.
The 3 biggest reasons I hear all the time from small business owners and Entrepreneurs on why they do not do strategic plans each year is:
1. It seems like an exercise in futility for me to set goals and milestones on paper when things in the past never went according to plan anyway.
2. Doing a strategic plan seems like a large daunting project that I frankly don’t have those large chunks of time to be doing.
3. I don’t know where to start in creating an effective strategic plan
Alright, so let me try to de-bunk some of these limiting beliefs, so that I can help you to accelerate your business growth in 2012.
First, think of your strategic plan as a staging plan.
Strategic planning is not just a piece of paper that shows you’ve written down a bunch of numbers and dates on when you would theoretically like to see those numbers and figures achieved by.
So, if you could have a do-over of this past year (knowing the cause and effects of each of your decisions)…
1.) What would you put on your short list of things you want to do the same?
2.) What would you put on your short list of things you would do differently?
That said, you don’t want to be answering those 2 questions for your business as a whole, you want to segment your post-mortem thoughts as you would address a house room by room.Take the analogy of selling a house. In today’s difficult economy, there are an awful lot of homes on the market.
So, if you’re the seller, you’re going to need to maximize the staging of your home to stand out from all your competition. There are so many other homes your buyers have to choose from!Your realtor or your staging consultant will walk you through room by room with their recommended list of changes you should make to maximize your home’s appeal to the type of buyer you are targeting. The homeowner typically, will have 2 common responses to the staging plan:a) Yes, I’ve been meaning to do that for years, but just haven’t gotten around to fixing that yet.
b) No, I never noticed that was a problem (because I live here I just get used to it and have grown immune to noticing that horrible wallpaper throughout the house)
When the homeowner follows the staging plan, he/she watches their home magically transform from drab to becoming the next coveted hot seller.
That’s what your strategic plan does for your business. It should serve as your room-by-room improvement list that will help you to attract more targeted buyers.
It can do even more than that. Your strategic plan is there not just to achieve your sales goals, but all your other business-related goals — like, here’s one I help small business owners with a lot: I want to work 10-20 hours less per week this year but still increase my profits.
Yes, I can help you formulate what you roadmap should look like in your 2012 Strategic Plan to help you achieve that goal of working less while still growing the business so you’re earning even more.
Now, as for the other 2 objections for not doing a strategic plan:
Not thinking you have the time
Not knowing where to start
You give me 1 hour a month and I’ll show you how to stage your business to have your best year ever!
If you truly want to achieve better results this year in growing your business and you are ready to commit even just one hour a week, I have a simple 1-page strategic plan system that I can hold your hand step-by-step and guide you to do.
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can invest 1 hour a week using my 1-page strategic plan system, I invite you to call me for a no-charge 30-minute discovery session to explore what that could mean for you.
But, hurry on calling me. Because good intentions often turn into wasting years from procrastinating on what you could have easily and quickly done today.
Why not call me now? My direct line is 215-292-4947 EST.
QUESTION: What is the most challenging part of working on your strategic plan to help you grow your business? Please share your comments in the box below.
About Yoon Cannon: Top business coach Yoon Cannon has helped thousands of small business owners, entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and sales teams achieve dramatic results in growing your business. Over the past 20 years Yoon has started 4 successful companies and sold 3 of them. She offers fresh insights as a seasoned business growth expert. Yoon delivers proven process for your sales, marketing and management development. Grab free valuable gifts and resources at https://www.ParamountBusinessCoach.com To book Yoon to speak at your next event email: YoonCannon@ParamountBusinessCoach.com To schedule a complimentary business coaching consultation call (215) 292-4947.
