Use the CANEI Method
Canei (continuous and never-ending improvement) as a philosophy is the driving force behind the most successful and profitable companies in the world today. It should be your philosophy as well.
With CANEI, you continually look for ways to improve every part of your performance, from the selection of salespeople through every aspect of managing and motivating them. You encourage your salespeople to improve as well, from the first customer contact to product delivery and customer satisfaction.
Quality circles are a popular use of the CANEI method. You bring your team together once each week to discuss improvements in sales methodology and effectiveness. The good news is that every single process in your business can be improved and should be improved continually. Sometimes one improvement in a key function can lead to a dramatic improvement in results. The most effective use of quality circles is to structure them around the key result areas in selling.
Seven Key Result Areas in Selling
There are seven key result areas in selling, plus one additional area:
1. Prospecting
2. Establishing rapport and trust
3. Identifying needs accurately
4. Presenting persuasively
5. Answering objections effectively
6. Closing the sale
7. Getting resales and referrals
The additional skill is time management for salespeople.
PROSPECTING
Give yourself a grade of one to ten on this key result area. How happy are you with the process of finding and developing new customers for your products and services? If you give yourself a low score here, this area can be the subject of a quality circle, where your team comes together to focus on methods and techniques to increase the quality and quantity of new prospects.
There is a principle in psychology that says that whatever you focus upon continually begins to improve, and sometimes quite rapidly. When you sit people down to discuss how they can improve in the area of new customer acquisition, they will come up with ideas that are working for them and that may be applicable to everyone in the sales force.
ESTABLISHING RAPPORT AND TRUST
You have heard it said that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. The ability of the salesperson to establish a high-quality relationship of trust and credibility is the absolutely essential starting point of the sales process.
Until customers are convinced that the salesperson cares about them more than making a sale, they will have little or no interest in meeting with or spending time with the salesperson. How could you improve your processes of building high trust and credibility quickly with new prospects?
IDENTIFYING NEEDS ACCURATELY
This is the process of asking preplanned questions, moving from the general to the specific, to uncover and identify the genuine wants and needs of a particular prospect. From the point of view of the customer, this is the most important part of the sales process in determining whether or not the customer will be interested and whether or not the customer will buy. How could you improve this questioning and discovery process?
PRESENTING PERSUASIVELY
According to thousands of customers who have been interviewed after making a purchase, the sale is actually made in the presentation. It is the way that the salesperson explains how the product or service can most benefit this particular customer, based on the previously identified wants and needs of the customer, that determines the sale more than any other factor. The good news is that all sales presentations can be improved in some way. How could your salespeople improve the quality of their presentations?
ANSWERING OBJECTIONS
There are no sales without objections. All customers have concerns about whether this product is the right one at the right price for them at this time. What are the most common objections that prospective customers use for holding back or refraining from buying? How could you answer or respond to these objections more effectively?
CLOSING THE SALE
Even the most promising prospect must be invited to buy. What are the low-pressure, no-pressure professional methods that are most effective in getting your interested prospects to take action and to actually buy and pay for your product or service? How could your closing methods be improved?
GETTING RESALES AND REFERRALS
The key to high profitability in any business is a steady stream of resales to happy, satisfied customers. In addition, referrals and recommendations from happy customers to new prospects and customers can be the most valuable and the most profitable part of the sales process. What is it that your salespeople do today to ensure high levels of after-sale customer satisfaction? How could you make your customers even happier in the future?
Time Management
The highest-paid and most productive salespeople manage their time more effectively than the lowest-paid and least productive ones do. What are the best time-planning and time- management techniques your highest-performing salespeople use every day? How can you teach, preach, and encourage your sales team to continually improve the quality of their time management so that they can improve the quantity of their sales results?
The Quality Circle Process
The best way to form quality circles is to establish a specific one-hour time period each week where the sales team gets together and focuses on a single part of the sales process and on a single question for continuous and never-ending improvement.
Have all of your salespeople explain how they have achieved the very best results in this specific key result area, and have them talk about how the “best practices” could be applied to their own sales activities.
The best time for a quality circle of this nature is either the first hour on Monday morning, so people can begin using the new ideas immediately, or the last hour on Friday afternoon at the end of a busy workweek, when people have just had a whole week of selling experiences.
Get Everyone Involved
Another way to use quality circles requires an interdisciplinary approach. You bring together people from all areas of your business, even the receptionist who answers customer phone calls, and have them all talk and share ideas on how you could improve both the sales process and the customer experience.
Bring in people from marketing, accounting, production, and shipping with their different viewpoints, and then talk about improvements and solutions. Be as specific and action- oriented as possible. Rather than saying to them, “Make customers happier,” your directive to them should be something like, “Answer each customer call within two rings, and respond to customer inquiries within sixty minutes.”
People develop high levels of loyalty and commitment to a company to the degree to which they feel they are involved in what the company is doing. The more that you involve your sales team members in the process of continuous improvement, the more dedicated, determined, and productive they will be.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Make a decision today to carve out one hour each week for the team to come together and look for ways to improve performance in a specific sales activity.
2. Once you have agreed on a new idea for continuous and never-ending improvement, have everyone try it out immediately and report back with results. Do this every week on one key result area. You will be amazed at the cumulative results in improvements in sales performance.
