The Best Small Company Sales Lead
Program I’ve Ever Seen

The owner of a local company recently asked me, “How can I generate sales leads with a limited promotional budget?” He went on to explain that his company represented home security and home theatre product companies with the best known brand names in both industries.

He had tried a professionally designed web site, newspaper and radio advertising and some direct mail with very limited success in generating leads for his two sales people.

My answer to his question was to tell him a true story about generating sales leads that has a lesson that could apply to almost any company that sells everything from high end consumer products to business systems and services. Here's that story:

In the second year after I left my vice president’s job at a large computer services company what I thought would be a one or two man marketing consulting business had grown into a 20 person company that had just moved into its own small office building.

We needed a new telephone system. Without much time to look for one, I called the local phone company. Two of their sales people dropped by to show me literature describing their systems and to ask questions about our phone usage.

At the end of a half-hour they said they would schedule an engineer to do a needs survey, after which they would recommend the system we needed. They advised we could have a new telephone system in about a month.

Coincidentally, that same morning when our receptionist was away from her desk and I picked up an insistently ringing telephone. The call went like this; “Good morning, may I speak to the person in charge of your telephone systems?” I replied, “That would be me.”

The person on the other end continued, “Great, I’m with Ajax Telephone Systems and I'm calling to see if you’re currently considering a new telephone system for your company.” I answered, “As a matter of fact, we are.” She continued, “Wonderful, would it be better for our local sales person stop by at two o’clock today or at nine tomorrow morning?”

At two o’clock the Atlas sales rep showed up carrying a small laptop computer. His opening words were: “Thanks for seeing me. You look busy, so to save time I’ll just tell you that Ajax is the largest installer of telephone systems in this area and that we carry virtually every one of the top rated telephone systems available. We sell more systems than anybody and we guarantee our prices to be the lowest you’ll find anywhere.” OK.

With no further small talk he flipped open his computer and began asking questions that sounded like input for a credit check. As he entered the information, I asked him what he was doing and he replied, “To save time I’m filling out an order form for you. I’ll add the details about the telephone system you’re going to need after I go over all the options with you.”

I said, “You haven’t sold me anything yet and you’re already filling out an order form? “ He replied, “I’m going to have to fill out an order form at some point and since we carry all the leading systems, from basic to high end, I know we’re going to be able to put in the system you want. Plus, if I send this order in today I can schedule your new telephone system to be installed next weekend, rather have you wait or interrupt your work week.” That was a Gotcha!

Needless to say, I ended up buying a telephone system from Atlas (the name is changed to protect the innocent), which was specified by the sales rep after a walk around the office and a few questions. The deal was done is less than an hour, without the need for an engineer or further decision making.

Impressed by his assumptive style, I asked the sales rep how many leads he received and he replied, “We have two sales people and we each get six appointment leads a day from our telephone contact people."

I asked, "And how many of those leads do you close?" His answer amazed me, "We close an average of four of them." Thinking I had not heard him correctly, I said, “You close 67% of the leads you get?” “Yes” he said, “in fact I already closed three before I came here.”

I had to know more: “Tell me more about your telephone contact people.”

He replied, “They work from yellow page listings of companies e-mailed to us quarterly by a national data company. There are about 7,000 companies with telephone-intensive S.I.C. codes in the three counties we cover. The companies are listed alphabetically within zip code and they're called that way to save us time between appointments. “

He continued, “Our telephone people call every company and ask just one question, “Are you currently considering a new telephone system.” If the answer is “Yes” they try to make an appointment for that day or the following day. If the answer is “No” there's no further sales pitch, they say “thank you for your time, have a nice day,” hang up and go on to the next listing."

“For every hundred or so companies they call they get six appointments. The actually speak to about fifty decision makers a day so, with call backs, hang ups, wrong numbers and holidays they're able to cycle through the entire list of 7,000 companies in about two months. Then they start all over again.”

The lesson here is that sales lead generation is a numbers game. The keys to success are:

1. Start with a comprehensive, up to date prospect list specified by criteria that fit your company’s prospects, such as company size by number of employees and/or annual sales, Standard Industrial Classification Code (S.I.C.), zip code, county, state and country, credit score and other data items, such as personal income or house size. When contacts are selected by these criteria they form your "hit list." For information on one good list source go to http://www.infoUSA.com/.

2. Continually contact your hit list by telephone, e-mail and direct mail. Repetition is key. With a correctly specified, up to date hit list a surprisingly large percentage of your prospects are already looking to buy what you sell. You need to be there when they are, so call and write them often.

3. Send your sales people enough qualified prospects to be successful. A really qualified lead is one that identifies who is in a decision cycle for what you sell. The day when you could send sales people out with a briefcase and a telephone directory and expect them to find cost-effectively find prospects is long gone (transferring a telephone directory to a computer with a CRM system isn’t the answer either). Once you crack the code on how many calls it takes to generate a qualified lead you can adjust the number of calls it takes to keep your sales people busy.

Note: Smart companies now send their sales people appointments with prospects they have pre-identified as being in the buying cycle for their products and services, and then measure success based on orders closed.

4. Provide your sales people with a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). In the case of Ajax Telephone Systems their USP is that they carry all the leading telephone systems from major companies. These brands had instant credibility with me, the customer. Why should I be limited to one system the local telephone company offered?

Your company may or may not have that advantage, but I guarantee you do have a unique selling proposition, whether its years of experience, service capability, size, breadth of product line, a local showroom, or your credit terms … you have something to say that’s both true and is viewed as a benefit to your prospects.

5. Train your sales people to make winning sales presentations. Sales people who make professional presentations featuring your USP will win a majority of the new prospects they call on. Training your sales people to prepare and make winning sales presentations is probably the most effective thing you can do to immediately increase sales.

A good first step in a training program is to assess the skills of your sales people as they present of your products and services. Chances are you'll find that very few of your sales people have prepared and perfected an effective sales presentation.

For a free management report on how to plan and manage sales assessments, go to http://www.SalesJudge.com/.

Epilogue: Did Atlas Telephone Systems consciously go through the steps listed above? I really don’t know, but I do know one thing, they sold me a $3,500 telephone system with a one call close. And their sales rep sold four of them that day.

How to Prove Your Sales Inquiry Program
Generates More on the Top Line
than it Costs on the Bottom Line

Closing the loop on the effect of sales inquiries on revenues has, and always will be, a challenge. Despite the high level of sales force automation, whenever you rely on feedback by sales people, the results will never be more than marginally correct. There’s no point in fighting this because there are, after all, more important things to bug sales people over than reporting on sales inquiries.

The correct objective for an inquiry program is limited to identifying sales opportunities and prospects. Sales people still have to follow up and make winning sales presentations. That’s why, when allocating budgets, it’s important to have a credible number for the effect of inquiry generation on sales.

The simplest and possibly most convincing way to measure the effect of inquiries on sales is to compare when invoicing begins on new accounts over a specific period of time with inquiries generated over a comparable period for the previous year. This method has two advantages; the numbers are totally verifiable and you don’t have to rely on reporting by the field sales organization.

Since experience has shown that it takes a full year for all sales to be recorded from inquiries are generated, this fact has to be taken into consideration. Here’s how to benchmark the effect of sales inquiries on sales revenues:

1. Ask your accounting department for a list of new accounts invoiced for the first time over a specific six month period. Be sure the list includes the amount invoiced for each account.

2. Generate a list of sales inquiries generated over the same six month invoicing period from the previous year.

3. Alphabetize both lists and match the company names to see how many new accounts sent in an inquiry prior
to the date account was first invoiced.

4. Add the number of company matches and divide the total by the number of inquiries to arrive at a percentage of inquiries sold. Add the amounts invoiced and divide that total by the amount spent for lead generation (based on the average cost of a lead) to arrive at the ROB (Return on Budget).

The result will provide a benchmark for future measurement of lead generation. Our experience has shown that a well managed sales team should close between 15 and 20 percent of all leads.

If you find that the results for your program are much less than this, chances are your sales people are not following up promptly on leads or are not winning a high percentage of sales presentations from inquiries.

For free information on sales assessments go to www.SalesJudge.com.

Free Management Report: How to Plan and
Manage an Effective Sales Assessment Program

Can you think of a better way to evaluate sales people than to see them through the eyes of prospects and customers as they present your products and services? That's the concept behind this eye opening management report on presentation-based sales assessments.

This eight page report is a "how to" guide for sales-knowledgeable executives who want to be better able to make better sales hiring and training decisions based on how well job sales people present his or her company's products and services to prospective buyers.

The management report includes:

1. An executive overview
2. Nine sales skill areas on which to evaluate direct sales people
3. Ten telephone sales skills on which to evaluate telephone sales people over the telephone
4. How to develop a Sales Competency Profile for every sales person
5. The eight steps to planning and conducting a successful sales assessment program

This invaluable management report can be downloaded as a Word document free and without obligation at www.SalesJudge.com.

Pre-Screen TeleSales People for Skills That
Match Your Company's Selling Proposition

The Internet is changing the staffing paradigm for many sales organizations. Face-to-face selling is being replaced and augmented by telephone sales follow-up to prospects who self-select by clicking on company web sites for solutions to their needs.

The critical component for success in this environment is to hire sales reps who have telephone sales skills and experience that match up with your company’s selling proposition.

1. If your company sells inexpensive, well understood products that require little explanation, you can hire part-time sales reps from a large pool of retired executives, housewives and college students who have minimal experience, good verbal skills, and can be readily trained.

2. When calling or customers to sell service contracts, upgrades, supplies and add-on products your present service representatives and sales support employees may be the first place to look to staff telesales team. If you have a direct sales force, the telesales team can also be an excellent entry level position and training grounds for new sales people.

3. If your company sells complex, high-value products and services, the game plan changes: In this case you'll have to recruit and hire full-time, highly skilled telephone sales professionals who can interact at a peer level with prospects. These pros will have the telephone persona to build trust and credibility using only the spoken word.

Fortunately, today there is an increasingly large pool of experienced part-time and full-time telephone sales people you can reach through employment web sites, classified advertising and employement agencies.

Whatever steps you take you take to staff your telephlone sales team, be aware that only one in ten people have the innate talent and personality make-up to succeed in telephone sales. As a result, the turnover rate for telephone sales can be three times that of a direct sales staff.

This fact makes it imperative that you not only do due diligence in checking resume facts and references, but, that you pre-screen the sales competency of telesales job candidates.

Here's the good news: You can you improve the odds of hiring successful telephone sales representatives with a very basic sales assessment you can perform over the phone.

This is how it works:

1. Provide candidates for telesales jobs with a concise description of your company and its products and services, as well as that of a prospective customer and provide them with details of a typical selling situation.

2. Allow them a few days to prepare for a telephone sales presentation at a specific day and time. You (or someone you designate) would then play the role of prospective buyer during this call.

3. Rate their performance on the following five criteria by awarding points from 1 = Poor to 5 = Excellent for each:

1. Previous Experience: Previous sales and industry experience count for a lot. Award one point for every year of related experience up to five. 1 2 3 4 5

2. Voice Quality: Listen closely and score for a regional-neutral accent, clear pronunciation, good vocabulary, moderate rate of speech, and most of all the tone of the voice. Tone is critical because it projects professionalism, enthusiasm and confidence. Deduct points if you detect nervousness, hesitancy, timidity or lack of confidence. 1 2 3 4 5

3. Call Opening: Score how well the candidate opens the sales call. Did they give their name and reason for calling? Did they sound confident? 1 2 3 4 5

4. Rapport Building: This key predictor of sales success is difficult to quantify but you’ll know it when you hear it. Did this person have the ability to make you trust them? Did they sound believable? 1 2 3 4 5

5. Closing the Call: Did they ask for the order or to further the process of consideration? Did they paraphrase your comments and use them to reinforce selling points? Simply put, was the candidate persuasive enough to be on your short list? 1 2 3 4 5

A sales person who scores 20 to 25 points is good bet to succeed, while one who scores 10 to 19 probably should not be considered for a telephone sales position.

For information on a more comprehensive telephone sales assessment click on http://www.salesjudge.com/.

Go to www.SalesJudge.com for more information on sales assessment solutions

Question: How Good Are Your Sales People
at Winning New Accounts?

Your company spends a lot of money developing and promoting its products and services in order to have a competitive edge. But, whether all this effort and investment pays off comes down to one question: How good are your sales people at winning new accounts?

The honest answer just may be "Not very."

In fact, since it's estimated that 20 percent of sales people bring in 80 percent of new customers, it's clear that most sales reps make a living not by bringing in new accounts but by selling to present customers. Granted, it's important to increase sales to present customers, but no company can grow to its full potential without constantly bringing in new accounts.

That's why finding and developing sales stars who can consistently bring in new customers is the probably the biggest challenge faced by sales managers.

Here are the key reasons this challenge is so daunting:

1. Hiring good salespeople is a hit or miss proposition. Traditional hiring interviews and aptitude tests are poor indicators of whether a sales candidate will succeed in the field. If you don't think this is the case, consider that over thirty percent of all sales people quit or are released within 18 months.

2. Most sales people avoid pitching new accounts because they don't have the confidence or
ability to deliver a winning sales presentation. Remember the 20/80 rule for new accounts?

3. Training can't overcome poor sales aptitude and lack of selling skills. Sales ability is, after all, an innate talent that some have and some don't.

The good news is these problems can be minimized by a sales skills assessment based on scoring sales people as they present your products and services on a simulated sales call to a prospective new customer.

The concept is both simple and logical: Put sales people in front of buyers and see if they can sell. Then, hire those that can. There's no interpretation of theoretical questionnaires and aptitude tests needed.

Granted, role-playing sales presentations is hardly a new idea, but quantifying the results for use as a management tool has not been systemized until now, at least to our knowledge.

The evaluation process can be as basic as listing the sales skills that are needed to make winning sales presentations and then scoring your sales people on them immediately after they make a sale presentation.

The following is a list of nine sales skill areas used in a professional presentation-based sales assessment:

1. Creating a favorable first impression
2. Use of conversational and listening skills
3. Presentation management - effective use of the buyer's time
4. Creating buyer confidence- presentation of company credentials,
products and services
5. Identifying the buyer's needs and solutions to them
6. Qualifying the buyer and uncovering the decision chain
7. Communicating a Total Value Proposition
8. Handling buyer objections
9. Closing the sale - advancing the sales process

This assessment can be used in simulated sales presentations or to score performance on actual sales calls in the field.

For more information on sales assessment solutions go to http://www.salesjudge.com/

How to Hire Stars for your BtoB
Telephone Sales Team

Finding and hiring the one in ten people who can succeed in selling business products and services by telephone is one of the great challenges of managing an inside sales team.

To begin with, standard sales hiring techniques are about as useful as spin the bottle in determining who will be successful in selling over the telephone. Selling by phone is as much about inborn talent as it is about training and experience.

Secondly, unless you observe some well-established parameters for hiring a b-to-b sales team, you’ll face an uphill battle you might not be able to win. These parameters are:

A. The more involved and technical the sale the more you’ll need full-time sales reps with industry and sales experience, especially where multiple call-backs and decision-makers are involved. Part-time and at-home workers are very unlikely to work out over time.

B. Telephone sales candidates should be interviewed over the telephone. If they can’t sell themselves over the phone they won’t be good at selling your products and services.

C. Don’t let how a telephone sales candidates looks or dresses decide whether you hire them (remember, prospects can’t see them). What you really want is someone who looks good in the mind of the person on the other end of the line.

D. Before recruiting and interviewing telephone sales people, set up a system for evaluating and documenting what you hear on the telephone interview so you can compare candidates accurately.

You can dramatically improve your chances of finding telephone sales stars by organizing the hiring interview into key characteristics. During the phone interview you can score each of them from one to five as follows:

1. Experience: Previous sales and industry experience count for a lot. Award a candidate points for every year of related experience.

2. Voice Quality: Score for a regionally-neutral accent, clear
pronunciation, good vocabulary, rate of speech, and most of all the tone of the voice. Tone is especially critical because it projects professionalism, enthusiasm and confidence. Deduct points if you sense nervousness, hesitancy, timidity or lack of confidence.

3. Call Opening: Score how well the candidate opens the interview call. Did they give their name and reason for calling? Did they sound confident?

4. Rapport: This key predictor of sales success is difficult to quantify but you’ll know it when you hear it. Does this person have the ability to make
you trust them? Do they sound believable? Are they able to communicate their personal strong points?

5. Closing: Do they ask for the order – the chance to be hired – or to further the process of consideration? Do they paraphrase your comments about the job and tell you why they will be great at it?

Finally, if you already have a telephone sales team it would be good idea to score them on a phoned sales presentation to you (or someone you designate) on the same characteristics you use in the hiring process. This will allow you compare one to another and to a group score and understand better where they need training and mentoring.

Go to www.SalesJudge.com for more information on sales assessment

How to Turn Your Sales Team Into a Growth Machine

If the oft-quoted metric that 80 percent of new accounts are sold by 20 percent of salespeople is true, it's axiomatic that most sales representatives don’t pull their weight when it comes to bringing in new accounts.

Finding and keeping rainmakers who bring in new customers is a huge challenge for just about every company. In fact, because of high turnover rates and increasing costs of recruiting and training many companies keep sales people who are marginal performers.

There are three key reasons for this:

1. Finding good salespeople is still a hit-or-miss process. Traditional hiring interviews and aptitude tests, while helpful, are poor predictors of whether a sales candidate will succeed in the field, as evidenced by today's high turnover rates.

2. Many salespeople avoid pitching new accounts because they don't have the ability or confidence to prepare and deliver a winning sales presentation.

3. Training alone can't overcome a poor sales aptitude and lack of fundamental selling skills in a new sales hire. The ability to sell is to a large degree an innate talent.

The solution to turning your sales team into a new account growth machine is to test job candidates with presentation-based sales assessments before they are hired and to pinpoint weaknesses and strengths in veteran salespeople as a precursor to developmental training.

What could be more revealing than assessing salespeople as they present your company's products and services across the desk from a new account prospect?

You can set up your own presentation-based sales assessment program using the following nine steps:

Step 1: Create A Selling Company Description: Provide a concise description of your company as the selling company to help salespeople prepare their assessment presentation.

Step 2: Create A Buying Company Description: Write a one-sheet description of a typical buying company, including information about the buyer?s objectives, applications and requirements.

Step 3: Appoint a Buyer-Assessor: Choose someone who has the knowledge and experience to play the role of the buyer/assessor to whom your salespeople make their presentations.

Step 4: Create a Scoring System: Prepare a list of sales skills areas on which you to judge your salespeople. Under each skill area, list on three or four specific skill factors that can be scored from 1 to 5, or Poor to Excellent. At the end of the assessment, add the scores for all skill areas for a total score.

Step 5: Sell your salespeople on the process: Both candidates and veteran salespeople need to buy into the fact that assessing their new account presentation skills will help them professionally and that the grading is fair and objective.

Step 6: Prepare an information kit: Put together an information kit that includes the selling and buying company descriptions, sales brochures and corporate literature to give to each sales person five days in advance of their assessment.

Step 7: Rehearse the buyer/assessor: Hold a rehearsal with the buyer/assessor and have someone acts as a salesperson. Score the presentation and fine-tune the buyer's/assessor's performance.

Step 8: Choose the right facility: Hold your assessment presentations in a setting that closely approximates what a salesperson encounters in a "real world" presentation.

Step 9: Produce a Summary Report: Provide a "report card" for each salesperson that details his score and includes comments by the buyer/assessor.

Provide the information kit to your salespeople five to 10 days in advance of their scheduled new account sales presentation.

You'll be amazed at what you learn with presentation-based sales assessments, not only about job candidates, but, about your veteran salespeople.

Perhaps most important, just the process of preparing this kind of sales assessment will put new emphasis on the importance of new account sales and the training required to make all your sales people competent in this critical area of sales performance.

For more information on sales assessments go to www.SalesJudge.com

How a Small Business Can Avoid
Hiring the Wrong Sales People

A basic sales assessment scoring system to help
small businesses hire their first sales representatives

All successful small businesses, in order to grow, reach a point where they have to hire one or more sales representatives. Many owners put the decision off for as long as possible because they don’t have the experience or skill set to select the right sales people.

Their trepidation is well founded. Even in well established companies, one out of three sales people terminates within 18 months of hiring.

In a small business the consequences of a sales person’s leaving can be traumatic in terms of wasted time and money, not to mention alienated prospects and customers.

Here’s how you can avoid hiring the wrong sales person:

After checking references, contacting previous employers and verifying resume information, find out if the potential new hire can sell your products and services. To do this, we recommend that you require sales candidates to make a simulated sales presentation.

Using the three-step process described below, you can judge sales people the same way prospects and customers do: as the sales person presents your company’s products
and services.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Provide sales candidates with information about your company and a typical sample buying company. Along with basic company information, describe a selling situation that includes the buyer’s objectives, current methods, application specifics, cost data and competitive factors.

Step 2: Give the sales person five days to prepare a sales presentation and schedule an appointment for the sales candidate to a make simulated sales call on the sample buying company.

Step 3: Choose someone, perhaps yourself, who is qualified to act as the “buyer” for the sample company and then rate the sales person’s performance in 10 sales skill areas shown on the form below. Grade each sales skill from 1 to 5 indicating Poor to Excellent performance for each sales skill, then add the scores for a total rating.

The resulting numerical score and rating will give you a way to objectively compare sales people for hiring decisions and will pinpoint where they need training and mentoring.

We suggest you perform the basic sales assessment shown below before hiring and after training new sales people. Simply circle a score for each sales skill and add them for a total score.

Sales Competency Profile

Name of Sales Person: ___________________________________________
Date: _____________________________________

Sales Skills Scores:

Poor = 1 Fair = 2 Good = 3 Very Good = 4 Excellent = 5

1. Created a favorable first impression 1 2 3 4 5

2. Use of conversational and listening skills
to engage the buyer's interest 1 2 3 4 5

3. Presentation management – made effective
use of the buyer's time 1 2 3 4 5

4. Created buyer confidence – presentation
of company credentials, products & services 1 2 3 4 5

5. Identified the buyer's needs and solutions 1 2 3 4 5

6. Qualified the buyer & the decision chain 1 2 3 4 5

7. Communicated a Total Value Proposition 1 2 3 4 5

8. Handled buyer objections 1 2 3 4 5

9. Closed the sale - advanced the sales process 1 2 3 4 5

10. Presentation organization 1 2 3 4 5

Overall Sales Competency Rating: __________

10 – 18 Poor – has inadequate sales presentation skills
19 – 27 Fair – requires significant training on presentation techniques
28 – 36 Good – has average sales presentation skills
37 – 44 Very Good – has better than average sales presentation skills
45 - 50 Excellent – has superior sales presentation skills

Remarks: ________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

Go to www.SalesJudge.com for more information on sales assessment solutions

Nothing happens until somebody sells something.

How to Turn Average Sales Reps Into Rainmakers

Why is there general agreement among executives that 80% of their new customers are brought in by 20% of their salespeople? Better yet, why do they accept it as a fact of life? And, why do so many salespeople settle for an income based on farming their present customer base, rather than persistently hunting for new customers?

The answers to those questions - and what companies do about them - is what separates fast growing companies from so-so peformers. Clearly the high cost finding and training new salespeople and the risk of losing momentum in territories by replacing salespeople plays a big role. Whatever the dynamics in your company, there is comfort in the fact that you can turn even average salespeople into new account rainmakers by taking some basic steps that are outlined below:

1. Establish new account selling metrics. If you don't have a handle on which sales people bring in an acceptable number of profitable new customers, start now to gather that information. When you know the facts, share them with your managers and use them to establish new account quotas for each sales office and salesperson.

2. Leverage the enormous power of peer pressure by publishing new customer wins every week, and summarize them monthly and quarterly by sales office and individual
salesperson. Praise those reps that are meeting or beating their quotas. This is a no-brainer when focusing a sales organization on new account generation. Nobody wants to be on the bottom of the list.

3. Benchmark your new account effectiveness. How good are your salespeople at winning new business presentations? Find out by sitting in on at least 10 new business presentations, then quantifying and writing your impressions for each one. You'll be amazed at what you find - good and bad - and where to concentrate your training and sales support. One tool to help in this process is a new product called the 28-Factor Sales Skills Assessment.

4. Create a worldclass new business presentation. Your sales reps have ten minutes or less to convince a new account that your company is the one to do business with. They need a new business presentation support package to help them identify what the prospect wants, how your company can help, and the ability to communicate a total value proposition that puts your company in the lead. In this effort we suggest you involve both inside and outside professionals to prepare, test and produce a winning sales presentation package.

5. Train your sales reps on new account presentation skills. Your new worldclass presentation package is the perfect reason to retrain your salespeople. You'll need a training professional who can put together a formal program, complete with a syllabus, course materials and verbal and written tests to be sure the material is understood.

6. Assess the selling skills of your sales organization. What's the best way to discover how well your sales reps can make a new account presentation? Put them in front of a buyer in a simulated sales presentation - before and/or after training - then score their performance.
Use this information for specific training and mentoring. Just the process of preparing for their assessment presentation will increase their new account competence and confidence.

7. List your best new account prospects. Access a new business list from any of the leading list suppliers, such as Dun and Bradstreet, for each of your sales areas and ask your managers to identify the companies they would most like to sell. Since there are over 12 million business establishments in the U.S. we suggest you specify your prospects by SIC codes, number of employees and/or sales, and by state, county or zip code. You can order records with the names of key executives and with fairly in-depth financial data. Make the companies your managers have identified your VIP targets for mailings and phone follow-up in each territory.

8. Reward the winners. Salespeople thrive on challenge and recognition. Use these factors to turn the 20% factor around - to where 80% of your sales reps are meeting their quotas for new account generation. Recognize the highest achievers at meetings, with perks and with special treatment - they deserve it.

Finally, establishing a new business culture should involve everyone in the company from the president to the shipping clerk to the technician, not just the sales organization. Remember, nothing happens until somebody sells something.

For more information on sales assessments go to www.SalesJudge.com

Your Sales Reps Have Ten Minutes To Live

That's about how long it takes a new business prospect to make a judgement as to whether she'll buy from a salesperson or not. The fact is, first impressions are important and it's almost impossible to turn a poor sales presentation into an order.

That's why the best thing you can do for your company is make sure your sales reps are well trained on how to prepare and deliver a winning sales presentation.

In other words, you need to know this answer: "Just how good are my salespeople?"

To find out, we suggest that you put your sales reps through a real-world test where, given the same information about your company and a prospective customer, they're required to present your products and services to a "buyer" qualified to rate their performance.

Simulated sales presentations are not only a good way to test the skills of your present sales reps, they're probably the best way to pretest sales job candidates before your hire them.

There's nothing new about the basic idea of role played sales presentations. But, now there's help from a new product called the Sales Judge 28-Factor Sales Skills Assessment that makes preparing, conducting and scoring sales presentations a fast and easy process.

Now you can accurately quantify sales performance and compare sales people. And, just as important, the 28-Factor Sales Skills Assessment provides information for developmental training and mentoring.

Check it out. You may never have to wonder again ... "Just how good are my sales people."

For more information on sales assessments go to www.SalesJudge.com