A good way to improve sales is to change our mindset.
When we hear the word “selling,” probably the meaning “closing deals” might be the first idea that comes to our mind. While it makes sense to think about closing a deal, first we can instead focus on what makes it possible, close a deal is the outcome of often long, complex and graceful labour.
What we can measure are only the activities done during the labour time… Let’s check how adopting an activity-based selling philosophy may shift the outome.
In activity-based selling, you focus on the actions that make a sale possible, rather than closing the deal itself.
The foundation of activity-based selling lies in switching your focus from results to actions. This type of mindset helps you to have more control of your time, allowing you to build a lifestyle while simultaneously improving your closure rate.
Here are 8 key points to develop an activity-based selling approach.
- Mind your goals. Even if it seems counterintuitive you need to know what your goals are from the start to set a specific plan to achieve them.
- Focus on your real motivation. There’s something deeper than the need to make money to pay the bills. Focus on that meaning.
- Record your success. Record your actions and look at the times you have been successful. Find the commonalities in your schemes when you were successful. You can understand a lot from your workflow.
- Look for references. Researching some of the most successful sales management techniques may be helpful, cause can offer excellent references to experiment with. Keep in mind that other people’s techniques might not work for you, so continue to nurture the actions that are already working for you.
- Find out your metrics. Knowing what your goals are, you should have a clear frame of your Key Performance Indicators. Track and collect data from them. Then compare and analyze them in an accessible way.
- Set daily tasks. To make sure your goals are realistic, it is crucial to understand if your ambitions are too big and if you can carry the daily load of steps required to fulfil them.
- Visualize the whole frame. Each week, look back at those metrics. Celebrate what you achieved and work hard on those you missed, so that you can improve.
- Improve. Depending on your attitude, at some point, you should start to recognize a change in your actions, that things are moving along better than before.
You’ve created a work environment that attracts more sales. This evolution can take time, but it will arrive.
What happens when teams start adopting ABS?
In long terms, people get more and more comfortable in setting tasks in the calendar and stick with them; to achieve it a Kick-Off training is required. The benefit of a proper set of task patterns will be clear when more than 75% of tasks start naturally in the calendar.
As long as only a few of them will be placed in the calendar, but many of the daily tasks will not appear in the calendar then the calendar management will be ineffective.
To facilitate it, we suggest creating automation of daily tasks and appointments that input all the new tasks in the calendar automatically but also create routines where people create, update and mark an activity as done in the calendar as a standard.
Sales people can have hectic days and it can be difficult to accomplish all the commitments with clients, not to mention days when everything goes wrong.
This is where the Activities Based Selling methodology really helps people to check the calendar and move to the next task or postpone it to the next available time slot.
We helped many teams in getting into ABS properly and we have seen the efficiency improve, but also how the working environment can enhance by better time management and stress reduction.
Tracking completed activities is also a good way to measure your own performance, something that helps salespeople to improve their productivity and have an impact on the bottom line.
