Field sales come with unique challenges. Getting access to the right decision makers, hitting your sales quota, staying motivated all the time, self-sourcing leads, recording pipeline and activity information – these challenges are all frequently faced by field sales reps, as per an Insidesales.com report:
The greatest salespeople, as well as the greatest professionals in any field, aren’t born great. No, they become great through a determination to always do what they need to do to gain more experience and sharpen their skills. Anyone who’s willing to work hard can, with a little guidance, become a sales rock star.
Here’s some guidance for you: the following five tips are sure to help any salesperson improve their performance.
#1 Plan Your Route In Advance
To be great in sales, you need to plan in advance. You can’t just wake up and decide which locations you’re going to go to that day. Being unprepared like that is just setting yourself up for failure.
You should plan which locations you’re going to visit at least a week ahead of time. Doing so will help you focus more on acquiring customers and less on the tedium of sales route planning. Acquiring more customers means collecting more commissions, of course. As Martha Stewart would say, it’s a good thing.
Planning your routes ahead of time will help you plan efficient routes that will get you to your destinations quickly, giving you more time each day to meet prospects and close sales.
Planning the absolute best route can be pretty tricky, though. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as traffic, construction, and weather. If you have a lot of stops to make, it’s easy to make a mistake during this complicated process and accidentally set yourself back hours.
Sales routing software can really help you here. It simplifies the route optimization process – with Route4Me, all you have to do is plug in the addresses you want to visit, and our software will design the most efficient route for hitting those stops in 30 seconds or less.
Route4Me’s route mapping software also offers a territory management feature that allows you to draw regions on a map, save regions as groups, and plan routes based on the selected addresses.
#2 Organize Your Data
Wasting time is wasting money. Every minute you spend looking through old email chains for a piece of information you need is a minute that could have been spent developing lucrative relationships with clients.
There are a lot of tools out there designed to help field sales reps stay organized, but the trouble with these tools is that they can be a little confusing to learn how to use. Salespeople don’t want to deal with that frustration, so they’ll often ignore such tools entirely.
Don’t be like that. Putting up with a little temporary confusion in this situation will allow you to make much more money.
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#3 Analyze Your Data
Organized data is good, but you need more than that to bolster your sales.
You also need to analyze the data in the context of your target market and sales operations to ensure you’re not leaving yourself vulnerable to the competition.
We’re not just talking about your sales numbers – you should also understand the output correlations based on the different activities you are employing (translation: you need to know what’s working and what’s not in order to move forward and improve).
Sifting through data is a tedious task to do yourself, but it’s not that bad when you have the right technology.
For example, Route4Me’s route planner has a reporting and analytics feature that shows you your rate of successful on-time deliveries, the time spent at each customer’s location, and many more tidbits of valuable information, all from a single dashboard.
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#4 Control Your Body Language
94% of communication is nonverbal. Micro-expressions that we have little control over like facial quirks and hand gestures have a huge impact on how people perceive us. Many sales presentations that were excellent verbally have been ruined by off-putting body language.
Don’t let body language work against you:
- Keep your hands composed in front of your body or still at your sides. Avoid fidgeting. This shows you are cool, calm, and confident
- Never touch your face – this indicates you are lying
- Hold eye contact, but avoid staring
- Avoid crossing your arms – this indicates you are uncomfortable and feel a need to defend yourself
- Standing straight with your shoulders back projects further confidence. If you appear to be confident about what you are selling, your client has all the more reason to be confident about buying it
#5 Communicate With Team Members Constantly
Field sales reps usually work separately from their coworkers that have other roles, and this divide can be a problem when people need to work together on some joint assignment.
Communicate constantly with your coworkers when you’re collaborating on a project together – this’ll help you avoid those pesky miscommunication errors that result in duplicated work, missed deadlines, and general chaos.
So, what strategy do you use to improve sales? Let us know in the comments below.
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