Happy Holidays, modern sales pros! With Christmas just under a week away, vacations are beginning, activity is winding down, and we’re starting to look forward to the upcoming year. But with so much happening all around, it can be hard to focus on details of the year’s past, and all of the ways you, the modern sales professional, have improved over the last twelve months.
Sure, you’ve been armed with ways to head into your annual sales reviews with metrics to back up your big successes, but keeping track of all the small ways you’ve grown in your sales skills can be an overwhelming feat. Nevertheless, those small improvements are just as crucial to your overall growth as a modern sales professional as the big wins your metrics may reflect.
On today’s special holiday edition of SDR TV, we welcome back Salesloft Account Executive Tyler Bliss… er, well, a very animated version of Tyler Bliss… as he discusses how he and the Salesloft sales team have spent the last year focusing on incremental improvements to their sales process, month by month. Watch the video below, be thinking about all the small ways you’d like to improve in your sales process each month of 2017, and get your game plan together for the new year in modern sales!
Video Transcript:
What’s up everybody? Tyler Bliss, Account Executive here at Salesloft. I wanna start out by wishing everybody happy holidays. I know things can get hectic. Around this time your in-laws might be coming into town. That might get you excited or that might get you a little bit nervous. So I want to remind everybody to settle down and really focus in on closing out the year but also I want you to focus in on that one thing that you can work on.
One thing that might sound sort of simple but we’ve implemented here with tremendous success is our managers have challenged us to focus on one thing month by month that we can improve on. Sales can be a hard game. There’s so many things thrown at you, so many great tips but really focus in on that one thing that we can improve on.
For me in the month of December, it was actually discovery calls. So I need to get better at adding value, educating people through the discovery sales process, asking better questions. So I’ve really worked hard on improving on that. My colleague is actually working on being better at knowing what our competitors are doing, how do we compete against our competitors, what kind of features are they coming out with?
And in January I might some bounce some ideas off him and try to figure out how I can be better at knowing what our competitors are doing. And the hopes is that in a year or six months to a year from now we’re looking back and we’re seeing exactly how we improved as sales reps.
So my challenge to you is that in the year of 2017 that you really take the mindset of focusing in on that one thing that you can improve on month over month. So my hopes for you is that not only do you grow but you also share that growth with the people around you.
So at times my manager actually has to help me focus back in on that one thing that I’m focused on. So in our one on ones I may bring up something that I needed to improve here, here’s where I could have improved on a deal, and he reels me back in and he says, “Well, how was your discovery?” Or, “How was that one thing that you were trying to improve on?” and really help me refocus back in.
Not only that but he also helps me measure my success over that month and so we have one on ones every week, and so we’re looking at that one thing and figuring out how am I improving week after week, day after day. From the Salesloft family to yours, happy holidays.
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In the spirit of the new year, it’s time to ask your modern sales organization one question: Houston, do we have a sales problem? Reflecting on 2016 may bring about some realizations of issues within your sales process, and these are just a few of the most common mistakes sales teams make in their day to day.
Download your copy of our ebook, “Houston, We Have A Sales Problem,” to learn how to combat these in 2017!
