Is your team producing the revenues and margins that you desire on a consistent basis? If not, fear not. A success formula can be implemented by any business owner in any industry to dramatically upgrade any sales organization.

Assess your team—you can’t fix what you can’t see. To maintain healthy sales, start by diagnosing your team. There are powerful sales-specific tools available to provide a clear x-ray of the players on your team. Screen for strengths, weaknesses, skills, conditions, priorities, blind spots and fit. You can learn, in advance, whether or not an individual will succeed in his/her role. Some assessments also include treatments for improvement. In “Good to Great,” Jim Collins tells us that great leaders start by placing the right people in the right seats on the bus. This principle is nowhere more apparent than on the “sales bus.” The rewards of diagnosing are substantial.

Assuming that you have the right people on the bus, it is essential they all use the same consistent, effective, measurable system. The result will be improved efficiency, revenues and profits.

Implement the three-legged stool. Executives understand the importance of process in their business. They also understand that sales are their lifeblood, but very few actually use processes inside their sales organization. Some have sales models, approaches and strategies, but few use a sales process. Imagine how ineffective your production, payroll or distribution would be without using a process—sales is no different.

Committing to a sales process means your entire team will be reading from the same playbook. This makes the adoption of a sales management process simple. When everyone uses the same selling process, your manager(s) can focus on their primary responsibilities—developing, coaching and maintaining accountability. Greater visibility into future orders will enable managers to deliver higher volume and more accurate sales forecasts.

You have raised the bar. Your stronger, proactive sales team will be producing more new business. You may quickly learn that your existing method of hiring reactive salespeople is ineffective. So, the third congruent process will be an objective sales recruiting process. Adding the right people to the bus from the onset will produce consistent results far better than you may have imagined.

Anyone can implement this entire success formula in less than 90 days—start today!

Joe Zente, TAB-Certified Facilitator, Austin