How to Close the Gap and Hit Your Sales Objectives
Do you need to close the gap in sales before the end of the year?
With a few months left in the year, are you:
1. On track to achieve your objectives?
Congratulations!
Or 2. Is there a GAP that you need to close?
To close the gap, you need BOLD and decisive action now!
If you are going to close the gap, you and your team need a high sense of urgency and a plan which you need to execute the hell out of it.
Forget about brilliant strategy or new tactics.
The next few months are purely about closing your best opportunities.
Execution is the discipline of doing the most important things really well. This is a call to action for all sales leaders!
3 Steps to Closing the Gap
1. Focus on Opportunities
Most sales teams try to do too much. As the leader, you must help your team identify the best opportunities to close the gap. Getting your team hyper-focused is critical to success. They need to focus solely on the opportunities that have the most significant impact on sales and determine what they need to do to close each one.
I can guarantee that if your salespeople embrace doing fewer things well, they will always crush their competitors who do a mediocre job on many things.
Have each rep build a plan for each of their top opportunities. Focus on all the things they can do to close the business ASAP.
Here are some questions your reps must address in their account plans:
- What are the actions they are committed to doing? By when?
- What resources do they need to close the business?
- How are they going to know if they have done them well?
2. Focused Leadership
Your role is to ensure that the reps’ plans are well thought out and focused on closing the business.
Great leaders understand that it is easy for their people to lose focus and chase the shiny fish.
Now is not the time to get distracted!
Every time you speak with your reps, refer to their top accounts and ask them open-ended questions like:
- How are things progressing against one of the account plans?
- What successes have they had?
- What challenges are they encountering in executing their plans? How are they addressing them?
You get the idea.
You need to ask the same questions each time you speak with them. This ritual will remind them of what is critical and keep them sharp, accountable and hyper-focused on what is vital.
To close the gap, your reps need to be focused on their top accounts.
3. Cadence & Accountability
Schedule bi-monthly execution review meetings with each of your salespeople. Have your sales reps come prepared to update you on how they are progressing in each of their top accounts and if they have executed the activities in their plan. Holding your salespeople accountable for what they committed to is where discipline and accountability come into play. It is not about being a micromanager but rather about executing with excellence.
Close the Gap!
There are so many things we can’t control. To close the gap, sales leaders must focus on what they can control, figure out which accounts their reps can close, set a plan and execute it with a sense of urgency.
