Many salespeople engage in a stop-start mentality in their sales practice. They start selling, land a few good prospects or customers, try to leverage them for all they are worth, then find themselves back at the beginning, having to start selling again. It’s little wonder that so many salespeople are not achieving continuous growth of a book of business.
In Sales Yoga we practice Sales Flow in how we sell, how we converse, and how we serve. For now, I’m going to focus on the first piece because, without it, there aren’t enough prospects with which to converse and serve.
One of the best examples of Sales Flow was demonstrated by Kerri, a senior sales manager at a multinational staffing firm based on the East Coast. In advising her and her team on the principles of Sales Yoga, it was the need for Sales Flow that had the biggest impact. Kerri, in particular, was in the detrimental habit of stop-start selling. As she made the shift to Sales Flow, she found that the book of business she managed grew faster than ever, doubling in less than a year’s time.
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Three of the keys to Kerri’s Sales Flow were as follows:
- Instead of latching on to a few prospects at a time, she always had several dozen prospects at different stages of the process. “I never thought I could handle that much activity,” Kerri said, “but building my stamina for an increasing number of possibilities, using Sales Flow, was easier than I thought.”
- Rather than assuming she had the best customers, she was always looking for better ones. “Now I pick and choose who to work with versus begging for business.”
- When she thought she had made enough calls, had enough meetings, sent enough proposals, or closed enough business she always pushed for a little bit more. “Before engaging in Sales Flow, I used to sell myself short. Now I’m managing four times the amount of business in the same amount of hours. All because I got in the flow.”
To sell or not to sell is not the question. How you sell is.
Sales Flow is the way to grow and stop-start selling has got to go.
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[…] Many salespeople start selling, land a few good prospects or customers, try to leverage them for all they are worth, then find themselves back at the beginning, having to start selling again, writes Scott Wintrip in a new post in The Staffing Stream. He advocates replacing the start-stop sales mentality with a sales flow strategy to achieve continuous book of business growth. Wintrip is the president of the Wintrip Consulting Group and StaffingU. To read his post, click here. […]