Improving any part of your business demands both learning and practice.

But there's only so much attention that you can give to a project while you keeping sales rolling in.

So a good place to start to conserve your brain power is to standardise your "sales process", so that it demands less conscious thought, freeing you up for a more creative approach.

That's what we advise clients embarking on a journey to grow sales revenue.

Sorry to descend into the old sports cliché: it's hardly news that coaching and teamwork feature heavily when it comes to getting better performance out of salespeople.

I've spoken to quite a few business owners and sales managers in technology companies over the years (and I've been a salesperson as well) - there's a common thread when it comes to performance problems.

What symptoms are you looking for?

• Competitive deals that are "low-profit", loss leaders
• Opportunities that take forever to close
• Lack of effective appointments - no clear outcomes

So,  Coach, what do you do? Pile on the pressure and go out on meetings together, show them how it's done? Fire and rehire in hope of someone better?

Of course, if it's all clear to you, then your salespeople should be good enough to create a sales process that fits with exactly what you are thinking.

And the rest of the team should get it, too, intuitively. Right? Wrong... not unless you write it down and work on it as a team, in a playbook.

Technology companies are faced with huge changes.  Customers need different solutions and want to purchase in different ways.  Your costs can be large, when you retrain staff to deal with new products and solutions. Your niche may be disappearing, forcing you out of your comfort zone.

You have a dilemma - chase new customers for growth, or just stick with loyal clients that know you?

Many of you rely on a steady flow of business from existing customers; better to "land and expand" your wallet share, with less competitive pressure. Maybe.

Often (well, most of the time), you only get new business by referral: from your happy users and business partners. It can be a bit hit and miss: many customers don't really understand what you do, so they end  up referring you to "bad-fit" leads - a sinkhole for misdirected sales effort.

A definite first step is understanding from your clients you "value proposition" and getting them to put some numbers behind it. 

As an important background task, you still need to attract new prospects so that you can grow.

If you read the Harvard Business Review, you'll know "solution selling" (popular as a sales strategy from the 1990s) isn't as effective as it used to be.

In the Business-to-Business (B2B) buying environment, things have changed so much over the last few years; older sales and marketing methods have "gone over the cliff" when it comes to being able to generate lead flow, identify profitable opportunities and shorten the buying cycle.

So, if your sellers are sitting at their desks with heads in their hands, they may be experiencing "Sales Despair".

• They are demoralised
• They wonder why nothing works
• Or, they're reading Facebook
• Or, they're trading bitcoin

...anything to get their minds off how they can't win business from new customers ( - and generating growth).

THE MAGIC OF INFORMATION

If you've been there, there's nothing like the feeling of answering a call from a potential client, who reveals to you their most pressing problem - something that fits perfectly with your main product or service.

They let you know that they have a large budget; a project allocation; they need a hand preparing a presentation for the key stakeholders (and they'd love a hand to prepare it, hit, hint!) - they also needed it delivered and finished in 2 month's time.

"Abracadabra!", you must have pulled a rabbit (or a new sale), out of a hat!

If you've built up "trusted advisor" status over years with an existing client you might get an experience like this. If you need to build this experience sooner, you'll need to work hard in many areas.

If you haven't, then you'll need to work out what's wrong with your sales process - where and how you need to adjust.

If you aren't collecting any data in a way that helps sellers and management, then you'll struggle to do anything.

There are two critical elements: asking the questions (so you can collect the answers) and building trust (so you're trusted to take the next step with your prospect).