When you’re in a frantic race with other runners hot on your heels, it seems impossible to take a mental step back and evaluate what’s happening. You just feel the need to push on and win. But real athletes do assess the situation during the race! And in business, it’s equally essential to find time to do a sales assessment to
- uncover inefficiency and
- reveal your business growth opportunities.
Otherwise, winning is in jeopardy. Your sales engine falters and others take the lead.
In this article, we’ll talk about sales assessment – because it’s about more than analyzing sales quantity over a quarter (useful as leading and lagging indicators are!) – and look at why and how your business could benefit from an assessment of your sales, strategies, processes, and people.
What is a Sales Assessment?
Remember that old chestnut about people looking at different parts of an elephant and coming up with different verdicts?
Sales assessment is something you use to measure the total efficiency of your sales systems, strategies, and sales team performance. One without the others gives you an incomplete and skewed picture.
A sales assessment is therefore a detailed evaluation of all things relevant to the success of your sales. It examines two main areas: people and processes. And looks at every sales stage from hiring of the team, lead generation, closing sales, all the way to customer satisfaction. Your people and processes need to be aligned for you to win!
A good assessment takes into account both qualitative and quantitative data. Together, they give you a detailed understanding of your entire sales activity, including the details of your sales performance, best practices, and benchmarks for your sales goals.
In addition, it leads to a plan of action.
But if you’re going to pause and take stock, you’ll expect benefits!
What Are the Benefits of a Sales Assessment?
It’s easy to think that the goal of a sales assessment is to point out what you’re doing wrong. But there’s more to the process. And the three major benefits lie strictly in the positive realm.
1 Providing Business Clarity
You can avoid a lot of mistakes in business if you ensure your sales people are clear on a shared vision, goals, strategies, and processes.
If not, they’ll undertake a flurry of unfocused activity – with the entirely preventable result of missing sales targets and not retaining customers! And if you haven’t aligned your sales and marketing, this is a good time to do so, to avoid the silos blaming each other for those poor outcomes.
Benefit #1
A sales assessment clarifies your vision for everyone. Clarity also brings into focus any gaps in understanding the vision that hinder you – as a business – from moving forward.
With a clear, shared vision you can also clarify the strategy to make it happen and update any processes your team would benefit from adopting.
2 Identifying Areas to Strengthen Your Sales Team
Your sales people are your business! You need them to stay motivated, equipped, and determined to reach their targets to grow sales and ROI.
When you look at your current team in the forensic way we’re advising, do you see people who are equipped to make things happen in the way you envision?
For example, are they responding quickly to customer requests/feedback? Is there a specific skills gap such as running live presentations?
Benefit #2
A sales assessment of your team helps you identify areas where your team can improve their performance by giving tasks to those with the skills that come most naturally to them.
In addition, when recruiting, your sales assessment will have shown you roles that need filling – and you can therefore focus on hiring the best candidates for those roles.
3 Providing a Foundation For Sales Planning
You need proper systems in place to create and execute your company sales strategy. You’ve probably been intending to take a deeper look into your goal-setting activities, resources, plans, KPIs, and milestones. Nevertheless, it can seem a task too many in today’s fast-moving marketplace.
But evaluating what you’re doing right or less well is crucial to being able to choose proper sales approaches that fit your target audience. And that audience is changing all the time. No assessment, no fine-tuning of your sales engine!
Benefit #3
A good sales assessment is a necessary and valuable pause. Think of it like a pitstop. You can reassess what you’re running on and determine what personnel, resources, and budget you need for the next lap to achieve your business goals.
How to Get the Best Out Of Sales Assessment
So, we’ve convinced you a sales assessment is not only beneficial but needs doing!
However, just like with any other process, how you implement it will determine how much you can benefit.
When making executive decisions for your business, the best way forward is to engage with a fair and impartial sounding-board about the direction of your business. It’s therefore a good idea to invite a third party to carry out a sales assessment. It will repay your investment many times over.
But however you decide to move forward, three things are important:
Be truthful about the state of your business
You need to be honest about the current state of your business – numbers, processes, and strategies. Whether it’s you or a third party conducting the detailed assessment, the value is in having a clear picture of what’s really going on!
Record your progress
When you make changes to your sales processes and people, record them. Without the evidence, you cannot judge success or failure down the line.
Repeat regularly
Sales assessment is not a one-off process. You have to find what works best for you. So – plan to pause and assess your sales and processes regularly.
We Can Help You!
Are you looking to help your team perform to the best of their abilities? Do you want to strengthen your people and processes to achieve your sales goals? We can help you with a customized 360 Sales Engine to help you win that business race!
At 360 Consulting, we start by assessing your sales needs and then work cooperatively to develop sales strategies that ensure you have what you need for predictable, profitable growth. Schedule a free consultation today!