Why Sales Teams Should Sell...

Out of all of the actions your business development team or sales team should be working on, attempting to find new business and/or prospecting is not one of them.... If you want to increase production and sales, that is. Every person is different, including salespeople. They have different methods of going about things and how they manage, work and produce. I haven't seen one salesperson that has a steady method of developing consistent news business. Salespeople need to focus on selling and closing new business, following up and catering to current clients that potentially will purchase again.

The vital daily and weekly tasks of a salesperson should include:

- handling new prospects to sell

- phone calls or meetings

- traveling to meetings

- following up with prospects or clients

- emailing or writing letters to prospects

- creating and sending proposals

- closing deals

Prospecting to develop new prospective clients should be done by either a separate unit within your company that supports sales or an agency. It's unproductive having your sales team spend their time trying to find and develop new prospective clients with methods that may or may not work which results in lost time and lost sales opportunities with the people in their current pipeline. The truth is, salespeople are not very good at it and don't really like it anyway.

If you have either internal efforts and strategies to maintain a very full pipeline or hire an agency to do so, it will improve productivity and cut out wasted efforts for your team. Focus on filling their pipeline with qualified new prospective business and keeping it full so they can spend their time selling and closing new business. It will make your salespeople happy and you'll ultimately be happy as well since this will certainly increase your profits.

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group