... and how much Sales Savviness can you manage in your team?
In this article we scrutinize a rather unusual competency in Sales called Professional Hygiene. This competency entails your capability to display Professionalism and compliance alongside standard working procedures. People who express a high level of Professional Hygiene often appreciate thorough preparations, are people who think before they act and try to avoid making mistakes.
Professional Hygiene may not be the most obvious competency when we consider effective development of salespeople. Moreover, Professional Hygiene is often considered as a hidden competency and therefore regularly forgotten or ignored. The reason for this is there appears no direct correlation between Professional Hygiene and Sales performance, however there is adversely: A lack of Professional Hygiene will certainly lead to a lower sales performance. This is why we consider Professional Hygiene to be a pretty important competency for Salespeople.
When you have a high score on Professional Hygiene and for example you appear always on time, you are perceived by your customers as capable of managing their issues adequately and therefore you more likely to be are considered to be trustworthy and honest. This attitude is therefore also closely linked to successfully managing customers’ expectations. However: Salespeople that display too much preparation and present a CRM system that is always up to date, often don’t seem to reach their targets though. This is why we believe that sometimes your salespeople need to have a bit of:
“Better to ask for forgiveness than approval”
This attitude we call Sales Savviness, and this appears to be in contrast with a high score on Professional Hygiene. So why is Sales Savviness important?
Because we know from experience that sales Savvy salespeople always surf on the edges of what is tolerable and possible. This encourages innovation and competition within sales teams and these people are (when carefully managed and coached) essential for your innovation and winning spirit in your team and thus vital for your entire organizational innovation and sales performance.
So now we understand why Sales Savviness is important, how much Professional Hygiene is good?
In trying to answer this question, the research database of SalesStep provides us with relevant data. Based upon the results of the assessments of 455 Salespeople our recommendation for an ideal score on Professional Hygiene between 50-70% (on a scale of 0-100%). The average score for the 455 respondents is however only 48% so there is some room for improvement on the development of this competency.
To measure this for your team, we recommend to your use SalesStep’s Teamviewer application that provides this overview for you on an individual as well on a team level.
Do we offer sales training on Professional Hygiene? Certainly not! This is a clear managerial responsibility and when you would like to develop your professional hygiene, we always recommend starting with displaying discipline during your regular sales meetings. Being on-time, well prepared, writing clear meeting minutes, meeting every week on the same day etc.
You will be amazed to see what will happen over time when you provide more discipline to your own meetings and the impact this has on to the preparation for customer meetings.
But again, be careful not to overdo this!
Any questions or remarks: info@salesstep.com
