Giving your salespeople a big leg up for success in 2016.

Often, commercial equipment manufacturers, distributors, and dealers experience really high turnover among the sales team. While some might posture that this is the nature of sales, some of our customers enjoy long term, committed, successful sales teams. The variables that contribute to their success are probably enumerable, but you’d be surprised how simple one common ingredient for success can be.

Recent research indicates that 69% of business owners value payment over purchase price. In fact, most of those folks don’t really even pay too much attention to the purchase price as long as the payment meets their cash flow and monthly budget requirements. Despite this customer behavior, only 6% of all equipment sales teams lead with a payment. SIX PERCENT! The factor that matters the most to the customer is usually only addressed when the customer brings it up or at the end of the process. The same research indicates that equipment sales teams that lead with payment are nearly 3 times as likely to close the deal.

While these statistics may sound alarming, they represent a tremendous opportunity to create a culture of sales success and increase your sales. Here are 3 simple recommendations:

• A payment on every quote. By making this simple cultural change in your sales efforts, you’ll be dealing with more buying signals more often and earlier in the process
• Lead with the payment over the purchase price. It’s not enough to just have the payment buried on the page, lead with it. Make it incredibly obvious just how affordable your equipment solution can be. Have the courage to even lead with payment over specs and features of the equipment.
• Establish a finance partnership that can help you easily position each deal for victory. Having a dedicated equipment lender that can act as a sales support engine to position each opportunity for success is critical. A partner that can help a wide variety of credit backgrounds, business situations, and execute reliably once the payment expectation has been set can massively increase your chances of winning the business.

By doing this simple thing, you position yourself to win more frequently. The more you win, the happier the sales team and the lower the turnover rate because you have more consistently successful salespeople. At Key Credit Corp, we help our equipment sales team partners with programs to increase sales. After 30 years in business, we’ve always known that if we do right by you and your customer, great things happen. If you’d like to start doing the simple things needed to grow the business, reduce turnover, and improve salesperson performance…let’s talk.