There’s a lot to be said for doing what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. It creates trust, and it creates customers.
So why do so many salespeople suck at it?
If we’re only managing a few prospects, it’s easy to remember all the promises we’ve made, the things we said we’d send, the next meeting we have lined up. But once we start scaling out our pipelines and regularly add new prospects, it becomes impossible to remember every conversation, every promise, and every commitment.
Too many sales fall through the cracks because of a lack of sales integrity. That’s why we sat down with Sharon Cupach, a sales expert who has dedicated her career to helping busines owners stand up sales teams, to learn how she systemizes sales integrity.
T – Trigger: Salespeople are making stated and unstated commitments all the time, so to ensure integrity comes into play, Sharon says it starts with hiring. Once we ensure a candidate exhibits integrity throughout the hiring process, the next triggering event is to put checkpoints into every commitment a salesperson makes.
Of course, it is better to have salespeople individually-manage their own commitments. However, once a salesperson begins scaling their pipelines with more and more prospects, it does become necessary to track our commitments outside of our heads. That’s why we need to make our integrity a repeatable process.
R – Repeatable: Sharon advises that we track which commitments we make most often and establish basic systems that make those commitments easier to deliver.
For instance, if one of the most common commitments we make as salespeople is to send information after a call or meeting, why not establish that as a task set within our CRM that not only tells us to send the follow-up information, but also includes a follow-up task to check with the prospect to ensure they received it and set a next step on the account?
I – Improvable: To continue improving our integrity, Sharon says to continue looking for ways to automate our processes so that we can put more focus into the individual commitments we make to our prospects. That may look like a scheduled meeting where the team examines their sales cycle and asks: ‘Where could we establish a task set for that process?’ and then take action to create checkpoints for the commitments we’re making.
M – Measurable: To measure how well we’re systemizing integrity, Sharon says to look at the most obvious metric: Closed sales. Prospects won’t become customers if we don’t establish integrity early in the sales process and continue to deliver on our commitments. Another great metrics is how often customers become repeat customers. A drop off there could mean that we’re all about integrity during the sale but have a drop-off of integrity in servicing our current clients.
Integrity doesn’t have to be a soft sales skill – IF you take the time to systemize it.