A sales wheel is a useful guide to strategically target new customers and improve sales performance. A sales wheel helps you account for multiple functions of your business so that you can distribute resources more effectively. As a sales professional, it’s a beneficial evaluative tool to measure your own actions and identify areas in need of improvement. It’s a dynamic device that helps align your sales targets with your overall organizational mission.
In this article, we define what a sales wheel is, describe why it’s important, introduce the eight stages of a sales wheel, and share tips on how you can implement one in your organization.
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What is the sales wheel?
A sales wheel is a visual representation of the process of targeting and enticing new customers to purchase your product or service. Illustrating this process in a wheel reminds professionals, like yourself, that business is a continuous cycle of creating renewed interest in your brand.
Unlike a sales funnel that seeks to achieve an end goal, the sales wheel’s cyclic nature means that it focuses on growth. Thus, the sales wheel considers the customer journey with a more holistic approach. It evaluates the reasons behind a customer’s association with a company. Next, it tries to align itself with customer expectations to build a more loyal following. This secures sales for the long-term.
Why is a sales wheel important?
The sales wheel is important because it encourages you to have a more adaptable approach to sales. It recognizes that the business environment is highly volatile. Therefore, it helps you address the following important sales concepts dynamically:
A customer-centric approach
A sales wheel is important because it helps you stay in touch with your customers’ changing needs and aspirations. The customer-centric approach helps you balance customer interests with your own business interests. Through its emphasis on research and development, the sales wheel encourages you to adapt your strategy to suit seismic shifts in the market. Responding to volatility quickly will benefit your ability to maintain relevance and profitability.
Adaptable analytical tool
The sales wheel takes an analytical approach to sales. It helps you identify products and services that outperform your expectations and singles out the underperformers. This information is valuable when planning your future sales strategy. It alerts you to your strengths and weaknesses, which can also inform your organizational goals. Since the sales wheels function as a cycle, it ensures you evaluate sales performance regularly. This is important to prevent costly problems and address areas that need greater support and resources.
Encourages self-evaluation
The sales wheel puts emphasis on self-reflection. It’s an important function that encourages you to evaluate how your actions and interventions impact sales performance. Once you identify these weaknesses, you can then target training initiatives to address the issue. This is an important step that empowers sales professionals to upgrade their skills and sales strategies.
Eight stages in the sales wheel
The sales wheel consists of eight stages that work together to drive sales performance. Here’s a detailed description of how each stage works:
1. Strategy
The first step in the sales wheel focuses on the strategic factors that impact sales within an organization. It suggests that it takes good leadership to develop, streamline, and execute a sales strategy. A clear and informed strategy gathers specific data about your target market to identify opportunities for growth. It evaluates the successes and weaknesses of your competitors and keeps track of trends within the market. Thorough planning will help you determine the most appropriate sales method. Through organization, you can learn from others’ mistakes and improve upon their strategy.
2. Structure
If you are in an organization with multiple territories, it’s important to implement a sales strategy that considers consumer interest in different regions and cultures. The sales wheel addresses complex organizational structures so that you can tap into revenue-growth opportunities in different markets. Without a logical structure, it can become even more difficult to oversee and manage sales performance in larger companies.
3. Operations
Operations refer to how efficiently the sales function of a business runs. This includes the practices they put in place to monitor activities and outcomes and the communication channels they implement to streamline the flow of information. The sales wheel suggests that sales teams who handle operations in an organized manner can reduce risks to performance. It gives leaders greater visibility into how an organization is doing or the changes they need to make to drive sales higher.
4. Enablement
The sales wheel puts emphasis on the enablement of sellers to sell at their potential. This essentially means that organizations should reflect internally to expose the factors that make their sales activities less effective than they could be. These factors could include a lack of sales training, absence of management, or poor use of technology and other resources.
5. Talent Management
Another parameter the sales wheel seeks to measure is the competency of the sellers themselves. You need to build the right team around you to drive sales. This means hiring the right people and pairing them with products they can sell. Talent management is a key stage in the sales wheel because it recognizes the link between the personality of sellers and the sales methods they employ. It illustrates that some sellers are more suitable for selling certain products or services.
6. Training
Training focuses on the development of sellers. This measure evaluates whether an organization’s culture facilitates the growth of its employees. For sellers to succeed, they need to learn to adapt their skills to different customers and situations. Thus, the sales wheel encourages organizations to invest in the education of their workers in order to see better results.
7. Capabilities
Capabilities refer to the skills that make good sellers. It takes a certain personality type to drive sales performance. However, the sales wheel suggests that with mentorship and experience, sales professionals can develop these strengths. Here are some capabilities that you should work on to improve your sales performance:
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The capability to build relationships
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The confidence to grow accounts
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The drive to meet sales targets
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The resilience to overcome challenges in the sales process
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The discernment to choose between different sales tactics
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The determination to convert customer interest into a sale
8. Motivation
No matter the role of a professional, motivation always has a positive impact on performance. This is especially true in the sales function of a business. The sales wheel states that the attitude, energy, and focus of sales professionals can optimize results. Leaders, in particular, play an active role in motivating their sales team. They can help sustain selling energy and lead to a more productive sales force.
Tips for implementing a sales wheel
Using a sales wheel as a guide to manage and improve sales performance can help your sales team stay on track with organizational goals. The regular analysis and reflection practices the cycle promotes will also detect barriers to operations before they turn into costly liabilities. Here are a handful of tips to help you implement a sales wheel as part of your sales procedures:
Define your goals
The two crucial initial stages of the sales wheel are strategy and structure. However, it becomes more difficult to create efficient operations without clearly defined goals. Brainstorm goals for individual sellers and your team that align with the organizational mission. For example, if your company is introducing a new product or service in the next quarter, you can quantify your objectives with individual sales targets. On a team level, you may create qualitative goals for strategy, such as designing a more intimate customer experience.
Delegate tasks strategically
Consider the strengths and interests of each individual in your sales team and delegate projects accordingly. The sales wheel emphasizes you consider the personality of each of your sellers. For example, outgoing individuals would be more at ease promoting sporting goods, whereas introverted professionals are great at building close ties with their customers. Refer to your original goals and equip your co-workers with the right resources to improve sales performance.
Foster a growth mindset
Just as professionals need to invest in their personal development, organizations also need to foster a growth mindset to enable employees to grow and improve. The sales wheel puts this responsibility on leaders in the workplace. If you are in a decision-making role, you need to drive opportunities to train and educate your co-workers. A company that nurtures the talents of its employees will inevitably see a rise in productivity and profitability.
Be open to feedback
Lastly, remember to frequently measure your actions. This means investigating your operations beyond just sales performance. Reflect on the efforts of your team, identify training needs, and embrace change. Sometimes a shift to your original plan is what you need to get customers excited about your products and services.
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