Are you a sales training manager in charge of helping your sales team win? If so, these terms are probably going to pop up everywhere—in conversations with your boss, in meetings with your team, in magazine articles, at conferences, and everywhere else in your professional life.
Ramp Up
Time rookies need to get to a productivity level that matches a veteran. As sales manager, you want to minimize this time as much as possible.
Efficiency
Doing work faster. For example, if five salespeople start making 20% more calls, you’ve gained a new salesperson without having to hire and pay another body.
Retention
Trying to keep your salespeople from leaving (provided that they’re doing great work). Not only is a lost salesperson lost productivity, you also incur costs from ramping up his or her replacement.
Turnover
Replacement of employees. A high-turnover organization means that existing employees are constantly being replaced with new ones. Typically, a high-turnover organization spends a lot on training because they’re constantly ramping up new hires.
Sales managers can cut costs by reducing turnover using a variety of retention strategies.
Quota
The number of sales a salesperson is supposed to make in a specific period of time. Oftentimes, you can identify top-performing salespeople by how well they meet or exceed their quota.
Knowledge Transfer
The art of cloning salespeople, often through sales training that aims to copy/paste your top salesperson’s brain into other salespeople.
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Some sales organizations have a stable of SMEs on call. Examples:
- A resident expert on cold-calling. Maybe a consultant.
- A resident expert on your product. Maybe the product manager.
- A resident expert on closing techniques. Maybe a consultant or top salesperson.
Sales organizations often arm their salespeople with access to SMEs.
Sales Enablement
Setting your salespeople up for success by providing them with easy-to-use tools, resources, access to helpful SMEs, motivational tapes, etc.
Competitive Intelligence
Knowledge that can help your salespeople explain how the products and services you’re selling are positioned against your competitors or alternatives.
Mentor
A “big brother” or “big sister” your salespeople can go to if they have questions. Some organizations have sophisticated programs that match salespeople with mentors like colleges match freshmen with roommates.
Funnel
Picture a funnel. What comes through the funnel are closed sales. At the very top is your first touch-point with potential buyers.
Here’s an example of what a funnel might look like at some business software companies:
10,000 in your mailing list
1,000 attend your webinar
500 respond positively to follow-up phone calls and request a demo
50 get a sandbox
25 buy a paid pilot for one quarter
10 sign a one-year contract
Pipeline
The total number of potential deals being worked on by your salespeople, across all funnels.
Lead Generation
A process that sets up your salespeople with productive conversations from qualified prospects.
Tags: sales training