Always Know Your Share

Guest articles > Always Know Your Share

by: Daniel Milstein

Whether it be through mystery shopping, asking your customers, doing Internet research, having competitive information can help you better understand how to sell against other salespeople, and in some cases assess your market share.

You should know how you measure up against the top salespeople in your area. Some professions, including mortgage lending and insurance, have industry-wide yardsticks that help salespeople gauge their success. For example, several mortgage lending trade publications have ranked loan originators on the basis of their annual production, which confirmed that I was among the top 10 loan originators nationwide over a ten-year period.

The Million Dollar Roundtable is one measure of life insurance advisers' standing in their industry. Real estate companies rank their agents based on units sold and total sales. Even where such benchmark information isn't readily available, you can obtain some of the sales data from local business groups, business journals, industry associations and other sources.

Your ranking in the marketplace also should account for how you match the competition in non-production statistics, such as best pricing, response time and customer service. Even though you may want to outshine other salespeople in terms of units sold, it is advantageous to surpass them on these points as well. Survey your customers to get their impressions regarding these areas.

It is essential to know how your market share measures against your top competitors. Find a way to gauge your success and deduce what needs to be improved.

Daniel Milstein is the bestselling author of ABC of Sales. For more information, visit: http://amzn.to/ABCARTICLES.

Contributor: Daniel Milstein

Published here on: 01-Jul-12

Classification: Sales

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