What if improving your sales performance didn’t need to be complicated or become exhausting for you or your team and instead started with making small improvements every single day.
That’s where Kaizen comes in. This method has been used by Toyota for around 70 years and has entirely changed their approach to continuous improvement. Although it originated in manufacturing, the principles are just as relevant to sales teams today. Let’s look at how it works and how you can put it into practice.
What Is the Kaizen Method?
Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning ‘change for the better’. Rather than waiting for a major transformational change, focus on making small, manageable improvements consistently every day.
Instead of trying to fix everything at once, identify one area that could work better and start making small adjustment. Over time, these small changes help businesses improve their processes, develop better habits and achieve stronger results.
The 1% Rule: Make small improvement for better results
One way to apply Kaizen is through the 1% rule: aim to make something just 1% better each day.
In sales, this could mean:
- Making one additional prospecting call
- Responding to enquiries slightly faster
- Improving your preparation before customer meetings
- Asking better questions during discovery calls
- Refining your follow-up process
These might seem like minor adjustments, but when sticking to them consistency will make a huge difference. So rather than attempting to succeed in something overnight, focus on one improvement at a time and build from there.
Overcoming Procrastination Through Small Actions
Sometimes, the biggest barrier to continuous improvement is getting started. When a task seems overwhelming, it’s a lot easier to put it off for another time. Kaizen helps this by breaking bigger goals into smaller, much more manageable actions.
For example:
- Instead of trying to fix your entire sales pipeline, take a step back and start reviewing a few opportunities.
- Rather than committing to hours or days of prospecting, create a list of 4-5 calls you can begin with.
The whole idea of Kaizen is to make the first step actually doable, and not feel like a huge task that will burn someone out. Once you’ve started this, it becomes much easier to reach goals and become consistent.
Kaizen and Continuous Improvement
One thing to remember is that Kaizen isn’t about making random changes and hoping for better results. It’s about repeating a process one section at a time and start to identify and test for improvements.
A useful framework for doing this is the ‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’ or the ‘PDCA’ cycle which consists of 4 simple steps to follow:
Step 1 – Plan: Start identifying areas for improvement and decide what small change to make.
Step 2 – Do: Start putting the chosen change into practice.
Step 3 – Check: Review the results and decide if it has made a difference.
Step 4 – Act: Keep what works and adjust what hasn’t then repeat the process again.
This helps by allowing yourself or your team to build on progress already made, rather than starting from scratch every single time, not knowing what has gone wrong.
Applying Kaizen to Your Sales Performance
There are 3 key stages of a typical sales process
- Generating conversations
- Converting conversations into meetings
- Turning meetings into deals
Each of these three stages show a great opportunity to improve.
Ask yourself:
- Could my team improve the quality of their prospecting?
- Would it help if we became faster at follow-ups to help secure more meetings?
- Could better meeting preparation or objection handling improve our conversion rates?
By making small improvements every day across these stages, sales teams can start improving their overall performance. The most important thing is to identify where the biggest opportunities are, measure the results and then focus on the changes that will make a genuine difference.
For more information on the Kaizen method, watch our short video over on our YouTube channel here:
If your team needs support with sales training, sales coaching, or more structured sales training programmes, you can explore our sales training courses, review our free sales training resources, or read more on how to ask great sales questions and consultative selling to strengthen your approach to discovery.
To get in touch with our team, call us on 01704 889325, email us at info@salestrainingint.com or fill in our online contact form.
