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Keeping Your Eye Out for New Sales Talent

October 7, 2014 By Larry Lewis

looking for sales talentFiring someone is not an easy thing to do. One part of you doesn’t want to fire someone, and another part of you wants to do it so you can move on and invest your energy in a new candidate. The task is particularly tough when the salesperson is a marginal producer with a previously successful track record. If you are unsure whether to terminate a salesperson ask yourself this: If this individual walked into your office tomorrow and quit, would you be relieved or would you try to keep him? Your answer will determine what you should do.

Unfortunately, most sales managers hang onto their marginal producers longer than they should, especially in tight labor markets. Sales managers are afraid to let someone go because they need a body in the position and someone (even a poor performer) is better than no one. For this reason, you should always be on the lookout for new sales talent. When you have a great candidate waiting in the wings it is a lot easier to let go of a poor performer.
This is the same reason that underlies our principle that says “the better you are at prospecting, the better you will be at selling.” When selling, when you have a full pipeline of prospects you are not afraid of disqualifying a prospect who isn’t a good fit. Similarly, when recruiting sales talent, if you have several good candidates waiting in the wings you won’t be afraid of letting go of a poor performer or turning down a candidate who is marginal. As a result, the overall caliber of your sales organization will rise accordingly.

In addition, when setting the standards for your sales team, your poor performers have a bigger impact in terms of establishing expectations than your top performers do. We like to think that by hiring a top performer he or she will raise the bar for everyone on the sales team, but it’s not so.

Hiring a top performer may motivate the top one or two salespeople to work harder in order to stay on top, but the bulk of your sales team will not do anything differently. As long as there is someone below them in terms of performance, the average salespeople will think this: “Hey, I am not the best, but at least I am not the worst.” Getting rid of your poor performers will cause the people in the middle of the pack to step up their game. They don’t care if they are first, but they don’t want to be last. The fear of losing their job is a powerful motivator.

As Brad Smart explains in his book “Topgrading” and as Jack Welch taught us when he was in charge of General Electric, the secret to building a culture of excellence is to routinely replace the poor performers at the bottom of your talent hierarchy with salespeople who have the potential to become top performers.

Promoting Overachievement in Salespeople – Part 2

September 30, 2014 By Larry Lewis

SupermanAccording to sales expert Dave Kurlan, founder of Objective Management Group, there are ten factors that impact a salesperson’s propensity to overachieve. Last week I presented the first five. This week I will present factors six through ten:

6. Self-Starters – This is whether salespeople are more effective when working independently or as part of a team; and whether they require supervision or can work without it. If you have self-starters on your team, you are one lucky manager. If not, you must start them up every day or as often as it takes.

7. Skills – The more the better, but let’s focus on the most important skillsets for overachieving. Your salespeople must be able to hunt for new opportunities, identify the most qualified of those opportunities and be able to close them. Anything else they can do is a bonus!

8. Sense of Urgency – Your salespeople must have enough urgency to get their opportunities closed, when they become closable, even when their prospects are trying to put them off.

9. Hidden Weaknesses – Unfortunately, there are weaknesses that will neutralize all of the previous eight factors. There can be dozens of weaknesses that could impact performance but none are so powerful as these five: High Need for Approval, Tendency to Become Emotionally Involved, Non-Supportive Buy Cycle, Money Issues, and a Self-Limiting Record Collection.

10. Coaching and Training – Your coaching must support any training initiative and help salespeople overcome their weaknesses, develop skills and master the selling process. While most training will be conducted by sales development experts from outside your firm, the coaching absolutely takes place from within. Pre-call strategizing and post-call debriefing, with every salesperson, at least every week.

 

Promoting Overachievement in Salespeople – Part 1

September 23, 2014 By Larry Lewis

goals planningAccording to sales expert Dave Kurlan, founder of Objective Management Group, there are ten factors that impact salespeople’s ability to overachieve. Here are factors one through five:

1. Goals – In terms of setting goals, we are talking about “raise the bar, stretch out of the comfort zone, more than the typical 15% increase in sales” type goals. You must raise expectations in order to celebrate superior performance. In addition, when setting goals, there are two things to remember: (1) a forecast and the plan that supports that forecast come from the goals; not the other way around; and (2) goals should be derived, not from the company, but from the individual’s income requirements, based on the bills that accompany life’s obligations and desires.

2. Incentives – This includes the compensation plan, sales contests, commissions, awards and prizes. Incentives bridge the gap between the corporate objectives and the personal goals we just discussed. If an individual has established personal goals but the company’s compensation plan isn’t designed to reward superior achievement, the incentive to perform cannot be maintained. If a company has a rock-solid compensation plan but the salesperson’s personal goals don’t excite them, the personal incentive to perform will be lost. Remember, most of us work for selfish motives. In other words, our personal motives take priority over a company’s objectives. The job of management is to help align a person’s personal goals with the company’s objectives.

3. Motivation – Motivation results from the combination of Goals and Incentives. In essence, it is the salesperson’s desire and commitment to do whatever it takes, every day, to reach their goals. When they don’t do whatever it takes to achieve their goals, it’s your job to motivate them by knowing what each salesperson’s goals are and reminding them what they need to do to achieve them. When talking about their goals in this context, I’m not talking about income requirements or gross sales volume. That doesn’t have the emotional impact to motivate someone. I’m talking planes, boats and cars, big houses, vacation homes, golf trips, world travel, home theaters, fantasy camps, exclusive events, etc.

4. Pipeline Management – The key to managing a sales pipeline effectively is working with critical ratios. The critical ratios you want to work with are: (1) Monthly sales goal, (2) Closing ratio, (3) Average sale and (4) Length of the selling cycle. Let’s say that a salesperson has a six month selling cycle, a $100,000 monthly goal, a $20,000 average sale and a 25% closing percentage. Effectively managing the pipeline requires that your salesperson places 20 new opportunities in his pipeline each month. How did I arrive at this? With an average sale of $20,000 it will take five $20,000 sales to achieve the monthly goal. With a 25% closing ratio, it will require four times of the number of opportunities worth of total of $400,000 (25% of $100,000) entering the pipeline 6 months in advance of the monthly goal to achieve that goal. If the goal is for July, then the opportunities must enter the pipeline in February. The number to focus on is the number of new opportunities entering the pipeline. Get that to work and the outcomes are all but guaranteed.

5. Accountability – This is huge factor in overachievement. You must hold each salesperson accountable to something measurable (like the number of conversations required to set the number of appointments needed to identify those 20 new opportunities) every day. Even more importantly, you must have consequences for failure to meet those requirements and consistently follow through whenever necessary. Develop the nerve for full accountability and you’re nearly there!

Next week, I’ll discuss factors six through ten.

 

Client Builder Sales & Marketing launches new website.

August 1, 2014 By Larry Lewis

epic_salesOn August 1, 2014 Client Builder Sales & Marketing launched their new website at www.ClientBuilderSelling.com. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out and sign up for any of the free tools and resources CBSM has made available.

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