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Tips to Profitable Restructure Sales-Examine Mindsets

TIP 2: SALES MINDSET

The motto of one of my clients is, “Adversity nurtures creativity.” He knows that leaders set the pace and the tone of a company. You are being observed by your staff all of the time. They take their cues on how to think, feel and act from you. If you are tough-minded, confident, and recession-proof, you will draw like-minded people to you.

In addition, you need salespeople who have a recession proof mindset, who think differently that than the average salesperson. In fact, I was helping a client sift through a stack of Express Screens for a VP of Sales opening. Only 4 out of 52 Screens had a recession-proof mindset that could lead up a growth initiative during these challenging times. To meet the demands of this new economy, they need Objective Management’s 4 Crucial Elements and the 5 Major Performance Factors.

If your existing team has the 4 Crucial Elements (Desire, Commitment, Responsibility, Outlook) than you’ll need to coach your recession-busters to help them develop their “hunter” instincts, their “qualification” mindset, and their “closing” skills. Recession-busters are not afraid to ask tough business questions, talk about money, or navigate the political landscape within companies to find the true emotional decision maker. They understand that their success in intimately tied in with the success of the company.

So, does your sales team have the mindset to be a recession-buster?

Danita

Tips to Profitably Restructure Sales Team-Sales Strategies

I think we’ve all come to the realization that the economic downturn is a reality. However, with a focused sales approach, you have a unique opportunity to gain market share and remain profitable. These turbulent economic and market conditions are creating an ideal environment for business leaders committed to creating a more focused sales approach, maximizing their return investment and capturing market opportunities.

Leaders know that the key to thriving during these times is designing a disciplined sales force based on well thought out sales strategies, mindsets, and processes. When the best option to strengthening your sales team is to restructure a sales organization, you must draw on the power of personal discipline to make objective decisions.

TIP 1: SALES STRATEGIES

Be diligent in defining your sales strategies and aligning each member of the sales team to those strategies. Don’t waste time and resources guessing if you’re making the right decisions. We’ve identified 19 different aspects about sales strategies that are core as you hire, coach and direct your sales team.

An objective assessment is the most effective way to learn which sales people will generate revenue based on your strategic objectives. In these economic conditions, you can only afford to retain salespeople who will successfully sell your product or service in your target market with your pricing strategy. Evaluate each salesperson you currently employ to determine who can be successful in your selling environment, who can be trained and coached to be successful, and who will only tie up your resources without a positive return if retained. Your profile, based on these 19 variations, should overlay all hire/fire decisions.

If you need info on these 19 areas, send me a note–danita@Salesgs.com

Danita

Sales Manager’s Energize Sales Rep’s Dreams

This surprises many sales leaders–salespeople work primarily for themselves, not for company!

That’s why it’s critical that we as leaders are skilled at at connecting their success, both personal and professional, to that of the company. Find out about the dreams and aspirations of the salespeople on your team and you find out several important things about the person:

Example: I was interviewing Mike for a sales position with our company. I asked, “Where do you want to be 10 years from now?” He confidently stated, “I want to own a business.” As I probed further, he talked about his dream to be an entrepreneur and build a successful company.

During the interview, I made a commitment to Mike that, if he chose to come with me, I would help him realize his dream. In order to keep my commitment, I regularly questioned him during monthly one-on-one’s, quarter business reviews and annual performance appraisals. I asked him what he’d learned that would help him run his own business. Then we’d talk about what was in his professional development action plan for the next month, quarter, or year. I was actively linking Mike’s dream to his performance.

Mike quickly became my top performer and remained there.

A best-of-the-best manager will seek to understand and articulate how the company vision can connect and lend support to the dreams and aspirations of the employee. While making profits for the company is important, it’s not the first thing on a person’s mind while at work.

Never underestimate the power of a dream.Ask your people where they would like to be in 5 –10 years.Stimulate their thought processes.

Then, coach them on how to achieve it.

Finally, connect that dream to their successes on the job.

So, what do you do to help your sales team realize their dreams?

“Find out what a person dreams for their future and you have found the key to their motivation”… unknown

Sales Manager learns the “real” motivators

One of my favorite books is
The One Thing You Need to Know…about Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success. In it, March Buckingham states:

“Great management is not about changing
people.  Great managers take people “as is” and then focus on
releasing their talents.”

Here’s an example of this principle in action:

Walt, the sales manager, is extremely frustrated with Dale, ready to have the Performance Action Plan conversation. As a regional salesperson, Dale covers a large geographical territory. Keeping Dale on the road is expensive. The problem is that his performance results don’t justify the large expenses. Walt tries talking to Dale, with no change in his actions or performance.

Walt calls, asking if I have any suggestions prior to the PIP conversation. After talking through his frustrations, we decide to assess Dale’s attitude and interest preferences, compare that with Walt’s, and see if there were any insights that help solve this dilemma.

We discover that Walt ranks high in Utilitarian: he is driven to ensure that every single meeting has a clear return-on-investment and that his sales people are making the most revenue from each visit

On the other hand, Dale, high in Social, is focused on helping his prospects and clients. In fact, he “helps” them even if the company doesn’t benefit. His high Social motivation is sabotaging his effectiveness.

Armed with this new understanding, Walt reframed Dales’ purpose. Instead of a Performance Improvement Meeting, they had a Help-the-Company meeting. Walt started the meeting with, “Dale, it’s great that you care about your prospects and clients needs. In addition, you also need to think about the needs of your teammates and all the employees of the company. They have families to feed and kids to send to school. They need your help. When you do your part by closing sales, they stay employed and can keep serving their families.”

It was a light bulb experience for Dale!

So, by understanding the values of your people, you can achieve company goals more easily.

Understanding an individual’s attitudes helps understand WHY he or she behaves the way they do. By learning their values, you can tune your communication to resonate with them.

The assessment tool that I use measures the relative prominence of six basic interests/attitudes:  Theoretical, Utilitarian, Aesthetic, Social, Individualistic and Traditional. If you’d like more info in this process, feel free to contact me.

So, what steps are you taking to understand the “real” motivators for your sales team?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Danita

Great Sales Management and Motivation

I’m researching sales motivation for an upcoming Business Expert Webinar, “Why Your Salespeople Don’t Work For You….and Never Will.” As part of my research, I sourced Proactive Sales Management expecting to find a chapter on sales management’s role of motivating their staff.

Surprisingly, there is no chapter!

This missing ingredient drove me to one of my favorite books on leadership and sales management, Buckingham’s The One Thing You Need to Know….about Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success

In his research, Buckingham highlights four practices of successful sales managers. Notice that two of these relate to motivation:

Selecting the Right People

In hiring someone for the team, the manager is hiring a person gifted with predictable patterns of emotion, learning, memory and behavior (74).

Defining clear expectations

Buckingham states that the second skill of great managers is to define clear expectations and that the manager articulates these expectations at every opportunity (76).

Giving praise and motivation

In studying high performance managers, Buckingham discovers that these managers, in addition to recognizing and praising above-and-beyond excellence, will also “…notice incremental improvements in performance and celebrate it” (79). Leaders, understand the psychological principle of positive reinforcement.

Showing you care for your people

High performance sales managers succeed because they are able to draw the best out of their staff. According to Buckingham, “…the only way to pull this off is to make certain your employees believe, genuinely believe, that their success is your primary goal” (42).

So, as the leaders, how do you show that you really you care for your staff? How do you draw the best of them? How do you discover their goals, dreams, and aspirations? I look forward to hearing from you!

Sales Manager’s Communication Challenge

Sales Managers must “tune” their communication to each person, especially to help each team member stay engaged during difficult times.

I call Kevin a “D Squared” sales manager. He has a focused, direct, aggressive and bottom-line oriented communication style. This mode of communication helps him in a strategic setting; however, his communication style doesn’t seem to help him when interacting with his star salesperson.

Mark, the star salesperson, believes in the need to connect with a person on an emotional level before actually entering into business issues. When Mark starts a conversation, no matter how insignificant, he has a need to “feel” the level of intensity before he can choose a strategy. Mark and Kevin, each in his own way, want to be in control of the conversation.

Kevin’s been realizing that to best influence Mark, he has to alter his communication style when speaking with him. Instead of directing Mark with a list of “to-dos” that need to be “checked off” by the end of the day, Kevin’s learning to slow down and take on a more collaborative style with Mark. As a result, Kevin and Mark are having much better communications and Kevin has learned an important tool as a manager

Learn to communicate in a way that resonates with each individual on your sales team. Listen and analyze how each person prefers to communicate. There are lots of tools that can help you, whether is DiSC, Meyer’s Briggs, or Strengths Finder. Just knowing the proper way of communicating with each person on your staff improves understanding.

What unique communication styles do your salespeople have? How have you changed your communication style to enhance understanding with others? I look forward to hearing from you.

Keep Pressing Forward!

Danita