Sales Growth Specialists

The next place to look is at your Sales Management Processes. 

Sales organizations that survive turbulent times will inevitably be the ones who have their sales management processes in place.  People draw confidence from the structure created by solid and defined processes. Create your sales management processes around four key elements: accountability, motivation, recruiting, and coaching.

Accountability: Review your performance management system to ensure that goals and objectives are owned
by
each
person
on
your
sales
team. 
Are
your salespeople aligned with the company objectives and vision? Are there clear behavior and results metrics each sales person can quickly review to know if they are on track or not? What are the feedback loops? During these times, communication must be clear and constant.

Motivation:
Motivation 
is
 actually 
a
 sales
management
 process. This 
is 
a
 good time 
to 
revisit
 your
compensation
 plans
 and 
to 
see 
if 
they 
are
 clearly 
aligned with your growth objectives. Discuss short-term and long-term career opportunities with each team member. Don’t forget to celebrate the individual successes of your people; by doing so you not only motivate your team, you also inspire them.

Recruiting: Use this time to upgrade your salespeople. Strengthen your force by employing the people you have questioned. Get rid of the dead wood. Be ready for the upturn and be first out of the blocks.

Coaching: If 
coaching 
is
 not 
a 
defined 
process 
in 
your 
business, you
 are 
losing significant revenues.
Effective
 coaching
 can 
lift 
someone 
from
 mediocroty 
to superiority, enhancing strengths and overcoming weaknesses. Implement core coaching practices such as 
such
as

pre‐call
planning, call debriefing, field coaching and deal coaching.  In so doing, you’ll help ensure your team is maximizing every opportunity. 

How strong are your sales management process? Are they strong enough to ensure that you’re recession proof?

Danita

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

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

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 tam  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

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

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: 

1. 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).”

2. 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).

3. 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.

4. 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!

“I hate sales meetings,” Steve complained. As we talked further, he voiced his disappointment with his staff, “It seems they find reasons to be late. Or, they can’t wait to get to the meeting to complain. This brings the whole sales team down. It’s de-energizing for me. It’s got to be depressing for the sales team also.”

I suggested that he start doing three things:

1. Start every meeting with a public praising, recognizing at least one person on the staff for something they contributed to the company.

2. Start sharing success stories on a regular basis. Ask salespeople to share the greatest success for the week.

3.    Start going off-line with non-productive conversations that will be irresolvable during the meeting. Group meetings are for making decisions, not complaining.

As a result of implementing the new format, the meetings turned out to be energizers. While the good salespeople couldn’t wait for their share of the limelight, the struggling ones got great ideas from the successful reps. Fortunately, the complainers had to wait until after the meeting.

Utilize meetings as a chance to laud efforts of your people and build positive energy. People tend to dread sales meetings when they are poorly planned and run. Make sales meetings an opportunity to give salespeople the recognition they deserve. Salespeople go to great lengths to accomplish a goal when you give them credit, preferably in public.

Point: Use your sales meetings to pump-up, not deflate your staff. 

For additional insights into running good meetings, I also pull principles from Chapter 6: Mastering the Daily and Weekly Executive Meeting from Mastering the Rockefellar Habits by Verne Harnish. 

What are you doing to keep your sales meetings energized?