Sales Laundry

Posts Tagged ‘coaching’

Who is managing your sales force, your Sales Manager or your compensation plan?

If you said your compensation plan, the good news is you are in the majority. The bad news is your sales could likely improve 15-20% with a solid Sales Manager steering the ship.  Neil Rackham , in his book Rethinking the Sales Force: Redefining Selling to Create and Capture Customer Value, would say 17%.

When I find a Sales Manager that is giving honest effort but is not effective, it is usually because of one of these reasons.

1. The Sales Manager was your best sales professional and is still your best sales professional. Management? What management?
2. Most companies have a training program in place for new sales professionals and executive management, but few utilize any formal training for their Sales Managers. As a result, Sales Managers have no tools to help them manage the revenue production arm of the company, and run solely on gut instinct.
3. Sales Managers have a responsibility to complete a myriad of reports every week, with consequences for not getting them done. There is usually no compelling reason to make time for training or coaching exercises, and as such they don’t get done.
4. The Right Now. Sales performance is often measured on 30 day – 90 day increments on products and services with sales cycles that are much longer. No one dares to take their eye off the sales ball long enough to build in team development time.
5. The Sales Manager compensation model is out of line with company and/or the sales teams defined objectives.

Here are the first five tools I drop in my tool box when I am headed out to fix Sales Management related problems.

1. Put a “sales Manager” instead of a “Sales manager” in charge of your sales organization. Having the wrong person or personality type in the Sales Manager role is more often than not a significant part of the problem.
2. Train your Sales Manager. If you don’t have the budget, think of what an additional 15%+ in sales could do for your business.
3. Build training metrics into your Sales Manager performance measurements and make sure his/her workload will allow time to get the job done.
4. Build a model of continuous improvement into your sales process, making sure you do not shortchange your sales team’s growth and long term revenue potential for short term sales targets.
5. Align the Sales Manager job and compensation model with company goals to make sure a Sales Manager is watching and responding to the objectives and issues that are important to the company. Tie your Sales Managers compensation to the sales team and/or the sales professionals he is responsible for.

I want my Sales Manager to take care of his customers (the sales professionals he is responsible for) and keep the road clear of obstacles that might prevent them from doing their job.

I want my Sales Manager to be my eyes on the front line, making sure we are allocating our sales resources in the most efficient way possible to engage prospects and that he has and will use his authority to make necessary changes on the fly.

I want my Sales Manager continually engaged in enhancing or reinforcing the skill set of the sales team and identifying new ideas and best practices discovered by one sales professional and incorporating them into the entire sales team.

Put your Sales Manager to work growing your business instead of growing the stack of paper in your in-box. There is typically not another person in your organization that can have as much immediate impact for the dollar on your front line sales team as a well trained Sales Manager.

Have any Sales Management best practices or unique signs of spotting trouble?  I would love to hear them.

Image courtesy of  lumaxart

Looking around these days it appears we could all do with more sales.  Sales experts have, since time began I guess, been telling the great sales unwashed that the best and easiest source of new sales are referrals from existing happy customers.  So why aren’t we all out there asking and working referrals on a consistent basis?

 According to a statistic I have seen plastered all over the Internet, but never sourced, 15% of sales professionals do ask for referrals on a consistent basis.  I assume there is a measure of truth to that statistic as it fits my anecdotal sales coaching experience.  So why would an estimated 85% of all sales people prefer cold calling among other methods to collecting referrals as a means of finding new opportunities?

 Because done poorly, through a lack of training or otherwise, the referral collecting process can damage our valuable hard won personal relationships.  Rather than risk doing more harm than good, most choose to do nothing.

 I think we can do better.  Here are some strategies, both relationship and transaction driven, to help you become part of the enlightened 15% that have referral based selling figured out.

Relationship based strategy:

Strategy 1: Ask a better question.  Instead of asking “Who do you know that could benefit from my product or services?” I would ask a more targeted to my profession.  “Can you think of anyone that is having difficulty hitting their sales numbers” or “…anyone struggling to get their new business off the ground?”

With the first question, you are asking your client to understand the problem your business solves and apply that to the lives of the people they know.  It is much simpler to just present the problem you solve and let them figure out who might be a fit.

When you do get a name, follow up with “What made you think of that person?”  This will give you an understanding of your clients thought process and give you something to work with when you do engage the prospect.

Ask your customer to make an introduction for you.  Ideally this would happen face to face, perhaps over lunch, but a three-way call, or an email between all parties could work in less than ideal situations.

Every few months ask your customer base a new question and begin the referral generation process all over again.

Strategy 2:  Tell a story.  More specifically, tell one of your success stories that involves the kind of referral client you are looking for and how you were able to help them.  It does not need to be long, just where the client was, where they wanted to be and how you helped get them there.  After you finish relating the story, ask them if they have ever seen a situation like that or know anyone in that situation now.  Asking this way changes the conversation in the head of the person you are talking to.  Instead of asking them to sacrifice one of their friends who may or may not need your services you are asking them to play a game of Classic Concentration in their head and match someone they know to the character in the story.  If they can make that match, their is a greater likelihood they will tell you because you have helped them identify a solution to a specific problem one of their friends has.   

Strategy 3:  Find vendors with complimentary products and establish a referral system with them doing reciprocal work.  Think auto parts and car washes, software and hardware vendors, advertising agencies and production studios, insurance agents and clinics/body shops for instance.

 Strategy 4:  Work with the people you know and depend on like barbers, waitresses, dry cleaners, your coffee shop guy, your realtor, or your insurance agent and where appropriate leave them with a stack of your business cards if a referral opportunity presents itself and do the same for them.

Transactional based strategy:

Strategy 4:  Build a repeatable transaction driven referral process.

Every time you engage a client in a meaningful way give them an opportunity to refer a friend and a reward them for helping you win a new client.

When you send out an invoice, drop in a flyer for your referral program detailing the reward for giving you a new prospect.  Technicians can leave a flyer when they complete their onsite work.  Promotional letters could be packed with shipments.     

Obviously, in your industry, mileage may vary.

The objective is to build a system that provides your business with a steady stream of referrals by consistently making your customers aware of your search for new customers and rewarding those who choose to help you identify and land new business.       

Strategy 5:  http://uRefer.com.  Pay to use a referral system someone else has already built like uRefer that just bolts onto your existing web infrastructure.  For the record I have never used uRefer, nor do I have any incentive for recommending them over any other company.

 I, myself, have ignored the “benefits” of having a formal referral program in place over the years because I did not honestly see a need based on the numbers we were turning.  In light of where we are today that seems careless and more than a little silly.

 If you told me today that a successful referral program could potentially bump my top line revenue 10-20%, again, mileage may vary, I would make that an immediate priority.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article.  Please spend another two minutes on this 5 question survey.  I would appreciate your feedback as it will shape some future posts.

Want to see how the Guinness Book best car salesman in the world used referrals? 

Image courtesy of http://trismartcoaching.com

My 8 year old daughter has some basic responsibilities around the house.  One of which is to keep the bathroom she uses cleaned up  (i.e. cleaning up the toothpaste that gets loose from a wild night of bedtime brushing, rounding up rowdy bath toys, swapping clean towels for the dirty ones, etc.)

One day, with inspired motivation, my daughter decided it was time to give the bathroom a serious cleaning to the standard set by her mother and well beyond the mundane challenges of wrestling with escaped toothpaste.

Once she completed the task to her satisfaction she flew through the house, rattling the stairs on her descent like a herd of stampeding cattle on her way to tell us of her accomplishment.

She was grinning ear to ear, beaming with pride and self satisfaction as she talked about how she cleaned the bathroom the way Mommy did it, not just the kid way.

At my daughter’s announcement, my wife was off like a herd of equally shocked and stampeding cattle, make that graceful gazelles, to survey the damage in the upstairs bathroom.

I knew what was coming next.  Ten seconds later, with precision matched only by the Master Clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory, I heard it.

My daughters name was called with a stern tone and frequency formally set aside by the FCC for the exclusive use of angry mothers.  When I was a boy this broadcast typically originated from my front porch and could be heard for blocks in all directions.

I watched my daughters face, beaming with pride mere seconds ago, register a look of shock and horror, as if she had just watched me punt Fluffy the cat over the back fence. 

We resolved the issue and restored order, but suffice to say my daughter would have rather been airborne with Fluffy than make the death march to her mother upstairs.

Given some time to think and laugh about the situation I began to draw some parallels to managing sales professionals. 

We continually reinforce the idea that our daughter should stretch herself; try new things and new foods for that matter.  We tell her don’t be afraid to fail, that is how you learn. 

We tell our sales representatives the same thing and have for years, give or take the “try new foods” part.

My daughter took our direction.  My daughter felt she had mastered the basics and was ready to stretch.  She felt she could do more and had the desire to prove it even if it meant breaking a rule or two in the process.

Was she rewarded for her attempt to stretch herself and hit the higher standard?  No, just the opposite in fact, being blasted for the final result somewhere shortly after I heard my wife exclaim “You put bleach, where???”

In trying to do more she found herself in more trouble than she would have been in for doing nothing or just meeting the standard set before her that she found unacceptably low.

A great opportunity to reinforce her positive behaviors (even if the end result was wildly off target,) show some appreciation for the effort and initiative, and coach her on some specifics to help her improve next time were lost.

Instead, she could have walked away with an attitude of “My work is not appreciated.  I tried my best.  Fine, from now on I am just doing the basics, it is not worth it to do anything more.”

I am not suggesting that the final results are unimportant.  What I am stating is that the final result, while being very important, is not the only measurement that counts in developing a sales organization.

Handled correctly, these opportunities can truly help you develop the middle 60% of your sales team and help some middle performers move to top performer status. 

Handled poorly, the same sales professional that dared to stretch himself to achieve can become an uninspired team member doing the minimum, working themselves out of your organization, and increasing churn.

Look beyond the end result.  Reinforce the right behaviors even if they deliver the wrong result.

After being whacked upside the head by my daughters misguided initiative the lesson seems clear, minus the small stars floating in a circle above my head.

 As a manager you can make a huge impact in your sales organization by taking a step back, recognizing not just the end result, but the behaviors that led to that end result and carefully selecting the tools and response that will help you develop your sales organization without gutting personal initiative or weeding out their desire for growth.

Image courtesy of cutiepie-photography.com