I’ve been working on this post for a week; for some reason, it took a little while to pull it all together. I think I was making it too complicated, so here it goes:

• In 1971, my dad got his new pickup truck, a powder blue IH 1210.
• Dad “pimped his ride” by installing an 8-track player with Panasonic speakers.
• My dad was a slow driver. No matter where we were going or how far, he’d drive 45 mph even when the speed limit allowed 55. 
• I thought it was a result of his old beater of a pickup.
• I thought for sure he’d drive faster with his new truck.
• Nope, he still drove 45 mph in a 55 mph zone.

I’ve been trying to connect this experience with the experience of watching sales organizations look for solutions to drive revenue growth.  Like an engine that needs three things to run, your sales organization needs three things to run.

Spark, fuel and combustion are required to start an engine and make it run. If you have those things, the engine will run.  Get all three at a grade “A” level and the engine runs really well.  If you want the vehicle that the engine is meant to move to perform at “A” level, you need something else.  You need a driver.

Not just any driver; you need a driver that has two things:  Competency and Drive.  Certainly, there are other contributing factors that determine if the driver is right for your vehicle, but basically speaking:

• Without competency, you might go fast, but there will be lots of damage, crashes and failures.
• Without drive, there won’t be any risk taken, no failures and, therefore, no success.
• Without drive, then there will be a lack of coach-ability and trainability.

My point here is this:  The engine size, the transmission, the gear ratios, the tires, the steering, the paint job, the aerodynamics… none of these things really matter if you don’t have a driver or a team of drivers with competency and drive.

When you get ready to put your budget together and are considering where to invest money, time and effort in order to drive revenue growth, focus on three things:

1. Sales Talent acquisition
2. Sales Talent development
3. A Crew Chief with desire, commitment and skills

CRM and other sales enablement tools are nice but, just like my dad’s new pickup, it doesn’t matter unless you want to grow and grow fast.

Hire Better Salespeople Today - Click here!

Guest Post By Alex Cole, Recruitment Specialist, Hire Better Salespeople

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, I’m sure you have all heard about the newest craze- Pokemon Go. If you haven’t, then I’m sure you’ve seen random herds of people walking around with their noses in their phones. Well, that’s because the newest and “greatest” game has graced 2016 with its presence.

Though I am not personally a proponent of the game, I have to give it credit for the impact it’s had on our community over the last week. People are getting out, getting exercise and socializing with other people, who are doing the same exact thing as them!

There are two categories of people here - those of us who sit back and chuckle at those running around trying to catch an imaginary character or those getting out and actively trying to “hunt” them down.

So, how is this relevant to you and what does it have to do with selling?

Typically, salespeople are good at one of two things- relationship building or social selling. Social selling is utilizing social media outlets to: share posts, give business updates, recruit new hires and prospect for new leads, stay connected and many other things. Those outlets include sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Anthony Cole Training Group partners with Objective Management Group primarily for their highly predictive sales assessment. One of the things that their sales assessment tests for is one’s ability to utilize social selling tools. The experiment OMG conducted included the following theory:

“Those that are not good at relationship building will be better at selling socially.”

After comparing 5,000 pieces of data, they’ve concluded this: 11% of salespeople are good at social selling, 16% are good at relationship building and only 5% are good at both. That means 68% of salespeople are ineffective at both social selling and relationship building.

I would say those are pretty concerning statistics. Do your salespeople stink at building relationships? If they do, are they at least good at selling socially? Per the statistics mentioned, it would not appear that way. So, how do you fix the problem?

Well, here are 3 simple tips to help you with your team’s social selling problems:

So, next time you see a group of twenty-something year olds wandering around the local park or gym, know they are chasing an imaginary character, but you are chasing the real thing.

Happy hunting!

5 Things to Do to Own a Sales Team Built for Growth

I’m working on an article discussing the 80/20 Power Curve.  It’s the concept Perry Marshall discusses in his book:  The 80/20 of Sales and Marketing.  Normally, I focus on the top part of the curve. The part of the curve that represents about 95% of all the production generated by a sales team (See Figure 1 below)

If you look at your total sales results, you would find something close to the following:

                                         Figure1

Last week, I presented to a group of CEOs at the BISA CEO Summit held at Vanderbilt University.  This slide alone raised a few eyebrows and caused some thinking about the relevance, importance and cost of the 64% of the sales team only representing 4% of the results. (32 sales people responsible for 800,000 of the 20,000,000 in revenue.)  What alarmed me was the bottom part of the 80/20 power curve.  What does the bottom look like? (See Figure 2)

                                             Figure 2

Trust my excel spreadsheet.  The numbers add up and they don’t lie.  They may not represent your team exactly, especially if your team has less than 10 sales people, BUT do the math and you will arrive at a similar finding.  Figure 2 is telling the president of the company that of the 50 sales people in his company, the bottom 20 (40%) Represent 32,000 of a 20,000,000 book of business (.0016%).

Regardless of how you dissect it, spin it, negotiate it or defend it, this cannot be what you expected when you hired these 20 people.

So, what do you do? Here are the 5 THINGS:

1. Start with your sales manager. This is the person responsible for sales, productivity, and sales effectiveness. If ROI is one of the metrics you use to determine success, how would you evaluate the ROI on the bottom 20% of the sales team?
2. Next, I would look at the recruiting practices. As difficult as this might be, you have to answer the question about under performers – Did you hire them this way?
3. You will also want to look at the on-boarding and the development plan in place that should be there to improve the probability of success. As above, you have to answer the question – Did you make them this way?  If you didn’t hire them this way – already failures – then you’ve made them this way – turned them into failures.

* I anticipate you might say – “I didn’t hire them, I inherited the team.”  Like it or not, after a year, they are yours!

4. Look at your systems and processes to make sure they are designed, implemented and executed to support successful sales growth.
5. Look at your sales system and evaluate how well it is being executed top to bottom. My guess is that your best people execute a sales process and they execute it consistently.

Additional resources:

Hirebettersalespeople.com

Perry Marshal – 80/20 Power Curve

Sales Management Certification Program

Here is the opening paragraph from the IQ Matix Blog – The Law of Cause and Effect by Adam Sicinski

“A person becomes what they think about all day.”

Understanding the Law

The universal law of cause and effect states that for every effect there is a definite cause, likewise for every cause there is a definite effect.

Your thoughts, behaviors and actions create specific effects that manifest and create your life as you know it. If you are not happy with the effects you have created, then you must change the causes that created them in the first place…

Change your actions, and you change your life… Transform your thoughts, and you will create a brand new destiny.

I’ve been thinking about this for about a week. I was in Pittsburgh last week and one evening my wife, Linda, called me. She told me that our friend, Kim, had called her to inform us that her son, Alex, had an accident while long boarding.  After Linda described the injuries, one of my first questions was, “Was he wearing a helmet?”  She wasn't sure.  This led me to thinking about accidents.

The fall was not an accident. It was an unforeseen incident, but by no means an accident. There was a definite cause and a definite effect that created another cause and another effect and so on and so on until Alex tumbled to the ground which caused severe bodily injury.

(Now…switching gears…)

Recently, I did some simple math in preparation for a workshop I delivered to the BISA CEO Summit in Nashville.  As part of the presentation, I demonstrated Perry Marshall’s Power Curve and the likely diagnosis of the sales teams represented in the room.  In short – about 36% of the advisors represented by a group of 200 advisors were responsible for 95% of the productivity for the entire group.  Once I highlighted the fact that less than 5% of the total remaining revenue was being generated by over 60% of the remaining advisors, I asked the question – “Did you hire them this way or make them this way?”

This is not an indictment of the CEOs present or the firms they represented. Any one of you reading this can do the same math and, if you have 25 or more salespeople that follow the normal 80/20 rule, then you will end up with the same numbers.  The reason I ask the question about hiring or making is because that is “the cause.” 

This group of massively underperforming salespeople is not in that group by accident.  Certainly, they are not in your group by accident. I don’t believe for a second that you intentionally hired 60% of your sales team to represent less than 5% of your sales. However, even if it’s actually 15 – 20%, there is cause for alarm.  And that alarm should create an effect and that effect should create another cause and another effect… and so on…

Which causes me to go back to the title of this post: Sales Management – Performance Management and the Law of Cause.

What is it that your sales manager is doing… or failing to do… that is responsible for the effect?  Here are some questions you might want to consider when attempting to arrive at an answer to that question:

1. What are the standards for success in your organization? I don’t mean what are the goals; I mean the standards.  In other words, I’m assuming that everyone on the sales team has sales goals, but what standard are they held to?  What percentage of the team consistently performs above 100% of the goal?  What percentage of the team consistently performs between 90 and 99% of goal?  What percentage of the team hovers around 80 to 85% of the goal, is still with you and will still be with you going into next year?  You see, that is the standard of performance that your manager is allowing.
2. What impact is your standard for success having on the overall performance of the team?
3. What is happening to the group just below the top tier that consistently hits or exceeds the goal? Does that group have a tendency to a) move upwards towards the top b)stay level or c) slide ever so slightly to your standard of success just before termination?
4. How well is your sales manager actually managing pipeline? Do they actually manage it or just monitor it?
5. What inspection process is executed to “inspect what you expect” and what is happening when what is expected isn’t getting done?
6. How well is the manager inspecting the revenue driver activities and behaviors?
7. How consistently are the salespeople following and executing the company sales process?
8. What information is your sales manager using from your CRM that allows them to have productive intentional coaching discussions with the entire sales team?
9. Finally, what activities and behaviors are you holding your sales manager to that, when executed correctly, would lead to more consistent, predictable sales growth?

Traditionally speaking, when companies think about performance management, most of the focus is on the group that is responsible for driving revenue – the sales team. What needs to happen is that anything that moves should get measured, there needs to be higher standards for keeping jobs and, ultimately, managers need to be held accountable to their own set of activities and behaviors.

Alex is home now and being cared for by his family. Let’s pray for his speedy and healthy recovery.

Additional Resources:

Sales Managed Enviroment® – A development program designed to create high performing sales managers.

Assess Your Sales Process – How effective is the sales process your people are supposed to be following and executing?

“The only difference between successful salespeople and the other 77% is that the successful salespeople actually do the very things they don’t like doing.”  

This is a quote from Dave Kurlan’s blog post about Bill Walton and John Wooden (see Additional Resources below).  Dave uses role-playing as an example.  I see this all the time!  Ask someone to role play in front of the group and they shut tight like a clam.  How can you possibly get better at pressure situations if you don’t practice under pressure?

Bill has published and is now marketing his book, Back from the Dead.  I read a couple of lines froman interview with GQ and immediately went to my Amazon add-in and downloaded the book with my 1-click.

Here was my amazing buying experience:

• I read an article that got my attention.
• I clicked on a button in my Firefox ribbon at the top of my page.
• I searched Amazon for “Bill Walton”.
• The book popped up.
• I clicked on the little thing on the right side of the page that said, “Buy Now using 1-click.”
• I wanted the Kindle version so I could read it on the plane without carrying a big book, so when Amazon asked me if I wanted it downloaded to my iPhone, I clicked “yes.”
• This all took less than a minute.
• And that, my friends, is today’s sales cycle.

In your sales world, it might not take as many steps or it might be more.  In your sales cycle, it probably takes more than a minute… maybe 30 days, maybe 120, maybe a year.

Bottom line: There is something that stimulates the buyer. The buyer gets the information they want and then… when they want to buy… they want to make the process easy and they want options.  If you are not doing those things (stimulating the buying response – providing information to make a buying decision – giving them options – making it easy), then you are going to lose the sale to those that do those things.  Not only will you lose occasionally, but sooner or later, it will become a permanent condition.

Now, my favorite Bill Walton and John Wooden story.

Watch the video to get the whole story, but in short, the lesson for the Sales Leader is this:

• You’ve been hired to do a job – drive sales growth/win market share
• Part of that responsibility is to put the best team in the market.
• As the coach, you establish the culture for winning; you set the team rules.
• You can lead people but you cannot make them do something – players have free will.
• If someone violates the rules, something has to be done – bend the rules, keep the rules
• If a salesperson wants to exert their independence, let them. But let them do it somewhere else.
• They have to want to play for you and win more than compete against you and lose.

Additional Resources:

Dave Kurlan’s blog:
The Sales Success Secret Shared by Bill Walton and John Wooden

Unless you have strong leadership, the money you spend on sales training is wasted. Stop wasting money.  In addition to great players, the key to a sales team built for growth is great sales management Leadership and Management. Read more about our Sales Management Certification.

Make sure you get great players who are committed to winning for you – Hirebettersalespeople.com

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