I continue to learn from my clients and the training director of a large national bank once said to me, “This is what we would like to keep doing. This is what we would like to start doing. And this is what we would like to stop doing.” Of course, all of this was framed up with lists of actions and initiatives because we were meeting to discuss coming years of training content, focus and delivery. However, this simple take-away can be applied to nearly any complex situation.

Some thoughts on What to Keep Doing:

Keep Learning 
As human beings, we continue to age and evolve. In order to thrive and survive, we must keep learning. Imagine if a child stopped learning—say your son turned 12 and stagnated and did not move forward mentally. Of course, you would find this odd and abnormal and you would go to great lengths to uncover issues so that you could fix this.

Unfortunately, adults sometimes do this and salespeople often feel like they know enough about selling. While a sales person may know that he must learn about new products, he often does not continue education in his craft of selling. Yet, to compete well in an ever evolving environment, one must know as much as possible and be well-rehearsed—after all “Perfect practice makes perfect performance.”

Play Like this is Your First or Last Game or Performance 
In the final season of Hall of Famer George Brett’s career, he was asked what he would like his last at-bat to be like—a signature double to right center field? A rocket single to left field? Brett said “No, I want to hit a hard ground ball to the second baseman and run as hard as I can to first base so that every young guy on our team will know that that’s how the game is supposed to be played.”

Prepare as though You’ve Never Done this Before 
It is an unfortunate fact of life that we tend to get sloppy over time. We think we know what we are doing. We think we don’t need practice or preparation.

Captain Edward John Smith had been commanding vessels for over 25 years. In 1012, he took command of an unsinkable cruise ship- The RMS Titanic. We all know what happened. While the stakes in selling do not usually involve hundreds of human lives, we cannot lose sight of the need for preparation. After all, “Perfect performance is a result of perfect practice.” (Am I repeating myself?)

Continue to Risk
“Sailing in calm waters doesn’t teach.”  I don’t know the origin of that expression, but it defines this particular Keep Doing.  I majored in physical education while at University of Connecticut. In physiology, I learned the SAID principle, which I believe in and continue to preach.  SAID stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand.  In other words, your muscles don’t grow unless you put them under strain – put them in a position that exceeds their ability. 

I believe our brain power and our emotional stamina work the same way-- In order for us to grow, to learn, to become better, stronger, sharper, we must take on risks, including the risk of failing.  Get outside of comfortable. 

Continue to Fall Down & Get Up 
As we get older and have more experiences, we learn that life is up and down. One day is great successes and the next brings difficulty and defeat. This is particularly true in sales, since rejection and loss of a prospect/proposal/sale is a common occurrence. So, I imagine you have a long history of falling, dusting yourself off and getting up.  

Unfortunately, as we get more tenured in our professional career and accumulate a revenue stream, we can get knocked down and decide to be comfortable with what we have amassed over the years. We can get comfortable because we don’t have the drive and motivation that we once had. SO--

Set Higher and Bigger Goals 
Identify the goals that inspire you to do all the Keep Doing activities above.

• Set goals that require learning something new or different
• Set goals that excite you
• Set goals that risk failure because they are a stretch

I just returned from the 2016 Bank Insurance and Securities Association annual convention. As always, it is a great event where competitors come together to discuss processes and strategies to deal with the challenges of growing financial institution-owned investment (broker) programs.

I believe this is actually my 7th conference: the first one being 2009.  As you can imagine, that year was quite a conference as banks and investment firms/companies were in the throws of a financially disastrous economic downturn.  This year, there is a new challenge on the horizon - the impending DOL (Department of Labor) legislation regulating fiduciary responsibility of advisors when discussing, presenting and offering solutions to retirement funds.  Although there was way too much information to get it all a single post, the topic did leave me with much I would like to share with my readers.

So, this is my thought for today - investing in success.

This is going to sound self-serving.  However, I assure you, it is not.  As a company, we have probably invested $40,000.00 in real dollars to learn about the industry the BISA represents as well as learn more about the problems and challenges facing those that are responsible for leading and managing sales teams to meet the investment program goals.  This year alone, and I just finished tallying just my expenses for the trip, we will have invested very close to $20,000.00 so that we can better understand AND service our target market. 

Understand that when I say "our company" I really mean my wife, Linda, and me.  It is our company.  It is our money.  So, every dollar we spend in and for our company that is a dollar that we don’t invest in our own family and future.  It really is our money. The point is that we look at it as an investment and not just an expense.  It's an investment that will return future dollars to the company.

As I was flying back yesterday, I was thinking about that and thinking about those that attended and those individual salespeople (thousands of them) represented by the firms/companies in attendance and I realized a couple of things:

  *  There are people there just like me that are taking money out of their pocket and investing in a future.

  * There are people there that are using company dollars BUT they are using personal time away from their family and investing that time to invest in their future.

  * The investment, either way, is substantial.

  * The investment of time alone is close to three 14-hour days.

My point and suggestion today is this - in order to become all that you can be, you need to personally invest time, money and effort to learn.  It’s more than an investment of the 40 to 50 hours a week working in the business.  It is an additional investment of time working on your business necessary for future success.

Prospects want you to have honest, direct and assertive conversations with them so that they can make better, critical decisions.

There are many contributing factors as to why someone may not be assertive such as: learned helplessness, low self-esteem, having a go-get mindset versus a go-give, false bravado, life out of balance causing a sense of desperation and a crisis management approach to work rather than a self-management approach to work.

Assertive people have certain characteristics.

• First of all, they have minimum acceptable standards for themselves and those people around them. They don’t associate with toxic people – they work with nourishing people.
• They have a goal philosophy; they have lots of goals and then they continue to pursue those goals and achieve those goals.
• They get outside the box. If you’ve seen the 9-dot exercise, you’ll know what I’m talking about. They get outside the dots- they expand their comfort zone.
• Next, they take risk and they understand that taking risk can result in failure. But, failure becomes defined as just another step towards success. They’re persistent. They find other ways to close.
• They themselves make decisions; that makes it hard for them to understand why someone would want to think it over.
• They know what they stand for and they won’t fall for just anything that falls under the category of objection or stall.
• They control the sales process. You can ask them about next steps and assertive people can give you specific details about what happens next.

To overcome the hurdles that might trip you up as you attempt to be more assertive, you might consider the following:

1. As they said in the Godfather movie, “It’s not personal; it’s business.” Don’t take it personally.
2. Take ownership of how you feel. Nobody can make you feel the way you feel in terms of being uncomfortable. You choose to feel a certain way.
3. Consider Emerson’s quote, “Do the thing and you’ll have the power.” There will be times during a sales process or sales step where you will feel the need to be assertive but you will be afraid. DO the thing… do the thing that you’re feeling and you’ll have the power.

As always, thank you and have a perfect day.

In his ground breaking book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey states that highly successful people start with where they want to be – “the end” - and then work to get there. That’s great advice for managers attempting to lead for results, manage activity and coach behaviors.

In a Sales Managed Environment®, a sales manager - in order to get the most out of their team - must execute two critical functions:

• Performance management
• Coaching

Both of these are contingent on knowing where your individual salespeople want to end up. What is it that is important to them? What is their motivation to do what they have to do to succeed in selling? Knowing that information and using that information to build a solid sales success plan is critical. In addition, gaining personal commitment to achieve personal goals is the only way to improve the probability of professional sales success.

I recall having a discussion with a COO of a large insurance holding company. He was about to address one of the agencies the following day and, as we were eating dinner, he was sharing with me his message. Most of the message was about the company growth and the importance of shareholder value. As gently as I could, I reminded him that the group he was addressing the next day didn't really care about shareholder value. They were more interested in making college payments, getting out of debt and building the cabin on the lake.

And so it is with your salespeople. Unfortunately, you can count on at least 75% of your people failing in the area of setting goals and having a solid goal achievement plan.

The information in this chart comes from the Sales Effectiveness and Impact Analysis produced by Objective Management Group – the world leader in sales team evaluations. In a group of 50 salespeople, you can see that 77% of them do not have written goals or a goal management plan.

What does this have to do with a sales manager and starting with the end in mind, you ask? Everything.

• The people that you have today who are performing in the middle of the bell curve or the wrong end of the 80/20 power curve:  Did you hire them that way or make them that way?
• Those salespeople who seem to have gotten stuck at a certain level of performance - could it be that they just stopped thinking bigger or are comfortable?
• Why is it a struggle to keep your sales team motivated?
• With changes in comp plans and implementation of incentives, why isn’t there more movement toward improvement in results?
• Why do you find yourself always talking about the same people who don’t seem to be “lifting their weight”?

All of these questions are tied to motivation or the lack of motivation. And that starts with management. If you don’t hire motivated people, you cannot make them that way. And… even the most motivated people need a “shot in the arm” once in a while. Starting with the end in mind, your job/task/responsibility is to create an environment where your people have the opportunity to dream the big dream and have a plan of achievement.

So, start today with these resources:

• Sales Managed Environment® Certification Program Certification Program

• Free Goal Setting Toolbox

Several years ago, I had an eye-opening discussion with one of my largest clients while reviewing the prior year and setting goals for the next year.  During this discussion, my client suggested several critical "Keep Doing, Start Doing and Stop Doing" items that he felt would help us to be even more effective.  This 3-dimensional discussion helped me to understand how we could grow by tweaking some of our traditional approaches.  I think this process is relative to all businesses and has a particular application in regards to building relationships with banking, investment and insurance clients. In our January newsletter, I covered what to stop doing to drive sales growth. Today, we will focus on what to start doing.

Start focusing on helping people get more of what they want: “If you help more people get what they want, you’ll get more of what you want.”  In his essay on compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson alludes to the law of the universe. The law of the universe fundamentally means that you can neither add nor take from the whole of the universe. If that’s the case and you spend time and energy trying to get more out of the universe, then you must start putting more into it.

Start spending more time on recruiting: One of the reasons managers end up with the wrong people is that they are reactive instead of proactive (this is just one of the many reasons). When you are reactive, you feel desperate, you cut corners, you allow for a wider margin of error and you take on the belief that a warm body is better than no body in the seat.

Start effective performance management: Gathering data in Sales Force or any other database is not performance management. Sending out reports on pipelines and production results is not performance management. Having and implementing a PIP process is not performance management. Performance management is having multiple data points to assess behavior, skill and performance. You then must use that data to develop business intelligence for intentional coaching. Performance management should be about helping people succeed in their selling process rather than using punitive measures.

Start coaching: Coaching is getting the sale pushed through the pipeline to closure. Coaching to change behavior and improve skill is what builds the foundation for long-term growth and success of your people and team. Make sure you have Coaching time scheduled on your calendar each week!

Start making your bottom better: Assume for a minute that you have a sizable sales team - one that has more than 10 people. If you break the group down into quintiles, you have 5 groups of 2. Each of the groups performs at a certain level. Understand that you will always have a top quintile and a bottom quintile. All the Jack Welch’s “fire the bottom 10%” in the world will not actually eliminate the bottom 10%. If you have 10 people, there is always going to be someone who is number 10 or last in the ranking. However, each quintile this year ought to out-perform the same quintiles of last year. Manage to that objective and you will blow your numbers away.

Start accepting responsibility for results and start making your people do the same: On the stop list was “stop making excuses”. It’s only logical that, on this list, I would include “start taking responsibility”. Own your outcomes. Make your salespeople own their outcomes. If they have no one to blame, they will find a solution or be forced to leave.

Start getting your people to think “extraordinarily”: The standard in too many organizations for too many managers and too many sales people is this: “Just enough is good enough.” The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) proves this. Implement a goal setting and work plan development strategy.

Start planning and executing effective sales meetings: Did you attend sales meetings that were boring and ineffective? How good are yours today? Do people miss or find excuses/reasons to not be there, come late and/or leave early? Do you find that the sales meetings are having ZERO impact on attitude, activity, performance and results? If they are not having an impact, then just stop doing them. However, if they are something that you are committed to doing, then act like they are more important than any meeting you have. Prepare as if your job depended on it!

Start each year with individual work plans already in place: Time and again, I hear sales managers working with their salespeople on business plans in December. This makes sense ONLY if you have a 30-day sales cycle. For most B2B sales, the cycle is a bit longer. If your cycle is 90-days, then the business/work plan for the coming year should be completed in September.

Start: Today! 

If you missed the What to Stop Doing to Drive Sales Growth article, go to my blog.

Additional Resources:

Personal Goal & Work Plan Development – Workshop

Questions to Determine Their Commitment – A PDF worksheet

Are My People Motivated? – Sample Sales Force Evaluation