Last week, I shared 5 key things that have helped us grow and serve others in the last 30 years, hoping they will be helpful to others on their journey. Now, I'm taking a deeper dive into the 5 key takeaways with a more detailed on each. Starting with #5: Focus on the Best Version of Yourself. 

Transcript:

Recently, we published a video celebrating our 30 years in business, and I appreciate everybody that's followed up and made comments and gave us a thumbs up. It certainly has been a joy, hasn't been without its challenges, but because of the great relationships we have with clients and friends around the country who have been able to succeed and grow, add to our staff, and have impact on a lot of people's lives. So I thank you. Our team thanks you.

So let's go ahead and get on today with these lessons. In that video, we talked about five important lessons that we've picked up throughout the years, and today's purpose is to go a little bit deeper, dive into some of those lessons and see where we go from there. So I'm going to go backwards and start with number five.

Number five is focus on the best version of yourself. And when we talked about the video, we discussed the spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, all those sorts of things. And that goes without saying. But my focus here today is, how about professionally? Are you operating as the best version of yourself? And one of the ways you might want to take a look at that is, well, okay, I'm hitting my goals. Well, is that why you got into the business? My experience is that a lot of people who end up in selling, end up as a lender, end up in wealth management, do so for other reasons other than I hope I can hit my goal. You're trying to provide for family. You're trying to have an impact on your community. You have loyalty to your company. You want to help them grow. And there's lots of components to that. And this isn't just selling.

Are you developing the relationships you have? Are you as good internally with your support group as you could be? Do you have people in the community that supports you and surround you and help you accomplish the things you're trying to accomplish?

And so if you take a look at different ways that you might create your own scorecard and your own report card like you did in school, then come up with your own criteria, I'm not going to try and dictate what that criteria ought to be and then score yourself on a scale of one to ten. I like ten because that's just the way my head works. And you go through when we do this. Typically in organizations, people end up with about a seven. I asked them to put a zero at the end. That makes it a 70. And I'm going to date myself. Now, when I was in school, the 70 meant average, I'm pretty sure that none of you got into the business that you're in to be average. So the next step would be well, how do I Close that gap? How do I go from my 7, 8.5, whatever the number is, to the absolute best version of yourself? So let's start with that.

Stay tuned for #4: Relationships.

This year, we're celebrating a huge milestone- 30 Years of helping our clients sell, coach and hire better. In 1993, we decided to start our own training and development company – it was a bold move back then. In this video, I share 5 things that have helped us grow and serve others in these 30 years in the hopes they will be helpful to others on their journey. A big shout-out to all the wonderful people and clients who have made the past 30 years extraordinary. We look forward to the next 30!

Tony Cole

The sales management activities that we are performing today are creating the results we are achieving today. Many or few, consistent or irregular, planned or impromptu, the behaviors and activities that we, as sales managers, use to motivate, train and hold our relationship managers accountable are at least partly responsible for the success of those we manage. In other words, what activities are you doing now that are creating your current unsatisfactory results?

The old adage, “If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always gotten” comes to mind. It is up to us as sales leaders to set higher standards for the behaviors and activities and hold people accountable so that we get better results. So, in the interest of bettering your bankers, we hope you will approach the following discussion with an open mind. A characteristic of truly successful individuals is that they welcome the opportunity to explore and implement new ideas and practices.

1. Hiring

Great sales managers understand hiring lenders, for example, requires a different process than hiring support or admin personnel. No other role in a company faces the same challenges and deals with the same performance pressures as the lenders. No one faces greater scrutiny and is on a shorter leash than those tasked with developing and bringing in new relationships. The hiring behaviors of great sales managers include: 

• Writing a great job attraction post – specific skills exhibited by top lenders
• Utilizing a pre-hire, sales specific, evaluation is the only way to know
• Having an initial phone interview to discover how good the banker is on the phone
• Conducting interviews like auditions – make it as tough as a prospect will

2. Offer and On-boarding

When the manager finally selects the candidate based on the above steps, the final step in the hiring is to have an effective offer meeting that includes the following:

• They make sure the candidate is prepared to make a decision when the offer is made to avoid using the offer to get a better deal from the current bank
• They lay out all the expectations for sales activity, sales goals, sales meetings, use of CRM, and define being a good citizen and how they will be managed and coached
• They gain agreement on all the conditions of taking the role, and then to solidify the agreement they ask this question: “Are you sure?” To which the candidate will say yes. They then explain that it’s ‘going to be hard’ and then don’t say another word to let that statement sink in and see what they say. Ask them, “Will you allow me to coach you?”

The three behaviors are critical. The reason they are critical is that many candidates that become 'new hires' fail especially in the execution area of sales activity - hitting goals, attending sales meetings, using your CRM and responding to your managing style and culture.

3. They Manage

Great banking sales managers understand what Jim Collins means when he states: “There is no such thing as micro – managing. You are either managing or you are not managing.” Effective Sales Managed Environments must include managing behavior. The behavior goals must be introduced in the very beginning of the new relationship manager’s career, and then yearly at least 1 sales cycle before the end of the sales year. The following discussions must take place:

• What sales results are attached to the words extraordinary, excellent, good, poor, and failing results? Setting goals.
• What activities and success formula will they need to arrive at the outcome the banker has committed to?
• Making sure they are committed to the activity by asking: Are you sure? And then stating: 'This is going to be hard."
• Discussing what happens when the data is telling you that your new hire is off track. Great managers get permission to coach salespeople when they are failing.

4. They Coach

As stated by Henry Kissinger; “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” Great leaders reap their rewards by gaining success through others and by developing others to be their absolute best selves. Sales coaching includes:

• 1-on-1 coaching sessions to improve skill and change behaviors
• Pre- and post-call strategy sessions to improve the probability of success of each opportunity the lender is calling on
• Meeting quarterly to review activity numbers against actual results to discuss success, where they are headed and gaining discrepancy between the behavior numbers and the sales results

5. They Verify

A strong sales leader has Healthy Skepticism. This doesn’t mean that they don’t believe what their bankers are telling them or what they are reporting. They have a Ronald Reagan approach: Trust but verify. Great sales managers stay off the “They’re going to make it because they have a big deal that is about to close” bandwagon.

If you and your bank must drive better sales performance, consider these 5 behaviors. You can also pull down our eBook The Extraordinary Sales Manager for more ideas.

We talk to hundreds of community banks a month about their growth plans and how they are doing against their target production goals. Typically, they fall into one of two cultural categories: Service or Selling. We know right away if a bank CEO is OK with the concept of their people selling. They expect their managers to lead sales, they have sales metrics in place and they are comfortable with the idea of developing the sales skills of their frontline people. They are in the community selling the bank themselves every day. They recognize that their relationship managers or lenders or business development people’s primary responsibility is selling. Sometimes that selling is by developing additional relationships with a current client but it also includes bringing in new client names and companies. It always involves putting the client’s needs, goals and preferences first. These bank CEOs must grow their banks and they know that a banking sales training approach will help them by putting a structure in place for all to follow.

Here are 5 things to consider if your bank is thinking about a more effective banking sales training approach:

1. Do some soul searching. Does your bank really need to know the answers to questions like; What are our current sales capabilities? How motivated are our salespeople and how are they motivated? Can we generate more business? Can we be better at reaching actual decision-makers? Can we shorten our sales cycle? Can we sell more consultatively? If so, time to look for a better banking sales training approach. Check out these 19 questions to help.
2. It is hard to fix something you cannot see. In order to have a more effective banking sales training approach, you will need to take a peek beneath the hood, meaning that you must evaluate your sales team, managers, and salespeople. We utilize the #1 sales assessment in the world with our clients which provides them with information about the Will to Sell (and Manage), Sales DNA, and Sales Competencies of their people. You must have an X-ray to develop the treatment plan. Your evaluation should provide a clear picture of who to train, strengths and weaknesses, what priority areas of selling and sales management.
3. Start your banking sales training development plan with your Management team and put consistent sales management practices, sales systems, and processes in place. We recommend a 4-pillar Sales Managed Environment® program that will make your managers better at setting standards, motivating their sales team, coaching, and upgrading/recruiting. Get your sales leaders a few steps ahead of the sales team and then implement a consistent sales process for all your team to follow. This should complement and align with your CRM so that everyone is evaluated on a consistent approach and your deals can follow a stage-based process. We know from working with thousands of salespeople that “elite” salespeople always have a consistent selling approach.
4. People learn in different ways so make sure that your banking sales training program offers an integrated learning path with in-person, online modules, live virtual, video, online resources, and even phone coaching to talk about actual deals in the pipeline.
5. Keep an eye on progress because as the saying goes, you must inspect what you expect. We also call this the shadow of the leader. The banks that are successfully implementing a banking sales training approach are led by CEOs and sales execs who have a passion for growing and inspect sales behaviors and metrics regularly and celebrate the wins. No one can hide from the expectation that they must help grow the bank.

In today's blog post, we discuss motivation in sales.  The problem, in many cases, is that the sales executive in charge of getting more out of their sales team has no idea what motivates those people on the team.  

Without knowing what motivates his/her employees, how could you possibly create a motivating environment?

How to Motivate Your Sales Team

Sales is the lifeblood of most businesses.  If you're a sales manager, or sales leader, you might be wondering how to better motivate your sales team.

Unlike most sales activities that can be measured, motivation is a more difficult metric to assess, but still vital to your sales team's success.

Here are a couple of ideas to help inspire your sales team.

How to Motivate Sales Team:

• Build trust among your sales reps
• Understand what motivates them 
• Set daily, weekly, monthly sales goals
• Give and promote recognition
• Lead with empathy

As many of you know, we use the Objective Management Group's (OMG) assessment to evaluate every organization that we do sales and sales management training, coaching and consulting for. 

The process helps us (and our clients) determine with great accuracy the answers to these 4 questions:       

1. Can we be more effective (sell more, more quickly at better margins)?
2. How much more effective could we be?
3. What would it take?
4. How long would it take?

Answering these four questions requires the ability to uncover at least two important contributors to improved effectiveness:

1. Their “will” to improve in selling and sales management
2. Their ability (sales and sales management DNA)

6 Factors That Determine Sales Motivation

There are 6 known contributing factors that OMG uses to determine “will to sell”  (click here to inquire about the pre-hire assessment tool).

1. Desire to succeed in selling
2. Commitment to succeed in selling
3. Motivation
4. Outlook
5. Responsibility
6. Enjoyment of selling

A CONSISTENTLY RECURRING QUESTION

I don't believe there is a way to effectively rank those factors in terms of relevant importance.  Having used the tool and delivered results to dozens of companies and hundreds of people, my experience is that these 6 work together to form a puzzle that gives you an overall picture of someone’s “will to sell”.  In this article, however, I want to focus on motivation because,often, when attending my workshops, attendees consistently the question,

“How do I motivate my sales team?”

ARE YOU MOTIVATED?

What motivates you?  If you are a manager, what is motivating your people?  If you are not motivated to:

• Be more effective
• Be more successful
• Compete to be the best
• Sell more to make your lifestyle dreams a reality

I have to ask: Why?

ALL ENCOMPASSING - MOTIVATION INVOLVES EVERYTHING

Let me address two things:

• Personal motivation
• Motivation of others

My experience – my own true, personal experience - about motivation is that when you desire something greatly in your heart, then you will live and breath the desire to make the dream a reality.  Many of you know I played football at UConn.  I always considered myself blessed beyond reason to have had the opportunity to make my dream a reality.  But blessed does not stand alone as the only contributing factor for the scholarship. 

Yes, I had some God-given talents (nature), but I also had some external factors (nurture) that contributed to my success.  Those factors were Mom and Dad and the attitudes they instilled in me regarding hard work, anything is possible, don’t give up, and success requires commitment.  I learned early on that, if you really want to accomplish something great in your life, you must be willing to give up some things to get where you want to go.

• When my classmates were going to Lee’s house to party after a game, I did not.
• I hated vegetables, but my dad told me he would tell Coach Cacia I wasn’t eating right – I wasn’t going to let that happen.
• At the end of a long day – 12 hours – working on the farm, I still ran my miles and lifted weights.
• When I got beat on a certain play during practice, I would make that person pay the price on the next play.
• I ran sprints every day at the end of practice.
  
  

THE REAL DEAL – MOTIVATION IS PERSONAL

When I answer the question - How do I motivate my people? - for workshop attendees, I tell them, “You cannot motivate them.  Motivation is an inside-out job and they have to come to the table with their own motivation.  The best you can do is create an environment where people want to come and they want to be motivated and excited because they have personal reasons to be successful.”

While assessing numerous organizations, we have found three things that hinder the motivation and success of the sales team: 1) 90% of the sales managers don’t believe they need to know what motivates their sales people.  2) 25% of the sales managers are not motivated to be successful in the role of sales manager and 3) Virtually 100% of the salespeople lack personal goals, lack a personal goal plan and fail to have a process in place to track if they are achieving goals.

Without knowing what motivates your salespeople, how could you possibly create a motivated environment or sales team?