I assure you that the military academies are all about performance management.  IF it moves, it gets measured.

Ralph Pim and I were watching a competitive sports team practice one day at West Point.  Ralph was a professor and Director of Competitive Sports teams at the United States Military Academy at West Point at the time.  He was telling me about the coach that was responsible for the company’s competitive football program.  He told me that this individual was retired Army and the Academy hired him back to run the program as well as other duties.  I asked him, “Why would he retire and then get hired back?”  I will do my best to explain what Ralph told me.

In the military, the system works like this:

• In the military, each soldier has a rank.
• You progress up through the ranks based on merit.
• A promotion board (my words) reviews the current career of the soldier and, based on merit and recommendations, either promotes the soldier to the next level or it doesn’t.
• In the military system, there are only so many seats available at each rank in the military. (I’m assuming that that number may go up or down based on the current state of world affairs and the status of military funding.)
• A soldier has only so long to stay in a certain rank. If the soldier gets passed by a certain number of times for promotion, then that soldier is considered “not promotable” and, at some time, is “retired”.

*From Militaryspot.com:  Enlisted:  Congress passes the Defense Authorization Act each year. This is how the number of Army members that can be on active duty in the upcoming year is determined. By separate legislation, Congress limits what percentage of the total active duty force can serve in each commissioned officer rank, what percentage of the total active duty force can serve in each warrant officer rank, and what percentage of the active duty force can serve in each enlisted rank above the grade of E-4 (there are no statutory limits for E-4 and below). These amounts are then the foundation of the Army enlisted promotion system.

My question is this: why wouldn’t this work in corporate America?  More specifically, how could you, as a director of sales, make this work in your organization?  How could this become part of your motivation and “upgrading” strategy?  You would need to outline your system and then plug your “sales soldiers” into the system to see how it plays out, but let’s give it a shot.

Ranking:  Let’s assume you could have ranks that look something like this top to bottom:

• Sr. Advisor
• Jr. Advisor
• Advisor
• Account Executive
• NBD Agent

Depending on the business you are in, you could substitute the word consultant, broker or agent for the word “advisor”.

Criteria:  You would need to establish criteria to enter the sales team at a certain level (assuming you are recruiting people) and to be promoted from one level to the next.

• Year of Service – not recommended – years of service have very little bearing on merit or accomplishment. “Survival” is not a solid criteria.
• Annual New Business Production
• Book of Business or Revenue stream
• Company contribution
• Professional designations
• Professional ranking within the industry
• Compliance with and support of company values, vision, mission and objectives
• Stature in the market

Process:  You would need a process to acquire the appropriate data and information to make any kind of objective and reasonable determination for promotion.

• Clearly identified metrics for success and established standards that determine success
• Collection of data that support objective reporting of success in achieving metrics in each criteria
• Timing of reviews and announcements of upcoming promotion board hearings
• Criteria to be a promotion board member
• Establish the size – number of people – at each rank. People at the top end of the sales rank would certainly be unlimited.  Other than the top and bottom ranks, you will want a fixed number of people at each rank.  This is the only way the system works.
• Length of time someone can stay in a rank or…
• The number of times someone can be passed for promotion before being “retired”.

I’m confident that you can think of additional ops and procedures that would need to go into this process.  Establishing the process is secondary to determining if your current system and process for upgrading your sales team and promoting people (giving them new titles vs earning new titles or ranks) is actually accomplishing what it should accomplish:  Motivating your sales team to perform at or exceed expected and required levels of performance.

Too often, I’ve been part of discussions about the lack of performance of very senior people and new hires.  Too often, I’ve heard excuses about them being protected classes, managing big books of business or have only been with the firm for a year.  I get it.  Making decisions that impact people’s lives and the lives of their family is important and serious work.  And because it’s serious work, a company should have a serious approach to upgrading the team.  The company should have a serious communication process that lets everyone know exactly what the rules are and what it takes to get promoted with the team, what it takes to stay on the team and what happens when there is failure to execute as expected.

Imagine for minute the following scenario:

With this type of structure/system, you would have a career path method that is clear and objectively determined.  This will help the right people continue to be motivated to perform as expected when you hired them.  It will give you a better method to determine what to do with those that “have retired on the job.”

You may not want to position this as a “military style” of managing, as that may not be consistent with your style or your company culture.  But performance management is the fundamental contributing factor for having a team built for sales growth.

Additional Resources:

Sales Management – Complimentary Book on The Extraordinary Sales Manager

Setting Standards – Video – What if you gave your best!

National Webinar Series for Sales Management – to inquire how you can participate call 513.791.3458 and ask for Jeni Wehrmeyer or email: jeni@anthonycoletraining.com. Subject line: Participate in National Webinars

Why Do So Many of My Salespeople Fail to Perform as Expected?

If you are a sales leader and you look at your numbers and the people producing those numbers and you scratch your head in confusion over why you are looking at a lack of sales results, what do you do next?  Certainly, you didn’t hire these people to be in the middle of the pack or at the tail end of the conga line, but that is right where they are.  I know you don’t believe you hired them that way, but it’s either that… or you made them that way. Don’t get upset with me or write me nasty comments; the reality is that your team’s performance is a result of who you’ve hired or what you’ve done.

So, in general, why do so many sales people fail to perform? I have detailed answers to that question that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else besides right here.

• Underperformers have 80% of the desire of top performers. *Note – not all performers have off-the-chart desire – that is about 7% of all top sales people.
• Those that underperform have about 44% of the commitment to succeed in selling that top performers do.
• These two factors combine to measure motivational level. Underperformers have about 60% of the motivation of your top people.

SUMMARY – Underperformers just are not as motivated to succeed.

SOLUTION – STOP hiring people that are not motivated to succeed at the highest level of performance!

Using the Objective Management Sales Evaluation, there are over 100 data points to measure the opportunity for sales growth of a sales team/organization.  Additionally, this data helps us to predict the likelihood of success of new sales people and managers.  Here are some interesting findings based on the raw data I have from assessing salespeople (as well as firsthand knowledge of some of the people in the study).

• Top performers are trainable and coachable
• Top performers have a high figure-it-out factor
• Top performers have a low need for approval and…
• Top performers score an average of 86.8 (higher score is better) and underperformers score 39.6 for handling rejection!
• Top performers are hunters, consultative sellers and closers (average score for skills is 55% of required skills while underperformers average 39.6% of required skills)

SUMMARY – Salespeople – regardless of tenure or previous success - need training and coaching. Also top performers handle rejection extremely well and move on.

SOLUTION – Do not hire based on past performance. (It’s like investing in a mutual fund – past performance is not a guarantee of future returns.)  During the interview process, reject the heck out of the candidate – the strong ones will recover and attempt to close you over and over again!

The following data indicates that sales strengths are better indicators of success rather than sales skills:

• Underperformers have 85% of the sales skills of top performers and have…
• Only 71% of the sales strengths that support execution of sales skills and…
• The severity of their sales weaknesses are 52% higher than that of top performers

SUMMARY – The skills are about the same, but those with strong strengths of desire, commitment, outlook and responsibility win.

SOLUTION – Make sure your pre-hire assessment process looks for strengths and “will sell” rather than just skills, personality and behavioral traits.

So, back to the original question:   “Why do so many of my salespeople fail to perform as expected?”:

• Poor diagnosis of the right contributing factors for success
• Candidates eliminated due to weaknesses rather than hiring for sales strengths
• Too much credit given to sales skills exhibited during interview process
• Lack of solid training and development on the root causes of poor performance

Now that you have the answers to the question, what will you do about it?

Additional Resources:

• Doing what sales managers are supposed to do to have a team built for growth
• Recruiting Talent – A and a
• 9 Keys to Sales Management
• Sign up for our upcoming May 18th webinar - Eliminate Hiring Mistakes and Hire Salespeople Who WILL Sell
• Inquire about our national webinar series for sales managers

Time for an Honest Assessment of Your Sales Team

There are many factors involved in the business of selling.  As any salesperson can attest, the sales process can be a complex and daunting experience fraught with obstacles like aggressive competition, tight markets, shrinking budgets and incumbent vendors.  While there are many obstacles like these that are outside a salesperson’s control, there are many others they can control.  So, as an effective sales manager, what do you need to do to understand how and why a salesperson is performing or not performing? 

The obvious metric to use to measure performance are the sales results of the individual. If they hit or exceed goal, all is good.  So, that takes care of about 10 to 15% of your sales force.  But how about the rest of them?  Sure, the results numbers tell you they are not performing but, as an effective sales manager, you need to find out why.  The only way to do that is to look at additional data points.

Data points that you must observe to measure performance:

• Critical ratios in the success formula
• Are they doing the right effort?  (dials, networking, LinkedIn)
• How effective are they? What do the critical ratios tell you? (10% of the conversations turned into an appointment– that is an example of a critical ratio)
• Observation
• Joint calls – Are they executing the company sales steps/process?
• Joint calls – Are they executing the fundamental sales skills…?
• Asking enough questions
• Asking the right questions
• Using stories, analogies and metaphors to weave a story and be conversational
• Effectively listening
• Inquiring for further information to clearly understand the impact of problems described by the client
• Role-playing
• Do they understand the fundamentals of your sales steps/process?
• Do they intellectually understand what you mean by consultative selling, challenger selling, and client-focused interviewing?
• Do they demonstrate in the classroom what you expect them do to in the field?
• Additional data
• Pipeline data – Is the volume increasing? Is it becoming more reliable?
• Stack ranking - Are the various quintiles in your organization performing better this quarter/year than last quarter/year?
• Sales activity – Are they doing enough effort to give them enough at bats to be successful?

In particular, for this article, I want to share a thought on observing your people perform.  Either in role-play or in live selling situations, you immediately get a reaction when you observe your people perform.  My guess is that your reaction could fall into 1 of 4 categories:

1. I would not buy from this person ever; in fact, I would love to compete against them.
2. I would not buy from them right now based on what I just saw/heard.
3. I’m on the fence post with them; I need more information or more time to make up my mind.
4. I would buy from this person; they were compelling, they got me engaged, made me discover some things that bother me that I need to fix and got me to a point where I was thinking I could undo any current relationships, add a new relationship and spend money that I didn’t think I needed to spend.

I have a client that just had a sales meeting that included about an hour of role-play covering a very specific step in their sales process. One of the product line specialists/experts commented the following: “With the exception of 2 people that I observed, I don’t believe I would buy from anyone else that I saw in that one hour.”

Wow, what a courageous, honest assessment.

My comment or suggestion to the team is to go back and review all the video or audio recordings of the role-plays and grade them using the standards I suggested above. 

As a sales leader, effective performance management requires the following:

• Supportive beliefs about what it takes to coach people and get them to perform. If you believe you can manage people better if they like you, then you’re in trouble.
• Recovering from rejection – If you cannot recover from rejection or fear of rejection, then you probably won’t tell one of the salespeople you work with that you wouldn’t buy from them.
• Knowledge of desire and commitment - If you believe that all of your people are trainable and coachable, then you will spend a great deal of time with the same people covering the same sales execution problems.
• Data nutcase - If you don’t look at data, then you won’t be able to have any intentional coaching sessions.
• Time allocation - If you don’t take time to do ride-a-longs or role-plays, then you are missing two important/non-negotiable data points.

These are just a few of the requirements of effective sales management, leadership and coaching.  The key point in the message though is to do an honest assessment of your talent and then have discussions with them about how you honestly feel about their performance.  Yes, it will be difficult.  Yes, you might lose somebody over this.  And, yes, you might actually get people to work harder at their craft.

Resources to help you improve performance management and intentional coaching:

• The Success Formula Template (with Critical Ratios)
• Sales Management Certification Program 
• Why is Sales Management so #$%& Hard:  Articles
• Make sure you get great players who are committed to winning for you – Hirebettersalespeople.com
  

To inquire about distance learning, call me or text me directly: 513.226.3913