I had a conversation this week with 3 executives that run bank-owned investment programs.
- The first executive is restructuring his program to go from $3 million to $8 million in revenue and will do that via a team approach to the credit union membership.
- The second executive is looking to improve the effectiveness of junior advisors and improve the quality of new hires. He is the president/program manager and sales manager.
- The third executive has sales management executives, and is part of a very large bank that has a robust training department, several leadership programs, a very tenured group and a full calendar of training programs scheduled for the balance of the year.
WHERE TO BEGIN FOR SALES GROWTH
If any of these rings true for you, consider the following:
If you’ve read any of my posts over the last 10 years, you know that our initial step in any engagement is to first assess the current state of the sales organization. In our initial conversation with any prospect, we attempt to explore…
- What’s happening
- What’s not happening
- What the objectives and expectations are
- The gap (money) between where they are and where they need to be; Attempt to uncover the symptoms that indicate the “why”
- If the problems are “have to fix” or “want to fix”
If we arrive at a “have to fix” state, then we discuss the process required to “fix” it. To help paint the picture, I normally describe a situation where someone has a “have to fix” problem. I choose improving my golf game as an analogy because I’m in a constant state of saying that I want to improve my golf game. (Apparently, improving my game isn’t that important because I always fail to take one really important step – I don’t take lessons. But… that is another story…)
I go on to ask, if my prospect was my new golf coach and we were in our first lesson, what would the golf coach do in our first lesson? Almost everyone (over 90%) replies, “Ask you to take a few swings with a club.” I ask why would the pro want to do that. Again, almost everyone responds with, “So they can see what might need to be fixed.” I respond with, “Perfect - that is exactly what we have to do. We can’t go about fixing the problem unless we know the root cause.” We have to have some insight into:
- The skills of your salespeople
- The strengths and weaknesses that support or hinder effective selling
- The systems and process that exist
- The skills of the sales manager, their tendencies and where (in the 4 functions of sales management) they are most effective
- The actual performance of the entire team
- Answers to 19 critical sales growth questions
A TALE OF TWO MANAGERS
As an example of what we find out, look at the chart below that describes the leadership and sales management skills, tendencies and effectiveness of two sales managers.
The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but the data has not been altered. Here is just one example of one of the findings from the assessment that companies find so useful when attempting to analyze the “why” of productivity and sales outcomes:
#1 – The score tells you how well Gene and Paul scored in their skills for the various data points evaluated as sales managers and sales leaders.
#2 – This helps us understand what a manager’s “go-to move” is when there is pressure to drive performance.
#3 – This tells us how effective the manager is when executing to a skill (recruiting, coaching, motivating, performance management, strategic thinking)
Looking only at the sales manager’s skills - performance management, recruiting, coaching and motivating - you can see that there are problems with motivating and recruiting effectiveness for Gene. Both of these are his strongest tendencies, but he lacks the skill and perhaps has a problem with the make-up of his sales team (not coachable). Therefore, he is not very effective. You would want to know this prior to implementing any type of sales management coaching program.
Paul, on the other hand, is average at best at 3 of the 4 sales management skills needed to effectively drive sales growth.
KNOWLEDGE IS NOT POWER
I once heard Tony Robbins declare that “Knowledge is NOT power.” He went on to say that “Knowledge in Action is Power.” That is the purpose of this post. Too many companies create budgets for training and development without good intelligence. Too many companies believe that training salespeople on the latest sales process concept is the way to drive sales. Suppose you have people that lack desire? Suppose they are un-coachable? Suppose you have managers that don’t have the skills to support the dollars and effort you spend on training your salespeople?
Before investing time, money and effort to train and develop your sales managers or salespeople, strongly consider doing a study - an x-ray, if you will - of the team that you have. Find out why they perform the way they perform, how coachable the team is , what the opportunity for growth is and if you’re going to help them with those contributing factors that support effective execution.
Supporting information:
Root Cause Analysis Training Video
Find out Why Selling is So $#$%! Hard?
Talk to Tony about the Sales Effectiveness and Impact Analysis – 513.226.3913 (Text: SEIA – provide your name)
How Do I Grow Sales? – An article that answers that question
