By Rick A Conlow

Research shows that at least 50% of managers fail in any profession. In sales, it’s higher than that. Why? The risks and rewards are higher. Have you heard the saying, “Sales is the lowest paid easy work and the highest paid hard work.” For sales management it is true as well.

Why do sales managers, and sales executives fail? What do we mean by fail? The easy answer is that sales decline or don’t exceed the established objectives. Did you know that your sales results may be reaching your objectives and you could be failing? Here is an examples. A sales manager I knew came up to me and told me he had “lit a fire” under is team. I replied, “How did you do it?” He said that in a meeting he told them if they didn’t sell X amount by the end of the month they were fired. Now, that’s an all-time great motivational speech, isn’t it? Just kidding. Guess who was fired? He was.

In another example, a sales manager had a reputation for being tough and no-nonsense. While he always seemed to make his goals, he had a revolving door of people on his team. After a couple of years, he was let go. A new sales manager came in and results skyrocketed. Regardless of your style to leading there are seven fatal errors sales leaders make, which ones fit you?

Seven Fatal Errors and How to Avoid Them

1. Focus on Obstacles not Objectives

Many sales leaders forget a fundamental prerequisite for high performance and that’s clear expectations, goals and plans. Set goals as a team and with each individual rep and as you do they will perform better. Make sure you review these goals and plans regularly, too.

2. Lack of Accountability

Many manager’s talk about this in terms of the sales team. The truth is as Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here.” In other words the sales manager is the ultimately responsible for results. No excuses. Complaining about or blaming the economy, customers, competition, products, reps or upper management doesn’t cut it. Remember this adage, “If you want you people to be better you have to be better.”

3. Lack of Training

With the high probability of rejection and failure sales reps need on-going training and support to sustain wins. Far too many managers do no training or maybe an annual session at the beginning of the year. The best sales managers are the best trainers. This means one on one and in a group with live role-playing and practice. This needs to be done week in and week out.

4. Lack of Coaching

It’s been said you can never find a manager when you need one. Poor sales managers pound out report after report from behind a computer. While you need to analyze results, you need to coach even more. Make coaching a priority. Learn to become a superb coach. Get in the field, do one on ones in your office. Discover the power of phone and email coaching as well.

5. Set low standards

In this world today it is inexcusable to focus on mediocrity. Without communicating what you want and coaching your team to want it more, you are doomed to be an also ran. Benchmark your industry and competition and learn what the best do. Then set your standards high. Could you image famed football coaches Vince Lombardi or Bill Belichick telling their teams, “Let’s just have a winning season.” Winning a few sales is not enough to lead the pack.

6. Recognize only top performers

The top performers will gain whatever incentives for glory you provide. All others may win sometime. Everyone needs a day-to-day pat on the back. Your job as a sales leader is to build-up your team so all of them achieve more than they thought possible. Praise for a job well done or improvement is one of the ways to do that. Praise everyone genuinely.

7. No Innovation

Leaders who lack creativity in their leadership styles, end up doing business the “same old, same old” way all of the time. Most sales teams I know work long and hard. With the time put in why not spice it up or change the pace or have some fun once in a while. One manager we knew asked each rep what they really wanted to buy-personally. He then set goals for each rep to win in it. They had a huge quarter.

Certainly there are other contributors to failure. While you may not win all the time, the best sales managers are remarkably consistent in their efforts. They avoid the mistakes above by continuous improvement in their efforts. They improve their game by listening to others, attending seminars, and collaborating with their team. Superstar sales leaders achieve success by emulating the best and working hard to become better leaders.

By the way, do you want to better prepare your sales team to learn to sell more effectively today?

If so, I suggest you check our free training and coaching guide: http://wcwpartners.com/free-sales-training-article/

Or, do you want to learn now how to be a superstar sales leader to achieve dynamic and sustainable high performance increases with your sales team?

If so, I suggest you check this out: http://wcwpartners.com/superstar-leadership-model/

Rick Conlow is CEO with WCW Partners, a management consulting and training firm. Rick has helped organizations increase sales 218%, improve repeat and referral business by 20%, increase customer retention to 99%, reduce complaints by 60% and achieve 34 quality awards. You can reach Rick at: rick@wcwpartners.com or 888-313-0514.

By Nicholas T. Miller

How would your sales teams respond to this challenge?

• Grow loans and DDA balances 10% (for the third year in a row) in a fiercely competitive market (never mind the recession),
• Retain 100% of the customers designated as “high value” when customer attrition has been averaging 17%, and
• Maintain current sales team head count – no additional resources.

Many small business and commercial market sales teams face challenges like this. If they don’t panic a little, they probably don’t understand the goals. And, since (typically) 85% of sales people have no documented plan and 73% have no plan for their top 5 accounts, serious panic and fresh resumes might be more likely. Whether you divide your sales teams into “finders and minders” or you ask relationship managers to acquire new business while deepening existing loan and deposit relationships, the key to reaching your sales and retention targets is a good guidance system that starts with picking the right targets and choosing the right flight path.

Choose the Right Targets

The most important element of any flight guidance system is the target. “My people are heatseekers,” a sales manager once told me. “Once we set targets, nothing distracts them.” So, you have to make sure you’re setting clear, unambiguous targets.

First, sales team members must know what success looks like: What’s the balance of account retention and account acquisition that makes the business model work?

Once the balance is set, targeting must include four elements:

• Target market segments and ideal customer profiles.
• Priority-tiering criteria for customers and prospects.
• Value propositions for target segments stated in words the target customers would use.
• A limited and specific customer base so that relationship managers mine deeply.

Establish Guidance Parameters

With targets established, Mission Control (sales managers) must establish guidance parameters – clear expectations and standards that tell heat seekers what acceptable flight paths look like. The standards tell your sales people exactly what’s expected and when they’re off track from an activity point of view, as well as from a results point of view. The relationship managers will incorporate these expectations into their planning.

The critical areas for standards or bench marks include:

• Activity levels,
• Product mix, and
• Forecast accuracy.

Discuss Annual Flight Plans

Once you’ve established targets and flight path limits, relationship managers and sales team leaders must plan their flights precisely. The more audacious their goals, the more important the planning… and it’s the last activity in the world the relationship managers want to do.

“Forget about this,” they say. “I need to be calling on customers.” The truth is: If they don’t plan, that responsibility falls on the team leaders’ shoulders. Since sales team leaders simply cannot call all the plays and manage eight, 10, or 15 active sales people, the whole team and the growth – retention strategy is put at risk.

We recommend that sales team leaders ask RMs to develop plans focused on accounts, activities, expected results, and resources needed, just as if they were managers of independent businesses:

• Annual territory plans.
• Relationship plans for critical “must keep” or “must expand” relationships.
• Personal development plans that are tied to the specific results an RM is asked to achieve. Once the RMs have developed their plans, managers and RMs should discuss the plans as if the RMs were independent businesses (franchisees) and the sales team leaders were the franchisers.

Start the conversations with a discussion of goals – the relationship managers’ goals for themselves and their businesses, for their compensation, for their markets. Then, focus on their strategies to reach their goals and the measures they will use to assess whether they’re on track. This information enables you, as a sales coach, to look for disconnects between their goals and their activity plans, giving you opportunities to catch potential problems early.

Mid-Flight Check Points

After initial discussions of the annual plans, we recommend a consistent pattern of team leader – RM mid-flight check points that provide a forum for inspection, feedback, and resetting course:

• Weekly – focus on deals, activities, field observation, behaviors, and skills.
• Monthly and quarterly – focus on “managing the business”, tracking progress against business plans and making adjustments needed for upcoming periods.
• Semi-Annually – a formal performance review.

These coaching disciplines drive sales results and ensure the appropriate balance between new business development and account retention activities. Sales managers’ expectations, coupled with feedback and consequences, change sales behaviors. In each weekly, monthly, and quarterly conversation, the manager and RM compare “business planned performance” from the written plans with “actual performance,” identify problems, and reset plans for the period leading to the next meeting.

Further, effective RMs and managers use the monthly and quarterly meetings to plan responses to “surprises” such as unexpected requests from senior managers so that such requests doesn’t cause instant circuit overload.

The Ultimate Benefit

Challenging sales goals should create a sense of excitement, a little panic, some nervousness. Just as we’d expect our customers to plan, sales team leaders should expect their RMs and themselves to plan. Since time is so precious, the plans should focus on the most important leverage points -target customers, critical activities, resources needed – to reach the sales goals.

The regular conversations about the plan between sales team leaders and their direct reports are the most important aspect of the planning process. The conversations must be frequent (at least monthly), consistent (there’s no avoiding them), and valuable to both parties. For relationship managers, in particular, the conversation time must ultimately lead to clear priorities and commitment of resources that the RM or sales team needs to make its numbers. These conversations leave the direct reports feeling focused, energized, and well supported.

In the words of one sales manager: “If you don’t plan, and we don’t talk, I can’t help you.”

Nicholas T. Miller, president of Clarity Advantage, helps banks generate more profitable relationships faster with small and medium-sized companies, their owners, and employees. Clarity consulting, communications, sales tools and training help banks recruit and deploy sales team members, choose their best business and consumer prospects and clients, then approach, engage, sell, expand, and retain relationships. Clarity also assists banks with consumer sales and cash management sales. Clarity clients have posted increases in household penetration, cross-sells, deposit volume, and loan volume. Visit Clarity’s website at http://www.clarityadvantage.com where you can subscribe to “The Weekly Sales Thought,” a free eNewsletter and podcast focused on business-to-business selling and sales management.

By Skip Anderson

The following job promotion ritual is repeated in numerous sales organizations every year:

Step 1: A sales management position is vacant due to growth, attrition, or the dismissal of an existing sales manager; Step 2: The top sales representative in the organization (or department) is selected to fill the vacancy; Step 3: The top salesperson doesn’t like to (or is unable to) manage the sales performance of other individuals, so he keeps focused on personal selling initiatives, but in doing so, is failing in his role as sales manager; Step 4: The cycle repeats itself.

Although sales representatives and sales managers both work within the realm of selling, many of the strengths required for success in the roles of sales manager differ than the strengths required for success in the role of sales person. Therefore, few top-performing salespeople will become top-performing sales managers. This is important to know if you’re looking to hire a new sales manager in your company, and you expect this individual to be successful filling that role.

This isn’t a phenomenon that’s unique to selling. There are many highly-skilled and successful physicians, for example who are unable to effectively manage a staff of other physicians. There are many prized athletes who are not able to successfully coach a team of other athletes. There are skilled kitchen designers, plumbers, and attorneys who are unable to manage respective groups of other kitchen designers, plumbers, and attorneys.

Before I offer support for my thesis, allow me to confess that there are two situations where I will not argue with the individual who says the top salesperson in an organization will become a successful sales manager:

(1) The first is where where the new sales manager retains the responsibility for personally generating sales revenue. This individual is, in effect, either a part-time sales manager, or a sales manager in title only; (2) The second is when the sales manager’s role is to be almost exclusively a rain-maker (a generator of new business opportunities). That is a selling role that some sales managers play, but it is not a management role per se.

The following is a list of strengths (skills) that are required to achieve phenomenal success as the manager of a sales team (or any team, for that matter). However, none of these skills are substantially required for phenomenal success in front-line selling. This doesn’t mean that a top sales performer will never be a top sales management performer, but it means that the strengths required to fill the two roles are substantially different.

Strength #1. Delegating.
The sales manager certainly cannot do the front-line sales activity for his entire sales group himself. Meeting a sales quota requires the contribution of all members of the sales team. The successful sales manager must possess the ability to delegate responsibility to others so the group can achieve its goals. Delegating is quite a different skill than, say, closing skill, which is required of top sales performers, but the skill of delegation is not a skill which is typically required for top sales performance.

Strength #2. Willing to give up the top spot.
Top sales performers who become sales managers must be entirely willing to give up the position of top performer in a sales organization. For those who can’t, disaster awaits. Sales managers must be willing and able to put their top salespeople on pedestals so their egos can be adequately fed, while also keeping their own egos in check for the sake of the advancement of their team. In a larger organization there is still opportunity for competition between several or many sales managers, but a top sales manager has to be able to point to his top performer and give her credit for being the top salesperson in his group. He also has to encourage other non-top-performers to become top-performers. Since many salespeople have been ego-driven in their successful sales careers, this transition from achiever to encourager is critical. The skill of allowing someone else to be the top dog is not a skill required for success in selling, and in fact, can be antithetical to it. Many sales managers who have previously been a top sales performer who have been driven throughout his entire career to achieve “pedestal” status will not work tirelessly to put another individual on this same pedestal.

Strength #3. Focusing on others.
Sales management requires an outward focus on others’ sales performance, whereas successful selling requires an inward focus on one’s own sales performance. Being in control of your own sales is one thing; but it’s impossible to be in control of an entire team’s sales. Therefore, a loss of direct control of the sale is required in favor of a focus on the sales manager’s team members.

Strength #4. Supervising.
Sale managers must possess front-line supervisory skills. They need to know how and when to step in to discipline or change behaviors in an employee. They must possess wisdom about when to support subordinates versus when to discipline them. Top sales performers do not need supervisory skills to achieve top dog status.

Strength #5. Managing.
The key skill of the manager is to utilize every subordinate’s special strengths to achieve the goals of the sales group. Weaknesses in employees exist, but assembling a group of team members who have strengths in the right areas, and knowing how to put those strengths to work, is not required of top sales performers. It is, however, required of sales managers who wish to achieve top sales performance. These management concepts are described by Marcus Buckingham in his book “The One Thing You Need to Know About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success” (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

Strength #6. Coaching, training, mentoring.
Successful sales managers should be able to coax salespeople to improved performance, both in one-on-one coaching events and in classroom training environments. Although there may be some of these elements present in all selling top performers, these elements are crucial for top sales management performance.

Strength #7. Leading.
According to Marcus Buckingham, again in “The One Thing You Need to Know,” successful leaders have two key attributes: (1) They have the ability to create a vision for the future; and (2) They have the ability to get subordinates lined up within this vision, so that individuals’ efforts will support, and not hamper, the group’s progress. Successful sales managers have these leadership attributes. Leadership skill is not required of top sales performers.

Strength #8. Filtering directives.
The sales manager will receive many directives from her superiors. To be effective, she must know when to filter out or adjust these directives, and when to take them on with reckless abandon. This is a delicate balance, and not knowing when to do which one can wreak havoc in a sales organization. The wisdom to know when to embrace upper-management directives, and when to subtly give them secondary attention, will help determine the success of the sales manager’s team, and therefore, the success of the sales manager.

Strength #9. Hiring and Firing.
Top-performing sales managers must make be able to accurately predict sales performance during the interviewing process, and must leverage that ability in their hiring of subordinates. Without this ability, sales performance will suffer. Top sales performers do not need this predictive skill. Successful sales manager must also know how and when to remove an employee from their team so that negative repercussions are minimized.

Strength #10. Deciding.
There’s no question that making good decisions is important in successful selling. But in a sales management role, all decisions are magnified because each decision affects more than one individual. The sales manager’s decisions affect an entire staff of sales professionals and their customers. This means decision-making skills are vital for the sales manager.

There are many skills required for sales success. Among them are the ability to prospect and create business opportunities, the ability to identify prospects’ needs, and ability to close the sale. But the sales management qualities listed above are not substantially required for individual selling success.

While there’s some overlap between the required skill of the peak-performing sales manager and the peak-performing sales person, here’s my advice: if you’re looking for a sales manager who will succeed, hire one that possesses the strengths of a sales manager (those listed strengths above). Many peak-performing salespeople don’t possess those strengths.

Skip Anderson is a recognized authority on consumer selling. He is the founder of Selling to Consumers, a sales training and consulting company. Skip speaks frequently on creating exceptional sales performance. Get the Selling to Consumers Sales Tips Newsletter, packed with free sales tips, at http://www.SellingToConsumers.com

Read the Selling To Consumers Blog at http://blog.sellingtoconsumers.com

This article may be distributed or reproduced as long as an attribution to Selling to Consumers and Skip Anderson are included, along with either a link to ellingtoConsumers.com (if in electronic form) or the Selling to Consumers url, if in print (sellingtoconsumers.com).

By Barrett Riddleberger

When you assess the make-up of your sales team, what do you see? Are they consistently going after the easy, low hanging fruit? Do they stop their follow-up and follow-through after only one or two calls? Or do you have salespeople who take their time in selecting the right prospects and then do their homework and prepare?

There are two types of salespeople that I will cover in this article: tactical and strategic.

Tactical salespeople go after the quick sale – usually low volume, low margin sales… the easy ones. Strategic salespeople go after the more complex sales – the ones that can take longer, are more difficult to navigate through, but yield much greater results.

Tactical salespeople will typically rely on external factors for success, such as appearance, personality, favorite sales technique, etc.

Strategic salespeople bring much more to the process like: emotional maturity, patience, analytical problem solving skills, asking great questions, etc.

Bottom line: Strategic salespeople are different than tactical salespeople because they view their roles from different vantage points.

As a result, strategic salespeople have a better chance of achieving great sales volume, higher levels of credibility and better quality clients with long-term customer-loyalty.

Can the Tactical Salesperson Become Strategic?

Salespeople who rely mostly on their personality typically can gain quick favor with a prospect. However, they can easily falter later in the sales process when faced with complex issues from the prospect. Many times they lack the ability to think strategically about the prospects issues because their natural charm and persuasion is no match for sophisticated solutions.

Personality-driven salespeople can sometimes get into the door quicker… and get an invitation to leave just as fast if they lack the wherewithal to demonstrate competence and effectiveness for the prospect.

Professional sales requires that your salesperson put themselves into the shoes of the prospect or customer. If they view their sales tactics from the perspective of, “They’re going to love me” or “I hope they love me”, it can be quite limiting to their success.

Mentoring salespeople, who rely solely on their great personalities for success, enables you to elevate their portfolio of experiences. Watching you navigate through a complex sale is invaluable. Watching you do it 8, 10 or 15 times, is career changing. Once they accumulate more and more “team sales” experiences with you, then you can wean them off and allow them to take a larger role in the “team selling” sales process… and eventually have them take complete control over larger sales opportunities.

How Do You Mentor a Tactical Salesperson?

How you mentor a tactical salesperson combined with the nature of your relationship with them really makes the difference.

Here are a few tips on mentoring your personality-driven salespeople into Sales Champions:

1. Help them to think strategically - Don’t allow them to only go for a quick tactical sale. Demonstrate that there is more credibility when you continually probe and listen to the needs of the prospect. From a senior decision-makers perspective, all aspects of his/her business are connected. Your salespeople need to know this so they don’t get so focused on product features and benefits alone. Instead, they must take a consultative approach but you need to show them how to do this. They need to watch you and learn from you that company executives want an advisor who listens, understands and then makes appropriate recommendations – not a charming salesperson with hopes of making a quick sale.
2. Encourage patience – The bigger the deal, typically the longer the process. Even though it may take longer, senior executives also have the means to pool resources and acquire money much easier than a lower level manager. When your salesperson finally gets to a top level decision-maker, don’t let them blow it by attempting to put together a low-level, tactical deal. Help them to expand their sights, raise their expectations, meet the executive where they are and then focus on bigger and better opportunities. Eventually they’ll get it. Remember, senior-level executives aren’t just product/service buyers – they’re strategic solution buyers.
3. Define their role - Your salesperson needs to know the value of the education they will receive by watching you. Help them to understand how import these team sell experiences with you are and how it will help them in the future when they go it alone. Since you are the one driving the sales process during these mentoring experiences, and not them, they need to understand that their secondary role is still important to the process, but their education and experience will be their greatest reward.
4. Debrief often - Ask pointed question about each sales call: What did you learn today? How did you feel when the prospect said or did this? What did you see me do? Why do you think I handled it that way? What would you have done previously in the same situation? What will you do differently when faced with the same situation in the future? Why? How can you prepare for that situation again? How do you think making that one change will impact your sales career?

Personality-driven salespeople need to experience a complex sales process done correctly. They need to observe you doing it step-by-step. I recommend that you do it as early in their career with you as possible. The quicker you set a high watermark, establish a mentor relationship, provide real-world experiences, and then debrief and coach throughout the process, the quicker they will rise to the occasion and meet those strategic sales opportunities head on.

Barrett Riddleberger is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of customized sales consulting, research-based sales assessments and sales force recruitment. He also is founder of Resolution Systems Inc., a strategic sales consulting firm. His book, “Blueprint of a Sales Champion,” details how organizations can find, train and retain top performing salespeople… even in a highly competitive market.

An accomplished author and sales consultant, Riddleberger is also highly in demand as a business development and motivational speaker for organizations seeking to drive their sales force to greater levels of performance. For more info visit ResolutionSystemsInc.com or call 866.880.5175.

1. The most important relationship in a sales organization is between a salesperson and a sales manager. Choose your managers carefully.
2. Success as a sales manager is driven by what is inside – a respect for the individual, a commitment to engage, challenge, and build trust, a genuine caring. Without these, a sales manager will never move from first base.
3. A sales manager’s ability to attract the right talent, to recruit and retain salespeople who possess egodrive, empathy, and resiliency, is critical to success.
4. Top sales managers are students of process. They know that solid, repeatable processes form the foundations of being a champion.They continually seek creative and “best ways” to achieve objectives, and to energize those best practices throughout the sales team.
5. Strategy, goal-setting, territory and competitive analysis, measurement, business planning, activity management, forecasting, key account reviews – Building strength in these areas of business management creates a bias for growth with the sales team.
6. Sales managers must embrace coaching as their primary practice. Superior coaches help their people see what they can be. They question, they listen, they challenge, they encourage, they teach, they mentor – knowing deep down that lasting performance comes from the inside out.
7. Sales managers are proactive change agents. They are continually in the field observing selling behaviors and guiding. They expect and inspect. They help strategize and debrief sales calls. They are catalysts. They anticipate obstacles and remove them. They analyze trends based on facts, and take calculated risks accordingly.
8. Sales managers build alliances within their organizations and with customers. They manage up as well as down. They champion and back up both the salesper-son and the needs of the customer. They know how to engage organization resources to add value, solve problems, and achieve results.
9. While motivation is primarily an internal quality, sales management understands that creating a positive, fun environment, coupled with the effective application of incentives and celebration inspires commitment and builds a culture of winners.
10. Sales managers never stop learning. They model a commitment to lifelong improvement. They train and practice relentlessly with their salespeople. They continually “raise-the-bar”. They make learning a priority and a habit, for themselves and their sales team.

 

Carlos Quintero, president of Sales Effectiveness, Inc., has over 24 years experience in sales, sales management, training, and consulting. As sales performance advisors, Sales Effectiveness, Inc. helps senior executives drive positive change and build high performance sales teams.

By Mike Whitty

Becoming a Sales Manager is an achievement in itself. It shows a certain level of competence and earned trust. It doesn’t indicate that there is nothing else to learn.

Training the Manager can be a great boost to dealerships who are keen to improve their bottom-line. Not only are good Sales Managers more productive than their counterparts, but an effective Sales Manager who also shows good leadership skills, can have a major impact on both their department and indeed their salespeople.

Training and developing your Managers can be a lot cheaper and more productive, and certainly more motivating, than many of the endless cost cutting measures dealerships will embark on. It can be the difference between Effectiveness and Mediocrity.

Dealerships spend a lot of money training their salespeople to sell, but what portion of that investment is used to train the Sales Manager? When was the last time your Manager went to a managment seminar, or read a leadership book? We tell our salespeople that they need to continue to be student’s of their craft, to keep learning new and better ways to sell, but don’t these same philosophies apply to your Managers?

Good Salespeople Don’t Necessarily Make Good Managers

The single most common mistake that dealerships make is promoting their number one salesperson into the role of Manager, thereby depriving themselves, in a single stroke, of their best producer and hamstringing their salespeople with an ineffective Manager. The skills required for managing, mentoring and developing a sales team are totally different from those required for selling. As a result, it’s not uncommon to find newly promoted Sales Managers who regret having taken a management position and may even leave to get back into sales.

Technical vs Leadership Responsibilities

I think that most Managers understand the technical aspects of the job – writing a deal, ordering inventory, creating advertising, monthly summaries, etc. But it’s the leadership aspects of the job that many Sales Managers need to learn. Some of these include: – training salespeople, recruiting, hiring and firing, performance reviews, praise and criticism, effective sales meetings, handling employee and customer problems, motivation, communication skills, etc. These are just some of the areas that most Sales Managers could use additional training.

No one can expect a person to automatically know everything that there is to know about management in sales. This is why sales management training is such crucial part of the dealership process.

Mike Whitty, president
Michael Learning Group
Celebrating 24 Years in Vehicle Sales Training
http://www.salestrainingstore.net

By Dan Goldberg

The position of sales manager often comes with multiple responsibilities. Each of which has a direct affect on the success of the organization.

The sales manager is frequently an active sales person, as well as an administrator. He or she must make sure quotas are being met, margins are in line, pipelines are full, salespersons are making their calls and individuals are realistically matched to their positions and territories.

An effective sales manager realizes that a person’s behavior is the key to success.

How a salesperson behaves towards his or her responsibilities has a direct link to results.
The individual who constantly complains about the state of the market, lack of leads and referrals, inability to get to the decision maker, etc. is usually better at making excuses than making sales.

The quandary for the sales manager is…how long should he or she put up with ineffective behavior?

In order to answer that question, the sales manager must first look at the reporting structure that he or she has put in place for the entire sales team.

All sales teams should meet at least twice a month. I prefer once a week. And each sales person must be ready to report his or her results to everyone in the room (or on the conference call). One easy way to hold each person accountable, while enabling them to communicate weekly progress efficiently, is to use that good old stand-by…paper.

At the weekly meeting each person should present his or her weekly “cookbook” or call sheet for the previous week. The sheet is broken into two different categories, one is titled Prospects and the other is titled Existing Clients. The two large categories are then sub-divided into smaller areas. Under Prospects, the column headings may read:
Calls/Contacts (which would include telephone calls, e-mails, etc.), Conversations (this measures how many calls and contacts actually turned into discussions, either on the phone, through e-mail, or one-on-one conversations), Appointments, Meetings Held, Networking Events Attended and Sales Closed. Under the Existing Clients category the headings may read the same with a few twists, such as, Reorders, Stop-by Visits, etc. Each column is then divided into rows, one for each day of the week.

These “cookbooks” instruct the salesperson to list his or her goals for the week at the top of each column heading. During the week the salesperson puts a hash mark for each call, appointment, meeting, etc. that they have accomplished. The sales closed category, however, has the dollar figure for each particular sale. I also advise clients to keep a separate sheet for each day of the week, in order to list the names of the individuals called or contacted and with whom the salesperson had conversations.

At the sales meeting, each person photocopies and hands out his or her sheet to the others in attendance. This leads to accountability by one’s peers and allows each individual to measure his or her results against those of the others in the group. It is vitally important that everyone is non-judgmental. The sales manager ultimately holds judgment, however at the weekly sales meetings people should be able to ask for help, find out how those who are consistently producing do so, and learn techniques to improve the production.

It is also important that attendees understand that communication is not limited to the weekly meetings, but that help is available, in fact encouraged at all times.

In addition to paper “cookbooks” the use of Customer Relations Software should also be used to add depth to the interactive salesperson/client/prospect relationship.
All customer or prospect conversations, sales, and other interactions with anyone within your organization’s sales or customer service process should be entered and summarized to enable the sales team, including inside salespeople, sales managers, new salespersons, customer service representatives and others within the company to have a complete understanding as to the current situation with every client or prospect. This includes specific problems, new orders, satisfactory comments, etc.

Besides the “cookbook” another effective tool is the “pipeline” sheet. This paper is used to report what prospects are in the salesperson’s revenue pipeline. The headings on this sheet may read, Company (or individual), Potential Sale (in dollars), Possibility of Sale (in percentages), Contact Person, Last Contact Date, and Next Step.

This weekly sheet should also be photocopied and distributed by each salesperson to the others on the team. The “pipeline” sheet gives a snapshot of potential revenues and new clients. It is also a valuable tool in easing potential rough spots that a salesperson may be encountering. By laying out prospective companies and contacts one salesperson may find that another team member may have an alternate means of securing the sale.

These two sheets are also concise measuring devices for the sales manager. They permit a clear view of a salesperson’s behavior as it applies to his or her consistency at following the techniques necessary in order to build a solid business.

While the revenue results may vary, the sales manager can see how new salespeople are performing on his or her way to growth and greater revenues and how longer tenured salespeople are performing in and out of his or her comfort zone.

With the weekly “cookbook” and “pipeline” sheets a sales manager will, over a defined period of time, be able to see who is, or has, the potential to produce, and who doesn’t.
These results and results indicator tools can then be used to decide which salespeople to terminate and which salespeople to keep and grow with.

A sales manager’s greatest tools are the ability to motivate, communicate with and support his or her team members, as well as measure the results of the salespeople under his or her guidance and the ability to construct a timeline for the success the team and its members. Once processes are put in place, so that decisions can be quantified and qualified, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this article becomes easy.

How long should a sales manager put up with ineffective behavior?

As long as the results and the behavior associated with them, within the timeline allotted, indicate it’s time to let the person go.

One last thought. If you are a one-person organization, the tools mentioned in this article work equally as well to measure your own productivity, goals desired and achieved, prospects to contact, sales made, etc. You are your own sales manager and while you’re not apt to fire yourself you may find that you need help in the form of adding another person, finding a partner, creating a symbiotic relationship with another firm, or getting coaching or training to overcome your weaknesses and increase you strengths.

The best thing is…it’s all there in black and white!

Dan Goldberg, MBA, is President of Dan Goldberg Consulting L.L.C. a training, coaching and business development firm located in the Philadelphia, PA area. He is the founder and former owner of “For Eyes” the highly successful international optical company and an internationally recognized keynote speaker. Dan is the author of the book “Stand Back A Second, Just don’t fall off the edge,” and of “The Six Steps To Solid Sales Success” and “The Seven Elements Of Successful Management” programs. He is Executive-In-Residence at Kutztown University and has been the subject of stories in Newsweek, Business Week, Playboy, Successful Business, Investor’s Business Daily, major newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, Baltimore, Miami, San Francisco, Oakland, St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles and many other national and local publications. In addition, Dan has appeared on Good Morning America and other national and local television and radio programs. You can contact him at dg@dangoldberg.com, visit his website at http://www.dangoldberg.com or reach him at (215) 233-5352

By Sam Manfer

If you’re not satisfied with your sales status looks to the coach of your team – your sales managers. Here’s a way to check how good they are.

First, does your sales manager know where his/her sales will come from by account, by product / service for 2008? Or is it about, “Here is my number, let’s go out there and sell, sell, sell.” Ask each one to explain where the sales for 2008 will come from.

Second, does your sales manager know how to motivate each of his/her people? Yes, the key is money, but money goes to the family. Money is about survival but, what really gets the sales person going? See if your sales manager can answer this question about his people.

Third, does your sales manager coach and mentor. Coaching is telling his people what to do, i.e. get to the ultimate decision maker. Mentoring is showing them how to do it, i.e. show how to use your main contact to network you to the ultimate decision maker.

This requires discussing sales call plans and pursuit strategies. Then making calls together – not for the sales manager to sell, but to observe, give feedback and lay-out a behavior modification plan. How often does your manager do this with each sales person?

Fourth, does your sales manager turn-over and recruit effectively and timely? In other words does he purge the bottom 10% each year and constantly seek new recruits. Most managers are reactive. When someone leaves, they then seek a replacement. Unfortunately, because of 1-3 above, the better people (maybe not the best) leave and then the manager starts recruiting. This leaves you with the poorer performers and the new hire becomes whatever was available.

Like a college football coach, your sales manager must be good at recruiting good talent and then showing this raw talent what to do and how to do it. Don’t ever get sucked into the “experienced sales person”. Experience only means someone has been doing it before. It says nothing about how good one is, especially selling your products and services. That’s where the coaching and mentoring becomes critical. As in football and all sports, coaching and practice is critical and ongoing.

Finally, does your sales manager hold your people accountable? That is when a forecasted sale isn’t made, is there a discussion that holds the sales person’s feet to the fire? Are there consequences as well as rewards? As my old football coach uses to say, “I don’t want excuses, I want results or else you don’t start”.

Now it’s your call. Is the person responsible for the most important element of your business – sales -capable and doing what it takes to get you where you want to be? Or do you need to step up and take actions of training your managers or hiring new ones – and then training them. If professionals like Tiger Woods and every other athlete needs coaching, your sales managers do as well.

Sam Manfer makes it easy for any sales person to feel comfortable connecting with top, C-Level leaders. For more inspiring articles and to receive your free Selling Wisdoms E-zine with powerful selling tips visit his Advanced Sales Training Website

By Rod McKinnis

Business Development Officer? Business Procurement Specialist? Did you know these types of titles for salespeople can ultimately rob your organization?

As a Sales Management Training Consultant, I often notice business cards from salespeople with titles that require some effort to decipher. As I inquire further about their role, eventually it pops out – “I’m in sales”. It makes me wonder, when did “Sales” become a five letter word that can no longer show up on one’s business card? It gets deeper…

Building high performance sales organizations is my specialty. Much of my success is a result of a startling discovery made years ago – there is no proven correlation between Personality and Sales Productivity. This discovery enabled me to lead a team that transformed a $40B business unit into a $60B business unit in 18 months for a Fortune Global 500 company. How? We recognized anyone can succeed in sales despite personality. Sales is simple if you learn how to master sales behavior intelligence and develop your salespeople accordingly. Sales is about behavior and our proven sales system is built on the 25 behaviors that is proven to impact sales productivity – Sales Identity> is one of the behaviors we measure.

What is Sales Identity?

Sales Identity
measures a salesperson’s pride of the sales profession. If a person views selling as noble, they are considered to have a strong Sales Identity. The opposite is true for those who view a sales position as something to be ashamed of, they are considered to have a weak Sales Identity.

Selling is noble, we all sell everyday whether we realize it or not. However, selling is often perceived negatively because of bad experiences. To some degree, society tends to cast a negative light on people in the sales profession. Due to the strength of society’s misguided views, some sales professionals feel shame and are compelled to hide their sales position and adopt deflected titles such as, “Business Development Officers” or “Procurement Specialists”. Such behavior is proven to be costly, read on…

Some people refuse to accept the notion of selling altogether, even though they are in fact trying to close a deal. A classic example…

Recently I was on a flight to a sales conference in Atlanta and I struck up a conversation with the gentleman next to me. Our idle chit chat led into a careers conversation. He shared with me how he worked for a major home improvement company in charge of the distribution centers in 4 states in the South and Southwest. After explaining my role as a Sales Management Training Consultant and how I help sales teams and salespeople. He immediately responded with “I could never be a salesperson!” We continued our conversation and he explained to me that he was preparing for a major presentation with the Executive Team of the company because he felt he needed an additional $3 Million allocated to his budget for the following year. He went on to demonstrate to me how the organization “would ultimately benefit from the additional spend with a better Return on Investment (ROI)…”

As he was explaining this to me, I began to smile and chuckle. Initially, he probably thought I was being rude. Then I asked him “So, you are trying to convince the Executive Team to give you an additional $3 million for your budget, correct?” “Yes.” He replied. I then added “And you can support the benefits of doing so, correct?” “Yes” he replied again. “Are you sure you’re not a salesperson?” He sat back in his chair and smiled, I could see the light bulb turn on. My point dawned on him. I eventually gave him some coaching on how to think more like a salesperson and improve his sales presentation.

Why Measure Sales Identity?

Measuring Sales Identity can ultimately save your organization a substantial amount of money long term. How?

Organizations all over the globe are challenged to hire high performance salespeople, not doing so can be costly in terms of sales results, hiring and training costs. Recent studies show, the average cost of hiring a poor performing salesperson has swelled to over $100,000/year. Think about it, how much are hiring mistakes costing you?

Research shows – salespeople with weak Sales Identity will under perform within 6 months of joining an organization and ultimately “self select” out of the sales profession within 18 – 24 months. In fact, we found people with weak Sales Identity prefer to apply for “sales” positions with deflected titles because they insinuate less sales accountability.

Unless detected, salespeople with weak Sales Identity will struggle and steal valuable resources from your organization via increased turnover, higher training costs and poor sales results. Here are 3 simple steps to protect your organization going forward:

Step 1: Remove the Identity Crisis

A surefire way to jeopardize long term sales productivity is to have your organization struggle through a sales identity crisis. If the role is a sales role – title it as such. Top performing salespeople absolutely love sales and prefer to be called – Sales Representatives. Having deflected titles attracts weaker performers who will struggle to get out of the ranks of mediocrity long term.

Step 2: Monitor Your “Motivational” Costs with Sales Reps

If you find your sales organization spending more time on motivating sales reps within the 6 – 24 month window of being hired, you may have a Sales Identity issue. Depending upon the severity, there may be hope.

Step 3: Know What You’re Hiring, Prior to Making the Offer

Hiring mistakes pertaining to sales positions can be costly! Use an assessment tool that measures the Sales Identity of your candidates prior to hire.

Rod McKinnis, Founder of The McKinnis Consulting Group is a highly sought after Sales Management Training Consultant, specializing in doubling sales results in a matter of months. To learn more or to schedule Rod for your next sales event visit www.SalesisSimple.com.

By Sam Manfer

The marketing components that used to generate leads — product, performance, promotion and price –are no longer effective. The tools for selling — lots of sales calls, lunches, golf and give-always — are expensive and inefficient. In the 21st century, selling and business development require the following:

* Prospecting Using the Internet
* Relationship Selling
* Network Selling and
* Investigative Selling.

Prospecting Using the Internet

Cold calling is dead. It’s not productive. It’s demoralizing. It’s expensive. Prospecting in the 21st century involves setting the stage for people and companies to find you so that you can solve their problems. Flaunting advertisements and brochures is also a waste. Everyone goes to the Internet these days to find solutions to their problems. Therefore, the successful sales person will have to know how to use the Internet to generate qualified leads. Corporations should have an Internet program, but territory and product-line sales people should have their own Internet marketing program as well. And it’s not about having a website, it’s much more. This is the passive side of prospecting. This means that sales and business development professionals must set up an aggressive Internet Marketing process for their territory or product so that the people they want to do business with will come to them.

Relationship Selling

The other 21st Century prospecting element is the active side of prospecting. This is where you use professional relationships to find out about problems or opportunities where you can assist. There are so many opportunities for a sales person or account manager to discover within their existing and old/lost accounts. Using professional relationships make this prospecting method effective and easy.

Sales and Business Development people with professional relationships are seen as a resource to protect or enhance buyers’ careers. These people will be open to give information and coach you for cross-sells into their business unit, associate divisions and/or other product lines. If you develop professional relationships, these people will give you qualified leads, buy more and more from you, and refer you to others.

Network Selling

However, one has to learn how to use these relationships to get networked to others. There are two focuses for successful selling in the 21 Century:

1. You must spread like a virus in your customers’ organizations. I use the phrase – move up and out.

2. You must get to the profit-center leaders, C-level executives, and senior staff of the business units you sell into and develop professional relationships with these people to effectively close sales, cross-sell and be seen as the preferred supplier. Hanging out with the subordinates will never secure your position with your customers.

The only way you’ll move up and out and connect with the leaders is by using your professional relationships to network you to others. People with whom you’ve developed credibility — your Golden Network as I call it — will help you if asked. But if they are not asked for a referral and introduction to others, they will rarely offer to connect you with the leaders and others you should be meeting. So you must ask for their help.

To make the networking process productive, what you ask for, how you ask for it, and where you look for help will make all the difference between getting to the right people and getting to useless people for your initiative. This process is Network Selling.

Investigative Selling

Once a sales or business development person connects with a person of value, using his or her network connection, the goal is to convert that individual into his or her Golden Network. In other words the sales or BD person will have to develop a professional relationship with this new contact.

People will consider another individual a professional relationship only if there is something in it for them. So a sales or BD person needs to investigate the critical drivers of their target contact in order to learn what this person values that s/he can deliver. Everyone is different and without knowing each individual’s triggers, a sales person will flounder or worst yet, become annoying. But if the sales person can make the connections between the desires and the deliverables, a relationship can be established, and then this new contact will continue networking you up and out until you are connected to the leaders and their staffs.

The process for determining one’s triggers is Investigative Selling. It requires knowing the questions to ask and how to ask them. Although this sounds simple, it requires finesse, skill and confidence. Investigative Selling also requires effective listening, and the ability to expose and entice. Both of these are advanced skills never taught in schools and rarely taught in product or sales training. So the successful sales or business development person will have to learn these Investigative Selling skills and be able to take them seamlessly to the street.

The sooner the sales or business development person masters these Internet Marketing, Relationships, Network and Investigative Selling Skills, the sooner sales will close and closing ratios rise.

Bonus Tip: FREE E-Book “Getting Past Gatekeepers and Handling Blockers”. Just click this C-Level Relationship Selling Link Sam Manfer makes it easy for any sales person to be effective and feel comfortable connecting with and relationship selling C-Level leaders.