Sales Leaders Rule #11: Mange Behavior, Not Results.

Many sales leaders and sales managers default to managing numbers, not behavior. How many managers are knee deep in spreadsheets every single day in an effort to see who's on track, who's not? This data is used to measure performance against quota and remind salespeople of where they stand. This typically starts a process of push back on quotas from underperforming sales people claiming, "There's no way I can hit that number". But what the sales person is really saying is that they don't know what to do in order to hit that quota. It's frightening for them since they have no idea how to achieve the goal, so they spend energy on rebelling against the number rather than ways of achieving it.

Sales managers tend to spend a lot of time managing the end result but people can't manage what they can't control. Your sales team ultimately can't control yes's and no's because they can't control what the competition is going to do and they can't control what the markets are going to do. But what they can control, and a sales manager can manage to, is behavior.

The first step that a sales leader needs to take to manage behavior is to set a plan. Convert your quota into a behavioral plan, what we call a recipe for success or a cookbook. That is all the things that the sales team should do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis that they can control in order to meet or exceed their goals. The advantage of this approach is that it takes this ambiguous, hard to get quota, and turns it into something that a salesperson can do every single day. It gives clear guidelines for accountability and control over their own destiny.

Managing to the behavior plan keeps everyone on the same page and improves the sales team's psyche. Why? Because once sales people understand what it takes every day to hit their quota, it makes consistent behavior more meaningful even in a temporary absence of tangible success. Let's say that the behavior plan calls for ten introductory communications on LinkedIn, a couple networking events, a referral ask, and five cold calls per week but the sales person didn't set a meeting from any of them in a particular week. On top of that they didn't make a sale. That can be a discouraging week for results. But if the sales person executed on their daily behaviors that has been reverse engineered to hit their quota then there still is a sense of accomplishment. They get to celebrate doing the behavior. These small senses of accomplishment are important because even the best sales people are going to lose more than they win when it comes to actual sales.

Most sales people know the what, it's the quota, but they don't necessarily know the how. That's what the cookbook is, strategically planned behavior. Create a cookbook for your sales people so that they know what to do and can focus on the things they can control. Manage the cookbook so that you have a clearly defined list of activities that the sales team is accountable for and serves as a forward looking gauge of success.