By Karl Graf
1. You consistently hear good reasons why your salespeople are not hitting their targets and your agree with them.
2. You are ok with salespeople who are not growing professionally, as long as they are handling some reasonably good accounts for you.
3. Your turnover rate is good. Very few salespeople who leave or get terminated.
4. Your turnover rate is high. And it's the good people who leave most often.
5. Your sales manager is spending considerably less than 85% of his/her time doing hands-on supervising, training, coaching and mentoring with your sales people.
6. No one tracking the weekly behaviors of your salespeople and holding them accountable for acceptable levels of activity and performance.
7. If you were to rate your salespeople as Quitters, Campers or Climbers, most of them would fall into the category of Campers...Happy Campers.
8. Your pipeline is never as full as it looks.
9. New salespeople rarely live up to your expectations.
10. You accept the fact that your sales have been below target for the past 10 months because of the economy, your markets, or your competition.
Some observations that may or may not apply to your sales team:
The average salesperson is less than 20% effective on a day-to-day basis.
The average sales manager spends less than 20% of their time managing their sales people.
The average sales mis-hire costs a company 14-24 times that person's annual salary.
Four out of five candidates for sales positions who make it to the interview stage of the hiring process either can't or won't sell when they are hired.
The average salesperson should be looking to double or triple their sales instead of hoping for incremental percentage increases.
Start to RAISE THE BAR
Solution:
1. Forget about historic performance. Attaching small incremental growth targets to territories that have historically under-performed is a trap. Set expectations on what should be, not on what has been.
2. Forget numbers for a while. Sales are history. They're lagging indicators. Develop and clearly define behaviors that are required for your salespeople to meet their targets, then track them and hold your salespeople unconditionally accountable for doing them consistently.
3. Look at your salespeople as campers, climbers or quitters. Start now to upgrade everyone to the climber, A-player category. It's that's not possible, you may have to de-select and stat over. And when you hire, do so with a no-compromise attitude. They must be A-players.
4. If you have more than four or five salespeople, you need to commit to having someone in place whose job is to supervise, train, coach and mentor your salespeople at least 85% of the time. That's not a luxury.It's a necessity if you want to maximize your ROI on your sales team.
5. You must unconditionally commit to raising the bar for your sales organization. If you cannot see that bar higher level, no one else will either.
RAISE THE BAR. DO IT NOW.
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