Category: Sales Management

I am sure every person who reads this post will, at one time or another, hesitate and either give way to negative thoughts or vacillate momentarily. At the same time, they deal with the need to Overcome Negative Thoughts that influence their self-belief system.

Some of you will not agree with that comment and go to great lengths to prove it, if only to yourself.

Firstly, let me say having negative thoughts is not a bad thing as long as you don’t allow them to dominate your self-belief system and cause you anxiety or any distress.

I decided to write this post after talking with a colleague recently who was sent a meeting request from their CEO and had spent a restless night thinking about what they had done wrong or should have done but not completed.

This colleague is an overachiever, achieving over 105% of the forecast despite the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Moments like this are when your brain is searching for the purpose behind the meeting, and it is very easy to make more of the situation and allow your brain to start down the rabbit hole of negative thoughts and self-doubt.

Overcoming Negative Thoughts

The secret to Overcoming Negative Thoughts is using the switch in your head that allows you to relive all the great things you have done and achieved.

Do this, and no matter what the CEO’s agenda is, you have the tools to turn the meeting on its head. Use the opportunity to cover issues that are limiting your effectiveness and to place changes on the agenda that you believe need to be made to allow you to achieve stronger growth.

In your role as a Sales Manager, you have acquired the art of persuasion and all the skills and techniques required to turn any meeting around and achieve a stronger outcome.

Brian Tracey uses a phase in his training audios that I have always found very helpful:

You aren’t what you think you are what you think you are.

One more time with emphasis.

You aren’t what you think you are

What you think

You are

It is bad enough when other people play mind games with you without you doing it.

Make a list of all your accomplishments and achievements and use these as the armour you need to protect yourself from your worst enemy. YOU!

As for the outcome of the meeting my colleague had with their CEO.

“I just wanted you to know that regarding the issues we discussed last month, I am going to make the changes to that department we spoke about, and I wanted to thank you for your strong and valued opinion.”

If you do not have an incentive program or an Incentive scheme that Works, you will need to build a business case that you can present to management. The key to doing this and achieving the desired outcome is not to be too ambitious. Start with small increases over your current forecast and instigate a moderate incentive payment.

Management usually buys into a program that improves profitability, so the key here is balancing the profit generated from the additional sales against the commission paid.

Approach one of the key people in the finance division and ask them to run some financials for you on 105% of the forecast with the cost of sales removed from the additional 5%. The answer is the number you can play with regarding incentive payments.

The objective of any sales incentive program is not to achieve 100% of your sales forecast but to push the team into what I call the “Sweet Zone”, which is between 105% and 110% of your regional/state/national forecast.

Following is an outline of a workable incentive scheme.

The program starts at 95% and has a ceiling of 110%.

If you have a salesperson who exceeds 110%, I suggest you make a provision to pay a nominated bonus awarded at the Sales Manager’s discretion.

All commissions would be calculated on an accumulative basis.

The beauty of this simple methodology is that it is impossible to overpay commission, and as long as the salesperson is earning commission, they are incentivised to stay ahead of their sales forecast.

Finally, the overriding consideration agreed to by the salesperson before being allowed into the incentive program is that if they leave your employment before the end of the commission year or fail to maintain their year-to-date sales to forecast, all overpaid commissions will be deducted from their salary at the time of separation or the end of any commissionable year.

To prove this theory, I developed a spreadsheet that pays $100 per every percentage point between 95% and 110%. The salesperson achieved 125% in the first month and 120% accumulatively for the next two months, crashed to 94% YTD for the next two months, crashed again in the ninth month to 94%, and finished the year at 105% of the forecast.

Commission Calculator

If you would like a copy of this spreadsheet, send me an email, and I will be happy to forward it to you at no charge.

It is important to note that each member of your Sales Team may have different incentives that incentivize them, forming a path to results. Finding out what that is will be a challenge worthy of your time. Identify this, and you can push into the sweet zone with every sales team member.

You may want to consider one or more of the following incentives to boost morale, unify the team, or just as an inspirational gift for a job well done.

1. Gift cards
2. Fine dining experience
3. Entertainment tickets
4. Tech gadgets
5. Spa Day, Round of Golf, or other activity
6. Wine Club Membership
7. Travel vouchers for a weekend getaway

With a strong emphasis on the need to coach salespeople to realise their full potential, I can’t help but draw strong comparisons to coaching sportspeople to improve their performance. So, the following is a Performance Coaching Example that may help explain this philosophy.

Sales Managers, like sports coaches, can easily be distracted by new toys and techniques, but when it comes to Performance Coaching, it will always drill down to the small things that can be improved.

I know that focusing on improving the Microselling Skills of any salesperson will return a threefold improvement in winning business, and I have proved this simple point time and time again.

Screen Time or Real-Time. It’s your choice.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not denying the importance of Screen Time with products like CRM and BI; I am a strong advocate for these products. To prove this, let me offer the following facts for your consideration.

CRM is the fastest-growing software used by Sales and Marketing departments globally, and here are some quick facts to support that statement:

1. 2010, it was a $14 billion industry
2. Forecast for 2025: $80 billion
3. That’s nearly a 600% increase
4. Provides sales enablement tools
5. Process automation
6. Workflow enabled
7. Built-in project management capabilities.

The businesses that leverage CRM software have seen there –

1. Sales increase by 29%
2. Sales productivity increased by 34%
3. Sales forecast accuracy increased by 42%

While CRM has very few downsides, it does have the unfortunate ability to entice Sales managers to spend more time accessing reports and reviewing KPI performance measurements rather than working with their salespeople to help them improve their selling skills.

CRM does not offer the ability to measure the effectiveness of what happens in a face-to-face sales call. It cannot up-skill the salesperson’s sales skills to enable them to win more business.

Performance Coaching Example

I was watching the Broncos vs. Souths on 07/08/2020 and listening to the reviews given by Gus Gould and Brad Fittler, which discussed a defensive error by one of the Broncos players.

Both Gould and Fittler commented on the need for a player to set themselves to perform either a left or right shoulder tackle and how this player had planted both feet and was waiting for the attacking player to move forward and be tackled.

One side step and a try later, it was obvious that Tevita Pangai Junior needed to change his defensive skills if he truly wanted to become the player he had the potential to become.

So here is my point—if two of Australia’s top coaches can see basic errors in a player’s defensive skills, what should their coach do with this player if they are effective coaches?

In the last four games, the Broncos have scored 44 points and had 158 scored against them.

Rugby League measures a team’s wins, losses, points for and against, and individual player statistics. It provides a game review tape to allow the coach to identify each player’s skills that need improvement.

An effective coach would work with Tevita Pangai Junior to ensure he decides to tackle with either their left or right shoulder and position his feet accordingly.

Sales Managers do not have access to game review tapes that will help them identify the skills each salesperson needs to improve their performance.

However, they do have the opportunity to spend time with their salespeople in actual selling situations, observing skills that need to be improved and developing a skills coaching plan to address these opportunities.

Screen Time or Real-Time. It’s your choice.

Customer Engagement anchors the sales system and defines the processes and methodologies used to engage customers and close business.

Following is an example of Customer Engagement, It’s a little farfetched, but I think you will get the picture.

Customer Engagement Outline

We are offering to sell you a $50.00 for just $25.00.

Skeptical? You may have a few questions.

• Are the $50 notes genuine, or are they forgeries?
• Are there any conditions?
• How many can I purchase?
• Is this a scam?

That’s a good start, but I am sure you would think of a lot more before actually spending $25.

But let’s say, just for argument’s sake, the offer was 100% genuine, but you wanted to be sure, so you asked, “Can I just buy one $50 note and come back later and buy more?”

This offer is too good to be true. Do you think I will come back and buy more if I take the $50 to the bank and they authenticate it as genuine?

But wait a minute. The first $50 would always be genuine if it’s a scam. That’s how scams work.

However, the offer is for a one-time purchase per customer.

Come on Now!

Is the offer genuine? It would play on your mind, wouldn’t it? No matter how far you take it, you will always think, “What If?”

For most of my career, I managed a team of salespeople who sold Capital Equipment. Our Customer Engagement centred on offering prospective customers substantial savings on any investment they made in our solutions.

No, it wasn’t a scam. It’s called ROI (return on investment) or payback period, and because of our Customer Engagement approach, the prospect had to confirm the savings before we offered the solution.

Imagine the confidence any salesperson would have, knowing that the financial outcome would, nine times out of ten, deliver a payback period of under 12 months.

Two Real Life Examples

A supermarket chain in Australia, because of its flawed accounts payable processing methodology, paid numerous suppliers twice for the same invoice, with total overpayments identified as $2.7 Million.

Staff in a large, well-known general insurance company misfiled just three policy files identified on the one day our team spent with them. They had an extremely large and complex manual filing system and, under discovery, admitted to recreating the files and forging signatures.

Without a copy of the policy file, they could not examine the legitimacy of the claim and would have been forced to pay 100% of the claim.

In fairness, the General Manager did not know his staff was in the habit of doing this and unleashed a verbal tirade on the staff when he found out.

The value of the claims against these three insurance policies was $1.3 Million.

No matter how effective our Customer Engagement offer was, the sales process required the salesperson to gain commitment from key decision-makers on seven key points before being in a position to close the business.

We needed to fine-tune several skills the salespeople used in our engagement, which were the stepping stones to any of the conversion ratios measured and reported by software products like CRM.

No software can measure or suggest how to improve these stepping stones; they had to be observed during each customer engagement and coached to improve.

We called them Micro Selling Skills!

Our best year-on-year result was 180% over the previous year. While our customer engagement strategy contributed significantly to that achievement, our attention to the minor selling improvements our sales team could coach was also significant.

Over 30% of our success was due to the coaching philosophy we used to improve the selling skills of each member of the sales team.

Customer Engagement strategies change, and with that change, you will always see fluctuations in forecast achievement.

However, improvements in the small selling skills we call Micro Selling Skills last forever because they become habits that tune salespeople into sales champions and a champion sales team.

Can a successful Sales Development program During and after a Pandemic be run?

The answer is yes. If you haven’t read either of my previous posts on The Power of Positive Thinking and Belief Systems, I suggest you have a look and see what is possible with the right attitude and approach.

So, if you’re not happy with the performance of your sales department or simply want to use this time to invest in improving the performance of your sales staff, then you should consider the following.

A recent report on Trends in Sales Management published in 2020 reported that sales management was underperforming, averaging 35.9% in the following eight categories.

1 Sales process and methodologies

2 CRM and other systems training

3 Customer’s marketplace/acumen

4 Coaching/mentoring skills

5 Forecast/pipeline management skills

6 Salesperson performance review skills

7 Training on value justification

8 Salespeople hiring skills

If your current role is in Sales Management and any or all of these points concern you, then now is the time to take action.

If your current role is CEO or anything between the CEO and Sales Management, then now is the time to invest in reskilling your team.

Coaching/mentoring skills were rated as underperforming by 35%, so now is the time to get your marketing and sales management teams working on improving their skills in all areas while maintaining a strong focus on the #MicroSellingSkills of your salespeople.

Why?

Improvements in these skills offer Sales Acceleration and sustainable long-term improvement in closing sales opportunities.

Ask your Sales Manager to provide you with six Micro Selling Skills he is measuring and how they intend to improve these skills.

WHY?

If you improve just three Microselling Skills in any salesperson, you will achieve a 30% increase in their conversion ratio.

How do I know this?

Because I proved it with the sales teams I managed, they achieved 180% sales.

So, if you’re unhappy with your sales team’s performance, now is the time to make changes.

While businesses worldwide are experiencing difficult times, with sales falling below forecasts, sitting back and waiting for the recovery is the wrong choice. Instead, now it is time to invest in the future, and our future is our people.

As someone once said, “More sweat in preparation, less blood in battle.”

New Zealand has eliminated the transmission of COVID-19 and lifted all containment measures except for border curbs, making it one of the first countries to do so.

Had it not been for the recent spike in Victoria, which accounts for almost 50% of the confirmed number of cases in Australia and with the state now locked down, Australia would not have been far behind New Zealand.

While the Marketing Department talks about expanding the Market and Market Share size, the Sales Departments focus on the opportunities in front of them and report on converted business.

A significant number of consumers right now have reservations about where our economy is heading and, as such, have held back on purchases.

That being the case, time spent now in preparation and training will see exceptionally stronger results when consumer confidence returns.

The big question is?

Will the winner be you or one of your competitors?