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Understanding the Sales Force
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I write for two different audiences. On the blog I write for management, while I write for salespeople over at my Baseline Selling Tips. Today I'm killling two birds with one stone, a case history for both audiences. Click here to read Case History - Dealing with No Responses and Negative Responses.
Now the sales management lesson. Do you train and coach your salespeople on how to effectively use voice mail and email?
When you conduct strategic account management, pre-call strategizing and post call debriefing, do you help your salespeople reach prospects that haven't responded?
What can you do better in this area?
(c) 2008 Dave Kurlan
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This blog began several years ago as a way for me to share real-world case histories from the world of sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments. Questions from readers often sent it off in other directions, covering development and leadership issues as well. Today's post is a throw back - anecdotes from the field...
Yesterday, one of our sales development experts delivered the findings from the evaluation of a company's sales force. We looked at their people, strategies, systems and processes. Two of the many findings we reported to the CEO were that 1) their Sales Manager was untrainable (won't change) and 2) he would agree with most of the findings relative to his sales management ineffectiveness.
The sales manager did agree with the findings and offered his resignation immediately after he completed reading his personal assessment. He said, "It says I need to set goals and I did that once and am not doing it again!"
You can't get better, faster feedback on the accuracy of the findings! He's not willing to change.
Our sales development expert told the CEO to accept the resignation and the CEO was thrilled with how quickly the situation sorted itself out.
(c) Copyright 2008 Dave Kurlan
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Executives in small to medium sized businesses have a tendency to become ecstatic when they have the opportunity to hire someone who was with a Fortune 1000 company. They immediately think, "Joe worked at Xorex" or "Suzie used to be at MBI" or "Phil was with Tfosorcim". And they think, "If they bring some of that big company magic to YSTI-YSTIB, we'll do great!" If you are considering a salesperson, sales manager or VP of Sales from a big, name brand company, there is a crucial point that executives from smaller companies usually miss. You probably don't run a large, name brand company. Your salespeople probably aren't automatically invited in with open arms. Your company probably doesn't have a reputation that precedes it. Your company probably isn't the market leader. Your company probably doesn't have the lowest prices.
So how would one of these former big-brand salespeople or sales managers fare when they encounter the resistance, challenges, ambivalence and rejection that the rest of your salespeople endure? They didn't have to deal with it before, and their success was more likely the result of the company they worked for and what they were selling as opposed to their own ability. Lesson: If your company is the underdog, get excited when you find a candidate who had success as an underdog! If you want to know whether a salesperson will succeed in your business with your unique challenges, use Objective Management Group's Proprietary Recruiting Process for Hiring Sales Winners, built around its Sales Candidate Assessment. (c) Dave Kurlan
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I was interviewed for the second in a series of podcasts for EyesOnSales.com and today's topic was How to Hire a Great Sales Team. Click here to listen to the 8 minute interview.
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Did you ever have a new salesperson fail? Did you ever have one who was highly recommended fail? Depending on how effective your recruiting, selection and on boarding processes are, you may experience new salespeople that don't work out. Let's explore some of the factors that impact short-term success. - Ramp-Up Time - an important factor in determining whether a new salesperson is succeeding or failing is your baseline ramp-up time. When you don't know what your ramp-up time should be, you will be guilty of either not giving a salesperson enough time to succeed, or being overly patient, allowing too much time to pass before calling the newbie a failure. My formula for calculating ramp-up time is to add your sale cycle in months to your
learning curve in months and then add an additional 30 days. So, if you
have a six month sale cycle and a three month learning curve, your
baseline ramp-up time will be 10 months. Complicating the matter even more is the fact that some salespeople will not ramp up exactly as the formula suggests, based on three additional factors:
So we can modify the formula like this: add 2 more months if sales experience is less than five years, add 2 more months if industry experience is less than 2 years, and add 3 more months if compatibility is less than 75%. Depending on these 3 factors, ramp-up could take as much as an additional 7 months! - The Assignment - The assignment is a huge part of this equation. If your new salesperson is assigned existing accounts, you'll probably be happy with his work unless he quickly loses some accounts. On the other hand, if 80% or more of the assignment is hunting for new business, you may conclude that the salesperson is failing unless the pipeline gets filled rather quickly with new opportunities.
- The Assessment - Clues abound here. As long as you are using Objective Management Group's Sales Candidate Assessment (92% of recommended candidates that are hired wind up in the top half of their sales force within a year, while 75% of those who were not recommended but hired anyway fail within 6 months), the answers are at your finger tips. Review these four sections:
- Hunter Skill set - which attributes are missing?
- Conditions for Hiring - what are the conditions listed and did you follow them?
- Likely Problems - are the issues your struggling salesperson is running into listed among the likely problems?
- Skills - how many are there and are they representative of the entire selling process or just the front end, middle or back-end?
- The Sales Manager - The sales manager is usually the biggest determining factor of sales success and the first place to look when it appears that salespeople aren't working out.
- Supervision - Are new salespeople being micro managed or at least closely managed? They should be. Are any of your new salespeople in a remote territory? A sure fire formula for disaster is a remote salesperson that is not being closely managed.
- Expectations - Have expectations been set? Do your new salespeople know what is expected of them in the first 30/60/90 days, how they will be measured and how they will be held accountable?
- Support - When two seemingly identical salespeople with identical assignments and territories have opposite results, it's usually because neither of them got the attention, direction, guidance, coaching, support, motivation and accountability that was needed, but one of them was better when it came to figuring out what it would take to succeed (see The Salesperson).
- Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) - Sales Managers that manage results (history) are months behind when it comes to being able to impact a salesperson using coaching and accountability. Sales Managers that manage activity (today) can see into the future and change it.
- The Salesperson - New salespeople can figure it out when the right mix of these next 14 factors, all found in OMG's Assessment, are in place - The "Figure it Out" Factor:
- 5+ years in sales
- 5+ years in the industry
- Strong Desire
- Strong Commitment
- No Excuse Making
- Self Starter
- Works well independently
- Works without supervision
- Will Prospect
- Prospects Consistently
- No Need for Approval
- Recovers from Rejection
- Greater than 75% Compatibility
- Effective Time Management
- High Turnover Factors - Depending upon these three additional factors, turnover could approach 150%.
- Compensation - Turnover is higher in straight comission environments. Straight commission with a long sale cycle will be even worse. Straight commission with a long sale cycle and a salesperson without the financial stability to stick it out will exceed 100%.
- Industry - Turnover in insurance (personal lines), telecommunications (long distance phone service) and automotive (car dealers) is very high because many companies in these industries don't have a selection criteria that extends beyond "breathing and willing" and don't invest time and money on development.
- Mindset - Companies that are resigned to high turnover and that are making a lot of money despite the turnover don't do anything to change it.
- Psychological Factors - Every once in a while you'll get a new salesperson who is emotionally unstable and you won't know it until it's too late. There is no better reason to use a psychological assessment at the time of hiring that to uncover this!
- Liars - I've even seen salespeople who took one base plus commission sales job while holding down another. The only thing better than getting paid for not performing one job is getting paid for not performing in two jobs!
(c) Copyright 2008 Dave Kurlan
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