The major problems where many sales managers fall short are usually confined to the following 3 steps:

1. Not compensating exclusively on performance

2. Not finding all-star sales people

3. Not training reps on consultative selling techniques

Can it really be this simple? These are the 3 pillars of effective sales manager training. If your sales team isn’t performing the way that you’d like, perhaps you are missing in one of these three areas.

Compensating Exclusively On Performance

Although uncommonly simple, this one is not always obvious to sales mangers or business owners. Simply put, every sales person on your team should be paid entirely on commission. Paying a guaranteed salary, with or without commission bonuses, encourages retired performance…
Which salesperson do you think is more motivated, pro-active and productive?

“Jim transformed into a profit center, not a cost“

Bob and Jim both work for Widgets International, Inc. Bob is paid $70,000 per year and receives a 5% commission on every widget sold. Jim is paid a generous 25% commission on every widget sold.
Furthermore, Jim is an independent contractor, and Bob is a full time employee that receives top of the line fringe benefits, 3 weeks paid vacation and a company car.
Bob making a comfortable $70,000 per year, not including other benefits, has little incentive to perform to his highest potential. The real cost of Bob is much more than $70,000 per year, and this is before he sells a single widget. Jim on the other hand, gets paid only after he puts money into the company bank account. Although he makes 25% commission on every sale he is magically transformed into a profit center, as opposed to a cost.

Let’s look at this example a little bit closer. For illustrative purposes a widget sells for $3,000. Bob would make $150 commission (5%) on every widget sold and Jim would make $750 commission (25%) on every sale.

“Why would I ever want to pay that much to my salespeople“?

Bob, who is comfortable with his job, managed to sell 43 widgets in 2009. Jim, who only eats after he makes a sale, sold 331 widgets, which is more than 7 times that of Bob. What could these types of numbers do for your company? What if you didn’t pay your salespeople until after they made you money?

Finding All-Star Salespeople

The personality type of the all-star salesperson that could revolutionize your business is very specific. Unfortunately, these people are also very hard to come by.
From my several years of recruiting experience, I believe this unique person represents only 2% of the population. Said another way, you’ll probably have to interview over 50 people just to find one person that fits this mold!
Furthermore, I believe there is 3 specific qualities inherit of an all-star salesperson. They are most likely not what you’ve consciously looked for in the past; Relentless, Self-Confident and Socially Intelligent. If you focus on these attributes, you’ll be able to find the best salespeople 10 times faster, with 97% less work.

There are many strategies to build your business, but nothing works unless your sales team can sell effectively. Sales training and coaching is hands down the most profitable way to build your business. When your sales team runs like a well-oiled machine, you control your future.

Sales Training & Coaching

Many companies assume that when they hire sales people that are already trained they don’t need to invest in ongoing training. The fact is that any sales team, no matter how good they are, needs to be continuously reinforced in terms of their behavior, their practices, and their techniques. Effective sales training is a key vehicle for doing just that. The Consultative selling technique is about becoming an ‘expert’ in what the possible client desires:

• Get the full picture
• Identify key issues
• Explore different options
• Design joint solutions
• Match buying criteria

Being educated with this type of sales training requires effective, systematic processes until the sales person grasps the techniques as part of their everyday sales call.

Best in Class organizations continuously work with their sales people to fine-tune their sales process and systems to keep themselves at the top of their game.

Written by: Linda Fontana

Edited by: Gary Schnell

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“Your most precious possession is not your financial assets.  Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together”

-Robert Reich (b.1946), economist and politician

As a leader, have you considered the amount of your time spent refereeing the many working relationships under your care? There’s almost always the person at the water cooler stirring the office politics, the prima Dona who demands special care, the eager beaver who’s into everybody’s business and of course the lawsuit waiting to happen should you want to fire the non-performer(s). If you could find a way to end the negative interaction of your staff and actually get them to cooperate and communicate with each other, how much more productive would the organization be? Training in improving employment relationships may just be the answer to consider.

1. What is the role of a relationships trainer?

While there are certain common characteristics in every relationship the overall dynamics between two people much less an entire staff will vary greatly. The primary role of the trainer is to first observe the relationships, understand them and then facilitate transformation towards a cooperative and inclusive culture. This process is a top down operation and the success highly depends on leadership’s ability to understand their personal relationships, and facilitate necessary change.

2. Understand yourself first

Believe it or not but how you relate to colleagues at work is based largely on what you learned growing up. The relationships you experienced with your family regarding authority, territory, cooperation, reward and punishment are the foundation for the relationships you foster as an adult. So at the heart of it, managers tend to have the same relation ship with their employees as a parent does with their children. This may stifle creativity and encourage resentment of authority; your primary role and responsibility. Understanding and identifying these relationship traits in you is the first step in creating a more productive working environment for all.

3. Knock down the silos

Effective training in employment relations will encourage employees to become less territorial and more cooperative. The “job” will become the success of the organization rather than accomplishing only the tasks of their individual “silos” where currently they may resent intrusions even if the intrusions improve the task.

4. Encourage collaborative effort

The old saying “two heads are better than one” is often correct. However, if both individual heads are vying for recognition and reward any benefit that they might have had working together disappears. Encouraging and rewarding collaborative effort is an important part of developing a more productive work force. It is imperative to respond by giving mutual credit and highlight how the individual strengths created a better team result.

5. Encourage creativity

Allow your employees to challenge the status quo. Encourage people to look at processes and challenges with new eyes and develop new creative solutions. Don’t confine them to solving issues only in their immediate area of responsibility, allow them to tackle the issues raised in other functions as a result of interacting with their work product.

6. Strive to be one person

Most of us believe we have two lives, a work life and a home life. As a result, we often take on different personalities and relationship standards based on where we are. A manager/leader can be a loving, caring spouse and parent at home but feels he or she has to take a different relationship stance at work. As a spouse you’re a partner and as a parent you’re a leader. Why would you change your style simply because you are at work? Try to be the one person that you really are. Be human, be approachable and be real.

7. The end game – increase the bottom line

Don’t confuse the items in this list as mere exercises in feeling good about yourself and your employees. The whole purpose of improving relationships at work is to improve the overall productivity which in turn drives profits to the bottom line. If implemented correctly, you will inject a new enthusiasm, a new energy and a new willingness to succeed on the part of your staff. Less time will be spent “dealing” with relationships and more time will be spent accomplishing a common goal as a result of these relationships.

The nature of employee relations can make or break an organization depending on how management perceives them. Effective training in understanding and continually improving relationships in the workplace will have an amazingly positive effect on both profitability and sustainability.

Written by Linda Fontana

Edited by Gary Schnell

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According to legendary quality expert Dr.W Edwards Deming, there is one critical and often overlooked factor, upon which success in almost any business endeavor depends. This critical component lies with your system, or process. Many companies neglect it entirely; focusing instead on individuals and performance issues while the real problem goes unnoticed and often unaddressed. Obviously it is vital to understand this and learn how to manage it properly so you can unlock the full potential of your force.

For the purposes of this article, the focus will be specific to the process of generating sales – your selling process. The ability of your sales team to meet and exceed your revenue targets will be determined largely by your awareness of this critical dynamic.

Dr. Deming believes, it doesn’t matter how talented, educated, or experienced your salespeople are, or how hard they work, there remains a very large gap between the actual results they will produce and the results they could have produced had someone been properly managing the process. In today’s ultra competitive business environment, where the margin between winning and losing is so slight, many companies continue to ignore an area that holds such potential for drastic increases in productivity and bottom line results.

It is common to assume your salespeople could be producing better results. The challenge lies in actually demonstrating it and then formulating a workable plan to take action. Most sales leaders would agree there’s always room for improvement. The challenge however, lies in knowing where to look in order to find the weaknesses within the sales process that are holding your people back.

“It’s hard to stop the bleeding when you can’t find the cut – or worse yet – when you don’t even know there is a cut”

Most companies don’t even know where to start. In that sense, it’s easier to manage people than to engineer process improvement. It’s always easier to treat the symptom than to actually diagnose and treat the underlying cause. The result is a selling environment where the true reasons for most mistakes and failures go unaddressed thus people are looked at as the problem. This way of thinking often leads to facing the same basic problems year after year with no end in sight. It stands to reason that a more effective and least expensive proposition, is directing sales managers how to apply the principles of Sales Process Management.

Sales Process Management (SPM) if implemented properly, promises to do more than just identify and improve weaknesses in your current sales process. When a dedicated commitment is made to SPM, the best practices in your selling process are identified and can be duplicated across your entire organization.

As a company specializing in sales process consultation, we have lead many organizations through a successful discovery of their internal sales benchmarks to highlight strengths and weakness. We have measured organizational sales objectives and best practices to define the gaps between actual and potential performance and determined what was actually left behind in profits.

The bottom line results in SPM implementation in every turn have been outstanding in uncovering your organization’s full potential.

• It starts with exploring,
• Develops with action and someone to champion the way, and
• Concludes with implementation of best practice solutions and striving to consistently achieve them.

Written by: *Linda Fontana

Edited by: Gary Schnell

* Linda has 20 years of experience consulting within the manufacturing sector

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How often do leaders make assumptions about their people? How do these assumptions affect employee performance?

As an experienced  business consultant, I believe the root of employee motivation lies within assumptions about others. In fact, a leader having the right assumptions about people is a key factor in their continual development.

For many years l was often asked, “How do you motivate people?”  My direct answers would often be “stay enthusiastic, encourage others; lead the way, and believe in people.” When I saw leaders follow this advice their success often appeared to be short lived, realizing that I was giving them the fruit of my motivational style, but not the root. This was particularly true because leaders often did not commit the time to actually understand their people.

Motivating with words alone loses impact; it is the listening skills that the leader must implement. I often suggested to that leadership devote most of their time with the top 20% of their people. This will help them develop and mentor the other employees who may need more guidance and provide the systems for their people to follow.

Negative assumptions about others will stimulate negative leadership of them. Positive assumptions about others will stimulate positive leadership of them.

Here are 5 assumptions about people that l have found to be extremely valuable:

1. Everyone wants to feel worthy – Everyone needs and responds to encouragement. Give it often and with meaning. In my years of developing people, I have yet to find a person who did not put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism. Monitor how often you criticize compared to how often you compliment. Five very encouraging words in an organization are “You do make a difference.”

2. People buy into the right leader – Too often we expect people to be loyal to the position of a leader instead of to the person who occupies that position. Organizational charts do not motivate people rather people respond to other people. The first thing a leader must declare is not authority because of rights, but authority because of relationships. People do not care how much you know until they know that you care.

3. Many people do not understand success – Often people think success is instantaneous, a matter of luck and learning not to fail. They look at it as a moment, an event or a place in time. Guide your people in the understanding that that success is really a process and true success is learning from failure.

4. People excel with natural motivation – Employees that work within their areas of personal weakness instead of personal strength will struggle to stay motivated. When individuals have been grinding away at tasks assigned in their weak areas and then reassigned to work in areas using their strong attributes, you’ll see a dramatic increase in ‘natural motivation.’ When people are naturally motivated, they tend to place a higher priority to their tasks. The greater the ownership they have of the task, the higher their motivation level becomes. Simply put, natural motivation makes them see the importance of their position.

5. People appreciate help – Although most want help, many have difficulty asking for it. Not only is a good leader responsible for providing assistance to their team, they continually offer it. Let your people know you are there for them, at all times. When people ask for help, it can often mean their problem or challenge is already exacerbated. Be proactive with sharing your experience and time. Be visible, ask the right questions and develop a plan for their growth.

As a leader you should remain enthusiastic, encourage others, lead the way and believe in people. These basic principles will make it easier to assume the best of them. This makes the entire relationship more communicative thus more effective. If you choose to assume the negative, give your employee every opportunity to prove you wrong.

You can impress people at a distance but you can impact them only up close. I often suggested that leadership must devote time to the top 20% in their organization. Encourage the many; mentor the few. Be transparent with them. Great leaders always give their people a head start over those who work under an average leader. Excellent leaders add value to their people and help them become better than they would be if they worked alone.  The first question a leader should ask is; “How can I help make those around me more successful?” When that answer is found and implemented, everyone wins!

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships” – Henry Winkler

“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in” – Alan Alda

“The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal” – David Brin

An assumption is an opinion that something is true. What one may assume about others is what they may be looking for. What they look for is what they may find. What they find may largely determine how they are treated.

People have a way of living up or down to your opinion of them. By assuming the best of people, we can gain better results from people.

Written by: Linda Fontana

Edited by: Gary Schnell

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As Business Owners and Sales Managers one of our key roles is to develop the selling competence of each member of our sales team, regardless of their generation.

The sales manager who was venting was referring to several of his Generation Y Salespeople, “They are disloyal, spoilt, self-interested and overly ambitious.”  He was also having sales performance issues and employee turnover problems. To fast forward, this sales manager was using the traditional power and authority management style (the military style) that he had experienced as a salesperson. This style is likely to be ineffective in today’s work environment.

So who is Generation Y? It is the label given to people born between 1980-2000. The majority of sales managers today were born in 1965-1979 known as Generation X, or Baby Boomers born in the years 1946-1964.

Every generation is unique because of economic and cultural influences that affect their development during childhood and teenage years. These factors impact on their perception, personal values, work styles and all areas of their life. So what differentiates Generation Y from previous generations? In short the answer is that they have grown up in a time with scant job security for their parents who are Baby Boomers, globalization, intense competition and an abundance of technology. They are the most highly educated generation so far.

So what behaviors make Generation Y different?

• They demonstrate a strong loyalty to their peer group
• They like to reach decisions by consensus
• They have a strong sense of community
• They need to connect with friends and so are often on their cell phones
• Their self worth can be affected if they can’t contact their friends
• They are not as influenced by power and authority

1 They are kinesthetic learners: They need constant movement in order to concentrate and learn. Baby Boomer Sales Managers may find this particularly annoying, however research has shown that this age group works very effectively with Generation Y in a coaching and mentoring role. Generation Y are ‘hands-on learners’ and need to be actively involved so keep sales theory to a minimum to avoid information overload or they will switch off’. They are also visual learners because of their comfort with the use of technology. Provide practical rational reasons why specific skills are applied and demonstrate selling skills during a call. They respond to spontaneity, fun and the personal interaction so let them ‘have a go’ on the next sales call.

2 Reward and recognition: Let’s face it we all feel great when we are recognized for a job well done. Providing positive feedback during a sales coaching session or at sales meetings will greatly impact on Generation Y’s self worth. As they thrive on immediacy actively look for attitudes and skills that were competently applied. Acknowledging them often and in a genuine manner will motivate them to greater heights. As they grew up with their parents telling them they can do anything they strive to tackle challenging tasks. Allow them do this if they are competent and don’t let their age be a barrier.

3 Encourage them to be connected: Sales can be a lonely occupation particularly for Generation Y because they enjoy social interaction. When they get an opportunity for business networking they will jump at the chance so teach them networking skills. If you have senior salespeople in your team, encourage Generation Y  to communicate regularly with them. They will be motivated to aspire to the higher level of selling competence.

4 Work flexibility: Generation Y is motivated by variety and a flexible open work environment. They do not see a difference between social and work boundaries, it’s all about living life. So if  they start early to finish early, let them do so provided it does not negatively impact job performance. Your adaptability to accommodate them will pay off and you will find they will go above and beyond what is expected of them.

5 Seek their input: Generation Y expects to be treated as an equal and likes to have their point of view put forward and respected. They like to pass on their ideas and thoughts because they are used to it, having used social media such as Facebook for years. The old saying: ‘They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” works particularly for Generation Y. Be open, relaxed, show genuine interest and understanding and you will have them actively engaged.

6 Set an example: Show sales leadership in an honest and trustworthy manner. Implement effective sales training & coaching and mentoring opportunities to develop their selling abilities. These practices will have a positive impact on their sales performance and trigger strong loyalty toward you.

We need to acknowledge that generational differences and diversity exist but this doesn’t mean they need to be a barrier to sales performance or developing solid relationships. If you understand this generation and adapt your management style to accommodate them your thoughtfulness will pay high dividends in more than sales performance.

Expectations of Gen Y High-Performing Sales Representatives

- Support from my Manager
- Product Training
- Introductions to my team and support staff
- Readiness: Phone, e-mail, account, business cards etc
- Regular Feedback
- Well-defined schedule of training
- Creation of development plan with Manager
- Company culture training
- Exposure to other areas of the company
- Mentor program

References: Kurt Newman; Louise Anderson (Anderson Performance)

Written by: L Fontana, Edited by G Schnell

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