Sales Productivity and Hiring the Inexperienced

In my last post, Sales Productivity And The Tower of Babel, I discussed Sales Managers that believe they should only hire candidates with experience because it relieves them of the need to train. In this post I'd like to visit the Sales Managers at the other end of the spectrum that are so frustrated with training seasoned professionals that they will only hire inexperienced sales candidates.

They tell me, "I never hire someone with experience, because they have too many bad habits to unlearn. It's easer to train someone from scratch."

Is that true? Is it really easer to train someone with no experience than someone with experience?

Lets think about this.

The new hire with no sales experience has to develop the following knowledge and/or skills in order to become productive and effective:

• the industry
• the products
• competitors and their products
• value proposition(s)
• sales terminology
  
• sales process
• buying process
  
• sales methodology
  
• prospecting/marketing
• setting appointments
• opening the initial meeting with prospect
  
• evaluating the prospects situation
• asking high impact business questions
• the decision-making process
• who has power and influence
• what's the sense of urgency
• prioritizing the objectives
• putting together the solution
• constructing the presentation
• presentation and demonstration skills
• handling objections
• negotiating
• preparing the proposal
• preparing the contract
• following up to build satisfaction
• obtaining referrals
• managing the pipeline
• managing their opportunities
  
• managing the territory
• managing existing accounts
• organizing their day
• sales metrics and what they mean
  
• using sales tools
• navigating your companies internal departments and systems
• completing administrative requirements

Depending on your industry and how complex the solutions you're selling are, it may take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to become a high-performance sales professional. Is this easier than training and developing a seasoned sales professional? More importantly, is this even a question we should be focused on?

Lets extend this logic into the future a bit further. So now its 2-5 years down the road. You have this crack hand picked sales team trained and developed by you. They're consistent quota busters and every year the company reserves a seat for you and most of your team at President's Club.

This year the national sales team is assembled in Orlando, Florida for the annual national sales meeting. The President/CEO walks on stage and thanks everyone for a good year in tough times. Then she drops the bomb, the company is shifting its focus to position itself for future growth:

• the target market is changing
• one of the main solutions has reached the end of the product life cycle and is being phased out
• new solutions are being introduced - with a new value proposition
  
• several divisions are merging, others are being eliminated
• implementing an enterprise CRM
• success metrics and compensation are being realigned with the new strategy

Of course this announcement is followed by presentations by the CFO and the VP's of Marketing and Product Development with all the graphs and charts to support the decision to change course. The break out session with the National VP of Sales delivers the bottom line... the sales team needs to be trained on the new products, sales process, CRM, methodologies, organizational structure, territories and success metrics. Of course you feel they expect all this to happen is some brutally unrealistic short time frame!

In short, the selling world that you and your team know so well just evaporated in a blink of an eye.

Now what?

Lets stop and think about the original premise that experienced sales professionals have too many bad habits (which were the good habits just a few short months ago) and its easer to train new inexperienced candidates. The solution to achieving the previous level of sales productivity and effectiveness in the face of this massive disruptive change, is to fire the sales team and start over.

The chances of senior management buying that strategy is slim to none. In fact, if you presented that idea the only one getting fired would be you.

If neither of the two hiring extremes (only hire experienced sales professionals so you don't have to train or only hire inexperienced sales professionals because they don't have bad habits and are easer to train) is not the answer to building a high-performance sales team, then what is?

Think long and hard about your answer, because the next person you hire is the future of your company and your career.

Sales Productivity And The Tower of Babel

Do you know what I find baffling?

The number of Sales Managers that believe the short cut to improved sales productivity and effectiveness is to only hire candidates with a lot of industry experience and a great track record.

I know your staring at your computer screen with that RCA dog look thinking. Ok, Martice finally snapped, he's lost it.

Stay with me and hear me out.

Why on earth would I question a practice that is obviously true. After all, isn't that what we're suppose to do?

Yes and No!

Of course, we should develop our selection criterion to identify candidates that have the most industry experience and track record. That's not my issue. What I find bewildering are the Managers that believe that this is the secret, magic bullet that relieves them of their responsibility to train and coach new hires.

These Managers tell me (with great pride I might add), "We don't need to train beyond covering the obvious differences in the product or service we sell". They bring these hot shots in, give them a little product training, tell them they're at the forefront of building a great company, so go forth and prosper.

Then six to eight months later they wonder why a good portion of them die on the vine and the ones that make it don't produce a super abundance of fruit (pressed down, shaken together and running over).

How about you?

1. Have you ever hired a person that had all the "right stuff" and they failed miserably?
2. Does each member of your sales team (and I use that term loosely) apply different sales processes, strategies, methodologies and techniques they learned somewhere else? A mixture of:

• Huthwaite's SPIN Selling,
  
• TAS Group's Target Account Selling,
  
• The Complex Sale's R.A.D.A.R Winning Opportunities
  
• Miller Heiman Sales System (Blue Sheets)
  
• Sandler Sales
• Richardson's Consultative Selling
• And to further exasperate the situation were you trained in a totally different system?
  

I can only imagine what account and opportunity reviews sound like in one-on-ones and team sales meetings. Everyone using different terminology, everyone describing where they are in the sales process using different definitions of the sales stages. And they're all speaking the different languages of the selling systems they came from.

How can this lack of standardization have a positive impact on sales productivity and effectiveness?

I remember a passage from the book of Genesis (11:6) about the Tower of Babel. The Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have done all this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them."

Now I'm not trying to get all religious on you, and your objectives are probably not as ambitious as the Babylonians. I'm making the point that if working as one and speaking the same language got God's attention back in the day. Then working together more effectively by standardizing the sales process, methodologies and having a common language will get your clients and prospects attention today.

But Martice, "We can't standardize the process. You know how difficult it is to get experienced sales people to change their habits".

I know, I know, I've heard it all before and there's only one response to that. To hell with what the salesperson wants. This is about what your clients and prospects want.

They want the selling process to match their buying process. Which means they're receiving what they value at each stage. The buying process creates a solid business case for change and keeps the deal moving forward at its optimum pace.

A well designed sales process that delivers value at each stage will move prospects through the pipeline quicker and once that starts happening your salespeople will whole heartedly embrace it. That requires agreement on what the process is, how each stage is defined, and a common terminology to describe it.

As a Sales Manager you should have an initial training program that defines your company's sales process, strategy, methodology, and terminology to optimize your team's sales productivity and effectiveness.

Your Sales Productivity Depends on Whether Sales is A Job or Profession

Someone posed the question: Based on your years of experience, if I could only give one piece of advice what would it be?

Decide early on whether sales is a job or career. If it is a career don't let anyone control the rate at which you learn. Focus on improving your sales productivity, sales effectiveness and efficiency. Buy books and training programs, go to seminars, read blogs, white papers, and articles to stay current and uncover new trends.

Learn, learn, learn! Become a learning machine. Google everything you don't understand and everything you think you understand.

Learn about your: clients, customers, prospects, market, products and competitors. If your company offers sales training or implements new sales tools, be an early adopter. Don't whine and complain, get after it and figure out what you need to figure out in order to improve your sales performance. Learn about the sales process, strategy and tactics. Learn what works and why it works.

Learn how to measure your own sales performance. Learn how to identify, track and trend your key performance indicators (activities and results). Learn what it means to be productive, efficient and effective.

Learn how to ask good questions and how to listen. Learn about your client's, customer's, and/or prospect's buying process, their customers and competitors. Learn what they value and how to connect what you hear and understand about them to your solution.

Sales is one of the best careers in the world. It warrants the effort it takes to become an elite high performance professional. Development is a process not an event, so develop a life long mindset of continuous performance improvement and actively seek out mentors along the way.

Never stop learning how to improve your sales performance! Focus on improving your sales effectiveness, sales productivity and efficiency.

Breaking Through The Sales Force Field

I was browsing through a sales forum the other day and ran across the lament of a person new to complex selling that felt he was left dangling when his manager and mentor left the company. Currently, he's under quota and his new Sales Manager apparently has little or no interest in his development. He said he was committed to succeeding despite the circumstances and was looking for guidance from fellow forum members.

Yikes! What a dilemma. All I could imagine was a giant force field of obstacles (an invisible barrier) keeping him from becoming successful. First and foremost I had to applaud this person for taking responsibility for his own development. But what should he do besides look for another job?

If you have to figure out how to improve your sales effectiveness by yourself, start at the beginning of the sales cycle. Systematically trouble shoot your approach to selling to identify where things begin to break down. Next isolate the activities or tasks you're not performing well and work on them, then move to the next area. Don't jump around.

The Sales Cycle:

1. Demand creation
2. Winning and closing opportunities
3. Retaining customers/clients
4. Obtaining additional business and/or referrals from existing customers/clients
   

Here are a few high level sales cycle trouble shooting questions to start with.

Demand Creation:

1. Are you targeting the right prospects in your territory?
   
2. Are you effective at prospecting by phone and in person to fill the front side of the sales funnel - can you set appointments?
   
3. Are you setting appointments at the right levels in the prospect's organization?
4. Do you prospect consistently to keep the funnel full?
   

Winning and Closing Opportunities - The Sales Process

1. Are you effective at identifying and meeting all the people that have power and influence and do you understand their role in the opportunity?
2. How effective are your questioning and listening skills? Can you:
   

• Create Interest
• Evaluate the Situation
• Prioritize Objectives
• Propose Options
• Tailor an Agreement and Close
  

Retaining Customers/Clients

1. Have you identified the metrics they will use to measure the success of the implementation?
2. Have you identified the metrics they will use to determine if the solution you sold meets performance expectations?
3. Have you scheduled periodic meeting during the installation and implementation phase to build satisfaction?
   

There's a lesson here for all of us. Be proactive - read books, blogs and articles, attend seminars and online webinars, hire a coach, or find a mentor regardless of your company's commitment to training. It's your career so take control of it.

Time Management - Sales Productivity's Black Hole

I spent a number of years as a consulting nuclear chemist and radiation protection specialist at commercial nuclear power plants. Which means I love physics!

I've always been baffled by the concept of managing time, because from a physics perspective time can't be managed. The proof is obvious when we consider... it's impossible to manage our time so effectively that we get 25 hours in a day, nor is it possible to manage our time so poorly that we only get 23 hours in a day.

We can't find time or make time.

The only thing we have control over is what we do in the slices of time each day.

A great deal of people manage their day by using a to-do-list. Stop and think for a moment, traditionally, how do we create a to-do-list?

The phone rings, emails arrive, clients or prospects call, boss assigns a task, a coworker needs a favor, sales calls to make, follow-ups to perform, demos to give, proposals and contracts to write, not to mention; market research to conduct and articles and white papers to read. If new tasks pop up while we're engaged in any of these activities, just add them to the list.

Yes, we can rewrite our task list. Yes, we can assign numbers or letters to denote importance, but what does that have to do with being effective?

So many people confuse their to-do-list(s) with their priorities. They run around with their hair on fire, adding tasks to and checking tasks off the to-do-list.

The gravitational attraction of the mountain of information and activities competing for our attention is like a giant black hole gobbling up space in our head and time in our day. Finally, our busy day ends without completing the key sales activities that add prospects to the funnel, move deals closer to close and increase our capabilities as sales professionals.

So what should we do?

Instead of trying to better manage our time, we should focus on managing our effectiveness. Sales effectiveness is a function of our ability to identify and prioritize high impact sales activities that are in alignment with achieving of our objectives.

Stop focusing all your efforts on planning your day and start planning your week, month and quarter.

1. Develop objectives for your territory, sales and personal development
2. Set objectives for each of the key phases of your sales process
3. Define the success metrics and targets for each objective
4. Create a rolling 90-day action plan and organize tasks by objectives
5. Create a model work week - your weekly schedule
6. Move your tasks off the action plan and onto your calendar
7. Measure progress towards achievement of the objectives weekly
8. Say no to everything else

I highly recommend Sally McGhee's book Take Back Your Life using Microsoft Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized (she even covers work life balance).

So how do we identify the high impact sales activities?

Start by answering three questions:

1. What does a great day of selling look like?
2. What do you have to do to prepare to have that great day of selling?
3. What do you have to do to string more great days of selling back to back to back?

I'm very interested in what you think so leave a comment.

Does Your Team Sell Transactionally or Are They Trusted Advisors?

What I find very interesting is that both selling tactics exist in the market and are successful...to a certain extent.

From the perspective of the buyer, competitive pressures among vendors and the rise of the internet positions many products and services as commodities.

What does this mean and why is it important to sellers?

1. The amount of vendor and product information on the internet allows for in depth comparative analysis of features, benefits, and vendors before a meeting with a salesperson is necessary
2. Features, benefits and vendors are starting to look the same to buyers, so that leaves price as the only real differentiator in the buyer's mind
3. This places downward pressure on profit margins as buyers beat up the salesperson on price or the transactional salesperson believes the only competitive advantage is price

Now here is where things get interesting.

I ask Sales Mangers and Sales Professionals "When you're in a competitive situation and it's down to you and two other vendors, what percentage of deals do you win?" The answer is usually somewhere around 33 percent or one in three. That means the Sales Representatives of the competing vendors are taking turns winning in competitive situations.

These numbers hold up when the vendors in the geographic market are all selling using transactional selling tactics. I need to point out here that when price is the only real differentiator the buyers are not loyal to any one vendor.

Consultative, strategic, and collaborative selling gained popularity through a few key landmark books that studied how elite high-performance Sales Professionals sell.

These sales tactics promoted the idea that vendors could differentiate themselves from competitors by transitioning their Sales Professionals away from transactional selling to value or solution selling. Meaning the Sales Professional repositioned themselves as a trusted or strategic advisor.

From a skill perspective Sales Professionals don't discuss their products or services (solutions) before having a discussion about the prospects business objectives, obstacles, solution performance requirements, and success metrics no matter how much experience they have in the industry.

Due to increased competition, these selling tactics became sales strategies that the vendors' Executives and Sales Mangers implemented to address several high priority business issues:

1. How do we increase our win rates in competitive situations?
2. How do we preserve margins?
3. How do we reduce customer/client churn?
4. How do we increase customer/client loyalty?
5. How do we increase deal size?
6. What does our market value?
7. How do we increase market share?
8. How do we reduce the cost of sales

Lets go back to the situation I described above where all the competing vendor's sales tactics are transactional. Once one of the vendors starts repositioning themselves as a trusted advisor their:

1. Win rates in competitive situations dramatically increase
2. They charge a premium for their products and services - profit margins go up
3. Clients and prospects view the vendor as a valuable resource/partner - customer loyalty goes up and churn goes down
4. Deal size increase due to selling full solutions
5. Market share increase
6. Cost of sales go down

This is a very long way of getting to the point that the era of selling products using tactics that assume an understanding of the prospects business without going through a questioning process that focuses on the prospect's business first, is rapidly coming to an end.

For the Salesperson who's sales tactics are transactional, that find themselves competing against high-performance Sales Professionals who's sales tactics focus is on asking questions and becoming a trusted advisor, the competitive future is not bright.

It won't matter how many times the transactional Sales Representatives calls, leaves voice mail messages, sends letters, faxes, emails or meets with the prospect in an attempt to keep their name in front of them.

In a head-to-head competition a well trained Trusted Advisor will win almost every time. In fact, transactional behaviors will only magnify the differentiation and value of the trusted advisor and the vendor they represent. This is about competing and winning.

The Marriage of Talent And Passion Leads to High Performance

Research on what makes a satisfying work life indicates that the most personally satisfying times in a person’s career are usually also highly productive in terms of meeting the organization’s goals.

If that's true the Sales Manager's strategic focus should be to build an elite high-performance sales team.

But how do you build such a team? I'm glad you asked because that brings me to

Sales Productivity Secret # 2

The only real improvement is self improvement

1. Align management systems and behaviors with the company's strategic focus and productivity objectives.
2. Assess the performance gap for the management and sales teams
3. Build a compelling business case for change – that aligns the team and engages emotional commitment to personally participate in improving individual and team performance
4. Focus on identifying and isolating the most relevant and strategic activities necessary to improve results.
5. Create tactical level development plans and implementation schedules to achieve desired results.
6. Develop success metrics, and accountability systems that link to development plans and schedules.
7. Focus on measurable results to revise plans and schedules

What do you think?

Improving Sales Productivity Begins and Ends With the Sales Manager

So you want to improve your sales team's performance.

There are so many places to try and squeeze additional performance improvements out of your team. The question is...where do you start?

Do you start with better tools like Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? Maybe implementing opportunity, account, and territory management methodologies would work. How about improving sales skills? You could train them in value/relationship/consultative/collaborative/strategic selling or negotiation. The truth is if your company is weak in any of these areas you could experience improved performance by addressing them head on. I'll discuss this in future blogs.

I can hear some of you groaning already. I know you invested thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement new tools, processes, methods, and training before, but it didn't stick or you got marginal returns on investments.

Sales Productivity Secret #1


No matter what you choose to improve, if you don't focus on the Sales Managers first the improvement initiatives will only deliver short term results.

The Sales Managers are the key to sustainable performance improvement.

Why?

Because they are responsible for hiring, training, developing, directing, planing, coaching, communicating expectations, measuring success, and managing change on a daily basis. This is where the rubber meets the road!

I have worked with hundreds of Sales Managers from small businesses to fortune 100 companies over the last 5 years and the vast majority of them were great salespeople that got promoted to Sales Manager. Most of them have spent years struggling to develop the heart of a manager. Most have developed their management systems and skills through trial and error or imitating previous managers.

Each quarter brings constant pressure to hit the numbers and each year the pressure mounts as their companys' raise the bar. Sooner or later the relentless drive to bring in the numbers causes the Sales Manager to fall back on what they know created success for them in the past. Instead of leading and developing the sales team they become "super closers" that get the job done by setting the pace, directing activities and closing sales.

So what's wrong with that?

If your company does not require the sales manager to carry a book of business (they have a personal quota or list of accounts to call on) then they are doing the salesperson's job. The very skills that made the Sales Manager such a great Salesperson are the obstacles to developing an Elite High-Performance team.

The Sales Manager's role should be to develop a management system that continuously improves the performance of themselves, the team and the individual sales professionals, in addition to managing the business.

What are your experiences or opinions?