Amdocs Customer Management SE Update 2006 – Lake Lanier, GA


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Setting the Bar Higher As a Top Sales Manager

I just love the “corporate sales buzzwords” don’t you?

Some of my personal favorites:

“We need to start thinking outside the box”
“Let’s take a deeper dive on that…”
“We need to give it 110 percent!”
“Let’s create a win-win for the customer”
“It’s all about change management”
“Let’s take that offline”
“At the end of the day…”
“Let’s produce some strong organic growth”

And my personal favorite:

“We need to set the bar high”

I once heard an expression that stuck with me on the use of profanity in speech. I may not have it exactly right, but it goes like something like this:

“The use of profanity is the work of a feeble mind trying desperately to express itself”

I do have to admit, I do swear a bit…but I never (any more) use cliched corporate sales “buzz words” in front of my sales team.

I only use them in front of any one who’s above me in the organization, like my boss’s boss or my boss’s boss’s boss…you do have to play the game a little bit to survive in the corporate world, after all.

However, just like the use of profanity, the use of “sales buzzwords” in front of one’s sales team is: “the work of an uninformed mind trying desperately to express itself above the din of the corporate world”.

It’s ineffective and not recommended for usage.

As you may have guessed, I’m not one for corporate cliches, sucking up, climbing the ladder and the like. Curiously, in spite of that, I have turned down multiple offers for promotion and never took any of them (more on that story in later course material). So as a sales manager, all I really want is to get my sales reps to produce big-time results, with minimal corporate fanfare and without sounding like a corporate automaton. For if you do use “the buzzwords”, your sales executives will notice and you’ll risk losing the trust you’ve worked so hard to gain.

After all, isn’t it “explosive sales results” what we’re after anyway?

In defense of the “corporate buzz-speakers”, there is absolutely nothing wrong with “setting the bar high” when it comes to sales performance, performance management or in any endeavor you need to oversee as a sales manager. As a rule, it’s a generally a very good idea to set the bar high, no matter what industry or position you are in. Of course it’s a far better alternative than “shooting low”.

Here’s the problem, though: everyone is trying to “set the bar high”.

And if everyone is “setting the bar high”, does that mean that you should?
No way.

One of the pivotal themes throughout Sales Management Mastery is to not do the things that everyone else is doing. Superior sales performance comes as an outgrowth of doing things differently, being unconventional when everyone else is being conventional. Whatever you do, don’t go along with the crowd, just because “everyone else is doing it”.

If you do what “everyone else is doing” then as a manager of a bunch of salespeople, you’ll get what precisely what everyone else is getting…namely average, mediocre, conventional sales results. And I doubt if you would be reading this course material right now if that’s what you were really after.

So with all due respect to those who have ever used the “set the bar high” buzzword in explaining the direction of their sales team (myself included)…then this course is for you.

As you’ll see, Sales Management Mastery is all about continually challenging your salespeople to reach higher than they think that they are capable of achieving. And because of the overuse of all the aforementioned “sales buzzwords” watering down the actual meaning of all these expressions, the expression “set the bar high”, no longer has the punch it once did.

In this hyperactive world of getting top results in shorter periods of time, with information flying at you at light speed at all hours of the day and night, and corporate sales objectives becoming increasingly more and more aggressive, you as a top performing sales manager, need to buck the trend.

What you really need to do is to “set the bar higher” (notice the little “er” on the end of “high”). And by doing things differently, you’ll have a base formula to produce superior sales results while separating yourself from your competition, your peers and those nasty corporate sales buzzwords.

To find out more about sales team motivation visit my blog about sales motivation at http://www.topsalesmanagerblog.com

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Linkedin Discussion For Sales Managers – What Do You Do When Hr Can’t Find The Hunters You Need?

I recently posted this question on LinkedIn:

Sales Managers:  What do you do when your HR group isn’t able to identify the hunters you need?

With the incredible costs due to unfilled positions (customers going with the competition, RFPs not completed and generally missed sales opportunities), what do you (the sales manager) do to help HR see the need to use an outside source? I have 2 managers right now with open jobs, no real candidates in the pipeline and HR says that they want to fill the job internally.

I got some really great answers from sales managers, business owners, recruiters, and HR people from around the country, and I thought the gist of the discussion was worth posting here for you.

The general consensus seems to be that HR departments are difficult to work with on a candidate search because (1) there are often corporate politics coming into play, (2) HR doesn’t have the expertise to handle finding specialized sales professionals, and (3) HR doesn’t understand the true cost of a vacant position (and might not be all that interested).   Especially if HR is working with a limited budget, they’re not going to be interested in using an outside recruiting source–because they don’t grasp the true cost of a vacant position to the company as a whole.  So, they should stick to the onboarding portion of bringing in a new candidate.

More than a few say that sales managers should just bypass HR entirely–because sales and marketing departments are much more equipped to recruit than HR departments, much more versed in what it is that they need in a new sales rep, and should already have an extensive network of sales reps to mine for their needs.  (In some cases, these were also their arguments for not using a third-party recruiter.)  Most importantly, if the sales manager is going to be held responsible for making the numbers, he or she shouldn’t have to rely on another department to that extent for their team’s success.

My position is, of course, that sales managers make much more productive use of their time by working with the team they have in place to make the sales, and leaving the candidate search to a recruiter.  The more money a manager generates in a normal cycle, the more it costs to use that time finding a new sales rep.  And if recruiting isn’t your business, you’re almost never going to have access to the kind of candidate pool a recruiter has, no matter how extensive your professional network is–which means you’ll be missing out on some very high-caliber talent.  If the sales manager (or the HR department) has to run ads to find talent, that becomes a costly gamble which can easily bring you no results from your efforts.  A good recruiting team saves time and money, while increasing productivity and sales force effectiveness.

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SMM 1 | The #1 Factor To Achieving Sales Management Success

Hello and welcome to Sales Management Mastery on line at salesmanagementmastery.com. We are here to help you and your sales managers build a team of highly motivated, elite sales people, using easy to use, real world leadership, motivational, and coaching tactics that will unleash a flood of new sales for your sales organization.

On this episode of sales management mastery we are going to get into a little bit about what we what to accomplish on this show. As well as, introduce one of our core foundational concepts that is absolutely essential to becoming a top sales manager.

I’d like to remind you that if you would like to get a jumpstart on starting your own team of supercharged sales people, using our proven system , you can claim your free test drive of the Sales Management Academy by going to salestraininggift.com

On today’s episode we are going to talk about some things that we will be discussing on the show. And this is the difference between the unconventional and the conventional sales managers. Conventional sales managers are the ones who are typically the average sales managers. And if you’re a sales manager, you don’t want to be average. Chances are maybe you’ve been beaten by your competition or maybe sales are down and you are looking for other ways in which to supercharge your sales reps in order to get the sales results that you are looking for.

Or maybe you’re a business owner and you are looking for specifically how to supercharge your sales manager so that learn more concepts and your sales go in the right direction. And that’s what we are really going to be talking about here. So we are going to talk about easy to use, real world tactics. There’s a lot of management books and management theory books that are out there, and courses that you can take that talk about theory but this show is really all about easy to apply, real world, meaty concepts that you can listen in a very short period of time, and then take out and start using on a daily basis in order to move sales in the right direction by motivating, leading, coaching, managing and hiring brand new sales people, in a certain mold that will get you the results that you are looking for. So in the subject of conventional sales management, we will certainly be touching on that quite a bit in the show, but conventional sales management is something that we rail against quite a bit and that’s because the leadership results that get the best results from a sales standpoint are typically unconventional. And I think a lot of the sales trainers and sales experts that are out there talk about the more traditional ways in which to go about leading, motivating, coaching and hiring.

We take a slightly different tactic.-
Fortunately I’ve had a fair amount of experience, about 20 years of sales and sales management experience with a consistently very good track record of being able to bring out the best in sales people, and turn out high performing, low maintenance sales people. And the low maintenance part of it is probably the best part of it because when you have high performance and low maintenance you have sales nirvana because you as the sales manager can devote your time to strategies and tactics to make the sales people even better, thinking about even better ways to beat the competition and drive more sales revenues for the company. That’s really what we are going to talk about in the sales management mastery show.

So our first foundational concept is what we call the “trust account”. And the trust account is an underlying current or theme which we’ll refer back to many times throughout all of these episodes. It’s a very important foundation concept. I am not sure where it came from, I first heard about it when I was a sales rep and then a sales manager and I got some pretty good training when I was first a sales manager. And that first sales manager that I had was my mentor talked about getting deposit or placing deposits in the “trust” account.

The trust account is a fictitious account that you have with your sales people. And each one of your sales people has a different balance at any given point in time. And your job as a sales manager, if you really want to lead and motivate them, and get them to really tune you in and having you tuning into the right frequency so that you message resonates with them, you have to establish trust first. And if you haven’t established trust, then we are going to teach you a lot of ways to reestablish trust, and get that trust going so that a lot of the other things that we’ll be talking about in the show will resonate with you and stick a lot better.

So the thing is that you really need to make daily attempts to get your sales people to trust you. And sales managers need to start doing this as soon as possible. And the analogy that we say is that it is a bank account that you taking withdrawals and making deposits to it; because you are going to be taking withdrawals out if it at a later time. But in the early stages of your relationship that you have with your sales people, you want to make sure that you are making hefty deposits at all times. So at every turn, at every possible moment, you need to be looking for ways to strengthen your sales managers trust in you. Once the sales manager gets that trust, then they can start optimally leading and motivating them, but really not a second earlier. Without that foundation of trust, you are both probably going to end up being in the cellar. And you are probably going to end of in the bottom of the sales rankings, and this is something that you don’t want. Don’t think like this, because if all managers led their troops it would be far more difficult for you to surpass them as your competition.

So when it comes to becoming a sales manager, sometimes it means doing things a little differently and doing things in an unconventional way, in a very unconventional manner. So doing things unconventionally means that you are doing things that 99.9% of all average sales managers don’t do.
But here’s the real news flash for you: Averages sales managers don’t bother with trust at all. And that’s great for you. They don’t worry about establishing that level of trust, then your sales people just tune you out.

To optimally lead your reps and to unleash those explosive sales that you are really looking for, a sales manager needs to be on the same page with their sales reps at all times. And they need to speak their own language and the only way that they’ll listen is if they implicitly trust you. So you can not put the cart before the horse and start leading, motivating and coaching if they don’t believe in what you’re saying-.

Right now I coach my son’s baseball as well as his lacrosse team and they really are not all that different than sales people in the fact that they don’t trust anybody unless they see that you know what you are talking about and that you are going to lead them in the right direction and help them.

So that’s what you are really trying to do here. Not that a bunch of 7, 8, or 9 year old are the same as sales people, but a lot of times it is the same thing. Because what we are talking about is using the basic principals in human psychology in order to get the best out of your sales people. And when you use those basic principals, it doesn’t matter whether they are 40 years old or they are 4 years old, they are all the same. You motivate and lead and coach people almost the exact same way that you would in any type of situation. In this way you’re motivating, leading, and coaching sort of a difficult type of employee, which is the sales rep. They are typically a different bread, which you may have guessed and if you are listening to this show, maybe you have become a sales manager or maybe you are a general manager and you have a bunch of sales managers that report to you. And you notice that sales people, by and large, don’t really like to follow the rules typically, they are kind of mavericks . And they like to think that they are rugged individualists. And they are highly suspect of people telling them what to do.
So because of that, it’s important for a sales manager, and for managers in general, to first establish trust with their employees. So make those regular deposits in the trust account.

Here’s our example here.

In your bank account you have an ATM card, and only you have a PIN # to it, unless you’ve given it to your spouse or whoever, to access that account funds. So every week you make these regular deposits into that account. The base salary deposits go in regularly through automatic deposit, your bonuses, your commissions checks go in as well.

Sometimes you make cash withdrawals, you make debit card purchases, you write checks, and you make other kind of payments. And unless you really enjoy bouncing checks and incurring overdraft fees you are probably pretty careful to monitor those balances so that you don’t bounce checks and rack up those nasty overdraft fees because if you do, you are probably going to end up paying the16.75% interest so be careful to make more deposits than you do withdrawals.

So think about the trust
The amount of trust that they have in you is like your beginning balance. And maybe you are trying to re-establish or build trust because you are brand new

But before you can do anything else, you need to establish a level of trust. We are going to give you techniques to do that. So but here’s the thing, both of you keep a running tally of the balance at all times and this fluctuates over time. So similar to how you might manager your bank accounts, each of your sales people has a trust account that only you have the PIN for. So at the same time you make these daily or weekly deposits in your regular bank account and you make daily and weekly trust accounts too. So it goes both ways. And what you ultimately want is to make more deposits in, especially in the early stages, because you are going to be making withdrawals later and those will be the subjects of future shows; which is really the heart and sole of leading, motivating and coaching and getting superior sales results.

So to keep your sales reps highly motivated and really productive your goal is to make as many deposits in the trust accounts as you can. Avoid making any withdrawals, at least in the early stages, because the more you can build up that bank account, they better off you both are going to be. Another thing is that you’ve got to do this consistently and consistently. Like I said, for the average sales manager establishing trust with their sales people is not really something that they think about. We have members of our Sales Management Academy that have emailed me and that I’ve spoken with on consulting that say, “you know I never really even thought of this I just always thought that when I became a sales manager I would start dictating, and they would do what I say”. And they found out that most sales people would just tune them out. So although this is something that you have to do on a consistent basis, it’s like brushing your teeth everyday. You don’t just brush your teeth once and say “oh my teeth are clean for the rest of my life”. You have to make these deposits every single day as best as you can. And we’ll teach you to do that.

So we are just getting to the point now that you understand that this is very, very important to become a top performing sales manager.

So the truth is that trust is the most important element to any relationship, whether the relationship is personal or business. And by establishing trust, you can really distinguish yourself from all of the other sales managers that out there, all these average sales managers. What we are trying to avoid is having your sales managers be “average”, we don’t want average results. The average sales managers are probably not listening to this show. And the average companies and CEO’s probably aren’t listening to this show either because they don’t care about being average. They are probably getting whooped by the competition, and they know that their sales managers are in this crucible of their sales organization. They are the ones who influence the sales team the absolute most. To make maximum impact on your sales, your sales managers are the ones who are the most cost effective and highly leveraged individuals within your organization to train to get best results and drive new sales growth, and establishing trust is the first step to it.

The beauty of all this is that by making daily deposits in the trust account, it works in any industry. It doesn’t matter if you are selling cardboard boxes or you are selling biologicals, these are all the same concepts.

It is a simple formula here. Think about it this way, when your sales manager/sales people trust their sales manager they produce for that sales manager, they go above and beyond the call of duty, they do the things that typically sales people don’t do, they don’t just put in the bare minimum because the level of trust turns into this other law called the law of reciprocity which we’ll get into in another show which is extremely important to be sure that you are giving before you actually receive, so eventually you will take, you will receive back. I don’t think that it’s better to give than receive necessarily, I think that you have to do it in both parts. But as the first step to top sales management, your sales managers have to establish a level of trust and credibility with their sales people upfront.

Once you start making small deposits in the trust account and your sales managers will start to see their leadership affecting this increase significantly. A funny thing will start to happen; you’ll notice that your sales management performance starts to increase with it. It seem a little bit corny, I’m not going to kid you on this one, it seems like a corny concept, but getting people to trust you in the tough world of business and sales seems like a silly thing to do when all you want to do is make more money, and drive more revenue for the organization, and maybe for a sales manager its to get promoted, and work less than 60 or 70 hours a week. The whole concept behind Sales Management Mastery is high performing, low maintenance sales people so that you aren’t working 90 hours a week, you’re doing what you need to do in order to get those top sales results, but you want your sales people to be really leading themselves. And we will talk about that more in future shows. In the current economic times that we have, there is very little talk on these “soft” skills. There is a lot of talk about the “what have you done for me lately” sort of thing. The recession is probably killing you, and maybe you’re coming out of it as we record this show, but if you start doing this every single day, then it will start to bare fruit just after a few weeks. You’ll see a tremendous turn around in your sales

Establishing trust is a critical building block to enabling you as a sales leader to unleash the hidden potential of your sales force. And in order for them to produce big time results, to achieve goals that you have as an ambitious sales organization don’t fall for that crap. Because when it comes to sales management, conventional thinking and doing things they way you’ve always done them leads to conventional results. And in sales conventional results is just “quota hitting results”. That’s really sort of average results, that’s basically just doing your job and you want to drive new sales revenues that catapult your sales organization to the next level of performance.

So when you start making these deposits in the trust account, you have taken the first steps towards unconventional sales management. And you are going to start taking the very first steps to “unconventional”, exploding results.

Okay so when do you start making these trust deposits anyway? We talk about this core concept, and its easy thing to answer, if you haven’t done it already, you’ve probably waited to long. Now that you’re listening, start thinking of ways that you can establish trust and start building trust for your sales people. We are going to give you a couple of tips in the next show. But if you haven’t started already, you should start now.

What we are really doing here is introducing this concept, and making sure that you understand that this is a core concept that you must establish right from the get go in order to lay that foundation for superior sales performance.

What you really need to do is start early and implement often. If you are re-establishing trust or establishing for the first time, then start making deposits in the trust account as soon as you can. In fact you can start a precedence of trust, right from the get go, even before they start working for you which is even better. And we’ll talk about some of those tips and techniques in our next show.

 

 

 

 

 

Sales Management Training; is it Really Necessary?

Sales Management training is not as common as it used to be, as more and more organizations think the sales management should already know it all. However, lack of training is the root to most companies’ bottomline problems.

Sales management training is just as important, if not more than, salespeople training.

Top executive management are the leaders of the sales force and need to be constantly demonstrating the appropriate behaviours for their salespeople to follow. It is really a monkey see, monkey do situation.

Are your sales leaders demonstrating appropriate behaviours?

Do they have goals and a plan of action to accomplish those goals? Are they disciplined, motivated, energetic and enthusiastic. Are they the type of mentor that you would like to have? Are they going on prospecting calls with their sales executives, or even handling accounts on their own?

Are they debriefing after a prospecting visit and providing feedback / coaching? Are they investing in their team or are they investing their time in moving upwards in the organization?

Without proper training, sales management is not half as effective as they can be. However, like most training, for the training to be effective it also needs to be customized to organizational objectives, it needs and should be conducted on an ongoing basis with one on one coaching.

Sales Management training should include following a sales results system, and demonstrating that system with their salespeople on an ongoing basis. For example, if sales executive management is always telling their salespeople what to do, who owns the idea and who is committed to making it happen? Also, what are the salesperson going to do with the customer – tell them as well?

What if sales management training provided a system whereby sales reps would be engaged, come up with ideas, take ownership and make it happen. Then who is committed? Is that not the way you would want your salespeople to be with your prospects and customers – engaging and buying from you versus telling and selling where there is no ongoing relationship.

Most organizations provide sales training, which is great, particularly if it is ongoing, but they forget salespeople management in the process. It will help management to hire top producers, and then allow them to motivate, mentor, coach, delegate, obtain ownership and commitment, build high performing teams, run effective meetings and provide for ongoing training, creating more winners.

Sales management training is the foundation to ongoing sales results from selection, to coaching, training, rewarding and promoting. It is absolutely necessary!

Hire the Right Sales Manager

Although every organization is different, hiring a sales manager is not as simple as it looks. In fact, the wrong sales manager can quickly damage morale, if not scare away the sales reps and potentially injure the firm.

A common mistake is to promote a high achieving sales rep who wants to move up in management. Unfortunately, a highly successful sales rep may be exactly the wrong candidate for sales management. Often aggressive sales reps are impatient, lack team-player characteristics, and tend to have huge egos; these can be exactly the wrong characteristics for a sales manager.

In my opinion, the following general characteristics or traits are needed for a good sales manager:

1. Teaching skills- This includes the ability and interest to help others learn.

2. Empathy- A good sales manager needs to understand how reps feel and how to react accordingly. Sales teams can be highly emotional and fragile. Insensitive sales managers fail.

3. Ego in check- A strong ego is required, but the needs of the team are greater than the manager’s.

4. Communication skills- This skill is an obvious requirement that includes the ability to lead the sales team and to work with the other departments.

5. Relationship skills- This is the ability to create long term relationships with internal and external customers. Sales managers must be likeable.

6. Analytical skills- The best sales managers must be able to decide the strategic options in complex sales situations. They have to make the tough calls.

7. Wins through the victories of the team- Gets satisfaction by helping sales reps win; this is knocks out a lot of reps who want to be managers.

8. Ability to handle pressure- On a day to day basis, the sales manager is “under the gun” more than any employee in a typical firm.

9. Continuous learner- I find that the best sales managers are always looking for new ways to get things done. They are naturally curious.

10. Sales manager experience- I always favor gray hair when it comes to hiring a sales manager. Conversely, rookies will likely make mistakes and those mistakes could be costly.

Remember to do an extensive background check on external candidates. Look for a history of strong performances with good references. Life is short, so hire winners.