Ralph Paglia; Internet Marketing and Sales Director at Courtesy Chevrolet


Image by ralphpaglia

Be a Successful Sales Manager, Not a Super Seller

There is a major difference between being a sales manager and a top-notch seller as there is a great deal of responsibility that goes along with being a manager. For starters, a manager must provide sales force motivation for the staff, as his or her career is dependent on how hard these other individuals work. In order to be good at your job, you must master sales order management and sales process management, as both of these skills will help you a great deal along the way. Motivating your team is the perhaps the most important aspect of this job, so your management skills will definitely be put to the test once you start.

The first thing that you must do is figure out what will provide sales force motivation for your team. This will allow you to develop your coaching skills in a manner that will serve each team member. Since you are attempting to build a long-term relationship with these team members, you must build their confidence in both themselves and in you as a leader.

Another extremely important aspect of being a leader is that you must realize that everyone has different sales abilities. You will find that certain members of your team will be more successful than others and there is nothing wrong with this. If you look at a professional sports franchise, every member of the team has a role. Not every player can lead the team in scoring, so part of your sales force motivation should involve getting these team members to embrace their roles within the company.

You must also be willing to relinquish your previous role of a seller, in order to become better in your new sales process management role. If you are still committed to selling, you will not be giving your team members the chance to flourish as sellers. A major part of this job is learning that your hard work will be seen in orders, rather than in your own statistics.

Make sure that you are always checking on your team’s sales force motivation, as there are many things that they should be aware of while selling. Make sure that you are not constantly telling them what to do, as this is not good for the sales process management of the company.

Finally, make sure that you are aware of the trends that are present in the industry, as this will allow you to connect with the real world and with your staff. Your sales order management will be highly dependent on this connection with the trends, so do not avoid these issues. Sales order management is a major key in this industry, as you must give your staff items to sell that people truly want to purchase.

The sales force motivation that you will instill in your team will go a long way in determining how successful you are at your job. These individuals should be able to learn from you and they should be positively motivated by your presence within this company, which will make both you and your staff successful.

Sales Lead Management Panel


Image by Robert101

Behind every winning sales team there is a great sales manager!

The sales strength of a company lies within the just one person; the sales manager.  Whereby some might be pronounced to state that the results of the sales department are the collective results of a team, I strongly believe that it is the sales manager who contributes 80% of the success of the sales team, whilst the remaining 20% can be attributed to the individual flairs and collective spirits. The sales manager is the key element within that department and thus has tremendous impact on the sales and productivity.

Do you believe that a bad or unproductive sales manager can have a negative effect on your company’s sales?  We all know the answer to that question.  With the same line of reasoning, a good and effective sales manager will leave a positive impact on sales!

For us to understand the impact a sales manager has on a company’s sales we have to understand the role of the sales manager and how this has a bearing on sales.  The central role of the sales manager means that the individual holding that post can leave an impression in areas like;

·        Staff moral – demotivation at the place of work resulting in poor performance, also possibly resulting in staff turnover,

·        High staff turnover – increasing the company’s costs of training, decreasing sales as new staff cannot reach high levels of sales, apart from the loss of company assets being in the sales experiences lost,

·        Bad recruitment – roping inside the company people with the wrong sales skills or with little sales skills will have a bad effect on sales and the sales team,

·        Teamwork – breaking the team spirit with the sales staff is detrimental as teamwork generates problem solving ideas, leads and a positive work environment,

·        Lack of product knowledge and belief – how can a person sell something he does not know and believe in?  Sales staff must be trained on a product and it is  the sales manager must first sell to them the fact that the product they are going to sell is the best on the market,

·        No direction – every team needs a captain who can give direction.  Sales staff cannot go out selling without direction,

·        Control – no controls are just as bad as too much controls.  If the sales manager does not achieve the right balancing act here this can result in serious staff demotivation that can have a negative impact on sales,

·        Desk syndrome – managers have a tendency to get infected by the desk syndrome, surrounded by paper work leaving them little or no time to leave the office and meet clients and customers.  No other disease can be so fatal for a sales manager than this,

·        Communication – sales people are communicative people and thus feel the need to have an effective communication channels within the department and also within the company.  Sales people can then get disheartened when sales managers do not serve as a  two-way bridge between the sales team and the company keeping them informed on all developments and serving as a feedback channel,

·        Resistance to new ideas – new ideas that can generate sales will probably come from those people that have greatest interaction with the clients and consumers.  The sales manager must be able to adopt new ideas coming from anywhere to achieve results.

These are some of the areas where a sales manager can have a negative impact within the sales team.  Similarly, if these areas are well managed the effect would be positive.  So what is the morale of the story?  Sales managers are not successful sales professinals who are then given a promotion.  Like any other management position the sales manager needs to be a professional in his area of competence.  This is more important than in other ares because the sales manager is the only manager in your organisation responsible for income – all other managers represent costs!  Mentor him or her well!

 

Afton Village – AV Management Company – Sales & Leasing


Image by Afton Village

Behind every winning sales team there is a great sales manager!

The sales strength of a company lies within the just one person; the sales manager.  Whereby some might be pronounced to state that the results of the sales department are the collective results of a team, I strongly believe that it is the sales manager who contributes 80% of the success of the sales team, whilst the remaining 20% can be attributed to the individual flairs and collective spirits. The sales manager is the key element within that department and thus has tremendous impact on the sales and productivity.

Do you believe that a bad or unproductive sales manager can have a negative effect on your company’s sales?  We all know the answer to that question.  With the same line of reasoning, a good and effective sales manager will leave a positive impact on sales!

For us to understand the impact a sales manager has on a company’s sales we have to understand the role of the sales manager and how this has a bearing on sales.  The central role of the sales manager means that the individual holding that post can leave an impression in areas like;

·        Staff moral – demotivation at the place of work resulting in poor performance, also possibly resulting in staff turnover,

·        High staff turnover – increasing the company’s costs of training, decreasing sales as new staff cannot reach high levels of sales, apart from the loss of company assets being in the sales experiences lost,

·        Bad recruitment – roping inside the company people with the wrong sales skills or with little sales skills will have a bad effect on sales and the sales team,

·        Teamwork – breaking the team spirit with the sales staff is detrimental as teamwork generates problem solving ideas, leads and a positive work environment,

·        Lack of product knowledge and belief – how can a person sell something he does not know and believe in?  Sales staff must be trained on a product and it is  the sales manager must first sell to them the fact that the product they are going to sell is the best on the market,

·        No direction – every team needs a captain who can give direction.  Sales staff cannot go out selling without direction,

·        Control – no controls are just as bad as too much controls.  If the sales manager does not achieve the right balancing act here this can result in serious staff demotivation that can have a negative impact on sales,

·        Desk syndrome – managers have a tendency to get infected by the desk syndrome, surrounded by paper work leaving them little or no time to leave the office and meet clients and customers.  No other disease can be so fatal for a sales manager than this,

·        Communication – sales people are communicative people and thus feel the need to have an effective communication channels within the department and also within the company.  Sales people can then get disheartened when sales managers do not serve as a  two-way bridge between the sales team and the company keeping them informed on all developments and serving as a feedback channel,

·        Resistance to new ideas – new ideas that can generate sales will probably come from those people that have greatest interaction with the clients and consumers.  The sales manager must be able to adopt new ideas coming from anywhere to achieve results.

These are some of the areas where a sales manager can have a negative impact within the sales team.  Similarly, if these areas are well managed the effect would be positive.  So what is the morale of the story?  Sales managers are not successful sales professinals who are then given a promotion.  Like any other management position the sales manager needs to be a professional in his area of competence.  This is more important than in other ares because the sales manager is the only manager in your organisation responsible for income – all other managers represent costs!  Mentor him or her well!

 

Hospitality Sales & Management International


Image by LunaWeb

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Hospitality Sales & Management International


Image by LunaWeb

SMM 2 | 3 Proven Sales Management Techniques To Establish Trust With Your Salespeople

On this week’s episode of Sales Management Mastery we’re going to talk about what’s in it for you to placing deposits in the trust account, plus three proven methods to establish trust with your salespeople so that you can drive your company’s sales revenues. Today we’re going to talk to you about the shear importance of why this is such a critical part of your overall sales management strategy. Whether or not you are a new sales manager, a tenured sales manager, a business owner listening to this, who has a bunch of sales managers that report to you, VP of Sales, CEO, establishing trust with your front line salespeople is important with your front line sales people is a part of good sales leadership but also great sales motivation, and everything sort of flows from it. And it’s the first thing that you need to do is establish that trust or re-establish it. On this show we are going to give you three proven techniques that will allow you not only to re-establish or establish trust so that you can drive your company’s sales revenue.

And our real goal here is to give you some honest, straight forward techniques and strategies that really do work. Everything that we’re really going to be talking about on this show really comes back to this basic foundation of trust. And think about it as you are building a house. Trust is the foundation. You can’t really build the house, and start putting up walls, or doing any other work on the house, unless you have a strong foundation first. So you have to dig it out, pour the foundation, and that’s really what the trust account is all about.

Today we’re going to give you 3 tactics to use in order to establishing that trust.
Whether you’re an old sales manager or a new sales manager or any other person involved in a sales organization, it’s extremely critical for you to establish that trust so that they don’t tune you out, and tune into your sales message.

You’ve probably been asking yourself, “What are these trust accounts going to do for me?” at least for right now. And that’s quite alright because when I first learned this concept, and then refined it through years of being a sales manager is that it was a relatively new concept because I had I thought that as soon as I became a Sales Manager that all I’d need to do start dictating and telling people would do. And I failed miserably, and it was the worst six months of my life because I realized that people don’t listen to because of what you tell them, they listen to you because of how it resonates with them.

That message that you’re given to your sales reps whether it is a leadership message, a motivational message, a management message; only resonates with them if they trust you enough to tune into you.

And we’re going to talk about tuning into the right frequency with your sales people and those sorts of things in later shows. But it turns out that producing great sales results has everything to do with trust.

What stands out to you most when you mention “trust account”? It’s that first word: trust. And trust is that one sole element that just can’t be absent in a relationship between anyone, whether in your personal or professional life.

But especially between a sales manager and a sales rep because sales reps, if you’ve been a sales rep, and have worked your way through the ranks, you know that you wanted to do things on your own, in your own way. And you always felt like you had the best answers to most of the questions. The best sales reps are open to suggestions, but in order to be open to those suggestions, they have to come from a credible and trustworthy source and that’s what we’re trying to establish.

As the saying goes: trust is the glue that binds people together in groups because it’s that thing that holds us together. If you ever had friends, or business associates that you couldn’t trust or they breached your trust you either didn’t want to do business with them, or you started to tune them out.

So it’s sort of a fragile balance as a sales manager, and as a management professional to make sure that you are always putting deposits in the trust account.

Because trust is hard to earn, it’s easy to lose, and when it’s lost it’s nearly impossible to regain. And that’s the reality of human interaction. So we have to be careful not to make large withdrawals from that trust account, and constantly make steady deposits instead.

Forming a relationship built on trust allows your sales reps to act so that the rules of the game aren’t constantly changing.

Then they know that your message is going to be consistent and that they trust what you’re saying then they know that there’s some stability in what you’re saying and what you’re doing. They know that your actions are consistent and congruent to what your words are. And if those to things are off, if your actions are different from what you’re saying, then you end up losing trust.

And when you have consistent actions with consistent words that you are dictating to your sales people, it encourages peace of mind. And when your sales reps have peace of mind, they become willing to exert extra effort and place themselves on the line for you, and the team, and the organization in general. Peace of mind is very, very important and that’s why establishing trust is so critical.

First establish trust then reinforce that trust by looking for the smallest opportunities to make deposits into those trust accounts. There are lots of ways to do it such as praising them for job well done is one way to do it. But there are many, many ways that you can do this.
And the beauty of it is that when you are making deposits in the trust account you are also motivating. We are going to talk a lot about motivating in this pod cast, but specifically trust has a foundation of motivation. If your sales reps don’t trust you, and you are constantly taking withdrawals from the trust account, then your motivational powers are significantly reduced.

If you are consistently enhancing that trust, then your motivational powers as a leader are greatly enhanced. So it really is a parallel concept in motivation.

Another thing to keep in mind when you’re talking about establishing trust is to always treat your sales rep as the end unto themselves. And what this is separates the men from the boys. Never treat them as a means to an end. They are not just a tool for you to get what you want. They are the journey; they are not the end point or the destination. So treat them as an end unto themselves. When you start to use your sales reps, then the sales reps will start tuning those sales managers out. So creating trust is very important, it encourages peace of mind, and it is a very critical way to motivate and lead your team to where you need them to be.

Let’s get into 3 proven methods to establishing trust with your sales team.

The first is to evoke the law of reciprocity. The law of reciprocity is a rule that states this:

If you do something nice for someone, then human nature dictates that the recipient will feel compelled to do something nice for you in return. It is in essence, you reap what you sow. And this is an irrefutable law that you should teach your sales people as a sales technique. It’s particularly effective because human nature dictates that at the precise moment that you do something nice for someone, the other person feels compelled to return the favor. This is just a law of human nature,

If you do something for them, then they do something nice for you in return.
I had a neighbor the other day take in my trash barrels because I was late getting home. And you know what I am going to do next week? I am going to take in his trash barrels. That’s the law of reciprocity. We are using this principal in order to establish trust, with the goal of driving sales.

So, we aren’t manipulating this rule, we are just using it to our advantage. And that’s really what this whole show is about, it’s talking about the laws of human psychology and how we can use them to get what we want which is success for your organization.

So be careful on this one, however, not to call this out as soon as you do it. There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. You can’t say, now that I’ve done this for you, what are you going to do for me! I know people that do that, unfortunately, and it’s really annoying. And it makes you not want to do anything for them again because it isn’t a win-win situation, you just keep giving.

You will eventually get more in return. Don’t keep tabs, don’t keep score because its really important not to do that because when the time is right they will repay you, you don’t have to ask for it or keep score, this is what the law of reciprocity is all about.

So the idea is to do something that allows them to feel that they must do something for you in return, so be subtle and don’t dictate. You can do this all the time with your sales people. The most important part of this law is to remember that reciprocity is implicit, meaning that it is implied, it’s not something you should call out on.

If my neighbor said, “Gee, I brought in your barrels they other day, what are you going to do for me?”, then that’s not reciprocity, that is negotiation. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about doing things for people that will help them, because usually it comes back to you and usually it comes back even more than what you’ve given.

If you’ve ever read the book the “The Go Giver”, I highly recommend you picking it up, by Bob Berg and John David Mann, it is a tremendous book about the Law of Reciprocity in essence. In this particular case we are using this law to get the best out of our sales people or for your sales managers to use this law to get the best out of their sales reps.

So number 2 in our proven methods to establishing trust is:

Let the Sales Rep take all of the credit for all of the good stuff.

Harry Truman said, “People always perform well if you don’t worry about who takes the credit”. You as a sales manager, have to make sure your sales managers understand this, if a sales rep goes out and makes a sale and the sales manager is out on the call, and comes back to the office and tells everyone how HE made the sale, how great do you think the initiative and motivation will be for that sales rep to go out and do the same? If he’s a very good sales person he’ll continue to go out and do the same.

But, is he really motivated to start telling people and makes himself feel good about what he’s done when he knows that the sales manager is trying to take the credit?

So don’t worry about who takes the credit. Your sales managers get paid for how well the sales people do. In most organizations there is a tie in to bonuses and incentive compensation.

Never take the credit for the good work of the sales people. Remember, one time in your career, you were probably a pretty good sales person, maybe you’re an entrepreneur and your built your business, you got promoted into management, you brought in new business, maybe you won a bunch of awards, and you had lots of individual glory. But they way to get the best out of as a sales manager, is not to put yourself in the spotlight. It is to put the sales person in the spotlight, and even give them undue credit for things. We will talk about how to lead and coach.

The time for individual glory really has passed. Your role is to look good by helping others get results for themselves.

Your job, getting results through others, is not getting direct results on your own. Unless your structure is completely different, but in 99% of the cases, and the members to our Academy Program, the sales managers lead, and the pay and compensation and bonus is tied into how effective the sales person is.

The glory for you comes as the proud manager or the proud business owner, who watches from the sidelines when sales people go out and do it on their own. Sales people need a lot of ego gratification, because there’s a lot of crap that they are dealing with out there, so give them the credit for the good stuff, it will just help establish more trust in that trust account, and it also motivates them at the same time. Motivating and trust account depositing are very much intertwined.

The better your sales people perform, and the more they do it own their own, the better you and your company look. If you’re a new sales manager this is probably really hard to change. I really do think that sales is an ego driven vocation, without question. Have confidence in your own competence to perform as a great sales manager on your own, don’t feel insecure or threatened by the work of your people, because the better they look, you are going to look more and more brilliant because they are bringing in more business under your tutelage.

Let them take all the glory, and when you do you’re putting more deposits in the trust account. In the end your trust account balance will be overflowing. The biggest balance at the end of the day wins because that’s the sales manager with the biggest balance has the most motivated sales people.

Number 3 in our proven methods to establish trust with your sales people:

No one likes to be told what to do, but suggest instead.

I’ve never known anyone, and personally for myself I hate to be told what to do, that’s why I started my own business, and became an entrepreneur is because I couldn’t take direction very well. I was a sales person for many years and didn’t like to be told what to do. My wife is in sales too and she doesn’t like to be told what to do, especially by me. People love to thing that they are in control, they love to think that are in control at all times.

If they are being told what to do all the time;

They’ll be plenty of times that you’ll have to tell your sales people, no question about it in not uncertain terms, what they need to do in a give situation. There will be times for it. How you say it, is the most important part, and it’s not the fact that you have to tell them what to do, because you are going to have to tell them sometimes, but How are you going to do it? That’s how you can put more in the trust account and motivate them at the same time.

Ben Franklin once said, he’s one of the greatest statesmen of the modern era, and proven sales man, having built many business and retired a very wealthy man, would advocate, “When at all possible, avoid giving direct orders.”

If you’re a new sales manager, this is going to be tough to do, because you going to want to tell everybody what to do, but avoid giving direct orders when at all possible.
Never dictate, or decree, instead imply or make suggestions. This is a great way to put more deposits in trust account, and motivate and empower your sales people too. Remember, one of the things that we want to do is create a high performance, low maintenance sales team.

You want to be off doing other things; planning strategy, helping yourself get promoted, you want to be looking at the thirty thousand foot view; you don’t want to have to do the job of your sales people especially if you’re running a big company and all of those sales people report to you.

Instead of telling them what to do, request, imply or make suggestions.

Instead of saying, I want you to go to the O’Neil account and tell them x,y, z.”

Change that slightly and say, “It might be a good idea if you went to the O’Neil account and…”

Or maybe say something like this, “If I were you I would do this at the O’Neil account…”

Or another one, “You may want to consider talking to the O’Neil account and saying this…”

The sales rep listens to that and says, okay, he’s not dictating to me what to do, but he’s giving me a suggestion and I’m going to decide whether it is the right thing to do.

You want to empower these people, and motivate them and lead them, and coach them and establish trust with them by doing little things like this. It’s not in what you say; it’s in how you say it.

Here’s another great suggestion, if circumstances call for you to absolutely make a suggestion instead of telling them what to do, or correcting them immediately, replace your normal response with just an answer to, “okay, can I make a suggestion?” or “May I make a suggestion”, this just softens them up the dictating part of telling them what to do part of your job.

This method is far more effective, and less dictatorial than saying, “No no no…what you need to do is this…”

Now if the sales rep is brand new, and they don’t know what they don’t know, they just came out of training, yes, you have to tell them what to do. But gradually over time, you’re going to wean them off of that, your not going to tell them as much. Remember high performance, low maintenance sales people is what you want to have. Then you as a sales manager, you as a GM, sales become more and more on auto pilot because your sales people are doing things automatically.

Once you actually make a suggestion, then if they don’t do it, then you could always come back to that after and say, “hey I thought we agreed that you would do this”. So the key word in the sentence is “we” decision instead of a “you” did this decision, the sales person memory is refreshed with that interaction that you have come to this point together, not just you as their boss. So they feel far more empowered, and they’ve taken ownership of the decision. Taking ownership is a very, very powerful technique in producing high performance low maintenance sales people.

So just as a review.

1. Evoke the law of reciprocity
2. Let the sales rep take all the credit for the good stuff
3. No one likes to be told what to do, suggest instead