Hospitality Sales & Management International


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Sales Management: Avoid Motivational Bankruptcy, 6 Tips for Exciting Your Sales Team

The president of an office supply company was recently lamenting that his sales people were not operating to their potential. “Motivationally bankrupt,” he said.

This is a very common complaint in any area of business. However, it is usually the managers who unconsciously demotivate their employees.

Sales people want to succeed in their jobs.  When they sign on they’re psyched to do well in the company. Even if they are experienced, they are new to you and new to your company.  If you haven’t made a conscious effort to show them how to do business your way, they will do it their way and probably be less effective than either of you hoped. What happens next is they become unhappy.  That’s strike one. You’re disappointed, which shows – strike two. Then, you probably tell them what they’re doing wrong and that’s strike three – motivational bankruptcy.

Here are 6 tips to keep your staff motivated and producing.

1.         Set The Expectations.

Tell your people what you want and your method to get it.  Nobody knows what you think they should know.  Believe this or live in frustration.  Never assume they know because of experience, intelligence or whatever.  Make your desires perfectly clear.

Also, get over any concern that it would be insulting to them, or unnecessary.

You will have to take the initiative because your employees are probably not going to ask for your expectation or how you want them to work.  They foolishly think this would make them look badly to you.  Therefore, pull each aside quarterly and spell it out.

If your employee has a different approach, work it out together.  Otherwise, even if successful, you will always be suspect, waiting for the fall, and your anxiety will come through.  This causes self doubt which leads to failures and demotivation.

2.         A Well-Trained Employee Is A Happy Employee.

Employees – especially when new or entering a new role – are like sponges trying to learn what to do.  You can fill that sponge with good liquid or let them fill it with whatever they pick-up.  Even your best people are sponges, but they are looking for new liquid to get a competitive edge.

Unless a person has learned how to sell (or do) your stuff how can you expect them to know how? I hear all the time, “They are experienced.”  I always retort that I am an experienced golfer, but I am still a 17 handicap.  Experience doesn’t mean they know how to do it well, and for sure not your way.

Doers need skills – skills they never learned and/or don’t use. Besides, everyone can learn again or be refreshed.  Employees will never accept responsibility for failure.  They will always blame the company – you.  So put your people through skills training. In this way you will know they actually have the tools.   Additionally business is constantly changing and your people need to be updated.

Be careful of in-house training. Consider bringing in a professional to train.  Internal people, unless doing or managing the task, lack the been-there, done-that knowledge and credibility to be effective. For example, many companies let marketing do training for new sales people. This is a curse to salespeople.

Marketing pushes product advantages, features / benefits, and competitive differentiation rather than selling skills. This indoctrination makes salespeople feel they should go out pushing prospects to buy, rather than digging for needs and relevant information. They become annoying and never build their credibility.

3.         Coach Your People Until They Get It Right.

People cannot coach themselves. If Tiger Woods needs a coach, your people need one. A few years back he was without a coach and his game slumped considerably. You are the best to do the coaching. Do sales calls together. First you do the interviewing. Discuss it and then let your person do the next one. It is crucial to give positive feedback. Also, once is not enough. You will have to do it until he or she gets it right. Better comes before perfect.

4.         Recognize Good Behaviors.

Saying something was done well – no matter how small the deed – is a big deposit in their motivational bank account.  Your urge will be to tell what the employee did or is doing wrong.  No matter what you think, this is a motivational withdrawal. You have to exert an extra effort to spin negatives into positives.  Say, “Consider doing it this way in the future.” This will be tough because it takes more energy to find positives, or take poor behaviors and restructure them into constructive suggestions, than it is to just say something negative.

5.         Pay Attention to Your Bad Days.

Here’s a typical situation. You’re up to your ears in alligators. It’s a bad day and you want to strangle someone, and now your subordinate comes in and lays-on another frustration.

Be very careful here. Your day is not his or her issue and a negative reaction will inadvertently be a drain to the motivation account. So be alert to your awful moments. Avoid your people or at least decompress before engagement. This will mitigate unintentional damage.

6.         Rewards Are Very Powerful Motivators.

Rewards are catnip to employees’ self esteem. Salary, benefits, and bonuses are part of the job. Rewards are special and personal. They are public acknowledgements of your appreciation and can be very energizing.

Two keys: First, don’t presume to know what will excite a person. Everyone is different. Ask what special something would excite him or her. If they say something monetary, probe to see what else. You’ll be amazed.

Second, the cost of the reward is not important. A plaque with the person’s name is big. Decals or coasters are significant. Make it tangible – something for them and others to see. This is a lotto size deposit into the employees’ motivation account.

Also, make rewards so that everyone can win for meeting expectations. This creates a team atmosphere for all to help each other.

In summary, demotivating is like going down a slide – fast and without effort. Motivating is like crawling up a flight of stairs covered with broken glass.  So check your negative reactions and your employees will stay motivationally high with little effort on your part.

Although intuitively obvious, the implementation will require you push yourself into behaviors that are different – and nobody likes to change.  However, if you make the shift you will stop the motivational withdrawals and your portfolio of satisfied, highly  productive employees will keep paying you dividends.

And now I invite you to learn more.

Bonus tip:  FREE SALES TEAM ASSESSMENT TOOL.  Just click this “http://www.Sammanfer.comCleveltest.htm” C-Level Relationship Selling Link.   Sam Manfer makes it easy for any sales manager to be effective coaching his or her sales people to feel comfortable connecting with and relationship selling C-Level leaders.  

Hospitality Sales & Management International


Image by LunaWeb

Hospitality Sales & Management International


Image by LunaWeb

3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Get Sales Firing Again – Activities For Sales Managers & Leaders

There is no question that in these economically uncertain times, sales leaders will need to get a whole lot smarter and more shrewd if they are going to keep their existing customers and they are going to need to be a whole lot more crafty if they are to win the slim pickings that are still out there to be had! That being said there are some fundamental sales management strategies that when implemented are guaranteed to generate sales within the next 90 days.

Strategy #1

Your first strategy will seem so simple and so easy that you are bound to say to yourself; “Is that all there is to it?” Please do not be fooled. Whilst the strategy below may seem simple, when done exactly as I have described below, it delivers some amazing results. So don’t question, just do! It has been proven that, when effectively applied, the practice of regular one-on-one Sales Performance Coaching is the fastest and most effective vehicle to drive your sales growth. One-on-one Sales Performance Coaching is a powerful, time-tested, behaviour-changing, sales acceleration strategy and is the foundation on which permanent and consistent growth in your business is built. Whilst there are many different processes and skills to be an effective Sales Performance Coach , there are 2 activities that you can apply that would have an immediate impact to your sales drive.

Sit down with each of your salespeople either in person or by phone, ABSOLUTELY NO LESS THAN ONCE A FORTNIGHT. Depending on the state of your sales pipeline, you may need to ramp that up to once a week. Here’s exactly all you need to do…

1. IN DEPTH review the week/ fortnight just past. When you are done …

2. IN DEPTH plan the week/ fortnight coming up.

That’s it, that’s all, that’s the lot!

What does IN DEPTH MEAN?

IN DEPTH means just that. As an example, when prospecting for new business opportunities either with existing customers or new prospects, your salespeople must complete some primary due diligence and be able to answer some or all of the following questions before even fronting up or making the sales call. By having answers to the questions below will afford them the best opportunity for success. Your job in coaching them IN DEPTH is to ensure that before they invest their time and your money going to see a prospect, they are extremely well prepared. Imagine if you asked your salespeople some or all of the questions below before a business development call.

“So you are going to see Bob at ABC ….”

1. What have you learned about ABC?

2. Who are all the “players”?

3. What does your research tell you about the critical issues that ABC is facing right now?

4. What is the evidence that they are facing these issues?

5. What do you believe the potential impacts of those issues to be? What evidence do you have that they are dealing with this issue?

6. What are their current constraints in solving that issue (in relation to time, people money)?

7. What is our answer for solving the issue?

8. What are the current market trends in their area?

9. What do we know about other companies that operate in the same space as they do?

10. What are ABC’s key strategic initiatives?

11. What would their decision constraint criterion be in relation to time, people money?

12. How may we be in a position to help them?

13. What questions do you have prepared to elicit needs?

14. How do you plan on positioning the company and what it is we do?

15. What information should you bring back from your visit, to move this opportunity to the next stage of the sales pathway?

16. What is the objective of the sales call?

That is what I mean by IN DEPTH! Can you imagine just how much better prepared your sales people would be to take advantage of the opportunities out there with this kind of IN DEPTH probing?

Strategy # 2

Look for sales closest to the “bulls-eye!”

Imagine standing front on and facing the circles of a target. Imagine the “bulls-eye!” in the middle is where the money is. The circle just out side the bulls-eye represents your existing customers, let call them A’s. They are the ones closest to the money. The next circle represents those customers that have bought from you occasionally, let call them B’s. The circle just beyond the B’s are your C’s and they represent those prospective companies you have targeted but have yet to buy from you. Then outside of your C’s we have the D’s. These are prospects we have yet to consider.

Once again, as simple as this practice may seem, it is often neglected. When we need more sales, where do we go looking? Out there in D, E, F, and G land. Start looking for business closest to where the money is. Your sales opportunity is to expand your influence within your A and B customer’s organizations and earn a higher percentage of their business. According to the 2008 CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Report only 33.6% of C.S.O’s interviewed were able to farm additional revenues from their existing customer base, and that was last year during a comparatively good market!

Your role as sales manager is to help your salespeople identify where you have previously left money on the table. What are the opportunities with your A, B and C companies? Go work there! Let your Marketing department figure out how to bring the D, E, F, and G prospects in to where the C’s, B’s and A’s reside. If your salespeople can’t answer the questions in Strategy 1 with your A’s B’s and C customers, you have work to do. Have your people renew old relationships. Have them beat the bushes for new opportunities you have yet to capture with your A’s, B’s and C customers. They live closest to where the money lives. Go get em’!

Strategy # 3

Go to work and re-engineer your current sales process, if you have one. If you don’t then get one! The latest research from the CSO Insights’ 2008 Sales Performance Optimization Report shows that ‘process-centric’ sales teams outperform non-process-centric teams for every measurable metric.

Sales team performance and effectiveness has been shown to increase by as much as 40% when sales teams have a clear, proven sales process visible to them. The chances are extremely good that if you currently have 5 salespeople on your team, you most likely have 5 different sales processes going on all at once! What other part of your business runs on multiple different processes? Imagine running your business with half a dozen different accounting processes, or multiple IT or customer service processes? Sounds silly doesn’t it? Yet sales teams do so all the time.

Whilst you can reengineer your current selling process, the exercise is not for the faint-hearted. It may be advisable that you bring in professional expertise to ensure the greatest success. You may just be too close to your own current sales methodology to see the gaps or dysfunction.

So there you have it 3 practical ideas you can implement right now to get sales firing again. At the very least run strategy #1 for 90 days. If you will do that, sales will start to flow again.

Hospitality Sales & Management International


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Sales Management Training: Protect Your Company From (sales) Identity Theft in 3 Simple Steps?

Business Development Officer? Business Procurement Specialist? Did you know these types of titles for salespeople can ultimately rob your organization?

As a Sales Management Training Consultant, I often notice business cards from salespeople with titles that require some effort to decipher. As I inquire further about their role, eventually it pops out – “I’m in sales”. It makes me wonder, when did “Sales” become a five letter word that can no longer show up on one’s business card? It gets deeper…

Building high performance sales organizations is my specialty. Much of my success is a result of a startling discovery made years ago – there is no proven correlation between Personality and Sales Productivity. This discovery enabled me to lead a team that transformed a B business unit into a B business unit in 18 months for a Fortune Global 500 company. How? We recognized anyone can succeed in sales despite personality. Sales is simple if you learn how to master sales behavior intelligence and develop your salespeople accordingly. Sales is about behavior and our proven sales system is built on the 25 behaviors that is proven to impact sales productivity – Sales Identity is one of the behaviors we measure.

What is Sales Identity?

Sales Identity measures a salesperson’s pride of the sales profession. If a person views selling as noble, they are considered to have a strong Sales Identity. The opposite is true for those who view a sales position as something to be ashamed of, they are considered to have a weak Sales Identity.

Selling is noble, we all sell everyday whether we realize it or not. However, selling is often perceived negatively because of bad experiences. To some degree, society tends to cast a negative light on people in the sales profession. Due to the strength of society’s misguided views, some sales professionals feel shame and are compelled to hide their sales position and adopt deflected titles such as, “Business Development Officers” or “Procurement Specialists”. Such behavior is proven to be costly, read on…

Some people refuse to accept the notion of selling altogether, even though they are in fact trying to close a deal. A classic example…

Recently I was on a flight to a sales conference in Atlanta and I struck up a conversation with the gentleman next to me. Our idle chit chat led into a careers conversation. He shared with me how he worked for a major home improvement company in charge of the distribution centers in 4 states in the South and Southwest. After explaining my role as a Sales Management Training Consultant and how I help sales teams and salespeople. He immediately responded with “I could never be a salesperson!” We continued our conversation and he explained to me that he was preparing for a major presentation with the Executive Team of the company because he felt he needed an additional Million allocated to his budget for the following year. He went on to demonstrate to me how the organization “would ultimately benefit from the additional spend with a better Return on Investment (ROI)…”

As he was explaining this to me, I began to smile and chuckle. Initially, he probably thought I was being rude. Then I asked him “So, you are trying to convince the Executive Team to give you an additional million for your budget, correct?” “Yes.” He replied. I then added “And you can support the benefits of doing so, correct?” “Yes” he replied again. “Are you sure you’re not a salesperson?” He sat back in his chair and smiled, I could see the light bulb turn on. My point dawned on him. I eventually gave him some coaching on how to think more like a salesperson and improve his sales presentation.

Why Measure Sales Identity?

Measuring Sales Identity can ultimately save your organization a substantial amount of money long term. How?

Organizations all over the globe are challenged to hire high performance salespeople, not doing so can be costly in terms of sales results, hiring and training costs. Recent studies show, the average cost of hiring a poor performing salesperson has swelled to over 0,000/year. Think about it, how much are hiring mistakes costing you?

Research shows – salespeople with weak Sales Identity will under perform within 6 months of joining an organization and ultimately “self select” out of the sales profession within 18 – 24 months. In fact, we found people with weak Sales Identity prefer to apply for “sales” positions with deflected titles because they insinuate less sales accountability.

Unless detected, salespeople with weak Sales Identity will struggle and steal valuable resources from your organization via increased turnover, higher training costs and poor sales results. Here are 3 simple steps to protect your organization going forward:

Step 1: Remove the Identity Crisis

A surefire way to jeopardize long term sales productivity is to have your organization struggle through a sales identity crisis. If the role is a sales role – title it as such. Top performing salespeople absolutely love sales and prefer to be called – Sales Representatives. Having deflected titles attracts weaker performers who will struggle to get out of the ranks of mediocrity long term.

Step 2: Monitor Your “Motivational” Costs with Sales Reps

If you find your sales organization spending more time on motivating sales reps within the 6 – 24 month window of being hired, you may have a Sales Identity issue. Depending upon the severity, there may be hope.

Step 3: Know What You’re Hiring, Prior to Making the Offer

Hiring mistakes pertaining to sales positions can be costly! Use an assessment tool that measures the Sales Identity of your candidates prior to hire.

Hospitality Sales & Management International


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