The “Defining Moment” of a Sales Manager

Every profession has a defining moment where the world can see whether you are truly a professional or just an amateur.  It only takes listening to a few bars of a song when a singer begins to tell whether the person is any good at singing.  Think about going out to a karaoke lounge and noticing someone stepping up to the microphone.  How long before you know if they are any good?

In the past twenty-five years I have seen thousands of sales meetings conducted by managers throughout the world.  I can tell within a few moments whether a sales manager is a professional or an amateur by how they begin a sales meeting.  I bet you can, too.  Of all the things you do as a sales manager, this is the most public thing you do in your business.  Holding an excellent sales meeting is a great chance to motivate the team and disseminate information and it is also a chance to lose momentum in a hurry!

The Essential Ingredient in Every Sales Meeting

Sales managers who have decided to run a sales meeting because they have something important to convey have passed the first test for a successful meeting.  They have a purpose!  I realize this test seems obvious, but think back to all the meetings you have been to that had no value or agenda whatsoever.  I know I have attended many meetings where I rolled my eyes and shook my head, thinking, “What a waste!”  The first step to leading a successful sales meeting is to have a clear reason for calling one.  Common reasons for holding a sales meeting are:

To inform the sales team– Give information on what is happening at the company, like a new product being announced or a new advertising campaign being launched.

To plan with the sales team– Discuss future goals and objectives, assess trends in the marketplace and discuss how the company can plan to meet challenges. 

To Educate the sales team– Training is a crucial component of any successful sales organization.  I find the best companies make training and education a part of every sales meeting.

To inspire the sales team– Like training, inspiration and motivation should be part of every sales meeting, but sometimes the whole purpose of the meeting is to get people revved up!

 To reward the sales team– Sales meetings are great places to bring everyone together to give out praise and recognition.  Remember to praise in public and criticize in private.  Never use a sales meeting to criticize an individual salesperson.  Use sales meetings only to praise an individual or team.

 To build teamwork among the sales team and the company– Sales meetings can be excellent venues to build teamwork as well as to integrate parts of the company that don’t always work together.  Schedule segments of the agenda  that the administrative team can participate in as well.  This is a great way to build an understanding of what each group does so that each can have more appreciation for the other.  I highly recommend that you work participation time into your sales meetings if you have an accounting group, an installation team, a customer service team, or any other groups that work apart from sales.  The payoff is a more understanding and cooperative organization.

 By following the guide you will be well on your way to running great sales meetings that inspire your team.  The most important advice I can give you is to prepare thoroughly.  This is no time to “wing it.”  Make sure you are ready and your team will know that you value them and their contribution to your team. 

Effective Sales Meeting Checklist

After each meeting you conduct, take a few minutes and ask yourself these questions to review what happened and how you can grow as a meeting leader. 

• Was I really prepared, or was I “winging it?”
• Did I start the meeting on time?
• Did the participants respond freely and easily to my questions?
• Did I keep the meeting on track?  Did we stay focused?
• Did I refrain from lecturing or playing the expert?
• Did I maintain healthy control of the meeting?
• Were distractions handled properly?
• Did I keep the interest of the participants?
• Did I make full use of the audiovisual tools?
• Were the points covered thoroughly?
• Did I handle questions properly?
• Did the majority of the participants enjoy the meeting?
• Did I give them something to think about?
• Did I end the meeting on time?
• Did I learn something?  If so, what?

 

Ron Marks is the author of Managing for Sales Results and travels extensively around the world helping sales managers work effectively with their sales teams.  Ron can be reached at ron@managingforsalesresults.com.

 

 

8 Reasons Why Salespeople Stay

By Rory Vaden

1. They understand the company vision – Sales gets monotonous when people forget the big picture of what they’re working towards. People need to be reminded of how their role contributes to something that is bigger than themselves. 2. They have a clear long term personal vision – The sooner you talk about a salesperson’s purpose instead of their production, the sooner you’ll see an increase in their productivity. When people aren’t producing it’s basically inevitable that they’ve lost sight of how their current position and activity today impacts their personal long term future. 3. They have proper expectations – One of the #1 causes of salesperson turnover is when a challenging circumstance or change in policy comes up that they weren’t aware of in advance. Whenever something negative happens that the salesperson wasn’t explicitly warned about there is a withdrawal from the manager’s (and the company’s) credibility bank account. If you have enough of those instances in a short enough window of time you will lose people 4. They have a proper place to work – Dealing with territory is one of the most frustrating and time consuming tasks for a sales manager. However, if you do not take the time to make sure that someone has a proper place to work and sufficient amount of leads to call in (with reasonably easy access) then you are guaranteed to lose people. And unfortunately we sometimes lose good people to this cause. 5. They have a system to execute – Salespeople are great at creating excuses. Eliminate their excuses by giving them proven step by step systems for them to execute. This includes sales talks and technical aspects of the job. If you give them a system then you are able to objectively confront their work habits. If you don’t give them a system then you will be in a perpetually subjective and emotional conversation about why things never work out for them. 6. They have a supportive and fun work environment – Considering about 1/3 of our live is spent at work, it is increasingly more and more important that people have healthy work environments. Make sure as a manager that you’re always trying to come up with fun and interesting things to keep things fresh. Pay attention to intra team conflict and confront difficult situations as fast as possible. 7. They have a leader who believe in them – This one characteristic alone can be completely responsible for a salesperson sticking with a company and turning around their performance. It is rare in the world today to find people who are selflessly “fans” of us. As a manager you have the rare opportunity to be someone’s #1 fan and to always pick them up and give them hope. This can create a lifetime of loyalty. 8. They see how the job helps them grow personally – Most of the world is interested in more than just a paycheck. Make sure that you’re maximizing the ways that you or your company is contributing value to people’s overall well being. Try to involve family and take a personal interest in people’s success and hobbies outside of work.

NEW SALES TRAINING VIDEOS POSTED

Success Starts Now! is excited to bring you a NEW venue for sharing our sales and motivational training tips. – VIDEOS!  Our new Video Training Section features great advice, tips, and motivation from all of the great staff of Success Starts Now!  CHECK OUT THE PAGE LINK ON THE RIGHT FOR ALL VIDEOS ~  CLICK HERE FOR MOST RECENT TRAINING VIDEO ~

Mastering Time Management for Managers

Below is a coaching session for a manager looking to better manage her time – By:  Rory Vaden

Congratulations on taking the first huge step of outsourcing your email and voicemail to get help with prioritization. Thank you for following through with that and it lights me up to know that your peace of mind and productivity is already improving as the result of your execution.

 We have no greater respect than for producing sales managers. It’s a rare person that has the skill to be a producer and lead a team and manage the helter skelter. You are one of those unique people.  Your focus for the next two weeks is to outsource your calendar. Put an assistant in charge of scheduling all appointments. Of course there will be unavoidable fires, but this will help tremendously.

 Remember the concepts we talked about:

-          Rocks, pebbles, sand, water- Put the big things in place first. Schedule groups of time around certain types of activities. IE Prospecting time, recruiting time, email/phone time, Team training time, customer service time, paperwork time, etc. Block those times out of every day and give them to your calendar manager so they know what times of the day to schedule what types of activities. Blocks of time for grouping similar activities.

-          “Batching” – Remember the magnifying glass. FOCUSed energy is more powerful. Group similar activities together. IE Try putting your personal conference calls altogether on 1 day rather than spread out. Contrary to popular belief it’s actually energizing to go back to back with 1 type of meeting. It allows you to be more “present” with each person knowing that you’ve dedicated the whole day to it rather than trying to squeeze an hour in with them in the middle of the other ruckus.

-          “Systematize” – Create systems for quick meeting preparation. Have your assistant pull the reports for all of your personal conferences the night before and put them on 1 spreadsheet with different tabs. Record basic things about each meeting for each person (topic, action item, next time talk about, goals, etc.). This allows you to prepare quickly and roll 1 meeting to the next.

-          “Be Protective” – As a sales manager you are busy; most of the rest of the world is pretty much not. Remember we like to do business with other successful people and people are generally pretty flexible. Let people know “My assistant handles the calendar” (which by the way will be very true in a short period of time you won’t be able to function without her) and have enough time blocks for the types of activities that people can fit into for the week. Don’t schedule meetings during the time you set aside to check email. And don’t email during the time you’ve set aside to prospect or interview.

-          “Be Prepared” – Have objectives for each conference call, each prospecting goal period, each personal meeting, etc. You’ll find that effective 1 on 1s might not take an hour. In fact they are often more effective if you do them in 30-45 minutes because the take away is often clearer in a shorter time frame. You will use whatever time you schedule for whatever the activity is so make sure it’s the appropriate amount and not too much. Better to error on the side of not allowing enough time for the meeting and scheduling meetings back to back at first.

Your action item is to take inventory the next 2 weeks. Take inventory of which team members and customers really need to spend the most time with you. (Sometimes you have to fire team members or customers who are taking too much time and not giving enough in return). Also take inventory of what types of activities make sense to do at what times of day.

Next time we talk we’ll physically block out the slots on an excel sheet of what your week should look like.

 After that we’ll talk through your interviewing methods, talk about reducing turnover, go through effective training ideas on building a great team, create a long term life vision, and highlight all the different methods of recruiting.

Drive Decisions Down

By:  Steve Savage

Last month I told you how FedEx and Northwest drove decisions down. Let me tell you about my own business. It gives me great pride to tell you that we gave our employees all kinds of power back in the 1980s—that was before the idea of “empowerment” became popular. We gave them much more power than FedEx gave their people with the hundred-dollar credit, and we went way beyond Northwest’s free round-trip ticket. We told our customer-service reps that they could do anything to make the customer happy.
We had a small company with a big name: Institutional Financing Services (IFS, for short). Our business was fund-raising, specifically for schools. Our specialty was fashion jewelry, and our average school bought $5000 worth of products.

Anna was our first customer-service rep—I wish you could have met her. She was twenty-eight years old, enthusiastic, intelligent, and passionate about her work. Within three months, she was managing ten other customer-service reps. I told her, “Look, Anna, my two partners and I want you to make customer service decisions. You’re smart. We trust you. And we want your people to make decisions. Don’t ask us what to do. Just do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. Pretend IFS is your company, Anna, because you really do own the customer service department.”

Then we got all ten of the customer-service reps together and told them, “We have asked Anna to make decisions without consulting us. Now we want you to make decisions without consulting Anna.”

About the same time we hired our first professional manager, a controller. His name was Dave. So picture this: The company, IFS, had three crazy entrepreneurs full of ideas, ten customer-service reps full of enthusiasm—and Dave.

Dave thought we were nuts. He did not like letting those customer-service reps make important decisions. “It won’t work. They’ll give away the company. We’ll go broke.”

Within six months, however, Dave began to come around. He analyzed the decisions our customer-service reps had made. Although he did not like to admit it, most of those decisions were sensible, with very few mistakes.

Yes, they made mistakes, but we said to Anna, “Go ahead and make mistakes. It’s OK. If you ask us to make the decisions, we’ll make mistakes also. And you’ll never grow. If you make a mistake, we’ll analyze it calmly, but we’ll never get mad.”

We told the customer-service reps, “Look, these schools are buying $5,000 a year from us, on average. That means they will buy $25,000 over the next five years. Let’s not lose that school over a stupid little fifty-dollar misunderstanding. If you think they deserve credit, or a prize, or extra merchandise, that’s your decision. Even if the worst should happen and the school wants to cancel the sale and get a $5000 refund, you can accept it without consulting us.”

You should have seen the letters we got from the schools we worked with. I remember a school principal who wrote me: “IFS is the best company I have ever dealt with. Your customer-service people are enthusiastic, and they can take care of every situation on the spot.”

You are probably thinking, “OK, Steve, that works fine with ten employees. But I work with a thousand employees. I can’t let them make those kinds of decisions.”

Well, let me describe how our company grew. We went from ten employees to six hundred. And our sales went from zero to $60 million in six years. And our philosophy never changed.

It was not easy. As we grew, we had to hire more professional managers, like Dave. We needed experts in production, operations, quality control, and management-information systems. And you know what they wanted? More rules! Yes, every day we discovered a new rule—they would impose a rule; we would remove a rule.

You may be wondering about training these people, and you’d be absolutely right. You must train them. You don’t simply tell your people, “OK, you’ve got power. Make decisions. You’re on your own!” We had weekly sessions in which all employees who dealt with customers brought up case studies of problems they’d confronted and strategies they’d created. Everyone got to talk. We learned from and stimulated each other.

You also may be wondering about employees who simply don’t want to make decisions. That’s fine; there are plenty of jobs for them. But keep them out of the front line. Don’t let them deal with customers. You want your customers to deal with people who can make decisions.