Tue, 30 July 2019
Whether you’re a brand new sales rep, a sales leader, or an experienced seller, the key to success relies on your ability to build a championship sales team. Will Richter drives revenue for medical device companies by increasing their sales volumes, reducing their operational inefficiencies and crushing their competition. He has the unique ability to find the blind spots in any company's sales process and can turn around a growth plan of action and a winning team in less time bringing bottom-line results faster. Deep assessment Will points to leadership and culture as the keys to building a championship sales team. Whether you’re a business owner, a CEO, or middle management, the culture gets dictated by the leadership. They set the tone for the culture and they define the expectations for everyone on the sales force. Those leaders also determine what will not be tolerated. Once teams accept mediocrity, it becomes the norm. When you’re a sales leader, you’ll either inherit a team or you may get the opportunity to take some educated risks and build a team. You must do a deep assessment of the team’s skills, its motivations, its past successes, and get to know the team members. Find out what makes them tick. You cannot manage every member of your sales team the same way because they may have different motivators. If you don’t discover their motivators, you’ll struggle to create a championship kind of environment. People and culture People are the fabric of any great culture. If you’re at the top, you’ve got to reassess your talent base, and you’re probably going to have to let some of that go. Think about the culture you want to create. Then, seek out people who have the experience and the knowledge you want. If your sellers are strong and they have similar values, they’ll outlast someone who simply looks good on paper. The average sales rep lasts about 18 months in any company. So if you bring a new seller on board, imagine the cost of onboarding plus the cost of training and the ramp-up time it takes for him to start earning money. Your company won’t likely make anything if he only stays for 18 months. Wrong person The worst part of the sales leader job results from having to let team members know that they aren’t a good fit for the team. In fact, the higher up you go, the more these people have on the line. They have families and wives and big mortgages and a lot to lose. Will reports feeling a lot of empathy for these folks. At the same time, do not accept exceptions or excuses. Expect your team to have the same “win all the time” attitude that you have. Will was hired to turn a sales team around in which only about half of the team members were strong. One gentleman who had been with the company for six years absolutely killed it his first year, but then he rested on his laurels. The company couldn’t fire him because people had tried in the past and it had become a political issue. Will had to work closely with the guy, giving him a lot of feedback and working to coach him up. But Will’s says that people are either coachable or they aren’t. If you aren’t coachable, you’re cutting yourself off from professional development. This guy didn’t want to be coached, so Will put him on a 30-day plan. The guy got in his face and screamed at him and eventually, they were able to ask him to go. Difficult conversations Will likes to build relationships by getting to know his sellers as people. He asks about their families and their hometowns, and what makes them tick. Then he recommends being an open book yourself. Be transparent and real about your shortcomings. If sales teams lock arms together and work as a unified front, they’ll accomplish much more than they will alone. #SalesCulture As you coach your team members, speak factually. Leave the emotion and personal information out of the conversation. Stick to facts and data. Highlight the fact that she has a quota, she has a territory, and she has a quantifiable history. Now, she has a certain amount of time to accomplish this other thing in order to avoid moving to a new set of consequences. Document everything. Factual information feels less personal and it’s easier to digest. Background information Create a profile for the kind of players you’d like to hire. How many do you need? What type of background do you want? Should they have a certain amount of experience? What kind of values are you seeking? Whatever your criteria might be, create a profile and then create a world-class recruiting strategy and a strong hiring process. Many companies place an ad on Indeed any time they need to hire a new seller. They sort through resumes, pick three, interview two, and hire one. It’s called reactive recruiting. On the other hand, when you’re proactively sourcing candidates, begin by hiring a recruiter. Tell him exactly what you’re looking for and ask him to leverage his database to find candidates who meet your criteria. Have him call the candidates that meet your criteria and then screen them. Ensure that they are the top of the top before you ever sit down with them. Hiring process Determine what you want your hiring process to look like.
Once you’ve matched the values, make sure you don’t hire reps with massive egos. Implement these strategies, then onboard them properly and train them thoroughly. That’s the foundation of a championship sales team. Once you’ve established your value system, you’ve put the right leadership in place, you’ve created the right culture, you’ve developed a good recruiting strategy, you’ve created your profiles, and you’ve built an excellent training program, then you must train your team on your product, as well as training them on superior sales skills for your market in your industry. Your ultimate goal is to create a proactive sales management program that sets realistic but strong goals that hold the reps accountable. Recognize that your success is directly tied to your sellers’ success. Military tactics Will calls himself a big fan of military and their tactics. He finds that leading from the front demands leaders who are willing to be in the field. If all they do is sit in the office, they won’t know what the team is doing. Sellers respect managers who get into the fight with them. After your presentations, talk with the seller about the call and the things that were great about it. Then address things that could have been done better. We all feel good when we accomplish things. It makes us confident. Understand, though, that there’s a big difference between being busy and being productive. Be mindful of managing the team’s time as well. What activities are they engaging in? Where are they going? Who are they calling? Are they making the best use of their time? Young sellers often think they can cut corners. Approach-based management allows well-trained, talented sellers who engage in high activity levels to reach their goals. If they do the right things at the right times and the right places, they won’t struggle. Shared culture You want to be in a culture with people who share your same values. Hire the people that you can trust and respect, and who are competent and honest and hard-woring. We’ve all taken jobs where we didn’t know what to expect until we started working. Do a great job of smoking out the company’s values and culture. If you can’t click with the existing employees, your time there will be short-lived. Episode resources You can connect with Will on LinkedIn. He’s happy to help sellers who are working to build a championship sales team. You've heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we're offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester. You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. If you and your team are interested in learning more, we'd love to have you join us. Call (561) 578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. As a savvy seller, you’ll want to continue learning, and you can take advantage of a free 30-day trial, complete with a free audiobook, on Audible. They have thousands of books to choose from and you can begin your free trial today. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. When you share your experiences with the show, others will read the reviews and give us a listen. I truly appreciate you and appreciate your reviews and your subscription, and your willingness to tell your friends and anyone you know that's in sales about the podcast. |
Mon, 1 April 2019
Sales leaders who neglect their own workload in an effort to help their sellers solve problems will find themselves falling behind, so it’s vital that sales leaders stop falling for the reactive trap. You hired your sellers to handle their assigned responsibilities and to solve problems. When your sellers distract you with problems, you’ll have less time to focus on sales plans or strategies. You won’t have time to conduct meetings or create reports because you’re trying to keep deals from falling apart. DISTRACTED LEADERSIn his book, The Sales Manager’s Guide To Greatness, Kevin Davis talks about all the ways that sellers can distract their sales managers from their own workload. The problem with this kind of distraction is that the sales leader’s responsibilities are to grow the department or the business. The business will suffer if sales leaders aren’t freed to do their own work. Additionally, you’re teaching your sellers bad habits and cheating them of the opportunity to learn to solve their own problems. This is why many leaders feel stretched too thin. LIMITED GROWTHSellers who never learn to solve their own problems will limit their teams’ productivity. Your team will never have extraordinary growth because you’ll always be limited by your own ability to solve everyone else’s problems. The sellers will never learn to solve problems, and they won’t learn to focus on solving problems for their customers. Instead, they’ll focus on features and benefits. Additionally, they won’t be able to function as well in your absence, which means they will struggle any time you aren’t available. So what will happen if you decide to take vacation? IMPROVING SELLERSSellers will only improve if they learn to solve their own problems and handle their own accounts. As each rep learns to handle his assigned responsibilities, you’ll be freed to focus on other things that will improve the team as a whole. You may be tempted to think that you’re helping your sellers accomplish more, but the truth is that they’ll never learn to manage their own schedules and their own time if you consistently help them manage it. Kevin points out that your involvement won’t likely encourage them to use their time for other tasks. Realistically, your sellers will simply be freed to do things like check social media or email. Forty percent of sellers don’t like prospecting, so they won’t likely do it if they don’t have to. They are likely bringing you problems they don’t want to handle themselves. TEACH PROBLEM-SOLVINGKevin suggests asking two questions of your sellers:
Your sellers likely have basic problem-solving skills; otherwise, you wouldn’t have hired them. If this isn’t the case, you might have to start by making sure you have the right people on the bus. Perhaps we’ll discover that the rep didn’t really qualify the prospect in the first place. Maybe the rep isn’t talking to the decision-maker. Assuming those things aren’t true and that the buyer suddenly backed out of the deal, you must discover what caused the problem. ROOT CAUSECoach the rep to ask questions that get to the root cause of the change. Teach your rep to use the 5 whys to figure out why the prospect changed her mind. It’s tempting for sales leaders to try to “save the day” and be the hero. Instead, you need to teach your seller to act as a guide to the prospect and teach your seller how to frame the customer as the hero of the situation. Consider identifying team leads who can help your sellers when they encounter problems. Maybe a senior sales rep can help answer questions or coach your sellers in weekly sales meetings. Schedule coaching sessions where you can teach your team members how to use these techniques to identify why their deals are disintegrating. Help them identify the common objections so they’ll be prepared when they encounter them. BUILD REPLACEMENTSNo doubt you hope to be promoted someday and you’ll need someone to take over your role so you can advance. Allow them to be part of the dialogue when you’re addressing issues in your area. Provide reassurance that it’s ok to try things and make mistakes. If you have a hard time saying “no” to your sellers, make yourself unavailable to them. Insist that they begin working on the problems themselves. If they make a mistake, you can still step in if you must, but give them a chance to try solving the problems. Take the time to coach your sellers. Make sure you give commands, give guidance, and give them room to run on their own. Whether you’re a sales rep, a sales leader, or a business owner, use these concepts to improve your efficiency and your output. “STOP FALLING FOR THE REACTIVE TRAP” EPISODE RESOURCESGrab a copy of Kevin Davis’ book, The Sales Manager’s Guide To Greatness. You’ll be glad you did. This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. I developed this training course because I struggled early on as a seller. Once I had the chance to go through my own training, I noticed a hockey-stick improvement in my performance. TSE Certified Sales Training Program can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only to watch your prospects choose to work with your competitors, we can help you fix that. The new semester of TSE Certified Sales Training Program begins in April and it would be an absolute honor to have you join us. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It’s super easy, it’s helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. You’ll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. Mailtag.io allows you to see around the corners. You can see when people open your email, or when they click on the link you sent. Mailtag.io will give you half-off your subscription for life when you use the Promo Code: Donald at check out. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss a single episode. Share it with your friends who would benefit from learning more. |
Wed, 6 March 2019
It's impossible to overstate the importance of being a great leader when you're working to build a team or an organization into something that will change the world and make things better for people. Today's guest Andrei Mincov founded Trademark Factory in 2013 to help entrepreneurs secure the legacy of their brands and preserve their hard work. TeamsAs you grow your team, as you grow your business, as you grow your dream, as you grow your vision, there comes a time when the leader can't come up with all the ideas. In order for the organization to grow, leaders need team members who help generate ideas and who provide initiative to improve things. You'll likely have some team members who simply have marching orders or tasks. Others will be responsible to help you move the organization forward. Those team members will have to have vision. They'll operate from your inspiration. HiringFinding those visionary team members is different than hiring task-based team members. Andrei uses small, unique tasks to help make hiring decisions simpler. He might, for example, offer a jpeg with a typo or error in it and ask prospective employees to find the error. The intention would be to measure the candidate's attention to detail. He might also ask the candidate to build a video or a graphics project. This process helps him narrow the field because not every candidate is willing to jump through the required hoops to get the job. It also helps him determine who actually has the necessary skill set to accomplish the work. Without poring over countless resumes and applications he can narrow the field to the best candidates. If candidates aren't excited enough, in the beginning, to show you what they can do for you, how excited will they be after they are hired? [Tweet "It's hard to hire from a bunch of unknowns, but it's much easier to select employees from a smaller number of candidates you've already seen in action. #HiringLeaders"] GrowthLeaders must have a compelling vision in order to grow a company. They should also likely have a track record of successfully accomplishing goals. Conveying thoughts and messages won't be enough to lead well. Leadership demands action and results. People will follow leaders who have vision and a successful track record. The better your business and the better your track record, the more likely you are to attract great people to surround you. Andrei shared that animals in the zoo don't care about ticket sales. They care about food and comfort and safety. Your team members are similar in that they care about basic things like provision and comfort. While you probably want them to have full ownership in your business, they likely never will. Your role is to provide enough vision for them to recognize that aligning themselves with your goal will benefit them personally. BuildingSmaller companies often fail to see that they are capable of building something that matters. They may have a really cool team or a really cool business and they assume it's a fluke. They don't take themselves seriously enough to worry about protecting their businesses. What steps would you take to protect yourself and your business if you knew that you would definitely succeed? This issue boils down to leadership, because if you don't have a vision of growing your company into something substantial, you'll miss an opportunity. Great leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos know that they are building something that can change the world. They are building something that will help a bunch of people do a bunch of great stuff. When you have a vision toward the path to greatness, people will follow you. Do something that people will remember years from now. "Being A Great Leader" episode resourcesYou can connect with Andrei and his team trademarkfactory.com. If you have a brand you're interested in protecting, you can schedule a free call with the team to determine the next steps in your process. This episode is brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It's super easy, it's helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. Mailtag.io allows you to see around the corners. You can see when people open your email, or when they click on the link you sent. Mailtag.io will give you half-off your subscription for life when you use the Promo Code: Donald at check out. This episode is also brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. If 2018 wasn't the best year for you, check out TSE Certified Sales Training Program. We can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only to watch your prospects choose to work with your competitors, we can help you fix that. The new semester of TSE Certified Sales Training Program begins in April and it would be an absolute honor to have you join us. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. If you haven't already done so, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss a single episode. Share it with your friends who would benefit from learning more. |
Tue, 28 August 2018
For sales leaders, improving your team’s numbers isn’t always enough. If you can help your team innovate, engage, build trust, and be purposeful, you’ll lift your team up and improve their lives. Lifter leadership will change your sales team and change your company. On today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Paresh Shah, author of the […] The post TSE 908: Lifter Leadership-How To Innovate, Engage, Build Trust And Be Purposeful All At Once! appeared first on The Sales Evangelist. |
Tue, 21 August 2018
Regardless of your industry, you’re probably invested in helping your sales team optimize its performance. Ultimately, we need our teams to hit their quotas and perform at their peak. So how do you help your team get more time back in order to exceed quota? Jason Loh visits The Sales Evangelist podcast today to help […] The post TSE 903: How To Get More Time Back As A Sales Manager To Exceed Quota appeared first on The Sales Evangelist. |
Fri, 15 December 2017
Why settle with 20% close rates when you can do more? Today’s guest is Andy Paul and he shares with us ways you can help young sales leaders become better and more successful. Andy Paul was here on the show back in episodes 359 and 364. Since then, he’s been doing some unique stuff working […] The post TSE 726: How to Help Young Sales Leaders Become Great Leaders appeared first on The Sales Evangelist. |
Tue, 21 March 2017
As a sales leader, one of the most important tasks is to be the leader that people want to follow. We often find sales reps leaving the organization, not because they weren’t making money or the product is bad, but just because of the relationship side. How do you become that sales leader everybody loves? […] The post TSE 533: Become the Sales Leader People Want to Follow appeared first on The Sales Evangelist. |
Thu, 25 August 2016
Well, it’s actually an interesting dynamic when you have a team of young and veteran sellers. It’s not unusual for doubts to set in and you ask yourself questions like: Is there a better way to approach this? Or do the things you do translate to leading a more senior group? The internal battle sure […] The post TSE 386: How To Lead A Team Of Veteran Sellers As A Young Sales Leader appeared first on The Sales Evangelist. |