| Top Story |
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| This is a weekly column transcribed from my Radio Show. The "Top Story" is the major discussion each week in which I address in great depth and detail, aspects of selling that are pertinent to your job everyday. |
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| Three Types of Salespeople |
Sales management is one of those very much misunderstood career paths that many of us take.
I mentioned that my training as a salesperson was "Go get 'em!" I was actually pretty good as a salesperson. I built a territory from the bottom of the pack, rising from 73 out of 75 in my region to number 3 in my region in just about two years. After I was doing that successfully I got some attention around the company obviously, and one day the boss, the VP of sales, called me into the office and said, "Warren we've got to talk." And I said, "Well what to you want to talk about, Bob?" And he said, "You've done such a great job in your territory, we're going to make you the sales manager." And he said, "You've done such a great job taking an under-performing territory and making it into the top three that we're going to give you another opportunity. We're not going to give you a geographic sales management territory. We're going to give you the 14 worst territories in the region, and your job is to get those territories up to standard." And here came my sales managers training. Are you ready for this? "Got get 'em, Warren!" The same three words he told me when I was a salesperson became my sales manager training! Obviously I had to teach myself how to be a good sales manager. And I know a lot of people out there are in the same boat today as I was in more than 20 years ago. That's why I want to talk about how important some of these skills are.
Now the thing I'm going to talk about today which I call the three classifications of salespeople came to the fore again just this last week when I was traveling around the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin for one of my client companies doing sales consulting and sales management consulting. The question came up: How do you manage different salespeople? Should they all be held to the same standard? Or are there techniques that are different depending on the salesperson?
The answer is, you manage different salespeople differently within boundaries.
There are some things that we all need as sales managers that are non-negotiable. For example, let's say that you're not as much interested in call reports. That is to say, you're looking to find out where salespeople have been in the previous week, but your main interest is finding out what salespeople are doing to plan for the following week or the next week coming up. And your goal is to know whom they're seeing, what they're talking about and what the agenda is for those various sales calls that they're making. Now if that's something you need in order to find out where you should spend your time as a sales manager - or maybe your organization needs that information for forecasting or for understanding what type of coverage your sales people are getting or giving you in the territories - then I don't care if you're any of the three categories or either of the three categories we're talking about today. If that's something you need then everybody has to comply with that request.
I just want to make sure that we all understand that there are certain things that are non-negotiable when you're a sales manager, and you have to figure out what battles you're going to fight, so to speak, or what positions you're going to stake out, and be able to be firm which is something we talked about a couple of weeks ago. The part of leadership in being a sales manager is being firm, so your salespeople know when you say something you mean it!
OK, so let's look at the three different classifications of salespeople. The first one is called the under-performer. So let's say that the standard for you in your business is that within each particular territory you need $1,000,000 worth of business. Now some people might do 1.3 million or 1.4 million. But the minimum standard, based on the geography that you've carved out and based on the way you organize your sales team, is that you need $1,000,000 per territory. What we've just established is the minimum acceptable level of performance.
Now what if you have a salesperson who is annualizing at the rate of $600,000 a year? Well what you have is an under-performer. And in that case, because you have an under-performer, that person needs the most hands-on management; that person needs the most accountability; that person needs you to take the most active role.
Now that's not to say that you ignore the other categories I'm going to talk about. What it does mean is, if you have an under-performer in your business they're actually hurting you, and sometimes it's hard to let those people go. And you say, "Well, at least I'm getting X number of dollars worth of sales." Sometimes it's better to have no salesperson covering that territory on an outbound basis. And you do it all through the telephone until you find the right type of person that can deliver you that $1,000,000 worth of business, as in this example.
Now if you're having an under-performing salesperson you need to be able to manage their activity, that's the key. "Activity" means: How many new contacts did you attempt in this reporting period? I like to keep it in a weekly type basis, so in the last week how many new people did you try and contact? How many decision-makers did you actually get hold of? How many new appointments did you have during the week previous? How many product presentations did you make? How many needs analyses did you do? How many times did you ask for the order? How many times did you get the order? How much business did you write? How many referrals did you ask for? How many referrals did you receive?
These are all very measurable statistics that we need the young or under-performing salesperson to report to us. They are the ones that are managed most actively from a statistics standpoint.
What about the second category? The second category is called the under-achiever. Now let's use the same example. Let's say you've got a million dollar territory and this person's bringing in $1,000,000 worth of sales. And you know that with the right type of motivation or inspiration or leadership this person actually is a 1.3 or 1.4 million dollar salesperson masquerading as a one million dollar salesperson. Now look at the productivity you get if you could figure out a way to inspire that person to achieve more than they are achieving today.
A lot of reasons why people fall into this second category of what I'm calling under-achiever is that they've reached their comfort zone and based on the way they're being paid - either through commission or salary plus commission or incentive or bonus or whatever - they're doing just fine and they're not really inspired to do any more. Well, if that's the case you have to figure out a way to get that person to describe to you what are some of the goals they'd like to accomplish in their life, and then we tie their performance and their compensation and their inspiration to achieving more.
The other thing you could do is raise the quota, which I'm not a big fan of. But if you think that territory and that person could actually be doing 1.4 million you base the overall compensation on 1.4 instead of 1.0. And now that person has to write more business and has to do more sales to make the same amount of money. Now I'm not advocating that, but it's a sure way to get the attention of the under-achiever.
Now the flip side to that, or the back side or the bad side, is if you're constantly raising quotas so people have to do more and more and more to make the same, you run the risk of alienating them, chasing them away, or actually having them go work for a competitor which you don't want to do. The under-achiever needs less statistics-oriented type management. The way to lead that person is to encourage them and inspire them to do better because of something that's in it for them. So you can work on high-level skills, strategic planning skills, key account management. You can give them larger accounts to work on and let them know that their job is to lead the charge and crack some of these large accounts that nobody else seems to be able to do.
Now you get to the performer. I also call this person the over-achiever. This is the person who's already doing 1.3 or 1.4 million dollars in a $1,000,000 territory. They're consistently your top performer.
Now the interesting thing is that so many times the top performer is the type of person that might not be as adaptable or as amenable to some of the management type things that we tend to place in front of them. Now this is going to sound like a contradiction to some of the things I've talked about before, specifically that you have to be firm. When in a sales management capacity, within that structure, within that firmness, we also need to be flexible. And what that means is, your main job when you're working with a performer or an over-achiever is to do whatever you can to remove roadblocks. Even sometimes within your own company there are roadblocks. And your job is to remove those so that salesperson can excel and sell more and more and more.
Your second job with these types of salespeople is to guide them, counsel them, coach them to help them think bigger, to help them dream bigger, to help them set bigger goals and bigger targets for themselves. A lot of times these people respond to challenges, and the only reason they're not doing even more business is because nobody ever put that large goal in front of them. They know they're doing a good job and they get, not lazy, but they get happy doing what they're doing. And our job as sales leaders is to constantly challenge those people do be better and to do more, to make it in terms they understand so they do it for their reasons not ours.
Now also these people get the most flexibility in terms of reporting, in terms of things that you would require of an under-performer and sometimes an under-achiever. The over-achiever, the performer type salesperson, kind of gets one of those "get out of jail free" cards to quote a Monopoly phrase. They have the most flexibility. Then if other people in the organization say, "Well gee whiz! Jack doesn't have to do this. Why do I have to?" the response is: "You know what? When you can do what Jack does and you can do that three years in a row I'll cut you the same type if slack" So it's OK to be slightly more flexible with the performer or the over-achiever.
Most of the top salespeople in most companies that I work with are just a little bit cut from a different cloth, and they need a slightly different type of management. They're not all round pegs in round holes. And so many times top performers get chased out of companies only because the leadership and management is based on structure and firmness and formality, and it makes these people feel like they're the canaries in the cage and they have to fly away.
Well those are my thoughts today on my ongoing discussion on sales management. And what I talked about today are the three types of salespeople and how sometimes they get managed differently. We've talked about the under-performer, the under-achiever and the performer or over-achiever. I hope this has helped people who are in a sales management capacity. And if you're a salesperson and you're in the under-performer category think of ways you can move up to under-achiever. I guess that's not really something to aspire to. But even more, think about ways you can become a performer and an over-achiever and then lead your management to lead you in the way you'd like to be led.
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Obligating Questions as a Selling Advantage
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Unlearning
We sometimes have to unlearn to become a better salesperson. Not learn, but unlearn. Think about that. Think...
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Keeping Score
Keeping score in selling is as important as keeping score in a baseball game. Knowing what statistics to measure...
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– Warren
Wechsler |
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