Secrets of Superior Sales Performance, Part 2: Staff and Skills

Written by Lissa C. Versteegh Thursday, March 31 2011

(Part 1: Strategy and Structure)
Firm foundation and sound structure (Part 1) set the stage for growth. Most any successful business owner will tell you that sales is the engine that makes a company run. With that in mind, it is absolutely critical to hire well, keep churn to a minimum, and fully leverage all members of the team for their absolute best-fit position. That is the “staff” piece of the sales equation.

Is Your Sales Staff Prepared?
How often business owners say of the sales team, “If they don’t hit their numbers we will just fire them and hire someone else.” Rarely do business owners, presidents, CEOs, or, for that matter, sales managers realize the true cost of turnover. Sure, you can fire underperformers and replace them, but at what cost?

Every new sales professional should come with a price tag. Realizing how much it costs to bring on a new person frequently is shocking. As you begin to add up the executive hours invested in interviewing, the lost opportunity cost both during replacement and ramp-up time, as well as the missed-opportunity cost of having an underperforming sales person in the position in the first place, the number can quickly become daunting.

It is a great reminder and one that too many businesses overlook relative to the importance of hiring well on the front end.

Another common struggle involves management’s inability to ascertain whether or not they have the right people on the sales team to get the company to the next level. Objectively assessing each contributing member of a sales team is a critical tool for every high-functioning, sales-driven organization. And that doesn’t mean a gut assessment or an analysis based on last year’s performance or knowledge of how well they are liked by their customers and colleagues.

There are many tools available to provide for you an objective look at a sales professional’s skills on a behavioral level. Once that valuable data is gathered, then you can begin to implement plans for improvement. More importantly, you can identify strengths and leverage them to the benefit of both the company and the individual contributor.

One last area that must be addressed relative to staff is the hiring process itself. It is truly astounding how many hiring managers will interview and hire only candidates with industry experience. Any company is better off hiring someone with sales skills and no industry experience than the other way around. Any sales manager should be able to teach a sales person new product knowledge within a fairly short period of time.

But if sales people lack the ability to execute the basics of good sales skills, then the organization is sunk, and it will be just a matter of time before that becomes apparent.

Another misconception is that if you hire someone from your industry you are buying market share. You calculate that such people have Rolodexes full of clients with whom they have fabulous relationships. They assure you that most of those clients will follow them. Warning: If you are considering hiring a portable Rolodex, don’t do it. That Rolodex rarely travels well.

Once you have hired the right people, it is essential that you give them the skills they need in order to do their jobs. The skills must be executable, step-by-step, block-and-tackle techniques that allow sales people to function well.

Does Your Sales Team Have the Right Skills?
Getting in front of the right people with the right frequency is job No. 1 for any successful sales professional. Seems easy enough, right? Maybe not. By the time sales professionals get in front of a prequalified suspect, they should have employed a whole host of sales skills. Unfortunately, too often so much focus is placed on the actual number of appointments a sales person has that potential areas of weakness are overlooked.

Sales managers have a wonderful opportunity to set sales professionals up for success by making sure they have three critical ingredients in their prospecting mix: a compelling 30-second “commercial,” well-developed communication skills, and a “cookbook” of behaviors that allows them to track activities and conversion rates between dials, conversations, appointments, and sales.

Assuming your sales professionals are getting to the right folks with the right frequency, are they preserving the company’s margins when they close business? Price pressure abounds in today’s world. Sales people who have not developed the skills to have a peer-to-peer budget discussion often will drop their price to close business. And sacrificing margins to close business will kill business. That is not sales.

Let us assume for a moment you have good sales people with happy customers. Do your sales people ask for referrals? I don’t mean the occasional happy customer who says something nice about the sales professional or the company. I mean, does everyone on your team proactively ask for referrals? Are all of your sales professionals comfortable doing that, and are their clients comfortable, too? It is truly a skill worth developing.

Referrals close for business 80 percent of the time. Referrals are so important that they should have goals attached. And referalls should be tracked. Otherwise, how do you know your sales people are meeting expectations?

The last skill is “unpaid consulting.” Let’s see if this scenario resonates with you. You have a sales person who has just come to you requesting help with a detailed proposal laying out how your company can solve the prospective client’s problems.

You pull people off of other projects to get this important proposal done. With your solution firmly in hand the prospect does one of two things. Either she takes your information and gives it to your competition to drive price down or she implements your solutions herself.

Either way, your sales person gave up too much far too early, with no commitment from the prospect. Hold on to such solutions until your sales person has real understanding of the prospect’s needs and a commitment for a “yes” or “no” decision to move forward. Otherwise, much time can be wasted with little, if any, new business gained.

Lissa C. Versteegh is president of Georgia Sales Development, a Sandler Training affiliate that helps companies increase their sales effectiveness by focusing on the people and the processes. The approach centers around using a systematic sales process throughout a company.

Prior to acquiring her Sandler Training franchise, Versteegh had 19 years of sales and management experience in corporate America. Her experience ranges from direct sales at a local then national level to sales management of a $40-million region for a national managed-care company. Today, she works with presidents, CEOs, and business owners, helping them acquire and retain sales teams with consistently superior performance.

Versteegh is president-elect of the Georgia Executive Women’s Network. She and husband, Ron, have a 9-year-old son, Garrett.