- Decide to be World Class
- Identify your current state of your Sales Organization
- Raise Expectations
- Hire / Replace / Expand with stronger sales and sales management.
- Train and coach until the end of time.
- Turn your Sales Managers into the Best Sales Coaches in the world.
Step 1.
Making the decision is the first step to anything. Often the question of How gets in the way. How is no one of our business. The how will show up when it’s time to show up. Here is a You Tube movie clip video that will explain this further if you have doubt.
Step 2.
Remember the owl in the tree in the childhood book, “Alice in Wonderland”? Alice was came up out of the hole and asks the owl. Which way to I go? The wise ol’ owl said, “If you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there.” Same here, you can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are starting from. You must first have the answers to the following questions.
After you have the answers to these questions there must be a plan to fix the cause of the current unacceptable outcomes. And an action plan must be defined for each salesperson, Sales Manager, and Sales Leader, Strategies, and Systems and Processes.
Step 3.
Every current employee deserves a seat on the bus and a chance to improve. The first 90 days action plan includes: 1. A strong robust Personal Goals Plan that ties the company goals to the individual personal goals with the personal goals requiring greater revenue than the company goal. 2. A consistent effective Coaching program to insure individual growth with each coaching session ending with an action plan and an exercise to abolish the weakness that prevents the desired outcome. 3. A frequent solid accountability system for daily activities that produce desired outcomes. However, if in the first 90 days in the action plan is not executed by sales and/or Sales Management and/ or Sales Leadership by default those that continue to resist improvement and development are showing you they do not want to ride the bus. They will self-terminate and must be replaced with only A players.
Step 4.
Don’t make the mistake of waiting to find replacements. Begin on day one recruiting for A players and always have a bench to pull from. A players will elevate the entire team. Follow a strategic Sales Specific Hiring process and take the guess work out of the hiring. (Check out our Sales Hiring Program – SHARK)
Step 5.
Training is often frowned upon. I don’t’ need training. I’m already hitting quota. What’s this BS about a sales program. Pilots train every day! Professional Athletes train year-round. Training is honing your skills, learning new skills, consistently improving and preparing for the ability to create and generate the desired outcomes. Roleplay, role play, role play is the key mantra.
Step 6.
Coaching is an art and a science. There must be a systematic process for Sales Coaching and there must be a sales system to Coach to. Without these coaching enables instead of empowering? A formal coaching weekly rhythm will establish consistent growth. Each coaching session must end with a lesson and an action plan. The coaching system will identify where in the sales process the salesperson went off track and if that cause is conceptual or technical. Technical means they didn’t know what they were supposed to do to keep on track. Conceptual means they knew what they were supposed to do but were uncomfortable executing. Technical issues are easy to fix with a well-defined milestone sales process. Conceptual issues can be defined in Step 2 above. The action plans are simple and should take no more than 30 minutes. For example: if the coaching session identifies the problem is not asking enough of the right questions, the exercise would be to write down 15 questions that could be asked in the next meeting with similar circumstances. Another example could be to reach a chapter in a book and write a brief summary that will cause different thinking and therefore different action.