40% Of Salespeople Miss Quota

"You only have to do one thing really well to make it in this world."

- Janis Joplin  

If that is true, and who can doubt Janis Joplin, then why do we ask salespeople to do so many things well?

I saw this headline in a marketing blog by John Sonnhalter and it peaked my interest. I wonder why?

40% of Salespeople Finished 2013 Under Quota

Well here are the results showing the most common reasons:

Here is my take on the solutions to the "pains":

1. 54% say the opportunities end up as "no decisions". Study after study show only 3% of any population is ready to buy "something" (a refrigerator, a massage, whatever) in the next few weeks. 80% of all sales are made between the 5^th and the 12^th contact. Only 10% of salespeople make more than 3 followups. Need we say more? This is a huge disconnect.
   
   Solution: After the salesperson makes the intial call, put the "leads" in your database and send them weekly or monthly TIPS (blogs, news briefs, videos), no selling - just really good information to serve them. When they are ready to buy they will call you, because they know, like and trust you. This is the only way I know to contact them 12 times or more and do it in a positive way, building trust. We cannot expect a salesperson to make 5-12 followups. What are they going to say? "Hi just following up" or "Just checking back"? Pleeeeease!
    
2. 33% state they are "burdened with tasks and spend less time selling". That is not shocking. The national average for outside salespeople is that they make on average 1.5 calls per day. Why? Many reasons but the most common one is "following up, reporting, coordinating, quoting, taking orders, handling customer concerns and questions, etc."
   
   Solution: Less salespeople and a sales coordinator teamed with each salesperson at half the price of a salesperson. My experience, and case study after case study, show you can double your sales at ¾ of the costs. A sales coordinator handles all of the above for the salesperson, freeing them to have sale conversations 6-8 times a day or more. Here is a flow chart I built for a client.

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

America's Happiest Employees

"Hire someone to do a job and they will work for your money, find someone that believes what you believe and they will give you their blood, sweat and tears."

-Simon Sintek

As we discover and rediscover the keys to a great business we keep coming back to the Right People, Doing the Right Things, Right.

I saw this article that studied companies across the US -Career Bliss rated the top 50 Happiest companies.  

It's a quick read, but contains some shared characteristics that seem to work.  First we need to define and write down the core purpose of our business. Only then can we hire people who believe what we believe. Then we need to create and maintain an environment that reinforces our values and core purpose. 

Dan Pink's findings are pretty much in line with this company's findings.

Employees need to feel they have a mastery of their job, autonomy to do it "their way" (to an extent) and --- this is vital---share the company's core purpose, WHY, or as they say in this article "meaning".

This core purpose or "why" that Simon is referring to in the quote above sounds warm and fuzzy to many small business owners, but it is comes up time and again when we talk about More Time, More Money and a Better Team.

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

I Told Them

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

- George Bernard Shaw

The single most important attribute of a leader, a coach, is to communicate well. A leader/coach has to have a vision and goals of where she wants to go, and she needs to align the team and take them there.  

That means "consistently" communicating to your team. I have had clients who finally set goals and wrote down a vision and then got the team together at the first of the quarter and told them what they were. Then they don't look or talk about them until the end of the quarter when I review with them how they performed. Some even tied bonuses to these numbers.

Wow what a waste of money! Either nothing is said, if we don't meet the goals, or worse, we hand out checks for something the team has totally forgotten about.

Communication takes consistency. The process I utilize is The Leadership Matrix and it instills that consistency in communications and ensures execution.

We ensure communication, follow up and execution through developing a rhythm in the business. We have team-based, weekly 20 minute Huddles, reviewing the goals and how we are doing against them, and Dashboards to ensure follow up on major tactical projects. We have weekly Coaching Conversations (10 -15 minutes long), one-on-one with direct reports to discuss how the individual is doing on their contribution to achieving the goals,how we can help them and to focus them on the right things.

Telling them once in a group doesn't work. To really communicate something we need to do it over and over with the team as a group AND one-on-one. In this way we align the team with where we are going, and we can motivate the team with the goals we have set by reviewing our progress weekly throughout the quarter.

Here's to process and consistency. 

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

I Quit!

"When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them."

-- Zig Ziglar, Motivational Speaker

I think the number one instigator of stress in a business is people. Whether it is the employee with the bad attitude (that we never seem to let go because we don't want to have to recruit someone new), or the employee that walks in one day and resigns.

How do you eliminate these two big stressors? Always be recruiting and build a Virtual Bench.  

A Virtual Bench is a list of great people who are working for someone else but have been vetted and acknowledge they would like to work for you in the future. Always be recruiting means keeping your eyes and ears open all the time to people you encounter with great attitudes and talents.

But you don't like recruiting. How do we overcome anything we dread doing? By simply doing it and making it a habit over time. The more we practice it, the easier and more fun it can be.

Plus, if you don't have a job opening hanging over you, the pressure of filling the slot is absent and the whole process can be more enjoyable.

So if we are always looking for talent, talking, meeting and vetting your Virtual Bench at least two stress inducing events no longer will stress you out.    

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

Just One Note

"It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important."

-- Steve Jobs, Apple Co-founder

From Seth Godin: 

Starting at the age of nine, I played the clarinet for eight years.

Actually, that's not true. I took clarinet lessons for eight years when I was a kid, but I'm not sure I ever actually played it.

Eventually, I heard a symphony orchestra member play a clarinet solo. It began with a sustained middle C, and I am 100% certain that never once did I play a note that sounded even close to the way his sounded.

And yet...

And yet the lessons I was given were all about fingerings and songs and techniques. They were about playing higher or lower or longer notes, or playing more complex rhythms. At no point did someone sit me down and say, "wait, none of this matters if you can't play a single note that actually sounds good."

Instead, the restaurant makes the menu longer instead of figuring out how to make even one dish worth traveling across town for. We add many slides to our presentation before figuring out how to utter a single sentence that will give the people in the room chills or make them think. We confuse variety and range with quality.

Practice is not the answer here. Practice, the 10,000 hours thing, practice alone doesn't produce work that matters. No, that only comes from caring. From caring enough to leap, to bleed for the art, to go out on the ledge, where it's dangerous. When we care enough, we raise the bar, not just for ourselves, but for our customer, our audience and our partners.

It's obvious, then, why I don't play the clarinet any more. I don't care enough, can't work hard enough, don't have the guts to put that work into the world. This is the best reason to stop playing, and it opens the door to go find an art you care enough to make matter instead. Find and make your own music.

The cop-out would be to play the clarinet just a little, to add one more thing to my list of mediocre.

As Jony Ive said, "We did it because we cared, because when you realize how well you can make something, falling short, whether seen or not, feels like failure."

It's much easier to add some features, increase your network, get some itemized tasks done. Who wants to feel failure?

We opt for more instead of better.

Better is better than more.