Barriers to Maximizine Revenue

I have been working with business leaders my whole career spanning over 25 years. A lot has changed since I first started working. No one smokes at their desks, drinking a scotch, scrolling their roll-o-dex and dictating a letter to their assistant who would then go type it up on the typewriter. Today, we are a mobile workforce. We work from coffee shops and drivers seats, using CRMs and high powered marketing automation tools. In all that time, one thing has remained the same, one of the top leadership concerns is that the sales force is leaving money on the table. I often wondered why the leadership believed this. This is despite having sales numbers that met or exceeded targets. The leaders just felt that the sales team was not performing as well as they could.

My original belief was that leaders were just overly optimistic about their products and services and how well they would be received by the marketplace. But over the years, that opinion has changed. I now see what these leaders intuitively felt. There sales teams could have been doing more, performing better. What I discovered is that if you ensure your employees, and that includes your sales team, feel at least safe, if not encouraged, to be creative, think out of the box, and take risks to achieve better results then they will. If you give them a process to follow, so they don't waste energy on determining what to do next and take away tasks that are not their core focus so they can focus on the key task at hand, they perform at the highest levels. They will deliver at a 120 to 200% higher than average. I have seen this first hand, I have experimented with this approach, I have read all the research. It works! It is not easy to get your employees to feel safe and encouraged. Most employers don't do that. The threat of reprimand or getting fired lingers and with some employees it is actual becomes baggage (especially if they were fired for the wrong reasons) that they have to overcome before they can feel safe again. So here is how you go about creating that safe environment for your sales team.

Common vision and agreement

There needs to be a common vision, objective and goal that the sales people each buy into and that they help create. It must be realistic, challenging and perhaps scalable. There needs to be real reward sharing, mutual target setting, and most of all there needs to be support to train and help those who aren't making the grade. There is no threat of firing. There are rewards and encouragement for creativity and responsible risk taking. There is above all support, coaching and training available ideally from an outside source. Above all, the sales person needs to agree to this model 100%.

Transparency and Integrity

This is not a program to increase revenues. This is the right thing to do and the side effect will be increased sales. It's important it works this way, because at some point things are going to get tough. Sales won't be there, clients will leave, markets will change, stuff happens and when it does, you need to be transparent and full of integrity and carry out your side of the agreement. You are going to need all the creativity and responsible risk taking you can get from your team in tough situations.

Process

You need to have and continually improve (harvested from the creativity and risk taking) a sales process. Call this the sales playbook. What to do when. It address every step of the process and how to deal with obstacles and challenges along the way. This doesn't mean there is no room for creativity, just the opposite. Use your energy on exciting and new ways to do things versus spending all your energy on what is the next step.

Focus

Remove or outsource or automate steps that interfere with the main objective. Have your sales team build relationships and spend time with leads and clients, don't have them doing tedious research on lead generation or hours of relationship building wasting away on 1 in 100 prospects. They need to capture information and report it, they need to build relationships they need to negotiate and educate (to some degree) leads. I do not have my clients sales people doing lead generation, it is outsourced. The salespeople deal with qualified leads not prospects. They get referrals to other qualified leads, they don't do cold calling. Lead generation can be done far less expensive by the right third party because they have invested in the tools to bring down the costs. Not all Lead Generation systems are the same. Some are not effective and simple play a numbers game. Others use sales techniques to start building the relationship for you. (contact me if you want to know more [email protected])

Tools

Sales people should be encouraged to find and buy tools that would help them be successful on an individual level. Too often, I've talked to sales people about employing a new tool or software to help them be more effective and I hear back the company won't pay for that. I ask them, if you paid for it this month, would your increase in commissions going forward pay for it and make you even more money in the future? Let this happen, encourage it, some tools, programs etc are unique to a salesperson to help them alone. I encourage companies to be open to paying for those tools, but also I encourage salespeople to not let little obstacles get in the way of their success. Find a way to win.

Of course the entire company culture needs to support the transparency and integrity belief and culture. It is not about writing it on the wall, it is about walking the talk. People need to feel safe, like someone has their back, before they can perform at their highest level. Make sure you provide the culture, environment, tools and support to make this happen. What would your organization look like if you doubled sales next year?

If you would like to discuss any of this further or would like to know next steps please feel free to contact me at [email protected]

About BricConsulting:

BricConsulting helps small and medium businesses scale and grow. We work holistically with organizations through strategy, growth plans, sales, lead generation, staffing, operations, partnerships, etc. to take organizations to the next level or achieve the next objective. You can see more at www.bricconsulting.ca or email [email protected]