Ordinary is something you are taught. You may have been infected with the idea that you are not to make waves, not to stand out, and not to draw attention to yourself. The people around you likely shared a set of common goals and beliefs like: go to school, get an education, get a good job, and work towards retirement. Even the people who love you will want to keep you safe, perhaps even telling you that using your gift is too dangerous, that you may get hurt.

what to do with under performing sales people When salespeople are not producing results?

#1 Not Enough Activity

The first reason you aren’t producing the results you want right now is because you aren’t taking enough action to produce them. There is no harvest in Autumn if you do not plant in the Spring.

Activity is what produces results, not desire, not intentions, and not luck. If you really desire a certain result, you’ll do the work necessary to produce it. Otherwise, it’s just talk. Intentions are important, but only when coupled with action. You can grow old waiting for luck to find you; she only looks for hustlers.

If you aren’t where you want to be right now, it’s very likely that you aren’t doing what is necessary to get there. If you were, you would already have what you want.

#2 Not The right Activity

Maybe you are taking massive action and still aren’t where you want to be, even though that’s less likely to be true.

You may believe that the activity you are taking isn’t the right activity. Before you decide that this is the case, you have to honestly determine whether or not you’ve done enough of that activity to get the results you want. Have you gone all in? Would some impartial party know exactly what you were trying to accomplish by looking at the actions you are taking, believing it to be an extraordinary effort?

You also have to decide whether you’ve done enough activity for long enough to get the results you want. Some outcomes you want require persistence, and that’s why so few produce those outcomes. It rarely makes sense to switch strategies and tactics without first executing against what you believe to be right.

All that said, if what you are doing isn’t working, treat each failure as feedback, and then change your approach. Find a model, someone who is already producing the result you want, and look for clues as to what they are doing differently. Repeat this until you find something that works, and then go all in.

The obstacles to success are almost exclusively internal. Even when they are not, with enough energy and effort applied consistently over time, the obstacle will yield.

6 Steps in the Right Direction

Step 1: Compare Yourself to Others

I don’t compare myself to anyone else. I just want to be better than the person I was yesterday.” This is one of those statements that sounds good on the surface, but is harmful when it comes to success (whatever that means to you). Comparing yourself to other people is necessary if you want to be more, do more, have more, and contribute more.

Lacking Knowledge

Without a point of comparison, you have no idea how you’re doing. Do you do excellent work? How do you know? How can you know without a point of comparison?

Do you have impeccable character, the kind of values that make you someone people want to work with, want to know, and want in their life? Do you know what impeccable character is without knowing what it is not?

How is your family and your health? How are you doing financially? To define how you are doing, you need some way to measure where you are.

The risk in trying only to be better than you were yesterday is that maybe you aren’t doing well enough for that to be a useful measurement.

Lacking Vision

When you compare yourself, you get an idea as to where you fall on some scale of measurement. Without that comparison, you would not know what’s possible. Without making observations as to how other people are doing, you don’t have an informed idea of what is possible for you.

Have you ever met someone and thought, “If that person can do that, so can I?” Exactly. You just needed to see it done, recognizing that the person succeeding in some area is really no different than you. Or at least the version of you who is willing to strive.

Comparing what you are doing to what other people are doing can help you develop a bigger vision of yourself.

Step 2: Spend Time with People More Successful Than You

You can’t see your potential from where you are now. It isn’t visible to you.

First, success is personal.

It isn’t measured on a curve. Your definition of success and my definition of success might be vastly different. They may even be at odds. In fact, you living my definition of success might make you miserable, while me living your definition of success might not make me the least bit happy.

There is a reason that you should spend time and develop relationships with people who are more successful than you are now. But before we get into all the reasons this is true, we need to cover a few important issues.

Second, success can get a bad rap, and some people make the very pursuit of success a divisive issue.

Success shouldn’t be divisive, and the idea that you need to surround yourself with people who have a greater level of success is not a judgment of the people you love and care about that aren’t experiencing the same level of success as the people you will need to spend time with.

The reason you need to spend time with people who are more successful than you is because you can’t see your real potential from where you are now.

Your potential is far greater than anything You can imagine. The only limit on your real potential is the limit of your awareness of what is possible for you. Your potential isn’t visible to you.

Think about where you were years ago, when you weren’t as successful as you are right now in some area of your life.

Your beliefs and behaviours were different than they are now. And even though you weren’t conscious of how they were limiting you, they acted as a governor on your success. At some point, you gained an awareness of these beliefs and behaviours and changed them.

Someone standing higher up on a mountain can see further than you can. They can also more easily see the path that is available to you, even if it isn’t yet clear to you. They have a greater view of your potential. By spending time with people who are more successful, you start to become conscious of what you believe and how it limits you. You also gain the advantage of transforming faster by finding people whose beliefs and behaviours you can model.

Develop relationships with people who are more successful than you. Find mentors. Develop a mastermind group of people who have something you want, whatever that is, be it financial success or being a great parent, or whatever you call success.

If you are going to listen to
advice, first determine whose
advice is worth taking.

STEP 3: Avoid bad advice.

A lot of people will offer you advice. Most of it, you should avoid.

Avoid people who:

Part 2 will be published next month or you can download the e-book today.

The post What To Do With Under Performing Sales People Who Are Not Producing Results?(part 1) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells the story of a road trip taken by an unnamed author and his son Chris, from Minnesota to Northern California on their motorbikes. The book holds the Guinness World Record as the most rejected bestseller in history, racking up a staggering 121 rejections by publishes all over the world. It went on to sell more than 5 million copies.

This book had a profound impact on me when I first read it as a 16 year old. As the books main protagonists debated the essence of ‘quality’, the balance between romanticism and rationality and the pursuit of ‘pure truth”, I knew without a shadow of a doubt I was way out of my intellectual depth. But at the same time I was intrigued. The book opened my eyes to concepts that still impact me to this day, like the search for meaning, enlightenment and purpose in our lives and in our work.

Sitting in a weekly sales forecast call, discussing the ‘close potential’ of a long list of deals, is about as far away as you can get from the search for truth and enlightenment which Pirsig so elegantly portrayed in his book…or is it? Once you start to peel the onion a little, some interesting parallels begin to emerge.

• The practice of Zen Buddhism often takes the form of intensive group meditation: That certainly holds true for most forecast meetings
• Zen Buddhism requires weekly if not daily dedication from its practitioners: In many B2B sales organisations, forecasting is now a daily ritual as well
• Zen Buddhism focuses the mind on removing doubt and uncertainty to expose truth: In theory, so does sales forecasting.
• Zen Buddhist meditation usually takes place in a seated position: With one notable exception, every sales forecast meeting I’ve been in I was sitting down.

“For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses” Robert M. Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In my experience, and I must stress this is only my experience, these are some of the best and worst sales forecasting practices I have observed over the years:

Sales forecasting – The Bad

• Over or under forecasting (also known as ‘bottom drawering’) – There are many reasons this behaviour occurs, including inexperienced salespeople, a poor sales culture in the business and the lack of a consistent sales process.
• Lack of lead housekeeping (especially common with in-bound web leads and event follow-ups) – Duplicate data, deals which aren’t updated, lack of notes in relation to a deal, these and many more factors lead to poor lead housekeeping.
• Zombie deals that never die (deals that last longer at a company than you do!) – Lack of forecast accountability by sales managers often lead to deals which hang around for months or years, constantly being pushed out to the next quarter, only to pop up again like the undead.
• Naivety or happy ears (it can be tricky to balance optimism with pragmatism) – Most sales people are optimists, however a healthy dose of sales paranoia is also required, to avoid falling into the trap of believing everything you hear or want to hear.

Sales forecasting – The Good

• Consistently accurate forecast (usually within a few percent of your commit figure) – Sales people with an in-depth understanding of their opportunities, who have established strong lines of communication with the customer or prospect and manage expectations on both sides of the fence.
• Attention to detail (many salespeople struggle in this area) – Knowing your deal, the possible road-blocks, the compelling drivers, the sign-off steps, the competitive landscape etc. will invariably be the difference between accurate and inaccurate forecasting.
• Asking the right questions (objection handling is a critical skillset to master) – Intelligent and ongoing discovery questions throughout the sales cycle, coupled with active listening, objection handling and problem solving skills are key to hitting your forecast.
• A healthy dose of paranoia (the perfect antidote to happy ears) – Optimism is important in sales. However constantly testing, questioning and refining the information at your disposal is absolutely critical. Avoid making assumptions or using out of date information to infer outcomes

So how do you fix a broken sales forecasting process?

Step 1 – Start by creating a consistent sales process. Sounds simple doesn’t it? I wonder how many of you reading this post have a written down or visually represented sales process that the whole sales team follows, which you can share with your customers in some instances?

Step 2 is a tricky one because it involves having honest conversations, both internally and with your customer. In order to forecast accurately, you need to understand where they are at in their buying cycle and overlay that onto your sales process to determine the gaps. This single step should lead to a significant reduction in the confusion and misinformation which exists in the average sales forecast.

Step 3 – Once you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, things begin to get a little more interesting. As a sales leader, the onus is on you to create a culture of trust and honesty. Your sales team have to be allowed to provide an honest assessment of an opportunity, rather than feel they are being painted into a corner.

I was a classic ‘bottom drawer’ sales rep during my years carrying a quota. This became my default setting for some years, because I often felt forced to commit a number I was uncomfortable committing to. So I managed expectations downwards, assuming I needed a buffer to protect against a forced uplift on my commit number. This sort of game playing, creates a culture of doubt and uncertainty in a sales team and creates forecast inaccuracy

Step 4 – Make your sales team accountable for the number. It seems like an obvious statement, so let’s drill down on it. The symptoms are easy to spot:

• Lack of detail or understanding around key opportunities in their pipeline,
• Deals which regularly slip or are constantly pushing out to the next quarter,
• Consistently missing their forecast commits (either over or under).

A good sales manager creates an environment conducive to an accurate sales forecast. They foster a culture of trust and honesty within the team, provide advice and support, whilst ensuring each member of the sales team is held accountable for their own forecast accuracy.

The post Zen And The Art Of Sales Forecasting appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Sorry if that offends anyone but it’s the truth. Leadership sets the tone and creates the focus in every organization; and culture is nothing more, nothing less, than the behavior of the leaders. Sales meetings often reveal short-term or lazy mindsets and sadly waste the time of most of the participants.

First a confession. I’ve held roles as sales manager and director of sales for public corporations and then Managing Director of global technology companies where I ran the Asia-Pacific region. I’ve been part of the problem in years past so this is a mirror just as much as a floodlight.

We all need to recognize that we cannot manage by results; only by activities and actions. If your sales meetings are dominated by the CRM on the big screen and blowtorch accountability sessions on forecast commits, then you’re focused on the wrong thing.

“83% of sales management metrics do not measure sales activities” – Jason Jordan, Cracking The Sales Management Code

In a group setting we need to inspire, educate and create the right focus. Individuals need to be encouraged to share their wisdom with others. Publicly embarrassing anyone is a sales meeting is a form of bullying. Weekly one-on-one sessions are where strong accountability should be driven and direct feedback given but even these private sessions are not the forum for any Gordon Ramsay style of coaching. There are no excuses for bullying… ever!

It’s almost always a mistake to fire-up the blowtorch and apply pressure to your sales people to go and explode a deal by applying clumsy pressure or making ill-conceived discount

offers or announcing hollow threats. Instead acknowledge that opening is far more important than closing and that understanding the customer’s timing and process is how to achieve accurate forecasting. We should always be asking the right questions of sales people at the beginning of the quarter and help them identify and execute the right actions that create progression. Applying the flame-thrower with just days to go in the quarter after neglecting the inputs that create success is a sure-fire way to damage relationships and drive-down price and margin. Pic in this paragraph by Jeff Warren (mike-lin-blowtorch).

In a sales meeting; by all means discuss key deals if multiple stakeholders are there and the group can contribute or learn. Here are some important principles for making sales meetings an effective use of everyone’s time:

• Motivate and inspire by celebrating success with individuals and recognize those who are over-achieving in their KPIs that ultimately create revenue. Highlight corporate wins and new customers. Always emphasize team effort along with the commitment of key individuals.
• Ensure that your marketing team is part of sales meetings and that you drive sales and marketing alignment and collaboration. This is a critical success factor for strategic social selling where sales people are content amplifiers and potential content creators. Sales people can learn from marketing to improve their messaging and branding on platforms such as LinkedIn.
• Collaboratively share market intelligence concerning competitor activity and tactics. Insights from both loss reviews and win review insights should be shared including trigger events that created interest with prospects early and then workshop how to create the most powerful conversations.
• Foster information sharing and train a skill or technique that can help people improve their skills to drive results. Invite a guest to speak or present briefly create better understanding of other parts of the business or how to best engage with partners.

I phoned a fellow sales leader, Wayne Moloney and asked

him for his thoughts as he just published an excellent book on sales management and here are his thoughts. He agreed with my list and offered additional thoughts.

Sales meetings should be about the team, not an individual,  and meeting should be more about the customer than your company.  The objective should be to ensure consistent communication of company messages.

Consider the teams overall performance and address any issues to get back on track. Seek feedback on what assistance the team needs to over-achieve their targets but don’t allow this to become a complaint session. Provide the team with something of value to help them succeed and be specific. Share examples of how a sale was won.

The meeting agenda should not be around the performance of individuals and limit it to one hour. Always start and finish on time. Don’t get stuck in a rut, change the order around and don’t have the same people talking each week. Ask one sales person each week to share something they have tried that’s working for them. It could be a way of getting into a new account, a way of presenting a new service/application (max 15 minutes including questions).

Ask individuals to present on a competitor or a new product, service, technology, process or solution. This will enable the manager to assess their skills and provide feedback and coaching later.

Tip of the Week – the sales managers chance to earn some ‘street cred’. Identify a weakness and provide suggestions on how to address, provide some market intelligence that they would not be aware of and could help them address a problem. It doesn’t need to be complex, just a positive to finish the meeting and help them leave thinking they got something they wouldn’t have if they didn’t attend.

Wayne’s book is excellent and the key point in all of this from me and Wayne is that sales meetings should inspire, educate and equip sales people to execute better with customers. Sales meeting should foster collaboration and serve the sales team, not the sales manager. Wasting everyone’s time going through individual deals may help the manager avoid 1:1 sessions with sales people but it’s not best practice.  If you run forecast updates then call the meetings exactly that. Preserve the title of ‘sales meeting’ for sessions that sales people want to attend and that provide value for all in attendance.

And now… the classic movie sales meeting from Glengarry Glen Ross with alec Baldwin.

The post How [Not] To Run A Sales Meeting appeared first on Head Of Sales.

How do you want to reach your sales goals? How do you need to adapt your plan for 2020 and beyond?

To create real and lasting business growth you need a solid sales plan.

To be on the front foot for 2020 we are planning NOW – are you?

A sales plan is the roadmap of the ‘who, where, why and how’ you will meet – even exceed – your goals for next year.

8 questions to help you develop your plan

1.     What are your goals for next year? Think big!

• What do you want to achieve?

2. What did and didn’t work in 2019?

• What insights do you have that will inform next year’s plans

3.     Do you have a month to month forecast based on insights and results from the previous year?

• What are your month by month actions to make this happen?
• What needs to happen to ‘farm’ these opportunities?
• What are the key milestones and deadlines?

4.     What are your specific niches to gain traction?

•  Target the main ones that you can help the most and grow your business the fastest?
• Are they already your top clients?

5.     Who are your top clients?

• How do you plan to add more value to them in 2020?
• What offers in your product suite are the natural next step for them to meet their goals?
• What’s going on in their business? They too are looking for new opportunities so what can you do to help them meet their goals?

6.     Who are your prospects?

• How do you plan to find more just like them and why?
• Who is sitting in your CRM just waiting for some help to plan their 2020?

7.     What partnerships or joint ventures can you develop to add mutual value to each other’s client base?

8.     Are there events or tradeshows where you should have a presence?

• If so, how will you leverage this activities?

2 tactics to be in the strongest mindset to develop your plans

1.     Remove all distractions

• Turn email notifications off
• Or even better – close your email down.
• Turn your phone to silent

2.     Change your environment

• Change your thinking by moving away from your desk
• Sit in a quiet meeting room where no one can interrupt you
• Take yourself out of the office

3.     An attitude of success

• Remind yourself of the successes/wins of the previous year
• Anchor those feelings to elevate a sense of optimism and possibility

How do and your sales team create your plan and how often do you review it once it is done? We like to have a ‘sales plan on a page’ and it’s up on the wall and it keeps us motivated and on track.

The post A Bullet Proof Sales Plan For The Year appeared first on Head Of Sales.

The Deal Manager – Manages Deals, Doesn’t Lead

The deal manager isn’t going to lead you. They are going to make you do a territory or account plan, and they aren’t going to provide you with any coaching. The deal manager does what you suspect; they manage deals. The deal manager isn’t concerned with your personal and professional development, your long terms goals, or the source of your motivation. The deal manager is only concerned with deals. You can learn a lot about deal management from this type of sales leaders, but you won’t gain much more during the time you work for them.

The Sycophant – Yes Man to Executive Leadership

I break out in hives when I interact with Sycophants. They’re difficult to talk to because they always have their lips pressed against their senior leader’s posterior. The sycophant tows the company line, come Hell or high water, providing a great sense of consistency and certainty, regardless of how bad, how unrealistic, or how difficult the initiative. They aren’t concerned at all with your performance, so long as it doesn’t reduce their standing with those above them in the hierarchy, as their strong desire is to climb up by sucking up.

Desk Jockey – Always Available by Email

If you have a desk jockey as a sales manager, you may not recognize them without first going to LinkedIn to view their profile, hoping that they updated their profile more recently than they updated you. The Desk Jockey will never join you in the field, and they’ll never visit clients with you. Their natural habit is sitting at their desk, working for their company instead of their team.

The Super Closer – Closes and Prevents You from Doing So

There may not be any more fun one can have as a sales manager as that of the super closer. You pretend your team needs you to close deals, and you insert yourself into the deal, knowing that you are going to bring it home safely. The Super Closer doesn’t trust their team to win deals on their own, believing the way they create value for the people on their team is helping them close deals. Working for a Super Closer will stunt your growth, preventing you from learning, and making the adjustments that allow you to win bigger and better accounts on your own.

The Reminiscer – The Blueprint for Your Success

The Reminiscer might also be called The Legend. The Reminiscer spends most of their time recounting their adventures in sales, and how they did it when they carried a bag. They are sure that worked for them must work for everyone, without exception, and without variation. The Reminiscer believes his people are not selling correctly and that his advice would work, if only they did what he did when he sold (even though he didn’t do very well himself). The Reminiscer doesn’t have any clue as to how to help his team improve, and he is modeling the sales managers for whom he worked.

Activity Manager – More is Better Than Better

The activity manager is a particular type of sales manager. They know that producing better results only comes from more activity. They are not concerned with the quality of a client interaction or anything that might require effectiveness. Activity Managers cannot help you improve and grow, so they go to what they know from their time in sales, that it is a numbers game. More calls are better than fewer calls, even if they are awful. A higher number of meetings are better than fewer, even if the meetings are with people and companies who are not qualified. While activity is essential, effective activity is considerably more critical.

The True Sales Leader

The Sales Leader is also just that, a leader. The sales leader will require much more of you than you would require of yourself. They’ll expect you to develop yourself personally and professionally. You will be required to do territory and account plans, to create new opportunities, to use your technological tools, and to win deals.

They’ll coach you, which will frequently feel more challenging than telling you what to do, but by making you work things out for yourself, they force you to grow. If you need them to help with a deal, they’re happy to give an assist, but they aren’t going to run your sale for you. When your leaders charge you with something difficult, they’ll challenge leadership, protecting you when it is called for, even if you eventually have to do what your leadership team asks of you.

You’ll sometimes find them at their desk, but you are just as likely to see them in a meeting with members of their team or sitting in front of a client or prospect, pursuing different outcomes than the desk jockey. While the sales leader will tell stories, their primary use will be to teach something about a principle that will drive you beliefs and your actions. What your real sales leader will want from you isn’t just activity. Instead, they’ll want you to take the initiative, the right and productive activity.

Young people often ask me what kind of company they should work for when they start in sales. They hope the answer includes cool companies in the technology space or companies where they can make a lot of money, none of which meet my criteria for how you learn to sell. If you want to work in sales—or any other role—pick a place with excellent leadership, great training, and great development opportunities. Spending a couple of years with people who care about your growth and development will serve you better than a job that pays a little more or has unicorn status.

The post 6 Types Of Sales Managers Companies Should Stop Hiring appeared first on Head Of Sales.

But life is too short to work with people you neither like nor respect. The first boss I fired was good person and we remain friends today but he could not provide me with a viable territory. It wasn’t really his fault, and he had been told to hire a sales person to ‘dominate the white space’… LOL! I discovered, painfully, that the ‘white space’ is that part of the market that’s already being serviced by your competitors or where there is little need for what is being offered.

But before I had the difficult conversation about our future together I worked hard for 6 months ‘trail-blazing our value proposition’ into a new vertical. I did the analysis by sizing the market, profiling potential clients and finding the industry influencers. I ran demand generation initiatives by working closely with marketing and I met with the industry leaders. I adopted a top-down selling approach to overcome the resistance we were encountering at mid-levels.

I felt I had earned the right and am committed to success and I said to my boss: “Either you’re going to fire me in 9 months for poor performance or I’m going to fire you in the 60 days for not providing me with a patch in which I can be successful. I’m happy to keep building this new vertical but I also need additional territory if I am to make my number.”

Seriously, when you’re at the interview, always ask: What’s my territory going to be, how viable is it? Also ask: ‘What happened here to make this role available – why wasn’t my predecessor successful?’

Before we continue, have a smile watching this video about Joshua Peters and Michael Blunt from my book. At the end of this post share your most outrageous stories concerning someone firing their boss. Perhaps via e-mail telling them to open their top drawer where the security pass, laptop and final expense claim is sitting?

In one of my posts I provide guidance to sales managers on who belongs in their sales team and how do they decide who needs to be managed-out? The “rule of 24” helps them make the decision but for sales people assessing whether to fire their boss I recommend the three Cs. The following is an excerpt from my Book, The Joshua Principle.

Success is a 50:50 proposition. By this I mean that you bring fifty percent of the potential for success and your employer represents the other side of the equation. You know that companies look for Competence, Commitment, and Character or Cultural fit when hiring someone and you should also consider these same things in evaluating your potential employer. In addition to the three Cs, you need them to discuss the three Ps. You should evaluate the potential for success within their organization based upon their response to the following topics: People, Proposition and Patch. Your employer has an obligation to provide an environment within which you can be successful. This means that they need to have people you are proud to work with (competent, committed and of good character), and a value proposition that is uniquely differentiated in the market; and a territory – patch – that is viable with an achievable quota.

Another good reason to fire your boss, or client for that matter, is when there is misalignment of values. An immutable law of selling is that people buy from those they like and trust… they also stay and work with those they like and trust.

Is your boss a person of integrity? The best boss I ever had was a woman. I think we need more female leaders because they are naturally wired for better relationships and better morality. People who are trying hard need to be nurtured, not napalmed with flame-thrower forecast pressure from lunatic managers seeking to manage what cannot be managed – revenue. Jason Jordan will convince you this is true.

Another boss I fired was the regional VP and I was country manager for Australia. He was a slippery soul, very cunning and good at self-optimization. He was happy to bold-face lie to staff about them being okay, and then instruct me quietly later to fire them. He happily abused his expense account and travelled internationally for his own personal purposes, staying in the finest hotels with limousines driving him everywhere. I didn’t handle it at all well but I learned much about how not to fire your boss.

The last time I fired my boss was after receiving an e-mail telling me to fire 40% of my employees in 48 hours by booking 15 minute back-to-back appointments before office hours in a hotel lobby to then hand them envelopes and advise they were locked out of the office and all systems. It was suggested that I follow the script and tell them that someone would be in touch to make a time for them come and collect a box with their stuff in it. At the time we were the most profitable region in the world – #1 amongst 40 offices globally. But when acquisitions happen, strange decisions get made. This true story is featured in an upcoming book on leadership written by Anthony Howard: Humanise, Why Human Centred Leadership Is The Key To The 21st Century.

So as you consider your current career; does your boss care about you, is he committed to your success? Is she competent? Do you have aligned values? Choose those with whom you share your life; especially with your work.

Photo is of legendary voice artist and actor, Matt Wills. Video was produced by Joel Philips who also plays role of Joshua Peters. Joel is a man of many talents… musician, actor, producer and leader.

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One thing which has remained and resonated with me over all the many years since my time in the ARMY is the teaching and training style the military used with our recruits and just how successful it was. They were able to take almost anyone from ‘civi-street’ (civilian life) and turn them into an outstanding soldier, all in just 12 weeks, with a wholly repeatable and scalable process.

If I think about what a lot of my current clients are trying to do in the business sphere, it’s precisely the same. Just replace the word soldier with sellers, and it’s the same sort of training problems and situations. Leaders are trying to create great sellers, specific to their situation from their batch of incoming recruits. Yet most businesses are only a fraction as successful as the Army. So, the question begs, what are the secrets that we can take from the military and then replicate in the business sphere?

Let me answer that by using the real-life example of how I and my platoon learnt the obstacle course as recruits in 1987.

I’m sure you can picture the situation already, barbed wire with soldiers crawling underneath, pushing their weapons through a muddy, wet pit. Unable to stand up because they are squeezed ever-closer to the ground by the tangled barbed wire roof.

There is a reason why they train soldiers to crawl under barbed-wire it’s vital in the scheme of things, and if you’ve not been in the armed forces it may not be immediately apparent, so here’s why it’s so important.

You see in battle, NO ONE gets up and runs across the battlefield as you see in the movies. It’s a sure-fire way to get shot, very quickly. If you get shot, and you’re lucky, you’re dead. If you’re only wounded, then it’s going to take 3 or 4 other soldiers to get you out of the battlefield. This scenario is the best-case for the enemy, 5 soldiers out of the action for the price of 1. Of course, if you’re dead OR wounded, you also can’t help anyone else on the battlefield. In short, YOU CAN NOT DO YOUR JOB. So, in order for you to be able to do your job, the number one thing you need to do first is NOT to GET SHOT. To be clear, as a soldier, your number one priority is not to get shot.

By training us, very early on, to crawl very low under the barbed wire the sergeants are teaching us the #1 critical skill we need to do our job.

How to move around the battlefield and NOT get shot. Because in the battlefield, under fire, you crawl everywhere, quickly. Only then can we do whatever ‘soldier task’ we’ve been trained to do to support the mission, such as blow something up, fire a machine gun of whatever.

This is essential information for soldiers, but the real value for us as sales leaders and sales managers is in the way that they teach their recruits and obtain such a high percentage of good quality soldiers at the end of the process.

Think back to the obstacle course with the barbed wire. On our very first pass under the wire, it’s set quite high, let’s say 800mm for example. It’s dry, no mud, we don’t take our guns or rifles, certainly no backpacks and even though it’s pretty easy, many of us still catch our shirts and mostly our backsides on the wire, ripping both our clothes and our skin.

We get yelled at a lot, mostly things like ‘Hurry up you squeezers. Your Mother’s not here to look after you now. Get a move on McInnes”. Not terribly supportive, this is true, but certainly creating some urgency for us to ‘act now’.

Two days later we do the obstacle course again, only this time we are to be timed, and the wire is a little lower, say 650mm high. And so a routine begins. We do the obstacle course on the way back from rifle practice, on the way to lunch, on the way back from a 20k march or on the way to PT (Physical Training)?. Lots of obstacle course practice. At regular intervals, the wire gets just a little lower, and the level of difficulty gets increasingly higher.

Before you know it, we are doing it, in the mud, in the wet, in the dark, tired, complete with our backpacks, webbing, rifles and even people firing rounds across the top of the wire to simulate battle type noises.

Let’s stop for a second and imagine if, as brand-new recruits, we had been subjected to this level of difficulty on day one? For sure someone would’ve panicked and tried to stand up and ended up caught in the wire (and shot if it was a real battlefield).

What I find interesting is, the military’s training success rate remains the same regardless of whom they are teaching. City kids, country kids, big kids, small kids, smart kids and not so smart kids, all trained in the same way and yet, out pops the same battle-ready soldier, almost every time.

If we think about training in business (or in the military), I know people generally want to be successful, people want to do well. They need the information delivered in a way which will help them make the transition from where they are now, to where they need to be. If we want our sellers to be great, we need to chunk our training down, break the learning strategies around selling into pieces where we get to practice and slowly increase the level of difficulty, incrementally. Making it much easier for people to succeed. Just like my Sargent did on the obstacle course.

We all know of those situations where the first-day seller who starts at a company, they get ‘on-boarded’ which means, here’s the HR manual, there are the fire stairs, here is our 17 principles of leadership perfection and then told to hit the phones, the social, the street, or whatever. Only to fail desperately after 5months and go to another employer. They leave with their self-esteem smashed, and both the employee and employer are the losers. #nowinners

I see it all the time. Sales skill development is not a one-time skill session thing. You can only learn a tiny piece of the puzzle in one given session, regardless of how long it is. Yet time and time again, I’m asked to provide a 4hr or 1-day workshop to help sellers upskill their sales or their social skills. Sure, I can give you an overview in 4hours, I can agitate the need for change, I can even provide some actionable strategies or motivate the team to need more, but transformational change doesn’t happen over lunch. (Unless you’re talking about a stroke or a heart attack, these two afflictions seem to make people instantly change their behaviour. I’d try to avoid these if I was you).

Recently, I ran a session for a small start-up with about 6 execs. The CEO kept questioning the social strategies saying, “yeah, great, but how can I scale that”, “How do I give that to my team in the Philippines to get 10 x activity”. I’m saying hang on a minute. You haven’t even tried these strategies as yet, and you’re already trying to find a shortcut? How can you possibly shortcut something when you don’t know how the process works? This is one of the real challenges in today’s’ B2B sales space, it’s ‘cool’ to be an entrepreneur, the language is all ‘scale up’, ‘10X Activity’, ‘Hussle’.

Here’s the truth

1 – You can’t scale up authenticity if you can’t create it one-on-one in the first place.

2 – Taking time to learn & master a skill will pay you back 10X. That’s the real 10X. When you reach out to 10 prospects and they all reply – that’s 10X. Sending 1000 messages at a measly 3% response rate is still 970 people who think you’re a jerk. Low authernticity is why automation SUCKS for 99% of the B2B sellers out there. #Avoid.

3 – Train the way we learn. The 70:20:10 learning principle works for tradespeople with tactical, tactile skills. Sales is the same. After all, typically us sellers are not the smartest people on the planet. #notrocketscience

4 – To create a real change in your selling style or your sales team, you need a sales transformation PROGRAM. Not a once of sales chat, a keynote or a motivational speaker.

5 – You cannot ‘HUSSLE’ poor performance into great results, no matter how hard you try or what time you get up #5amClub.

Figure out what your seller’s core activity is, (the sales equivalent of not getting shot on the battlefield) and get good at it quickly, by simply building a system of regular practice, call it role-play, training, rehearsal, call it whatever you want. #justdoit.

If this training process can successfully get young men (& women) to run headlong into gunfire, across 80meters of no man’s land, then I’m confident it can also teach someone to improve their outreach strategy. Or show them to make 30 calls a day, or build out a social strategy, or handle objections, or whatever, I know this because this is what successful teams do.

Lastly, DISCIPLINE it’s a dirty work in today’s, I want it now, do it later, ‘nimble it’, everyone’s a winner, society, and yet that’s precisely what will make you the star performer. Being contrary, going the extra mile, working late on real stuff, getting in early and doing the numbers and practise, practice, practice. It’s an unpopular piece of advice, I know, but if you want to be productive, successful and fashionable, these are the keys. There are NO shortcuts. #10XSUCKS

The post Lessons From A Front Line Soldier appeared first on Head Of Sales.

We surveyed 1700 sales managers and salespeople from both Australia and New Zealand on their sales meetings. It’s not pretty.

58% of all sellers we surveyed said they were LESS motivated AFTER their sales meeting than they were before the meeting. What could be causing this level of motivation drop-off? 

Your terrible meeting. So stop it!

Running sales meetings is a core activity of every sales manager. Yet, based on these results, I say the vast majority of sales managers should immediately stop running them. Not only are they not adding value to their team, but they are also actively DEMOTIVATING them.

The teams’ productivity levels and morale will IMPROVE by merely not having a meeting. Running a bad meeting is much worse than running no meeting at all. 

Stopping running sales meetings might be the most effortless lift in morale and productivity you can implement. Nothing for you to do and the entire sales team get their hour back. Win-win.

Our first-hand research of those 1700 sellers found that.

• 58% of sellers are LESS motivated AFTER their sales meeting than they were before.
• Yet 69% of sales managers say they run great meetings.
• 57% of salespeople see sales meetings in a negative light.
• 49% of Salespeople say meetings have ZERO impact on their sales activity.
• 63% of Salespeople say their meetings have ZERO effect on their sales skills.

IF YOU WANT ACCESS TO THE RESEARCH – SEND ME A MESSAGE.

What should you do?

If your sales meeting is currently an activity readout, such as listing whom you visited last week, your wins, your losses and what you hope to achieve this coming week – it’s simply not worth having. Stick all this detail in your CRM and review it from there.

Are you running through admin, marketing, the latest promotional campaign or product updates? Then it’s not a sales meeting; it’s an admin meeting.

Typically, sales meetings are high-jacked by the high performers in the team leaving those who need the most help feeling isolated and most certainly not looking forward to their turn to contribute, most likely they are attempting to hide. You probably think you’re making people accountable in these meetings. Accountability is better managed through an individual coaching session rather than in front of the entire team. You’re only demotivating your team.

So ask yourself, are you actively increasing your team’s sales skills in your sales meeting? Are you sellers leaving your meetings with something new to do that is relevant to their current selling priorities. If so, well done. If not, why not?

I ran terrible sales meetings for 15 years. I now know better. Helping your team to grow their skill base and overcome their current selling challenges is real sales leadership. Yes, these types of Sales Meetings are harder to run and require preparation and planning. It’s also where SalesITV excels. If you’d like to run a Sales Meeting that drives better sales results, please let me know.

The post Why You Should Stop Running Sales Meetings appeared first on Head Of Sales.