Consider these stats [i]:

• In the U.S., average turnover in sales is between 20% to 30% annually. This means that for many firms, the equivalent of the entire sales team must be hired, trained, and socialized every 3 – 5 years.
• Depending upon the position, it now takes 3-4 months to hire a salesperson and,  once hired, getting to full productivity takes more than 9 months. That is more than a year without a fully productive seller, and each hire becomes a sunk cost for a longer time while a bad hire is very costly.

Hiring in sales is often more expensive than many companies’ cap­ex decisions, but typically treated with less rigour than purchasing software. How can you get better at this core task?

First, recognize the challenges inherent in sales hiring:

Unlike many other business functions, there is no easily identified resource pool or educational priors for sales positions.

If you’re looking for an engineer, you can go to an engineering school and find people who have studied engineering. For an accountant, finance person or software developer, you can find majors in those subjects. But few colleges and universities have sales programs or even a sales course. Yet, it’s estimated that more than 50% of graduates (in U.S. colleges) will work in sales at some point in their careers, regardless of their major.

Hence, most salespeople start with little preparation and must learn by doing on the job. And selling jobs vary greatly depending on the product or service sold, the customers a salesperson is responsible for, and the relative importance of technical knowledge during sales calls.

In dealing with these hiring challenges, here are two common mistakes to avoid:

(1) Hunters versus Farmers

Sales roles are far more diverse than that cliched dichotomy. Consider the difference between reps who sell direct to customers versus those who sell thru channel partners, those who work in highly automated inside sales models focused on SMB prospects versus those who call on enterprise accounts, those who sell individual products versus a bundled package solution, or those who sell multi­year software license agreements versus monthly SAAS contracts.

The Hunter/Farmer dichotomy is of little use in setting hiring criteria between those roles. In fact, hunters and farmers are, in my experience, usually used by managers as after-the-fact rationalisations for their hiring choices, not ex­-ante hiring criteria. Make sure your managers have relevant criteria before they make an offer, not just when they try to justify the decision.

(2) Chasing Stars

Talent matters and differences in individual sales performance are typically very wide in most firms. The top 20% of salespeople often account for ­60% of company revenues.

If 20% of your salespeople are making 60% of revenue, that’s a 3X multiplier; and since the remaining 80% bring in only 40% of revenue, the top sellers are 6X more productive than their peers. Sales is like other creative occupations where the stardom phenomenon is well documented. In areas like software programming, the arts, sports and others, the best are typically a lot better than the average. Performance profiles in those areas are (in statistics jargon) a “power distribution curve,” not a normal­ distribution bell curve.

However, stardom is not easily portable because it typically depends upon firm-specific qualities and resources—e.g., brand, training, team chemistry, and other factors—as well as individual capabilities. [ii] This is especially true in sales where tasks are determined by a firm’s business strategy and choices about which customers to focus on.

In turn, selling behaviours are affected by your control systems, culture and how you hire. Those are all firm­-specific factors and, when you hire someone from another firm, they leave all of that behind. Talk to the corporation who hires the high performing star from a competitor and finds that she does not perform the same way she performed there. Or consider startups who bring in an experienced big­ company rep and he flounders in the early-stage firm. Those people didn’t suddenly get stupid or lose individual capabilities. In business, there’s no such thing as performance in the abstract. There is only performance in each context—here, not there—and much of selling depends upon the relationships, knowledge, and mutual trust that the rep establishes with others in his or her company.

Sales is a performance art and salespeople exhibit a wide range in performance outcomes. Those outcomes depend upon innate talent as well as the context in which that talent is nurtured and deployed. Further, the effects of talent management are cumulative as people learn from each other. Reps get better by watching how the best of their peers perform key tasks. They pick up lessons about how to pitch, answer objections, and other aspects of selling that product at that price in that market.

Here are 4 tips for screening and hiring high performing sales professionals:

(1) Hire for the Task

Effective hiring starts with knowing what you need. Sales tasks are determined by buying contexts which differ greatly by industry. In computers and electronics, channel management is a key capability, but not in metals and mining. In the former, the products are often part of a package that customers buy at one-stop-shop intermediaries; in the latter sectors, direct bulk buys are the norm. Account management skills are important in chemicals where managing a portfolio of specialty and commodity products is a key sales task, but not so much in electronics where channel partners often perform account management tasks.

Every sales job has implicit required behaviours. Take the time to clarify and make that explicit in your job postings. When companies focus on the tasks, not job titles, the relevant labour pool typically expands. Coding boot camps, for instance, are now an accepted source of software talent because after a few months of task focused work the participants have job relevant skills without (and often despite) previous formal degrees. The same is true in sales. Relevant talent comes in all shapes and sizes but is dependent upon the job to be done, not some abstract ideal of undifferentiated selling skills.

(2) Avoid Behaviourally Useless Cliches

Ask sales managers what they’re looking for in candidates and you typically get lists of cliches like Sense of Urgency, Passion, Motivated by Money, Work Ethic, Coachability, Emotional Resilience, Communication Skills, Listening, Integrity, Humility, Efficiency, Commitment to Succeed, and so on.

These traits are behaviourally useless for doing what a hiring process must do: say yes or no to an individual applicant for a given job. When you’re speaking with someone at an interview, how do you unearth whether they have a “sense of urgency”? One author says, “Look for answers around impatience and 4th quarter comebacks.” Really? Confusing this stuff with job skills and evaluations is a waste of time and resources. In a job interview, who would not want to come across as hardworking, resourceful, efficient, and so on?

You’re hiring the person and not the interview version of the person. But only about a third of companies monitor whether their hiring practices lead to good employees or track cost per hire. Another problem with these lists is the assumption that a salesperson needs all of those qualities to be effective. However, it’s often advisable to shrink the span of sales activities. This requires understanding where the salesperson (versus marketing, service, or a customer success team) has the most influence. In many inside sales models, activities like lead generation and qualification are the jobs of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and renewals are given to service personnel. This allows the firm to focus more precisely on recruiting for Account Executive roles where product demonstrations, pricing, and closing the sale with a multifunctional buying unit are the key tasks.

(3) Complement Interviews with Behavioural Assessments

Decades of research consistently show that managers overrate their ability to predict someone’s performance and fit for job tasks on the basis of a few interviews. Correlations between interview ratings and job success vary from about 0.1 to 0.4 — less than the 50/50 odds of a coin toss. [iii] In fact, some studies show a negative correlation between interview assessments and subsequent job performance: the firm would have been better-off selecting at random!

Judging a person’s fit for a sales job is, in most circumstances, a complex task. It involves evaluating the relevance of past experience, personality, fit with the culture, and so on. But people are inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information, so always get multiple opinions and perspectives in evaluating candidates. Doing multiple assessments also often motivates people in your firm to discuss and communicate the tasks you’re hiring for and the questions and activities likely to elicit relevant skills. Conversely, this approach provides the interviewee with a better basis to judge fit.

Then, complement interviews with role plays, task assignments and, whenever possible, internship type hiring scenarios. Selling is about behaviour. Job performance from one time period to the next correlates at a much higher rate than interviews. So probationary periods are better predictors of actual performance. Meanwhile, technology is increasing options for behavioural assessments via game-like activities, video, and online media.

(4) Assume Mistakes Will Happen

Sales hiring requires judging people’s future performance in a changing market environment. Mistakes are inevitable, but the sunk cost fallacy—continuing to throw good money after bad—is not.

Consider Amazon’s policy of offering a voluntary severance package called “The Offer.” Annually, each service and warehouse employee are offered up to $5,000 to quit. The policy helps to deal with inevitable mistakes—by the hirer or the person hired—and with the reality that people change and their relationship to their work can change with marriage, divorce, sickness, the need to take care of an aging parent, or any of the other natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Amazon believes “The Offer” helps it shed less-committed employees while improving retention among others. [iv]

Sales reps represent your company to customers and prospects. A poor hire is not only costly but can also do collateral damage to your brand. It’s worth your time and effort to improve your sales hiring criteria and process.

Frank Cespedes teaches at Harvard Business School and is the author of six books. This article is adapted from Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing. Published by Harvard Business Review Press.

[i] See Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton University Press).

[ii] For a review of this research, see Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes, and Nathaniel Peterson, “Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion,” Judgment and Decision Making 8, no. 5: 512-520. 

[iii] For a review of this research, see Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes, and Nathaniel Peterson, “Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion,” Judgment and Decision Making 8, no. 5: 512-520. 

[iv] Alana Samuels, “Why Amazon Pays Some of Its Workers to Quit,” The Atlantic:  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/amazon-offer-pay-quit/553202/.

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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.

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If you believe there is an easy button for success in sales, the joke’s on you! While there’s tremendous value in a vast array of digital tools, all emerging technologies have a dark side.

Take the internet itself and its use for nefarious purposes: I wish the majority of its usage were for knowledge. How many people are studying the rich tradition of human history, MOOC learning, culture and fostering communal collaboration to break down cultural barriers, cure cancer and end the common cold?

It’s overwhelming to fathom that the internet has become a TV substitute. The Social Networks are laughing all the way to the bank monetizing your time. But you can be laughing all the way to the bank, too, if you realize this.

One of the most powerful things in the world that you can personally do to improve your life and business career, sales or otherwise is to turn off TV and social media. Understand where the new school tools fit in and acknowledge their place in the cosmos. Modernized sellers who are deadly serious about being elite performers in their field use them differently, I assure you. A cautionary tale privately emailed to me:

“Tony, Building our sales team and I just had to fire a sales rep who was only emailing and messaging on LinkedIn and logging fake sales on our CRM. He tanked our company and I’m back to square one building from the ground up. Your post resonated with me and reinforces my belief that HUMAN not ‘social’ connections are the best. Picking up the phone, sitting down for a coffee, flying in for a meeting…are irreplaceable experiences.” – Anonymous

I’ve polled thousands of you from every continent and walk of life, from transactional to enterprise flights, to massively matrixed, complex government procurement cycles that can take 36 months. The jury is in that the phone is still absolutely essential to develop business at every stage of the funnel.

To make the most money possible, the top reps in your company and industry have figured out how to manage their time, leverage old and new tools to position themselves as a trusted advisor and subject matter expert. They’ve figured out which opportunities to prioritise in a pipeline and what they need to close to hit their number.

The simplest way to get there is to build ultra-targeted prospect lists, dial on them yourself with a razor sharp value proposition and set the appointment, don’t try to sell the product. Social is a phenomenal tool for locating which prospects to go after and getting foreknowledge of what they’ll care about but paradoxically, super personalized communication can be a repellent.

Sales Managers who work for ambitious CFOs often prognosticate fantastical growth rates. 30% is not an industry standard, it’s a mass delusion. This is why there’s blowtorch management going on where 10 lemmings get hired so they can systematically fire 7. I can’t help you if you are inside a blowtorch culture. If you have a fair management system, quality product market fit, and you are on a global team in which 20-40% of your peers are hitting their number or exceeding it, so can you!

There’s no secret to sales. You need to hustle and work harder than anyone else to make it pay off for you. “It’s no longer a numbers game,” is a band-aid for the lazy modern seller. I want to contort that statement the other way: it’s harder than it’s ever been. If you truly knew how hard you’d have to work to be successful in this game, you’d probably quit.

Maintain a good sense of humour. See things more clearly, don’t buy into things being more different than the same. Observe the actual day-to-day behaviour of top reps on your team and in your industry. Study the old school and fuse it with the new school. Look at your PHONE as the ultimate social device: “the social phone.” Invest in the best tools money can buy and read your company the Riot Act if they don’t invest in you. They spent 15-25K to recruit you, they can spend the price of a cell phone getting you the best tech for prospecting due diligence.

20% of any system will drive 80% of the results. 20% of any given day’s work will engender 80% of output. That means shockingly 80% of every day is waste, friends! The Pareto Principle is alive and well in all human systems. So in order to optimise the levers that will get you to your financial goal, it’s critical to focus on the most constructive revenue producing daily activities. That’s “tripling” a targeted list – call, text – LinkedIn invite. That’s methodically attacking the same 50 targets for an entire quarter top down, bottom up, middle out, lateral, by bee swarm, referrals, and teamlinks.

After decades years of looking at this stuff, I would say that chasing the wrong people to sell them things they’ll never need is the biggest error. You need to get crystal clear about your target list.

Step one: Go after the competitors of your existing clients. Go after the companies your own direct competitor is working with and are listed on their website.

Step two: You are only as strong as your own intel, just like in war. If you can get an edge, it’s massive. If you can read any LinkedIn Profile, even one that’s hidden to you, it’s pivotal. If you can get a direct phone number to add the power of your tone, intention, and warmth to the sales cycle, it’s imperative.

Elite athletes spend 10,000 hours honing their craft and know every stat down to the wire. They will spend any amount of money getting their driver in golf to weigh one less ounce or having one more component on their racing bike, be made of carbon fibre seeking aerodynamics to crest the hill faster in the Tour de France.

Per Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” You can’t do what hundreds of millions of people are doing and get an elite, unusual, uncommon result. You can’t just social sell or just pound phones, or just use one method of sales.

You’ll get noticed by swimming upstream against the current. You’ll stand out like a sore thumb by doing anachronistic things like writing handwritten notes. You’ll make waves by blending multiple channels in combinations. You’ll jut out by exhibiting business acumen and understanding the fundamentals of how your prospect makes money and SWOTTING where they’re weak.

You’ll get VIP status if you have a confident, sardonic and knowing chuckle because, like them, you are laughing all the way to the bank. You can bank on my methods in these posts, field tested by thousands, and influenced by thousands.

I wish I could tell you, cold calls are dead and it’s all just social selling. The savviest sellers are using both. Top reps are interrupting their “dream prospects” and landing meetings which are converting into rich opportunity pipeline and closing millions in new business. You’ve gotta spark people to realise and react the “pain of same is greater than the pain of change.”

There are too many paradoxes in sales to simplify something that is really an art form. E.g., reconcile these two quotes for me:

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Abraham Lincoln

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Bruce Lee

I’d look at these two quotes like this to master the art of sales. Abe Lincoln is the strategy piece and Bruce Lee is the tactical piece. There is no Strategy without effective tactics and effective tactics fall down without a stellar strategy.

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Not only for its own sake, but as part of the life-long, habitual practice of being thorough in everything you do. So, why do we say that organisations are built on culture?

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines an organisation as “a group of people who work together in an organised way for a shared purpose”. I see this definition as having four parts: (1) A group of people (2) Who work together (3) In an organised way (4) For a shared purpose.

However, breaking the definition down to such a degree changes the original concept, and instead of objectively defining an organisation, I believe it idealises one. The first point is the bare minimum to be an organisation; the other three are the qualities that make up a productive organisation.

Furthermore, they form a pyramid of importance: a group of people can be anything from a successful company to a smattering of passengers on a bus, but a group who works together become a team. If that team can work together in an organised way, you have efficiency. Finally, if a shared purpose can underpin and inform the actions of that team, then you have something special.

So, where does culture fit into this definition?

The simple, but not particularly easy answer is: everywhere.

A group of people will always naturally develop a culture over time. Supporters at a sporting event grow rowdy or excited or despondent together over the course of one match. A group of high school friends, whether consciously or not, will over time decide what they do and don’t like to do, and will in turn either support or dismiss the actions of their peers based on this culture.

Beyond the first part of the definition, the idea of culture splits in two: conscious and unconscious.

Your high school friendship group, for example, probably isn’t aware that their obsession with a particular genre of music could be closing them off to a wider world of sound. On the flip side, that same obsession might happen to foster an appreciation for the virtue of disciplined, consistent practice needed for constant improvement. Either way, it’s most often luck.

A step beyond this (usually) unconscious culture-building, is “working together” in “an organised way”. To stay with the high school example, this is where something like team sports come in.

Instead of building a culture based on who you sit with at lunch and what you end up idly chatting about, these people build their culture around more organised, conscious objectives. For one thing, you change into a different uniform to participate in this culture – you change from the school uniform, which everyone wears, into your particular sport’s designated training or playing gear. You wear numbers on your back, which will, in many sports, decide exactly how you’re meant to work together. In rugby union, the number 10 can commonly expect a pass from the number 9.

Though more complicated, this same kind of structure extends to the working world. If you’re an assistant manager, you can expect most of your directives to come from the manager. If you’re a sales rep, you should expect to be making some sales.

However, in both situations, and really in any organisation, this is the broadest, least productive understanding of culture you could have. If the depth of your connection to your number on the sporting field is knowing where you’re meant to stand, then the only culture your team has is that you’re playing a particular sport. If the depth of your connection to the title on your name tag is knowing that sales reps make sales, then your workplace’s culture is probably only as deep as “people work here”.

Culture is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s always working for us. Our culture of convenience is one of the reasons for Australia’s (and much of the developed world’s) obesity crisis, for example. Our culture of connection in the digital age is one of the reasons so many young people are experiencing higher levels of depression and anxiety than ever before. These examples highlight the difference between conscious and unconscious cultures. Whether you know it or not, every group, every organisation has a culture, and the impact of each one is inescapable.

So the goal, then, is not to build a culture – that will happen no matter what. Instead, the goal is to build the right culture.

In rugby union, everyone must wear boots. But in the All Blacks, rugby union’s most successful national team, everyone wears black boots. Apart from headgear and mouthguards, boots are the only uniform item that individual members can pick for themselves, and as such, you see a dizzying array of flashy, neon colours striding across the pitch on any given game. The All Blacks, of course, don’t have to wear black boots, but it’s about culture: everyone’s on the same team, driven by the same goals, and wearing the same boots is just another reminder of this fact.

But who decides this?

In a team like the All Blacks, who decides everyone wears the same boots? In a huge company, who decides that every member should prioritise learning? Who makes the standards, and who upholds them?

The answer, in any domain, is the leader. In a truly productive organisation, that really means everyone, because in a productive organisation, everyone behaves and acts like a leader. But realistically, and especially in bigger organisations, a leadership structure needs to be anchored by specified, formal leaders. And so then, the question becomes, how do you choose the right leader?

Choosing a leader is a concentrated version of choosing a culture. Culture is ultimately the behaviour and practice of a group of people, and the right leader will not only influence their team’s behaviours and practices in the right direction, but will bring a new dimension of understanding to what makes a productive culture. Productivity is the ratio of outputs to inputs, and so maximising this ratio is only half the battle – the other half is prioritising the right outputs. Publishing more books is a good step for a publication house, for example, but only if they’re good books.

Clearly, selecting the right leader is incredibly important for an organisation, and doing so can sometimes feel like weathering a heavy storm on open seas without a compass. So if I can at least offer a compass, that might be the first step in offering some security and clarity in making this all-important decision.

I use this framework when consulting or offering support to others, but I also use it regularly to assess myself as a leader. I am the leader of my small business, and so I need to consistently check myself, and assure that I am the right person for the job. Since designing The 15 Disciplines framework, it has been the bedrock of all of my leadership thinking, and so serves as the starting point for my leadership investigation.

15 questions to establish the criteria for choosing leaders in your own organisation:

1. Do you have the capacity to override your own emotions to respond productively to a situation rather than react unproductively?

2. Will you lead from a foundation of credibility, not a foundation of authority?

3. Will you ensure ethical decisions are made for the greater good of the organisation, despite the harm, discomfort or inconvenience it may cause to a few, or even yourself?

4. Will you challenge the way people in your organisation think and act so that they understand how this impacts the intended outcomes?

5. Do you hold a strategic perspective of all factors in and around your organisation that either energise or de-energise its capacity to achieve its objectives?

6. Do you have the capacity to prioritise and systematically coordinate activity with a team to ensure it will achieve the standards required of a task or project?

7. Will you establish and maintain a position of control to ensure delegated tasks will be completed on time and to standard without relinquishing overall responsibility for the task?

8. Will you orient yourself to new information in a timely manner to ensure your decisions remain relevant to achieving objectives?

9. Will you ensure all people are provided an equal opportunity to succeed and treat them differently, according to their demonstrated competence and commitment?

10. Do you have the capacity to maintain a positive culture and leverage small successes to elevate people’s performance?

11. Will you create an inclusive environment through the fair and appropriate dissemination of information and expectations?

12. Will you maintain a healthy emotional and physical lifestyle to ensure you are in the best condition to lead and inspire others to do the same?

13. Will you connect a diverse group of people to a common cause to ensure unproductive sub-cultures do not form?

14. Will you be a credible exemplar of the standards you expect of every team member and build accountability in others for those standards?

15. Will you create a safe place for people to share the good, the bad and the ugly to ensure a continuous cycle of learning and growth in team capacity?

Remember that culture is a living thing: it is constantly evolving, and leaders need to do so in order to remain productive. Check in with these questions whenever you feel that you or your organisation’s leaders may need to evolve with changing times or priorities.

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For many years the legend of the 600lb sales gorilla or Alpha Hyper Masculine ‘sales superstar’ has been strutting the hallways and boardrooms of businesses. Often revered for achieving top of the league ladder sales results, yet feared by many for their aggressive, manipulative, ego centric, demanding, intimidating antics, countless CEO’s and sales managers have allowed these sales prima donnas to remain in their sales teams but at what cost to their sales team and their business?

Too scared to confront them about their behaviours or sales tactics for fear of losing their sales contribution, many sales managers and their sales team have simply suffered in the presence of these sales bullies. In my many years of working with sales teams and sales managers I have met my fair share of Alpha Hyper Masculine sales bullies and their distressed managers and sales teams. Here’s what I have observed:

1. They have the ear of the Managing Director/CEO who thinks they can do no wrong.
2. They won’t let the business anywhere near their customers.
3. They tell tall tales about their legendary sales conquests.
4. They refuse to be coached, counselled or trained.
5. They are very demanding, always complaining about the lack of resources and taking up the time of countless people to do their bidding, leaving the other sales people to fend for themselves.
6. They often exhibit bad behaviour, and may be heard swearing or making inappropriate comments to their colleagues or other staff who are often too fearful to report them (see point 1).
7. They can engage in questionable sales tactics, yet claim that they are pristine and operate with the utmost of integrity.
8. They claim to know a lot of people and be very well connected.
9. They use actual or implied intimidation to get their way with internal team members.
10. They use charm and manipulation to get their way with key stakeholders.
11. They act with righteous indignation if you question anything about them.
12. They don’t think they need to comply with company policies so often refuse to complete paperwork or keep up to date CRM’s if they think it’s a ‘waste of time’.

You only have to watch the movie ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ to see your fair share of Alpha Hyper Masculine sales bullies. This type of sales culture was revered by a number of industry sectors in the 70’s and 80’s, including real estate, car sales, stock broking, etc. Watching it makes me feel ill, but many sales teams got off on this and even use ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ as a model of how they should sell in some quarters today.

Yet most people watching ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ or meeting their very own Alpha Hyper Masculine sales bullies feel repulsed by them. Often very wary of them, others wonder why they have to tolerate them and why management won’t act. Truth is these sales bullies have never been pulled into line. Their outstanding sales results have somehow bought them immunity from behaving in a civil manner. The smell of money they can bring in has condoned behaviour that has often outweighed the need to act ethically and uphold team values and respectful behaviour. Their bad behaviour has been allowed to manifest without restrictions, ‘oh let him get away with it. Look at the results he pulls in’. These sales gorillas are the direct result of poor quality leadership, lack of clear standards and bad decision making.

What most businesses do not know is that these sales bullies, for all their so called sales success, actually fall well behind the real sales superstars in terms of achieving high level and sustainable sales results who, by contrast, are open minded, curious, collaborative, team oriented, open to learning and aim for partnerships on every level. And these real sales superstars are humble too which is a direct contradiction to the behaviour of the sales bullies.

• So are you currently letting fear hold you and your team hostage by allowing your Alpha Hyper Masculine sales bullies to persist?
• What would happen if you got rid of the sales bullies?
• How would the rest of your team respond when they left?
• What would happen to sales and the clients?

In my experience when the sales bully – the Alpha finally departs, there is an initial sense of shock which quickly gives way to relief and the opportunity for the sales team to really pull together and prosper. The biggest fear of losing the sales bully’s sales power and their clients doesn’t eventuate in the vast majority of cases. In fact it is often revealed that the clients are happy the sales bully has left and look forward to a more open and prosperous relationship with the company concerned and sales grow even more.

I am not suggesting that most leaders intentionally hired these sales bullies or intended for them to manifest however, without clear codes of conduct or values and a proper understanding of what you want by way of ‘ good sales performance’ ‘ you cannot hire or develop the right salespeople to do the right things in the right sales culture.

In his book ‘The No Asshole Rule’, Leigh Buchanan writes about bosses behaving badly. Its thesis – don’t hire jerks, has become public policy in many companies around the world. I would suggest we think clearly about what we want manifested in our sales teams and take a leaf out of Leigh’s book and make sure we employ ‘The No Asshole Rule’ and don’t hire sales jerks.

The post Hiring A 300kg Gorilla Is A Big Mistake! Why? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Albert is fanatical about his work, striving to deliver value to companies he works with and the people within his team. He brings extensive expertise across Banking, Financial Services and Insurance and core focus areas in Financial Crime, Fraud, Data, Analytics and Identity.

In his free time, Albert is a passionate target rifle shooter and volunteer, serving as Director of NRAA, Chairman of the Victorian Rifle Association and Vice-Captain of the Australian F-Open Rifle Team,

(1) What was your first sales role and in which industry?

My first sales role was when I left South Africa in 2006 and moved to New Zealand. I had to find a job pretty fast to secure a work permit and found myself selling EFTPOS terminals to small retailers. The role was entirely phone based and taught me incredibly valuable lessons in how to be successful as a salesperson. 

(2) What was the first lesson you learnt on the job?

My first lesson as a sales professional was that input equals output. It’s a rather simple one, but one that had a huge impact, especially in a role that offered remuneration directly linked to my efforts. If I put in the work, hit the phones, engage with clients, follow up on my leads with determination and grit, the dollars will start to roll in. I understood very quickly that if I apply this simple lesson, I could take control of my own destiny and be in control of how much money I get to take home every month. With a young family at the time, this was incredibly valuable. 

(3) How or why did you become a sales professional?

What’s interesting is that I didn’t become a sales professional by choice. I moved to New Zealand 15 years ago and I needed a job. However, once I fell into sales, I never looked back.

Sales is the only profession that can shape the culture of an organisation. As salespeople, we get to engage with everyone across an organisation, be it the product development team, operations, marketing, procurement, customer service etc. The culture of the sales team will shape the overall culture of an organisation. In a nutshell, the sales team has the power to drive a high-performance culture, and to shift and lift a culture through accountability.

(4) How would you describe your approach to sales and what are the values that you live by?

My approach to sales is two-pronged. Firstly, in order to be great at selling, one has to be inquisitive. You have to be curious about what are the challenges of your clients, understand their pain points and their long-term goals. Being a great sales professional goes beyond just closing deals. It’s about providing solutions to your clients.

By being curious and genuinely wanting to know about your clients, you will be able to unlock trust and value. The clients will quickly understand you are committed to their success and will start to see you as their partner, an extension of their team. If you can unlock trust as a sales professional, your clients will keep coming back to you, even if you don’t close that deal today.

In terms of the values I live by, I’m a man of my word. If I say I’m going to do something, you bet I will follow through with it. It makes me reliable, it builds trust with my team, clients, and other stakeholders. I don’t over-promise and under-deliver and if I make a mistake, I’ll own up to it.

(5) In your view, what are the three most important factors that determine sales success?

In my experience, the three most important factors are:

Taking action – to be successful in sales, you need to have the willingness to spring into action and be proactive about it. You can’t afford to sit back and wait. You need to have the willingness to make phone calls, go door-knocking if you have to, engage with your clients, etc.

Curiosity – if you ask the right questions, you will uncover your client’s pain point and therefore will be in a better position to offer the right solution for them

Drive – a successful sales professional is also one who has a never-ending hunger in the belly. This hunger is what will keep you going, hit those numbers and build up your sales pipeline.

(6) What did/do you love about sales?

What I find the most exciting and rewarding is when I get to see how my clients, or others are positively impacted by the solutions I provide to them. Especially in my current role at GBG where we help create an environment where everyone can transact online with confidence by reducing the risk of fraud, there is a bigger societal impact to what we do. Cyber criminals and fraudsters use stolen money to trade children, slaves, drugs. To know that in my role at GBG I am contributing to putting an end to this, is deeply rewarding.

(7) What did/do you dislike about sales?

The perception that people have of sales professionals is what I don’t like. We are often seen as manipulators, liars and money-driven vultures. And to defy this perception comes with the job, day in day out.

(8) Tell us about your most memorable sale and why.

The biggest highlight of my sales career is when I closed a multi-million deal with one of the four banks, at a company where the average order value was $10K. It took 18 months and multiple conversations across the organisations to find out how each department would benefit from the software I was selling at the time, in order to finally get it over the line.

(9) What is the best piece of advice a sales manager passed on to you when you were in sales?

The best advice I received very early on in my career was that there are multiple ways to achieve success in sales, depending on your personality, the industry you’re in, what you’re selling etc. Very often, once sales professionals reach their high, they think they’ve unlocked the secret formula to closing deals. And they tend to believe that their approach is the only approach that works, which is not true.

So, it’s important to be open-minded to other people’s approaches, learn from them and keep evolving your own formula for success.

(10) What do you wish you had known when you first started out in sales that you know now?

I wish I had known that I didn’t need to buy the most expensive suit and tie for people to take me seriously. While how you present yourself as a salesperson is important, it’s not what will impress your stakeholders. 

(11) What traits do you believe are critical for success in sales management and sales leadership?

Support – Get to know your team and their preferred ways of working. Provide the support, resources and training they need and commit to their success and their professional development. Ultimately, you are only as successful as your sales team

Accountability –  Hold yourself and your team accountable and be ready to have the hard conversations. 

(12) What is the secret for sales leaders to get the best out of their teams?

Clarity of message is of utmost importance. Very often, the reason why sales teams don’t deliver is not because they are not hardworking or don’t have the right skills. It’s because they didn’t understand the tasks, the products, or how to cross-sell or up-sell.  As such, it is important to also foster a culture where your team feels comfortable to ask questions when in doubt or if they need clarifications on anything before sending them out on the field.

(13) How has your industry evolved in the last 10 years or so and what changes do you see coming in the next 10 years?

Fraud detection and identity verification have taken on a new meaning altogether in the past decade. With financial crimes on the rise, organisations across the globe are increasingly relying on technology to protect their businesses and customers against rapidly evolving financial crimes. Organisations both large and small are increasingly looking for comprehensive identity verification and fraud prevention practices to try to keep up with the rapidly evolving threat landscape. 2020 has particularly been a pivotal year for identity-based fraud. COVID-19 created both a global healthcare and economic crisis, making the environment ripe for sophisticated fraud rings to capitalise. 

In the next 10 years, the use of Artificial intelligence (AI) to fight fraud will become even more widespread in identifying fraudulent transitions and strange behaviours. It will be increasingly possible to analyse thousands of technological and behavioural data points in a matter of seconds. However  according to some reports, fraudsters will start to use fake faces for biometric verification whereby these “Frankenstein IDs” will use AI to combine facial characteristics from different people to form a new identity, creating a challenge for businesses relying on facial recognition technology as a significant part of their fraud prevention strategy.

(14) How do you balance life and work?

By setting clear boundaries, for myself and for those around me. You have to create your own work-life balance, it won’t just happen. I make sure I take the time for myself. For example, every Friday, I commit to working from a remote location in the country. A weekly change of scenery keeps me feeling refreshed and this translates in my work as well. I’m more energised and it makes me more effective.

(15) What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I’m a competitive rifle shooter and I grow strawberries on my farm to make delectable jams.

About GBG Plc

Headquartered in the UK and with over 1,000 staff across 16 countries, GBG Plc specialises in digital identity and fraud solutions. Its technology helps clients transact quickly, safely and securely with their online customers. Many of the world’s best-known businesses rely on GBG to provide digital services and keep the economy moving, from US e-commerce giants to Asia’s biggest banks and European household brands. 

For more information visit https://www.gbgplc.com/apac/

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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.

Throughout his career at media agencies and publishers, Ricky has worked with major global and local brands within prominent categories, including FMCG, auto, finance and retail.

Prior to joining Twitch, Ricky was the Managing Director of Unruly (News Corp/Tremor) for three years where he led the sales, operations and other business functions. During Ricky’s tenure the business grew to be one of the most profitable (EBITDA) in the APAC region. Before changing lanes into the sales side, Ricky spent 11 years at the buyers’ side. He was at GroupM, with the last years leading Maxus (Wavemaker) investment nationally as Head of Investment.

1. What was your first sales role and in which industry?

My first sales role was as an account exec for Mediasmart, the publisher of for the Yellow and White Pages—talk about the heydays of digital advertising!

2. What was the first lesson you learnt on the job?

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. This is a cliche for a reason—networks are incredibly important in the sales field.

3. How or why did you become a sales professional?

From my early days selling lemonade in front of my parents’ house to being named employee of the year for customer service in my teens working at McDonald’s, I’ve always had a knack for sales—it’s seemingly built into my DNA. I love conversing, building connections and creating positive outcomes with people in all parts of my life. This coupled with my real passion for commercial acumen and hustler soul made jumping into sales a no brainer.

4. How would you describe your approach to sales and what are the values that you live by?

The two most important mantras I live by are:

• Progression before perfection. I truly believe in this manifesto as time is our biggest, most sacred commodity. Everything you as an individual or a team do has to be accountable—there should be a value proportion attached to your work, with you ready to sell it at any given time. This thinking also helps to continually improve new iterations of your offerings rather than waiting for the perfect solution, as there’s no such thing as ‘being perfect’. For example, steam engines haven’t been reinvented since the 17th century—they’ve instead been consistently evolved in line with customer needs and modern technologies. This analogy should be applied to everything we do.

• Be your biggest devil’s advocate. This is the only way to keep up and remain relevant as times change. I fundamentally believe that we need to stop sitting in meetings where everyone agrees with everything said, like the group thinks the world is full of waterfalls and rainbows. Don’t kid yourself! Instead, throw tough questions in, be ready for uncomfortable situations and pressure test every scenario. If there is one thing we’ve learnt in 2020, it’s that there’s no such thing as future-proofing!

5. In your view, what are the three most important factors that determine sales success?

Without a doubt, relationships, honesty and transparency.

6. What did/do you love about sales?

Outside of hitting targets and the multiple benefits attached to this, I get such adrenaline when there’s an all-round positive outcome for every party involved. Any sale is ultimately the byproduct of hard work, multiple meetings, negotiations, contracts and everything else in the middle that’s agreed upon along the way. So at a macro level, you could almost attribute a sale to eternal ‘happiness’.

7. What did/do you dislike about sales?

Winning and losing are essential elements of every sales process. However, my biggest dislike has to be not receiving feedback from a lost deal as it means you can’t truly unpack why you weren’t successful in converting the deal and learnings can be missed. There’s so much emphasis on winning, yet the biggest insights come from losing.

8. Tell us about your most memorable sale and why.

This has to be unlocking one of the biggest FMCG clients in a previous role. After spending no money with my team for several years, they became one of our highest-value clients in the ANZ region. This didn’t happen overnight—it was off the back of constantly asking the client for feedback on why they didn’t see us as a partner in the first place. We worked constantly on their feedback and it paid off. I’m proud to say we became their best partner in recent decades.

9. What is the best piece of advice a sales manager passed on to you when you were in sales?

‘People with problems need solutions’. Some time ago, I attended an Elkiem High Performance Masterclass, and this sentiment has stuck with me ever since. Solutions are fairly easy to locate within your arsenal once you know what the exact problem is, so spend time sharpening your axe!

10. What do you wish you had known when you first started out in sales that you know now?

Know your audience. One size fits all has never worked in the fashion industry and will never work for any organisation trying to keep its customers happy. Be agile, be dynamic and always bring the customer lens to everything you do.

11. What traits do you believe are critical for success in sales management and sales leadership?

The three key attributes of a successful leader are:

• Trust
• Respect
• Like

My advice is to spend your time on the first two elements—once your team trusts and respects you, the last likeability will come automatically. Too often can leaders spend time on getting the team to like them, however, this doesn’t necessarily mean they trust or respect you.

12. What is the secret for sales leaders to get the best out of their teams?

Your words should never travel far away from your actions. To foster a high-performing sales culture, you need to lead by example in everything you do. Soft-skills are essential here—empathy, emotional intelligence, resilience for your team and clients are all just as important as objection handling. Success starts from the top, so walk the walk.

13. How has your industry evolved in the last 10 years or so and what changes do you see coming in the next 10 years?

Embrace the disruption or be disrupted. Across my advertising career, I’ve tapped into so many industries and have to say this applies to everything we’ve seen in the past decade and what’s coming up over the next 10 years. I’m sure some in the taxi and hotel industries are still scratching their heads on what went wrong, but really, most could see the dominance of Uber and Airbnb coming miles away.

This ladders back to the importance of creating a culture of self-critique. Put your own ideas, offering and solutions through a pressure cooker, then view them through the customer lens. If you’re struggling to be your best devil’s advocate, bring in a third-party for some brutal honesty. Reflecting even on the events of 2020, it’s clear that every organisation needs to have a strong focus on the ‘why’. The stronger the reasons, the wider your choices.

All this said, I’m really excited to see what the next 10 years have in store and I truly believe Twitch is the future of entertainment. Throughout the shelter-in-place restrictions, we’ve experienced an unprecedented surge in the number of hours our audience is watching and all-time high levels of engagements with not just gaming content but also sports, music, entertainment—you name it. People want connection and it’s what our powerhouse community does best. My big, hairy, audacious goal is to cement our place among Australia’s biggest media networks, so watch this space!

14. What are some of the biggest challenges in moving from management into executive leadership?

As your career progresses, you move from a part-time to a full-time delegator and spending time on being proactive than reactive. This is all while being accountable to every function within the organisation. To find true success, you need to embed a leadership team at the management level who are respected and trusted by business and reflect your wider decision-making process.

15. How do you balance life and work?

To be honest, my work-life balance isn’t great at the moment. With the work from home arrangements, I’m still learning to differentiate between where work finishes and home starts. However, I’m getting better at this every day. What’s helping me is to implement walking meetings, move away from my desk every hour or so, and shut all devices for a minimum of three to four hours when the ‘workday’ finishes, like I do when physically working at a place.

16. What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I’m really gifted to be surrounded by some amazing friends and family. Usually, my spare time’s filled with hanging out with them, which sees my wife and I enjoying lots of breakfasts, dinners and even house parties. By no means am I a pro at golf, but I love to hit the greens every now and then. Really, I love a good workout—there’s nothing better than working up a sweat at the gym and getting the endorphins pumping to destress.

About Twitch

Launched in 2011, Twitch is a global community that comes together each day to create multiplayer entertainment: unique, live, unpredictable experiences created by the interactions of millions. It brings the joy of co-op to everything, from casual gaming and world-class esports to anime marathons, music, and art streams. Twitch also hosts TwitchCon, the biggest community event of the year, where tens of thousands of people come together to celebrate and connect with others who share their interests and passions. We’re always live at Twitch. Stay up to date on all things Twitch on Twitter and on our Blog.

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