How To Get More Out Of Your Sales Team?

[Video Transcript]

Hello everyone my name is Umar Hameed and today we are doing a blab about how to get more out of your sales team. We have these people that we hire and we have a job for them to do well but it’s really challenging for a lot of sales managers to make it happen so here is a quick way to look at what is going on.

Number 1: Examining your sales process.

What is the process you have in place for your sales people to go out there and do a great job? Often there is no well-defined process and if there is a process not all the salespeople are following it. Now here is why a process is crucial.

A process allows you to do a step-by-step approach to creating great results. If you are not getting great results, you can figure out where in the process things are breaking down. Once you figure out where it is, people smart enough to figure how to resolve that issue. But without a process, you go on for a really long time before you identify what the problems are.

Number 2: the skill set of the sales people

You need to take a look at every single sales person in your organization and kind of rank them in terms of where they are strong and where do they improvement. And that is your job, as a leader, to figure out places that they are doing well to encourage them so they get better at what they do. And find the places where they are struggling how can you provide them with the insights, the training, the guidance and motivation to improve in those areas. It takes constant monitoring of what they do well and what they need to do better that allows you to nurture salespeople to get better and better and improve the entire sales performance for the entire organization.

Number 3: Sales Department Interaction

How does the sales department interact with the other departments? Because often times the salespeople are seen as, “All those guys do is go out there and you know play golf with clients, have fancy meals, they are pretty much lazy group of people.”

I was working with this organization and in our retreat, one of the things I ended up doing is saying, “OK salespeople you know once you get a lead what do you do?” And they say, “Well once we get a lead, we schedule an appointment,” And I took them through step-by-step what they do and it turns out their process and what they have to do to get someone that might be interested into becoming a customer had about 40 steps in it.

This was like breaking down every single step that they did and all the other people in the organization were like dumbfounded, it was almost like a, “Huh, oh my God you guys have a lot to do.” So couple months later, one of the chefs was in the kitchen and one of the other catering staff were complaining about the sales team and the chef says, “No, you don’t complain about those guys, those guys have a really tough job, you wouldn’t believe.”

The question is, in your organization, what is the connection between the sales department and everyone else are the other people supporting the sales folks in their endeavors? And are the sales people keeping everybody else in line so that they don’t make promises that they know that the organization can’t keep? So, you’ve got to pay attention to what the connection is with everybody in your organization.

Number 4: The Target

Is your company targeting the right people to do business with? Often times, we have a general sense of, “Ah, well, these people will need our product, our products are amazing, so fantastic, people are going to not knock down our doors to get it.” And the reality is that never happens. So, you need to understand who has a problem that you can really help fix and where are they located. How can we find them? How can we find them and then how can we seduce them to do work with us?

Number 5: The Message

Now that you got the target who you want to connect with the question is what is the message that you need to use to get these people to take action? A lot of times people have a message saying, “We are fantastic and our product is the best,” and what you really need to figure out is what is the pain of the client? What is the thing that keeps them up at night and the message that needs to connect with that?

And what happens is out of all the thousands of people that you reach, the people who are having that pain and suffering will see your message and take action immediately because you are talking to them. The other people that don’t have that problem might go, “You know, that is kind of interesting.” So, your messaging has to be spot on. Don’t make it too general. We are appealing to different demographics and we have to have a general message that doesn’t alienate anyone and that is a great way not to sell anything.

So what you need to do is figure out who need you most and only do the messaging to them. This is how you get business floating into your company.

Numbers 6: The Competition

Who is your competition out there? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? Who are they going after? Can we kind of start analyzing what they are doing and get some insights on how we can do it better?

So the idea is not to beat up your competition to your customers. The idea isn’t to ridicule what they do. The idea is to learn what they are doing well and to do it better and also learn what they are not doing so well so you don’t do it. So, keeping your finger on the pulse of the competition is really, really important.

Number 7: The Culture.

What is the culture of your organization?

Is it a culture of, “My department is best and you need to support me. We need to take all the resources.” Or is the culture a culture where everyone says, “Okay, how do we work together in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” When you do that, magical things happen.

I was working with an organization on the West coast and the problem was the salespeople were caving in on price. When we started analyzing the issue, we uncovered that there was a distrust between all the departments and the salespeople were not confident.

“If I go out and I sell this thing will the other people really look after it?” And once we created that cultural shift where everyone connected with each other in that profound way.

What happened was sales people started selling at a much higher level and I asked the salespeople what is the difference since we did the retreat? What has changed?

And the answer was, “Before we did this transformation we’d come back from a customer and the customer say, ‘We want something changed slightly.’ And what we would hear from our people is, ‘I can’t do that or we can’t do that.’ And now after this retreat, after the transformation we come back with modification that we need and everybody in marketing, engineering and support and finance, first they say is, ‘how can we make that happen?’ It Is a totally different mindset for the organization.” So, it is the culture of the organization that creates, has a profound impact on the results that you get in sales.

Number 8: The Leadership

Are they there to  support the team, give motivation or are they there with you know, strict disciplinary actions? I heard this thing that I still can’t believe goes on. It is called a “steak and beans dinner.” So, I asked, “What is a stake and beans dinner?” “That is when we take the sales team out at the end of the quarter and the people that hit their quota and did really well get these amazing steak dinners and the people that didn’t do well get to eat beans at that same table.”

So it is a public shaming, I wouldn’t recommend it, I don’t even like it but it is amazing what kind of leaders are out there. To be a great leader this is what you need to do, you need to understand your people.

You need to understand what motivates each individual sales person and the best way to do that is to ask them. Say, “You know, you really went above and beyond the call of duty on this one particular account why did you do that?” And they will say, “The reason I did it is because the client needed help or the reason I did it was  I was part of our team and I got a win or the reason I did it was  the CEO stopped by my desk and said you did a great job.”

Just by asking those questions, you uncover what motivates them . As a leader, you need to figure out what motivates them, you need to know their strengths so you can actually support those so they get better. You need to figure out what their weaknesses are so you can actually get them coaching around that so they are continually improving.

No one is ever at the top of the game. Your job as a leader is to continually provide coaching so that they get better and better as they go along.

Number 9: Mindset

What is the mindset of the sales person that is going out there? Do they have a mindset of we are going to win, I am going to win, I have a certainty that I am going to do well?What if they have a mindset that they are not really sure?

Every single sales person gets rejected. The truly great sales people get rejected and they might go down into a slump for a minute, an hour but then they are right back up at what they are doing. Their bounce back rate is very, very quick. People that are not strong in sales don’t have a great mindset.

They get this major rejection and sometimes they can go into a slump for the day and the whole day is wasted, sometimes it happens a week and if they get another rejection during that week and it goes even deeper and it last longer.So we need to figure out what is the mindset of our salespeople? How quickly do they bounce back.

Jane gets rejected two or three times she goes in a slump, how can I bring her out of that slump very, very quickly? How can I notice it and then  how can I coach her through that. Then later on, how can I coach her to identify when she is going into a slump so she self corrects.

So being a leader is really putting your hand on the pulse of all your sales people, what motivates them, what demotivates them, what they need to learn, what they need to strengthen and being that kind of leader is where you get people going, “You know Umar gets me, Umar is out there looking after me, he is celebrating my wins.He is strengthening my capability and he is helping me with my shortcomings.” This is where you get salespeople that will go above and beyond the call of duty to get the job done.

Number 10: Motivation

Motivation is the sense of urgency that not only sales department has but the entire organization.

For the sales department often times people really have urgency to do a great job. They reach a certain Pplateau and then they start coasting, “Hey made my quota this month.”

And what you want from people is to have an ongoing sense of urgency so that they are always driven, always improving, always getting better results. So here is what we took you through today in this is really short blab.

We said okay here are the 10 things that you need to master when you want to be a great sales leader and get the most out of your sales team.

Number 1, you need to have a process that is looked down in place that we are always looking at, always improving.

Number 2, you need to have a winning skill set, so people know the skills they need to do great at sales.

Number 3, what you need to have is the company support is the company one unit supporting the sale department and is the sales department looking after the rest of the company?

Number 4, do we have the right target to client, are we going after the right people?

Number 5, is our message correct, so people want to take action with us.

Number 6, are we keeping an eye on the competition what they are doing well, what they are not doing so well?

Number 7, what is the culture of our organization?

Number 8,  do we have great leaders in place and as CEO’s and on the C team. Are we providing enough coaching to our leaders at the sales levels and others to continually be improving in what they do.

Number 9, we have got the mindset, we need to make sure we are providing mind training so all the salespeople, all the managers, all the workers are continually operating at a high level where they have high self-worth, highly motivated and committed to each other to do a great job.

And number 10, the motivation of the entire company, the sense of urgency to get the job done because when you have that urgency and that type of team connection and that kind of culture this is how you set new standards for the entire industry and you outpace and out think all of your competition.

My name is Umar Hameed and if you like this, please come to my website and there is a button there that says, you know, hey I would like to sign up for some free courses and I have got some mind training for leaders and salespeople that is going to blow your mind. One aspect is about sales, the other aspect is about mind training how to get better at what you do and get your mindset to reach at a higher level and then finally I’ve got some  different things and ideas that will make you a better human being, a better manager, a better salesperson and more effective and happier in your life and the website www.nolimitsselling.com. If you want to go directly to the courses it is www.nolimitsselling.com/courses. Hope you enjoyed this is, please tune in for more blabs in the future, thanks a lot, take care bye.