Train Your Salespeople

Excerpt from “The Business Sergeant’s Field Manual: Military Grade Business Execution without the Yelling and Push-Ups” by Chris Hallberg.

It’s crucial to make sure your salespeople know how to both open the door to a sale and then CLOSE the sale once interest arises. I’ve witnessed potential deals fall apart right as they were about to happen because the salesperson wasn’t properly trained by his or her team leaders on how to cover both ends of the process. While your salespeople need to be given a certain amount of latitude and freedom to close sales, they also need very clear and easy-to-use, in-the-heat-of-the-moment pricing guidelines. When a potential client starts to express interest, and seems in the mood to do a deal right there, your salespeople need to be nimble enough to not lose that “let’s do a deal right now” mentality because that opportunity might never return. At that point, your salesperson has only opened the door to the possibility of doing a deal. He or she must know how to close the door, as well.

This is the most crucial and yet most easily fumbled part of closing the deal. Salespeople need to be able to close with confidence. The greatest help sales management can provide is to not saddle salespeople with algorithms so complex they can’t figure things out on the fly. Once that momentum is stalled, the prospective client will sense it and often back out because it no longer “feels right.”

When I first started coaching businesses on sales improvement many years ago, I found that less than half the clients I met really understood the sales process, and fewer had a consistent sales pipeline vs. a lumpy or sporadic pipeline. As we work together, sales start to grow consistently each quarter, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot, and the clients now know WHY they’re successful. Equally as important, they can literally turn the marketing wick up or down (depending on when their sales momentum dictates it), and the sales they close are in direct correlation to those marketing adjustments they make.

Probably 60 percent of the companies I work with at the outset of our collaboration don’t have a consistent and repeatable sales process. If they have a spike in sales, it’s short lived because they don’t have a process to understand how they did it and how they can repeat the success. They often chalk it up to luck, but as the famous saying goes, “90 percent of sales is process, 10 percent is good old-fashioned luck.” Your sales process should be custom manufactured. When you don’t have one in play, it creates pain all around in the company. It can become an uncomfortable place to work, especially if you’re part of the sales team. The entire company is relying on that team to generate the income that supports the business, and they, therefore, deserve not only the support of the rest of the company, but also a reliable process that generates leads and closes them at a high percentage.

Have a Plan to Improve Your Sales Team

If you have sales members on your team who are not performing, what’s the plan to get them to perform? After-action reviews are important here, as well as listening in on some of their sales calls to find out how you can help them improve. It’s also important to ask a lot of questions, to do a lot of triage and diagnostic work to find out where that salesperson is failing. They might be doing nine steps flawlessly out of your 10-step sales process, but if they’re getting that one key step wrong, the sale isn’t going to happen. Great sales management has to put a great training and coaching program in place, because there are very few salespeople who are born sellers who don’t require any direction. Even someone with the greatest natural sales instinct had to hone that talent along the way, usually with the help of a mentor who showed that person the ropes.

Forecasting your sales accurately is another important issue to pay attention to. You can’t just make up a figure every day; you need metrics to measure the baseline, even though your salespeople have to be given a little bit of latitude. Whatever the learning curve may be for your industry, you have to give your people the time and attention to get them there when they’re first starting out. But once you’ve established a given baseline for a salesperson and he or she is not excelling beyond that latitude, you need to start firing people to make room for those who can do the job. The trick is, you don’t want to do this too early; they might not have gotten all the training they need or enough time in the field to learn the route/customer base. It’s important to remember that salespeople just starting out can get wrapped around the axle. So the last thing you want to do is fire people who might have the potential to stay in that middle third.

That said, way too many small business owners hang on to dead weight for way too long. When I work with new clients and start digging into their staff issues, I routinely find salespeople who haven’t met their quotas (sometimes for years) and are still around. It just blows me away when a company is still employing someone who hasn’t made the numbers three quarters in a row. It’s important to never overpromise anything up front and to set realistic vs. unrealistic expectations for your sales team.

So it’s important to create an eco-system that will enable you to recognize underperformance in sales and the steps needed to improve it. Without that, your company won’t survive. The sales manager has to keep his or her finger on the pulse of the team’s daily lead flow and go on sales calls because, as we say in the military, you can’t lead your troops from battalion headquarters. You have to be out on the business battlefield with your troops.

Excerpt from “The Business Sergeant’s Field Manual: Military Grade Business Execution without the Yelling and Push-Ups by Chris Hallberg.

Chris Hallberg is a seasoned business advisor, U.S. Army veteran, and was ranked #9 on Inc.’s “Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts.” He received his B.A. from Century College in White Bear Lake, MN). H is the author of “The Business Sergeant’s Field Manual: Military Grade Business Execution without the Yelling and Push-Ups.”