Читать книгу Sales Management For Dummies - Bellah Butch - Страница 7

One of the first orders of business after a new sales manager gets settled in is to take an accurate, honest look at the current sales team to see who you’re working with.

I refer to the salespeople like a professor would a classroom full of college students. You want to know who are your A students. You need to figure out how to continue to keep their fires lit and challenge them to grow and progress from where they are now. Nobody on your team is as good as they can be, trust me.

You need to identify your B students and find out how you can move them into the group with the A’s. You need to identify your C students because you’ll spend some time with them to determine if they have a future with you or not.

Most importantly, you need to get to know the D and F students. They’re the ones who run you ragged. These are the people who constantly complain and fret over every little thing and blame their lack of sales on the government, global warming, and anything else they can come up with. These are the ones who can drag you down and take your focus away from the salespeople who really need your attention. Don’t let them.

Grading on a curve

One of the interesting parts of your first few months as a new sales manager is assessing your team. Although looking at their sales numbers is good, as the sales manager you now have access to data you never had before – namely, the gross profit each salesperson generates and their accounts receivable.

A great salesperson doesn’t just do a lot of volume, he generates profit and collects his receivables.

So that explains it

Not long after I started my first position as Vice President of Sales, I had a division sales manager who had let a customer build up tens of thousands of dollars in accounts receivable. This was a customer I was a bit leery of in the first place, so I didn’t have a real warm fuzzy feeling when he got behind on his payments.

I called the salesperson one day and read him the riot act, “You’ve got to get out there and get the money. No excuses. I don’t care what you have to do, GET THE MONEY!”

I was steaming hot because this was about to blow up in his face and mine, too. I was not only trying to protect the two of us but keep the company from losing a ton of money in the process.

He said, “Butch, calm down. This is why I’m selling them so cheap. That way when they beat us out of the money we aren’t losing as much!”

Yes, he was kidding, it broke the tension, and we both laughed. And, yes we eventually got the money – but it just goes to show how some salespeople rationalize away anything.

Now that you have the ability to see all the numbers, you can determine who is actually producing for your company. Just because someone is on the top of the board every week with the most sales dollars doesn’t make him your top salesperson. If his gross profit is low and receivables are high, he could very likely be costing you money.

Those are things you don’t see as just another salesperson. But, in your new position you need to take in all the facts and make your own judgment about how your team is assembled and who your top producers really are.

Finding out where you need help

In analyzing and grading your current team, you will be called upon to make some decisions about individual salespeople and where their strengths and weaknesses lie.

Even though you’ve probably worked with these people before, I doubt you’ve really stood back to see what part of the sales process they excel at and where they struggle. But, now, it’s time you do.

The only way to discover your sales team’s strengths and weaknesses is to watch them in action. Salespeople are seldom accurate judges of their own talent levels in any area of the process. Even though everyone wants to be a great closer or be able to answer every objection, if they aren’t spending an appropriate amount of time prospecting, they’re going to be staring at their desk all day. No prospecting equals no prospects and no prospects equals no sales.

Two things you can do immediately to give you better insight into individual team members are

✔ Work with them: Jump in right alongside as they wait on customers, make their calls, or run their sales route. Note this is called working with them and not for them. You won’t learn anything about them or how they operate if you take over and do everything yourself. That’s not what this is for. Just be an observer at this point. There’s plenty of time to cover your findings later.

✔ Role play: Whether it’s one-on-one, just you and the salesperson or in a group setting during a sales meeting, you can learn a lot about how your people respond to certain situations by role playing. Don’t go easy on them and throw them softballs. Making it easy for them is not a learning experience. Treat them like they’re out in the field and bring up as many real-world objections as you can.

As you go through these exercises, take good notes. I mean really good notes so that you can go back over what happened when you and the salesperson are back within the safety of your own office.

By identifying strengths and weaknesses in each and every salesperson you get a much better idea where to spend your time when you work with them.

If someone is the best prospecting salesperson you’ve ever seen but doesn’t have any new customers, the breakdown for them is obviously somewhere between that initial contact and the close. On the other hand, if you have a master closer who’s not afraid to ask for the sale who’s struggling, it’s likely he isn’t making enough new calls.

Don’t assume you know how your salespeople work just by past experience and what you’ve heard from the previous manager or the salespeople. See it and hear it for yourself.

I can’t stress enough how much of your job is simply to make each member of your sales team better, and until you know where each person needs to improve, you really can’t do that, can you?