Every month, businesses strive to hit aggressive sales targets that, if hit, will demonstrate business growth. If the targets are missed, it is common for sales managers to “turn up the heat” thereby pushing their sales team even harder. The work environment resulting from this negative reaction is not enjoyable for the sales team or the sales manager. Most importantly, it fails to accomplish sales objectives with any level of consistency. The end result is that both sales staff and sales management find themselves on a treadmill, unable to jump off. If this is a familiar situation for you whether you are a salesperson or sales manager, you are not alone.
Does the sales professional have control over the prospect opening their wallet and forking over money? Can a sales person force the prospect to sign a purchase order before they are ready to buy? Of course not. Yet despite their knowing, sales managers still expect their team to swim upstream, against convention and professional business behaviors in order to hit the company’s annual sales plan.
Stress is created when people are made responsible for things that they have no control over. If businesses are to be effective in the management of their sales team, they need to stop managing to a number and start managing the one thing their sales team has complete control over: their behavior.
Sales managers should help their team define daily behaviors that, when performed consistently over time, will produce the results that support the business plan. They can help in determining the number of prospecting calls that need to be made each day, the number of networking events to attend each week, the number of referrals received over a period of time and so on. Once the behavioral recipe is developed, the manager can, without stress, hold the sales professional accountable to execute the defined behaviors. If they are done successfully, then it is time to praise the sales professional for doing the behaviors regardless of whether or not sales are produced. If behaviors are done, and results are short of what the business needs, then the sales professional might need training on sales technique so that when in the sales call, they can be more effective. Maybe the behavior plan needs to have more activity to generate the right amount of sales.
Managing behavior is the stress-free, highly objective and effective way to manage a sales team. If a manager can produce consistent selling behavior throughout the team, the sales will come.
by Karl Schaphorst, President
402-403-4334
Sandler Training is a global training organization with over three decades of experience and proven results. Sandler provides sales and management training and consulting services for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as corporate training for Fortune 1000 companies. For more information, please contact Karl Schaphorst at (402) 403-4334 or by email at kschaphorst@sandler.com. You can also follow his blog at karlschaphorst.sandler.com