8. February 2010 by Dan Trudell.

The word on the street, real or imagined, is that the economy is in trouble. How severe and for how long is anybody’s guess. So, what can you do to maintain and grow your business, regardless of external economic conditions? Superior sales teams produce superior results in good times and bad. By implementing a more effective selection process, you can improve the quality of your sales team which will produce more revenue year in and year out.

So, how does a company build a superior sales team? There are 4 factors that must be present for a superior sales team to come together. These four factors are:

• Successful Personality Characteristics of sales people
• Sales process skills including deep understanding of your customer’s business 
• Excellent sales management 
• Product and pricing knowledge

If any of these factors is missing, it is impossible to build and sustain a high performing sales team. I will expand on each of these factors and then share some action steps that any company can take to begin building a more effective sales team.

First among equals is Successful Personality Characteristics of your sales people. Conventional wisdom has been that to improve sales performance, a company needs to train their people. Before you train them, however, the people you are investing in must have personality characteristics that, coupled with sales training, will drive performance. Examples of some of the key characteristics that have been correlated to superior sales performance are energy level, resilience, optimism and follow through. No amount of “sales training” will overcome missing success characteristics.

Second are sales process skills. With the right sales people that possess the necessary personality dimensions to be successful, training in how to sell can be worthwhile.  A common sales process involves 6 steps:

1. Prospecting- Do they know how to develop new business?
2. First Meeting- Do they create a good first impression, not only appearance, but by demonstrating some understanding of the customers business?
3. Probing and Questioning- Do they know how to ask questions that aid the client in buying?
4. Handling resistance/objections- Do they know how to respond to typical objections or obstacles in the sales process?
5. Influencing- How does the sales person present and persuade the client to move forward?
6. Closing- Are they able to ask for the order to close the sale or do they oversell? 

Too often, sales training has been viewed as the “silver bullet” that can make anyone into a superstar. In my 20+ years of experience, 2/3 of the sales training time and money are wasted on people that do not have the “right stuff” to be successful in sales!

Third, is excellent sales management. Excellent sales management is much more than setting sales revenue targets and assigning accounts. Excellent sales managers understand what motivates each individual sales person and use that knowledge everyday in assigning accounts, developing incentives and contests and in how to relate to each sales person. As an example, some sales people are motivated by affiliation; they need to have time to interact with others on the team every day. Others like to be given their assignments and be left alone to complete them. Treating all sales people the same will guarantee that as a sales manager you will be MIS-managing a good portion of them. In addition, on going feedback is essential; coaching on account strategy is another key factor that excellent sales managers regularly practice. Research has shown that excellent, effective sales managers can have as much as a 50% positive impact on sales performance!

Finally, understanding your industry, the market and the pricing structure and competitive options is important. Often, however, an inordinate amount of time is spent on this one aspect of selling. The truth is that perfect understanding of the internal workings of your organization will not make a person that is deficient in one or more of the first 3 factors successful!

So, how do you get started on the road to a superior sales team? The first step is to understand who is “behind the mask” when you are selecting a new sales person. Screening and selection tools are available today that can provide an enormous amount of relevant information to help aid your selection of sales candidates. It is important to keep in mind that any tool you choose to utilize in the hiring process must be valid, meaning that it accurately measures what it purports to measure; reliable, meaning that the results will be consistent; and lastly that it be job related.

There are many tools available today and as is the case with most things, some are better than others. A tool our clients have had great success with is SalesMax. SalesMax measures sales personality factors, sales knowledge and sales motivations and generates a recommendation for the hiring authority. It also generates specific interview questions to aid in “unmasking” the real candidate. A recent validation study done with SalesMax for a large, multi line insurance company found that those salespeople who scored in the best range sold on average over $200,000.00 more than those who scored in the avoid range.

For more information on SalesMax, send an email to dant@peakperform.net and put SalesMax info in the subject line. I will send you an assessment survey to see if SalesMax is a “fit” for your sales process and a sample report .

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4. May 2009 by Monica Le Grand Trudell & Dan Trudell.

As we write this article, it is baseball season. Imagine, if you will, a team of excellent, talented players; athletic and skilled at their respective positions. One might predict much success based upon that scenario. But further imagine that while they are skilled in the basics, hitting, running, etc., they don’t have a solid understanding of the rules of the game! Would that change your outlook for how successful this team will be in season play? 

We find the same scenario occurring in business after business today; highly skilled and talented “players” in each area, but without the critical understanding of the fundamental rules of business. Those fundamentals include a basic knowledge of the “cash to cash” cycle, the basics of operational decisions on the financial success of the business and how important it is to understand how each functional area or department “fits” together for organizational growth. 

And in today’s difficult economy, it becomes more important than ever that each and every person in your company understands exactly how your business makes money, how what they do on a daily basis, contributes to the bottom line and how the decisions they make impacts the profitability of the company, keeping the company strong enough to weather difficult times.   

Here are several questions to ask yourself to determine if developing the business acumen of your employees would be beneficial to your business: 

1-      Are you asking your people to do more with less?

2-      Is competition getting tougher?

3-      Are key decisions being made at lower levels in the company?

If so, do the frontline folks in each department or functional area that you depend upon to make the best decisions for both the company and the customer have a solid understanding of the foundational business basics to make optimal choices? Do they have strong Business and Financial acumen? 

Many of our clients have concluded that they have been putting those critical frontline folks at a disadvantage. They realize they have neglected to provide them with the knowledge to make good business decisions. Manufacturing Reality^TM: Ca$h Flow^TM addresses that missing component. By working in teams, running their simulated manufacturing business for 3 years, they make decisions and very quickly experience the impact of those decisions both operationally and financially. They must manage their cash, make tough choices about how to invest their limited resources and quickly learn that “there is only so much money”!  Through discussion and debrief, they are able to make the connections to how the decisions they make on a daily basis impacts the financial success of your company.  

Often, we are asked how a company can justify the investment in this type of learning exercise. I ask in response “What is the cost of sub standard or downright wrong decisions on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis?” What would it mean to a company if your frontline workforce had a better understanding of how your company’s operations and their decisions improved the cash to cash cycle, why it is important to control overtime, how much waste impacts bottom line performance, etc. The answer to those questions in dollar terms usually far outweighs the investment in your people. The simulation experience will drive behavior change and enhance the quality of the hundreds of decisions that are made every day. Ultimately, the cumulative effect of all those decisions drives improved financial performance. 

And isn’t that the goal? 

Dan Trudell and Monica Le Grand Trudell are partners in Peak Performance Associates, Inc.  Since 1990, Peak Performance Associates has aligned the people strategy with the business strategy of client companies.  For more information on Manufacturing Reality^TM:  Ca$h Flow^TM or how we can assist you with aligning your people strategy with your company strategy, please contact Dan Trudell at 608-835-9288 or dant@peakperform.net.

Posted in Talent Management, Development, Financal Acumen, Business Growh, Business Acumen | No Comments »