Check out this interview with Eliot Burdett of Peak Sales:

Employers, Recruiters and the Web

As a Sales Manager, you’re constantly faced with the challenges of leading a team while answering to your management, keeping fresh ideas circulating through your team, and playing to the strengths of your salesforce. In the face of this, many sales managers forget about working toward their own strengths when in charge of managing others.

If you find yourself leading, following, being pulled in 100 different direction and feeling tired, you’re not alone. Plenty of sales managers forget that exceeding their own expectations is part and parcel of having a quality job experience.

Here are some tips to help you remember how exceeding your own expectations as a sales manager, team leader, and employee can help you rise above the noise and kill your numbers.

Be Willing to Change

Some sales managers are so bogged down in day to day priorities that they forget how to make true, extraordinary changes happen in their own leadership and management styles.

Make sure to spend time each day reviewing your leadership style and success. Be open and be willing to make the changes necessary to represent yourself as a true leader to your team. In many cases, you’ll be surprised at how much your team and organization  are willing to change with you.

Look Around

Do you know what your competitors are doing? Are you at the top of your game – not just copying fresh, new ideas you see out there, but inventing them?

The only way you can stay ahead of the curve is to do your research. This is about more than taking a look at blogs and current methodology of selling. Listen to your sales staff, and make a and objectively evaluate what is and isn’t working with your current team. Sometimes even small changes to process and tactics can pay huge dividends.

Manage Dynamic Work Practices

If you’re willing to change, you’re willing to never stop changing. Once you resolve to yourself that you’re going to keep pushing the limits, trying new things, and preparing to excel, you can’t ever stop that process or you’ll lose momentum.

Being a dynamic, motivated leader is a huge part of being the kind of manager that your sales team respects and wants to follow. It isn’t necessarily about bending and breaking the rules – it’s about introducing new rules and strategies that ensure the results of the sale efforts are higher than ever before.

Be Willing to Listen

If your sales reps have great ideas, don’t squash them or take credit for them. Make your sales team an idea box. Your sales reps do work for you, and you can’t let them forget that – but you can allow them to take part in meaningful dialogue that will help you propel your sales team to record-breaking numbers.

If the chaos around you is getting in the way of performance, use the chaos to your advantage. Do this and you will be breaking sales records.

Many of our coaching clients are CEO’s with limited or no sales background and a question we are often asked is what sales tactics should be learned to close more business. My response is not what you might expect.

Rather than quoting sacred sales theories or the latest and hottest sales training, I suggest not learning any sales tactics at all.

Counter-intuitive? Yes, but it works and it generates more business than sales hooks and closing techniques.

People don’t like to be sold. This is especially true in the Internet age where people tend to prefer researching and buying over being sold.

So I advise my clients not to sell. Have conversations with prospects. Learn about them and their goals. Talk about requirements, challenges, who they plan to solve their problems, what alternatives they are considering, who makes the decisions and how. Describe your business in the context of their goals. Share your passion for your trade and insight about how you’ve helped your customers. Establish a relationship of trust and mutual interest with your prospects and customers. Take a sincere interest in their well being. Help them first and they will help you.

Create conditions that compel prospects to want your offering and let them buy.

If you avoid trying to sell, you will likely find you close more business.

To your success!

Eliot

If you are a sales manager who has pushed your team to peak performance over the last few years at your company, you have accomplished an impressive feat, given these economic conditions. You might think you deserve a raise for your performance and you likely do, but since so many good people are still out of a job, and things have been slow for many companies over the past few years, you might still feel the timing is just not right.

In many cases, you should be a little cautious.

Even if you’ve had a great review and your team is killing it this year, there are plenty of factors to consider before asking that you or your team receive an increase in salary from management. Here are some things to consider.

If Yearly Increases are Cut, So are Performance Based Raises.

If your company typically gives out an annual increase to employees, but you’ve seen that cut back over the past few years, your company is likely reducing overhead just to be able to stay in the game. Meaning, if you ask for a salary increase, you may not be likely to receive good news.

In this case, patience is a virtue. Continue to demonstrate your importance to the company over time, work to make the company money and prove your worth, and a salary increase won’t be too much to ask when things are better financially.

Performance Based Raises Can Demoralize Other Team Members.
If you are promised a huge salary increase based on good performance, other team members at your level are likely to catch wind of it. When that happens, it demoralizes other employees in your company and could potentially cause problems between you and other staff members. Executives tend to avoid making decisions that will cause these kinds of results.

One way to handle this is to explain to executives what you have to offer the company, and how rewarding you now will benefit your company in the long run.

Your Bosses Want to Know They’ll Get Their Money’s Worth.

The value of a dollar expands when times are tough. If your bosses need to know that you are going to bring more value to the company if they pay you more money, tell them that – and how you plan to do it.

And when they ask if you won’t bring that value without a raise? Tell them you’ll certainly continue to add value to the company, but that you hope you’ll be considered in the future.

If you’re ready for a raise, and you think a financial incentive will help you manage your team more efficiently and bring in more sales, you don’t have to be concerned about mentioning it to management – but definitely be ready to let them know what’s in it for them, and how it will change your role in the future.

If you are missing your sales targets and you’ve evaluated your entire sales staff, and possibly even let some reps go, in efforts to get things on track, but here’s a question to ask yourself – Is it them, or is it you?
When it comes right down to it, sales people that are underperforming either don’t belong on the team or aren’t getting the guidance they need from you.

What are you doing to hire the right people?

Know what you are looking for – have you analyzed your selling environment and characterized the role in terms of sales experience, skills,  and DNA someone would need to be successful on your team?

Hire Objectively – does your interview process screen each applicant with the same process to objectively assess who is best suited to succeed? Do you settle for who is available or wait to find people highly likely to succeed?

Check Up On References. You’d be amazed at how often sales managers, particularly those working at small companies without human resources divisions, don’t check up on the people they’re hiring. You’d be surprised how often a simple call could have saved a hiring manager a lot of headaches.

And what are you doing to make sure your reps are successful?

Analyze Your Sales Goals. Are these goals attainable? Do your reps have the support and resources to achieve the targets?

Take Time Out for Training and Sharpening Their Skills. Do you reps receive the product and sales training they require to be successful? Elite athletes have trainers, so it should come as no surprise that even seasoned sales people need to develop new skills and stay sharp.

Meet Regularly and Coach Them – Your reps are not likely to stay on track by themselves. Do you meet with them regularly to make sure they are practicing the right behaviors and performing the actions that will make them successful? Are you helping them close key wins?
If a particular member of sales staff isn’t working out, it makes sense to weed them out – but if you are not helping your reps be successful, you may find you spend all your time weeding and replacing rather than celebrating success.

The ideal scenario for many businesses is to have a sales team of reps who are paid on contract, with no base salary and receiving 100% of their compensation in the form of commissions. And why not? Most employers would like their reps to assume all the risk of performing and be highly motivated to sell.  So why don’t more companies build teams this way? The reality is that good reps know their own value and if they are given the opportunity to change jobs they will usually go to the highest bidder which often is one who offers a package with a base plus commissions and support to ensure their success. There is, however a simple way to make the 1099 contractors work for sales hiring.

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The software as a service (SaaS) model continues to be popular in the tech sector, but many of the companies that adopt this model struggle to get their sales function working properly.  On the surface, the differences between the traditional software model and SaaS appear to be small, so why does is it so hard to get the sales approach right? Because from a sales perspective selling SaaS is fundamentally different than selling traditional licensed software.

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Most people don’t like to hear other people say “no,” but in sales it happens all the time. Does the ability to handle rejection have a direct relationship to sales performance? Absolutely! Insensitivity to rejection is one of the most critical attributes of highly successful sales reps.

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When we get called in to help a company improve its sales hiring record or turn around poor hiring performance, the first thing we do is investigate what has worked and has not worked in the past.

There are several mistakes that are commonly made and most involve poor preparation or lack of process. Given the pressure to deliver results, the temptation always exists to cut corners and make a hire, but the results can be catastrophic in terms of lost revenues, lost leads, and lost customers. The good news is that these misakes can easily be fixed once they are recognized.

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In the sprit of the FIFA games that we are probably all watching, we thought we would pick on baseball players using a soccer analogy. No country expects to be competitive by building a national soccer team made up of a random group of athletes from different sports. To state what is probably obvious, it wouldn’t work because the players would lack the following:

1. the right skills
2. the right training and conditioning
3. passion for a sport that is not their primary sport

A soccer team like this wouldn’t win many games and no amount of conditioning, training, leadership or incentives would make a difference.  If this is obvious, why do so many managers use this approach when building and developing sales teams?

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