Are You in a Race to the Basement?

by Mike Stewart

If you are feeling the economic pinch, you are not alone -- times are tough for lots of companies right now. As a result, many companies are going into a defensive mode, and, from what I see, creating an attitude that's having a negative, sometimes devastating impact on sales forces across the country.

When sales slow down it's real easy to start making excuses, reduce demands on your salespeople, and cut back on training, but that's the time that positive thinking, high expectations, and assertive sales training are needed most.

I received a call from one of my clients earlier today whose salespeople are really getting beat up in the field. He said that they are so defensive that they are mostly just calling on their buddies. He recognizes that they are heading in the wrong direction and said, "at the rate they're going its just a race to the basement."

If your salespeople (or you personally) are heading for the basement during these tough economic times by defensively making excuses instead of assertively making productive sales calls -- by cutting back instead of cutting loose -- let me suggest three things:


First Step

Review each salesperson's territory and find out where that person is spending their sales time. Have them spend their time where they have the best opportunities for making sales.

• Do they really know where the sales opportunities are? Have they segmented their accounts and prospects and identified their A's, B's, C's, and P's, their 1's, 2's, and 3's?

• Are they hiding in their comfort zones calling on their buddies at the expense of making tough calls on qualified prospects?

• Is there a plan in place to handle the "drag" accounts (B's, C's, 2's, and 3's) so your salespeople can perform as professional rainmakers generating business and not as highly-paid customer service reps generating busy-ness? To create an excuse-free sales environment, you must begin removing the excuses!

• Implement a winning formula. When you draw on your own experiences and think about the successes you have achieved in your life, you realize that you have had to work harder when the chips were down than when things were coming easily, and you played the game harder when you were losing than you did when you were winning.

• Set the example. Never ask from others that which you are not willing to do yourself. You must show the way and demonstrate the behaviors that you want to see from those you are leading.

• Demonstrate a positive can-do attitude. People aren't stupid. They know the score, and they can see through a bogus, sugarcoated attitude, so don't be a phony. Be honest about the situation, then let people know what they have to do to be successful under the circumstances. Almost without exception, this involves sucking it up and working harder and smarter.

• Be encouraging. People need to know that you genuinely care about them as valuable human beings and that you have confidence that they can do what's called for. Sometimes even blue-chip high-impact performers become discouraged and need help.

• Training - like motivation, eating, and bathing - is something that you have to do all the time. This is especially true when times are tough. That's when salespeople tend to lose focus, become defensive, and forget to do the things that they know how to do. It's like a golf swing breaking down under pressure; even the most successful golf pros have to go to their coaches for a tune-up when they start to wilt under pressure.

• These activities and behaviors are the training points that you need to address. Focus on the critical-to-success factors (strategic selling, making calls, meaningful discovery, persuasive presentations, handling objections, closing, negotiation skills, etc.) and not activities that don't directly produce sales.

• Prioritize these points in order of importance and concentrate on the most important first.

• Realize that you must take personal responsibility for getting this training done. You can do more of this yourself than you may imagine; let me know if I can help you maximize impact and get measurable results in a critically shorter time frame.

• Understand the economics of training. If your sales team makes only a few sales (sometimes only one!) that they would have otherwise missed, you can recover your entire training investment!

• Be an entrepreneurial manager not a custodial manager. Be creative. If your training budget has been cut, find the money in another category. If your meeting budget has been slashed, provide tele-seminar training.

• Recognize that training fails for two reasons: Information Overload and Lack of Follow Up.

• Specialize the topics and limit the amount of information covered. Go for depth, not breadth. Learn about "unbundling" (separating training topics into their component parts and zeroing in on those parts that are most applicable.)

• If you are a manager, you are a coach. Make joint calls with your salespeople to insure that the training is being implemented. If you are a salesperson recognize the reality that you must become your own self-coach. I can't begin to tell you how important these two things are.