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Over the years, I’ve seen all sorts of people become sales superstars. In the early stages of my management career, I often was surprised by the variety of personalities in a successful sales force, incorrectly thinking that a great sales person would always be charismatic or witty or well-dressed or intelligent. Oddly, I didn’t find this to be true at all. Don’t get me wrong, I found lots of sales people who possessed those qualities – they just didn’t correlate with a sales person’s success. In fact, often the best dressed, most attractive, and smartest sales people were total duds, spending more time trying to explain why they weren’t getting new business and getting me to like them than making sales calls. I found this puzzling. Why were the most obvious “natural” sales people not performing while some of their quirkier, less extroverted and seemingly less skilled peers were ripping the cover off the ball? The answer is both simple and, at times, counterintuitive. Great sales people share activity in common not personality.
Strangely, the amount of sales activity is the most important factor, while the quality of that activity is a distant second. This becomes really apparent when a “new” sales person – with little to no experience or contacts in your industry – joins your sales team and blows the doors off of long term players. It is mind boggling how many times a territory has languished in apparent agony under the efforts of a revolving door of professionals who couldn’t seem to light a campfire when a brand new person with virtually no skills comes in and ignites an inferno. How do they do it? They make more sales calls on a daily basis than anyone else. They do it systematically and religiously, even if they do it poorly.
Implementing a system that produces mediocre or poor quality in abundant quantity seems like a really bad idea. Until you think about businesses that do mediocre really well – McDonalds comes to mind as one example. I know some people like the taste of a Big Mac, most of them are under 18 or moderately intoxicated, yet most of us would agree that the flavor and the quality aren’t all that terrific. The trick is consistency. Reliability outweighs the downside quality – we aren’t looking for gourmet fare when we mow a Quarter Pounder, just a cheap product we can count on. Another example is Southwest airlines. Want an assigned seat? No go. Food? Nope. Clean plane? Depends on how quick the turn time is. But if you want to get from point A to point B in the Southwestern region of the US with the most options and a great safety record, Southwest is your choice. The quality of the experience might be low, but the consistency and quantity is high.
Which leads us back to salespeople. When a senior sales executive calls me and asks for my help building sales results, they usually have one of two common solutions in mind. First, they believe the antidote to lackluster sales results is sales training. Intuitively, this makes sense – if you want to improve performance, you enhance skills, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, rolling out sales training usually misses the more important point – sales skills only benefit a sales person if that sales person is making enough sales calls to actively work on their skills. Sales training is a lot like taking a class in Microsoft Excel – it only makes a difference if the training is applied immediately and consistently. Anyone who has ever taken a software class and then promptly not logged into the software for a couple of weeks after the class knows this all too well – pretty much everything has leaked out of that tightly packed bundle of goo inside your head and you’re back where you began.
Changing compensation is another common cure sales executives order up for sales teams struggling to perform. If I had $50 for every time someone said to me “put the cheese where you want the mouse to go,” or its corollary, “pay for the behavior you want,” I’d be Donald Trump (minus the hair thing.) Compensation can be part of the problem, but usually not the most important part. Typically, the way a sales force is structured and the requirements of each position need to be refined, then the talent needs to be assessed in the context of those refinements before a compensation change can have any positive impact. Just like you wouldn’t choose to saddle up your Ferrari to pull your trailer, you probably don’t want an account manager charged with cold calling senior level executives. Each position requires a different type of skills and talents; matching those requirements to the right strengths is key to success, just like you’re more likely to pull your Airstream with your F250.
Since neither sales training or changing compensation is usually the right first solution to a salesforce’s lackluster performance, what is? Two words: Focused activity. What goals and activities do the sales people strive to achieve every day? Are those goals and activities in alignment? Are the objectives simple, tangible and explicitly clear? Are sales people working on focused activity every single day? In virtually every struggling sales organization, the answer to these questions is either “no” or “not really.” For goals to be powerful and to drive the right behavior, they have to be both results and activity focused. Many of the sales plans I’ve seen talk about desired financial outcomes but miss the highest value activity milestones which lead to results. It’s not enough to outline revenue, market share, dollar expansion or other financial metrics without stating objectives which coincide to the most meaningful parts of the sales cycle. Activity goals vary with your industry but examples include # of meetings with decision makers, # of leads generated, # of contracts issued etc. Isolating the fewest component parts of the sales cycle which are most correlated to revenue results and developing monthly goals around those components get sales people clearly focused on the most important aspect of their performance: what they choose to do every day.
For individual sales people, as well as 12 step program participants, each and every day is a battle. Temptations, distractions, emergencies, and other time villains suck sales people away from the activity required to win every day. Slaying these foes in a quest to stick to a daily sales plan which drives the highest value parts of the sales cycle determines an individual sales person’s success. The sales person who focuses on executing a daily activity plan and ignores distractions is going to hit goal.
Sales leaders can help by watching their sales team’s pipeline and intervening early when sales cycle milestones aren’t being achieved. In most cases, sales people who are behind their plan have fallen off the activity wagon – assuming the plan was reasonable in the first place. The best intervention strategy starts with a discussion focused on how the sales person spent their day. Who did they call? Why? Who did they visit? Why? How would they have improved the quality of their sales day? What gets in the way? How can they handle those distractions in the future? Make no mistake, asking these questions can be pretty infuriating since it’s so much easier to either a: not make the time for the conversation at all or, b: just tell them what they should be doing. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches work. Helping a sales person to see the value of their time and helping them think about priorities from inside their own cranium is the most powerful way to get them on the right course. It usually takes a number of conversations and a few ride time days (where the sales leader joins the sales person on a full day of calls and other mayhem) to help a sales person who is stuck in lower value activity to see the light. Eventually, with a little patience, persistence and the right approach – questions and inquiry rather than statements and “guidance” – sales people get on the path of properly focused activity. And like a magic trick, great sales results appear from thin air.