If you were to ask your sellers what they need to sell more… look out!

The responses may include: new computers, a lead generation resource, approval to discount, more support staff, a pay raise or many other answers that no matter how much you ‘think outside the box’, it isn’t going to happen!

Yet you still need more sales with the same resources, budgets, and time.

Tip:  The great news is this can be achieved when your sellers look for “Success Within The Box.”

Remember the Apollo 13 space mission?  “Houston we have a problem.” In order to bring our men home safely – the people on the ground could only use the resources within the space shuttle to come up with a solution.  And lucky for everyone involved, they figured out a way to put a big square peg in a small round hole!

Since status quo is your biggest competition, it’s time for your sellers to elevate their creativity and problem solving abilities using what already exists and not sit around for the ‘only if one day’ day dreams!

Show the clip from Apollo 13 to generate some problem solving creativity!

Sales leaders strive to have an entire team of top performers – and if you’ve been following all of these weekly tips you know the 3 actions that will guarantee that.

They are:

• Regular field ride-alongs

• One-on-One coaching, and

• 30 minute sales training meetings.

Whether you are doing all or any of the three – you may not currently have a team of top performers and wonder what’s up with those under performers.

How you ask what’s up is critical to getting to the root of the reason and avoids hearing it’s the economy, poor quality leads, timing, and the such.

These six questions gain specific information and are very telling on how much thought the seller is giving to their accountability to under performing sales.

1. Where are you in relation to meeting goal?

2. When you met goal before what did you do that you may not be doing now?

3. What barriers are currently keeping you from reaching goal?

4. What are you willing to do to remove those barriers?

5. What specific skill, if improved, would aid you in driving more sales?

6. What actions do you recommend for yourself?

Schedule a meeting with each under performing seller and you’ve helped them.  Plus, you can check off an action for yourself- a one-on-one coaching session!  You’re 1/3 of the way there to building a team of top performers!

Recently I was reading Michael Hyatt’s, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Thomas Nelson Publishers blog – Five Ways to Energize Your Team.

Michael wrote:

“People will only go so far in the performance of a duty. If you want their very best, you have to have their hearts. You can’t demand this or even buy it with a paycheck. You have to earn it.

In my experience, there are five ways to do this:

1. Assume others are smart and working hard.

2. Listen intently and ask thoughtful questions.

3. Acknowledge the sacrifices others have made on your behalf.

4. Express gratitude for their effort and their results.

5. Remind them why their work is so important and the difference they are making.”

I agree with Michael’s 5 and have 5 more to add:

6. Include others in the decision making process when the decision affects them.

7.  Admit when you are wrong, even if you are the boss.

8.  Make the invisible visible.  Display goals, analytics, progress.

9. Encourage and entertain new ideas even if they come from others!

10. Believe in others more than they believe in themselves.

Leaders, the time is now to personally create the environment where people not only want to work, but they want to excel.

Are you thinking upstream?

In order to out-think, out-service and out-sell the competition you and your team need to think “upstream.”

Gather your team together and discuss:

• What’s typical today about the customer’s strategy and decision   making process when purchasing your products?

• How’s it’s changed in the last 6-12 months?

• What’s the competition doing these days?

• How can you demonstrate value beyond pricing to separate you from the competition?

• What trends and challenges is taking place in the client’s market?

• How are they different from the last 6-12 months?

• What will change for them in the next 6-18 months?

Everyone tends to go about their business day in and day out.

Taking the time to stop and evaluate keeps you and your team going upstream and leaving the competition downstream.

Your sellers don’t hear back from the prospect after they’ve sent the proposal.

Does it mean your proposals stink?

Not necessarily.  More likely than not…

It’s all in the set up prior to mailing or emailing the proposal.

As a sales manager, I bet it’s frustrating for you to listen to seller after seller say the client went ‘awol’.

Every one of those ‘awol’ prospects add up to lost revenues and a higher cost of sale because of the time and resources the sales person poured into getting to the point to present a proposal.

The obvious reason this might be happening is – the seller ‘smells’ a deal and/or becomes desperate and skips necessary steps of the sales process.

Note to self:  It’s more important to be discriminating than desperate.

Here’s where the seller may have skipped some steps:

• Sticker shock –The budget question wasn’t asked.
• Priorities shifted at the prospect’s company – Omitted prioritizing this initiative in relation to everything else with specific timelines and deadlines
• Buyer was price checking to current vendor – Avoided a question many sellers are uncomfortable to ask – “What brought you to this juncture where you picked up the phone to seek out an alternative to your current supplier? “What roadblocks do you foresee to switch suppliers?”
• Prospect not ready to buy – Didn’t ask, “What are our next steps?  What’s the downside of moving forward?  What’s the upside?  How important is that?”

But there’s another problem for the missing in action prospect after a proposal is mailed or emailed…

And that’s all in the set up prior to mailing or emailing the proposal.

So, what’s the proper set up?

When it’s time in the sales conversation to discuss the next steps – and the next step being the seller will prepare a proposal – here’s how to set it up:

• Explain how the next steps work

• Proposal is presented at a face-to-face meeting in person where applicable and via Skype, GoToMeting, Join.com or whichever resource you use – preferably with a 2 way web-camera

• All decision makers are available and committed to attend

• The proposal may (and I emphasize may) be sent 15-20 minutes prior to the meeting. There are times where the person does need to review the information and there are several buying styles where this is actually beneficial.

• Calendars come out and set the next appointment.

This is non-negotiable.  This is how you and your company go to market. 

It’s time to rethink how your team delivers their proposals. The benefits of sticking to your guns and only presenting together are:

• Establish yourself as a strategic business partner

• Avoid looking desperate

• Not over-investing in non-qualified buyers

• More qualified buyers

• More closed deals

Together with better selling skills – not skipping steps and a firm in person delivery plan, your sellers will be closing more deals and investing their time in the most qualified buyers.

I read this clever and interesting phrase and story the other day…

Don’t spill your candy in the lobby.

Heather Baldwin mentioned this phrase in an article In Selling Power magazine.

It goes like this:

You go to the movies, buy a box of candy, open it before you leave the counter, you’re distracted and slip and spill your candy.

What would your mother have said to you?

“Why didn’t you wait until you got into the movie theater?”

So, next time your sales reps “spill their candy in the lobby”… meaning they open their mouths and spout out information like a run-away train well before it’s time in the sales conversation – tell them this story.

Eventually it will be a classic phrase in the office as each rep catches the other spilling their candy in the lobby!

Are there people on your sales team that are toxic or annoying?

When you were a high performing seller you figured out how to avoid the likes of negative, toxic and annoying people.

You either ignored them, didn’t feed into their stuff, or hung out with the positive contributors like yourself.

Yet as the sales manager, you can’t ignore them – although you might want to. They aren’t going away easily and they are causing you and your team a problem.

Recently I heard the term ‘Hurricane Employee’ – because the damage this type of employee causes extends far beyond themselves.

Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management found a single negative employee can cause a 30-40 percent drop in a team’s overall performance in his study.

What damage can they do?

• Drop in morale throughout the team

• Other sellers feel apprehensive, angry and/or dejected

• Productivity drops from reps concentrating on how to avoid the employee

• Sales managers lose respect, credibility and authority from their team

You certainly don’t want any of that to happen.  Meeting sales budgets is hard enough without these added complications.

So what do you do?

First – Eat The Frog. 

Have you seen Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog video? Brian says, do the most difficult thing first – eat the frog- and everything else the rest of the day will go better.

So DO NOT ignore it.  It isn’t going away.  These may be the difficult conversations that you as a boss run from.  It’s time to eat the frog oriIt will only get worse.

What’s the conversation look like?  It isn’t you telling the person they need to change.  What do you do when someone tells you to change… you don’t.  This is the beginning of many coaching conversations.

1. Determine the root of the negativity.  State what you notice, ask about it.

2. Explain the company, office or department’s expectations.

3. Clarify the vision.

4. Discuss how they fit into the vision.

5. Collaborate on changes, next steps.  Include deadlines.

6. Conclude with commitments and set up next review/coaching meeting.

This may sound easier said then done, so take your time and prepare for the coaching conversation.  Do not wing it.  They will win – not you.

Now go out and eat your frog and avoid the hurricane season.

What does a rubber band have to do with a positive mindset?

The answer isn’t what you might think.

First, what happened that I even thought of the rubber band idea?

A colleague posted in our private mastermind group saying she was struggling with mindset.  Even though she believed she has a positive mindset, things don’t always go as planned and she finds it hard at times to stay positive.  She wanted to know if she was alone and if not, what do we do.

Ergo the rubber band.  This idea helps you snap out of it – no pun intended!

• Place a rubber band on your wrist.

• Each time you have the negative or limiting belief thought – pop the band (ouch) and say cancel-clear.

• Followed by, “Thank you for that thought –it no longer serves me… and reframe the thought in a positive way… ie.

• I am capable of achieving goals – I’ve done it many times before and will do it again now.

• My body is my temple and it heals itself.

• Good things come my way because I deserve them.

• Customers buy from me all of the time and are thrilled with their results.

People say no for a variety of reasons and it’s okay.  I learn from each encounter – and more people say yes to me than no.

Changing mindset is incorporated in all of our training workshops because organizations growth is dependent on sales teams who believe they can achieve and break through the clutter in their heads that often hinders them.

Go get your rubber band and try this. See what you think and then introduce it to your sellers.

Give a shout back with everyone’s experiences.

A reminder… this tip works on every kind of thought – weight loss, when you’re upset about something or some one, breaking into a new account, losing an account, a new territory.

There’s no limit to the opportunities to ‘snap out of it.”

Do you have a friend or family member who cannot make a decision?

Bet you’ve been out with your sales reps and came across the slow decision maker there too.

So what’s a rep to do to gain the business when the decision maker can’t make a decision?

Before I tell you how to approach the non-decision maker, let’s take a quick look at what’s behind the story.

Generally, people who have difficulty when it comes to a decision need:

• To feel safe and secure about the decision

• To have all the I’s dotted and T’s Crossed

• To be comfortable this won’t come back and bite them

• To know you’ll be there long after the ink dries on the contract

Now the tips to turn the hard to make a decision person to commit:

• Do not expect them to say yes the first time

• Take a slow sales approach.  Visit often, give bite size pieces to digest one meeting at a time.

• Invite others to the meeting so they can be comfortable that the people they are buying this for, like it and want it

• Remove or minimize all the risks.

• Provide lots of data and more back up data.

• Hand hold and be easily available.

Sell the buyer the way they like to buy and it’s easier to close the deal.

Your sales rep spent hours working on this important slide presentation.

You didn’t have time to preview the deck (presentation no-no #2).

It’s 2 minutes into the presentation and all the energy got sucked out of the room.

What went wrong?

The rep is enthusiastically presenting.  Yet, they are presenting the wrong thing.

It’s the kiss of death no-no slide…  All About Me… or in other words the slide titled… Our Corporate History.

If and I say IF you need that slide to show up much later in the deck.  A better place is in the solution portion when you are validating the solution and your company.

What’s the rule of thumb to begin?  Keep the What’s in it for THEM top of mind.

Here are some thought starters:

• The reason they are at this meeting

• The problem, opportunity, want or need the client wants move from current to desired

• What’s going to be accomplished here as a benefit to them

Now, go look at your sellers slide decks and do the right thing!