accountability

This happens at companies all the time when companies hope to recreate the success a salesperson enjoyed at another company.  But you have to look at what you’ll need them to do and compare that with what they were expected to do before.  In this case, one is not the same as the other and the failure of the $130,000 man could have been easily predicted with OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessments.

I wasn’t able to sleep – at all – because of the incredible discomfort I was having. When you put stuff in that shouldn’t go in, it has a way of coming back out.

The exact same thing can be said about the pipeline of a salespeople that don’t create enough opportunities. 

Momentum seems to be a force when it comes to sales performance.  When Bob gets on a roll, new opportunities fill the pipeline, move along fairly quickly and close at the first opportunity…until the momentum changes.  When Bob goes on vacation, gets distracted, becomes busy with deliverables or gets sick, it’s a whole different Bob.  Suddenly the new opportunities are hard to come by, existing opportunities languish in the pipeline or worse, are removed from the pipeline.

To a certain extent, this whole scenario plays out like Natural Selection, a sort of survival of the fittest.  You must understand the conditions in order to recognize that it’s usually whining by the losing salesperson when, in fact, the first salesperson had control of the situation until he failed to close the business.

As you can see, coaching, albeit different coaching , is required for each base.  Motivation is most important for getting your salespeople to first base while pipeline management and accountability are crucial along the way.

Big numbers don’t impress me. How come the salesperson who always reports 40 dials, 10 conversations and 3 appointments never seems to have any meetings and never seems to be adding anything to the pipeline? 

Most companies don’t have formal sales processes but some companies think they do but really have a list of milestones.  How can you tell whether you have a sales process or a number of milestones?  You can map them!

That was the question posed to me yesterday while speaking at the Crystal Palace in Livingston NJ.

To effectively answer that question one must ask another question, that being, what is the largest number of salespeople a sales manager can manage? 

The sale doesn’t end when the sale is made.  It ends when someone screws it up!