Understanding the Sales Force

We hear those words a lot.  Some companies aspire to it.  Others claim to be there already.  You are more likely to hear claims like those from a large enterprise, but you have better odds of actually finding it in a small-to-midsize company.

One of the comments on my article, The Validiation of the Sales Assessment Validation, mentioned the reluctance of CEOs and Presidents to redeploy or terminate ineffective sales managers. That topic deserves an article of its own, making 3 of my last 4 posts about ineffective sales managers. That will surely upset and perhaps eliminate a significant number of my regular readers.

Just like the salespeople who work for them, CEO’s come in all different sizes, shapes, styles and flavors. As you can imagine, those variances influence the outcomes of sales force evaluations, sales infrastructure, sales and sales management development and sales recruiting. Here is a sampling of how some of the CEO’s react to what I tell them about their sales force:

Yesterday, I had my annual physical and my doctor ordered the usual array of blood tests. It didn’t matter that I felt terrific. It didn’t matter that he observed my blood pressure, throat, eyes and ears to be perfect. It didn’t change his mind when he listened to my heart and lungs. And he was still ordering those tests after he felt for things and didn’t find anything. The tests he can do in his office – basically the eye test – are observations. How I report to be feeling is my version of the eye test – it’s based on my own observations. And the reason for the blood and urine tests is that we don’t know what we don’t know.

A title like, “Presidents & CEO’s: 4 Out of 5 Sales Managers Are Ineffective”, will cause some Sales Directors, Sales VP’s and Sales Managers to click and read the article.  That’s OK, but a spoiler warning:  if you feel threatened by hearing the truth about yourself or your sales team, or would be uncomfortable sharing the truth about you or your team with the President or CEO, you should probably exit this article right now.

HR Directors love our sales candidate assessments because when they finally learn to select the right salespeople, their job becomes easier and they become heroes!

Promises of great success would lead you to believe that this is not a difficult sale, but it doesn’t always go that smoothly.

The Selling Power Blog published a new article of mine, The Top 10 Steps Salespeople Can Take to Improve. The article includes a really terrific video on the importance of tonality. I thought it would be helpful to expand on item #5, Persistence, because selling requires more persistence than ever before.

I’ve previously written about sales compensation, with the average salesperson earning $96,000, a good salespeople earning $135,000 (varies by industry and geography) and poor and entry level salespeople earning around $67,000. Several companies have recently asked me about how to hire salespeople when you can’t afford to pay even the entry level sales compensation.

Deloitte conducted a sales compensation survey and identified many issues of common concern. Some of the highlights are:

Frank Aubuchon of Aubuchon Associates, an HR Consulting Firm, wrote an article about Compensation to incent salespeople. With his permission, I have taken an excerpt from his article to share with you.