BUSINESS KILLING MISTAKES #14 – YOUR BIGGEST SALES PROBLEM IS NOT YOUR SALESPEOPLE

Nothing makes a CEO cry more than unpredictable, poor, or inconsistent sales performance.  Therefore, “getting your salespeople right” is a smart investment, correct? Just the opposite.

What frustrates you most about your sales growth and performance – inconsistency, slow-moving prospects, low win rates, losing easy sales, winning low-profit contracts, forecasting is laughable, or sales CRM information has no value?

ARE YOU ATTACKING YOUR SALESPEOPLE TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE? – PLEASE STOP!

The number one reason our phone rings for help from small companies to large corporations is sales problems such as those listed above. The conversation starts off along the lines of, “I’ve got a sales problem, and it’s driving me nuts!” What’s interesting is that the problem might be different in each case, but the solutions the CEO or leader has tried usually fall into a scarily consistent order of flawed “T” named interventions.

Whether you are leading the company or in sales or not, sales problems set up every other area of a business for success, underperformance, or failure. Yes, every area – every employee – is affected by sales performance but usually not in a good way. In this article, I want to share with you the shocking thing that our CEO and leadership clients have discovered working with us about solving their most difficult sales problems. In addition, unlike most “sales fix” solutions that cost money, this different approach usually doesn’t cost them a dollar or new a new sales hire. 

Make sure everyone in the company reads this article because they will all play a key role in solving your major sales problems forever and following the action items. 

WHAT IS THE GREAT SALES PERFORMANCE MISTAKE?

What is your biggest sales challenge? Take a minute and write down any or all of those listed above or add to the list. Every leader and team are suffering from, or will soon suffer from, some type of sales issue(s). 

How have you and your team tried to solve your sales problems? If you’re like most CEOs, business owners, and leaders, you start with what is called the “salesperson” fix. Sadly, most “salesperson” interventions fall into these five “T” buckets. How many of these have you tried or have experienced if you’re the sales management victim? 

TALK: Let’s review your work, talk about your performance, discuss a plan on how to get better and sell more consistently. Poor performance always starts with a “talk.” That takes some or a lot of time. 

TRAIN: At some point, leadership will determine this: “Our salespeople need more training.” Let’s bring in a training company or go online (99.9% of sales information or advice on the web can be the worst information regarding sales performance). There’s a reason it’s free. Training can waste a lot of money.

TAKEAWAYS: Take the salesperson’s account, deal, or pursuit from them. Takeaway some of their territory. Takeaway some of their commission or bonuses. This approach destroys morale and costs or wastes time and past effort. 

TORTURE: Don’t laugh; we see this approach all the time. If talking and training doesn’t work, then another step is creating stress, pressure, or putting the non-performer on a “plan.” Remember, mental torture can be far worse than physical. This is a classic management intervention and becomes a “micro-aggressive” approach of more reporting of every activity, more “ride-a-longs” (that means management involved in the physical sales calls), more CRM inputs, and more “lets’ see if you can answer 21 questions”, etc. Wasting management time and resources. 

TURN: And finally, if the first four “Ts” don’t solve the problem, the final step is to turn the salesperson. It’s the hire-now-fire approach. It makes sense, right? If a salesperson can’t be talked to, trained, or even changed due to even torment (I actually don’t like using the more accurate word “torture”), then you have to turn them. But sales churn is extraordinarily expensive. Finding and hiring another salesperson eats management time, HR resources, sales support time. In addition, with the missing salesperson, opportunities aren’t worked or won even if spread across the team. And what if you get another miss hire? Ouch!

Did you identify the common flaw in the five “Ts”? They all cost time, money, and/or resources.

What’s another major flaw? Every fix is focused on the individual or salesperson. 

But there is a bigger problem with these oh-so typical sales solutions. The flaw is that 99% of all “performance interventions” are focused on “attacking the person.” 

When it’s only 1% of the time that the person is the REAL performance issue’s root cause.

Let me repeat this because this is the colossal difference between bad management and effective leadership. And I hope you want to be a leader, not a manager. 

The biggest business-killing mistake with performance issues and solutions – not just in sales – is that 99% of all solutions, interventions, and different management methods NEVER solve the real underlying reason for the performance issues. Never ever! Even worse, many times, the solution – or cure – is worse than the cause. Yes, the intervening approach creates more damage in other areas.

WHY DO SO MANY LEADERS ATTACK THE PERSON AND NOT THE CAUSE? 

Why do so many leaders and managers make the mistake of “attacking the person” because of performance issues and not the root cause? There are dozens of reasons but let me give you the top two.

• It “feels good” for management. Something is being done. There has been an intervention. When a person – because we are human – feels threatened or stressed, they “jump.” And because management sees a reaction, they feel good…for a while. 
• The second reason is that if a leader doesn’t attack the person, then who must they attack for the problem? Yes, you guessed it – themselves. That means they are not a leader, and not even a good manager. About a thousand times, I’ve had to tell leaders to their face, “Your person is not the problem; your decisions are.” Wow, who wants to hear that? 

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF ATTACKING THE PERSON AND NOT THE PROBLEM?

Attacking people for performance issues and not solving root cause damages organizations in dozens of ways. Here is just one example of one. 

• The effects of wrong solutions ripple across the organization. Think back about firing a salesperson – now leadership, management, other salespeople, and maybe even sales support, vendor relationships, prospect and client relationships are all affected. This can mean millions to tens of millions in lost sales, unnecessary expenses, and damaged relationships. 

CHANGE – WHAT MUST YOU DO DIFFERENTLY? 

Stop attacking, stressing, torturing, or turning your salesperson – or any individual in your company. Attack your “strategic enterprise system” – holistically. 

In the book Entrepreneur to Millionaire, there are four phases to optimizing sales, revenue, and profit production – without spending more resources or hiring more people. Staying with the salesperson example, salespeople performance issues are way out in the third phase called “Go to Market”, of four phases of optimized growth. 

“Go To Market” is how your organization is designed, built, and executing your marketing, sales, and partnering models and system. It is where your salespeople survive or thrive, and here is why that is so important to you and them, and everyone in your firm. Unknowingly, for most, 99% of all sales problems’ root causes occurred before or after the “Go to Market” phase. Yes, the biggest problems you have, or will experience over and over, in not achieving your sales and growth potential happened way back in the first two phases: “Revenue Ready” and “Market Ready.”

Our experience transforming thousands of organizations such as sales shows that sales suffer or underperform because of business model flaws, lack of framing the FMP properly, missing or wrong revenue streams, poor “Perfect Client Profile” (PCP) targeting, and dozens of other areas you can read about. There is always one root cause and many sub-causes that you need to know before you should even think about treating a symptom such as individual salesperson’s underperformance. 

SUMMARY – KEY LEARNING POINT

Until you fix the root-cause issues that set up other areas for underperformance, you will ALWAYS be experiencing people-performance issues that are unnecessary. This lack of solving the most strategic problems will guarantee that you and all leadership will spend far too much time being managers – and not enough time being leaders. 

But even worse, by not fixing the problems that set up high or low performance and your competitors do, then you will never be competitive and “Own Your Market”, Phase IV. Yes, you will win business because you work so hard, but you will never optimize performance and secure the best, biggest, and most lucrative contracts possible. 

ACTION AND URGENCY – WHAT YOU AND YOUR TEAMS MUST DO RIGHT NOW

• As a leadership team, identify your biggest or most urgent sales problem or organizational underperformance issue (if you are the lone salesperson or entrepreneur, use your partner or spouse for this exercise).
• Read or listen to the book Entrepreneur to Millionaire to learn the phases and principles
• Identify where each of you believes the REAL root cause of your current performance issue resides. Do this assignment individually and then compare each other’s responses.
• How should you fix that root cause forever?
• To fix this problem as fast as possible and to make sure your teams are truly fixing the root cause, contact us for a brief conversation. We can tell you if you are on the right path as we help dozens of companies a month solve their most complex and strategic growth problems

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AUTHOR BACKGROUND

Kent Billingsley is the founder and president of the Revenue Growth® Company, LLC (TRGC). He is a published author, international keynote speaker, and business transformation expert. He has become America’s Revenue Growth® Architect by helping thousands of entrepreneurs and CEOs (representing over a million employees) generate several billion in new sales, as well as tens of billions in new revenue and profits for large corporations. He has personally designed, built, transformed, and turbocharged several thousand organizations in 36 countries. Over the last 20 years, his proprietary content and trademarked programs have helped thousands of entrepreneurs and employees become millionaires and multimillionaires by “creating wealth” inside their companies. He can be reached at [email protected].