Transcription of video

How To Develop Salespeople for Top Performance Part II

Every business needs sales, whether you’re a professional services firm or selling a product, and boosting the performance of salespeople over time is essential. I’ll explain how to do that in part two of this video. Hello, I’m Stephen Goldberg of Optimist Performance, bringing you practical tips and ideas on leadership, team development, and employee performance in the workplace.

In my last video, I covered the three steps to having salespeople improve their performance. And the first step is to evaluate their performance using specific criteria. And I also offered a free download of a tool with some criteria to use in that process.

The second part is to train, develop, and coach the salesperson so they’re continuously improving their performance and you’re aligned together with what the objectives are. The third part is you as a leader, in terms of developing yourself to be more effective in leading, managing, and coaching your employees, and to strategize which way the business should go in making important decisions. So going back to step one, I covered that in some detail in my last video, and I highly recommend that you check that out.

Again, I did provide this free form, which is kind of like a template where you set your level of importance on the left side and on the right side, you set the level of accomplishment or achievement, and both you and the salesperson do that. This is free for you to download. But there is another more sophisticated tool, which is done online.

This one that I’m sharing is pen and paper, the old-fashioned way. There is an online tool that I do provide called the Profile Sales Checkpoint. This one is for sales, and it’s not a 360-degree assessment, but a 180 in other words the salesperson and the manager.

So, it’s the manager and the salesperson that does it independantly, and then you share, you sit down and you share, you look at the results together, and you discuss it. And what are the competencies? There are seven universal sales competencies. Entrepreneurial approach, understands the prospect, develops appropriate solutions, prospects proactively, manages selling process, closes the sale, and manages sales relationships.

So those are the seven competencies, but there’s 19 supporting skill sets as part of those competencies. And you do have an interesting graph showing the gap between the two perceptions, the manager and the salesperson. So, for example, like looking at closing the sale on this sample report or brochure, it shows manager at seven and the salesperson at five, meaning the salesperson assesses themselves at a higher rate of accomplishment than the manager.

So, what this does, it gives you, again, like I mentioned in my last video, a platform to sit down and discuss the development needs of the person. And this is important because what I find in a lot of organizations, especially smaller, medium-sized businesses, there’s not a lot of training that’s provided to salespeople. And if there is, often it’s more around the techniques for selling, the selling skills.

But what you also need to consider and discuss with the salesperson is them as a person. And that looks at their level of confidence, their self-esteem, their work habits, their work ethic. And so having a tool to mutually evaluate how the person is doing opens up to have these types of conversations and perhaps provide more structured training than just sitting down and looking at how things are going, strategizing about potential clients or current clients.

I mean, all that’s important and I’m sure that’s going on anyways. But I’m saying to take a step back and look at what’s driving results because it’s not just the techniques, it’s how the person communicates with people, with buyers, how they understand the selling process versus the buying process. So, understanding people is a big part of it.

In one of our sales trainings, it quoted a famous sales expert from the insurance industry who said that 98% of sales success is understanding people and developing good human relationship skills and only 2% is product knowledge. Because if you’re taking a consultative selling approach, people don’t really know what the solution to their problem is. You have to build that trust as a salesperson, and they will then start confiding in you their problems and hoping that you’ll provide a solution.

I mean, the trust goes beyond just you, it must go to the product as well. As you engage in discussion, you build trust on multiple levels with the person. They must even trust that the company you work for can deliver.

So, you have to understand what the person is thinking and that’s where aligning the buying process with the selling process and understanding how you need to help the buyer move through that to have the trust and understanding so they can make a good decision. And that’s even more important when you have higher price tags of whatever it is you’re selling. The more you invest in tools like I’m suggesting and that you then act on the information you receive from it will generate good results.

For example, closing sales, I mean that’s always a classic that business owners want their salespeople to be better at. And maybe they’re not asking often enough. Some people feel that if they ask too often, they’re coming across as too aggressive.

But there’s gentle ways to ask for the order or at least to check in to see where the buyer is at during that decision making process. And that’s what I mean about understanding the buyer and the selling process and being able to help the person navigate through that. So, if let’s say closing the sale is an issue, then discuss how the salesperson is asking for the order, is trying to close.

And this is also where training and development can come in, the skill of doing that. But the person also needs to have the confidence to ask for the order. I mean there’s another study that was done on salespeople that said that those that ask for an order up to four times, whether it’s for an order or next step in the selling process, are 60 something percent, more successful than those that only ask once or twice.

And this applied even to salespeople who were obnoxious to a certain degree. Because sometimes the buyer needs to decide, and you need to ask them to do that at the right time of course. And salespeople that have that confidence or the personality trait, the assertiveness to do that are more likely to win more orders than those that shy away from that.

So, keep that in mind as a tip here as well if you’re in sales or you’re the coaching a salesperson who doesn’t close often enough and maybe they’re just not asking for the order.

The other tool you can use is our PXT Select in terms of better understanding the person and those tendencies around the sales competencies like closing, asking for the order, even just prospecting is a big one. Are they doing enough prospecting often enough? So, all these discussions that come out of doing this evaluation will really help you to then develop a plan of improvement and both the profiles sales checkpoint and my tool have a worksheet where you could plan out what you’re going to do and agree on a plan of action with the salesperson.

Whether it’s formal training that you bring in or additional coaching that you’re going to provide, you need to agree on a plan of action and act on it and measure progress along the way. So, if you don’t have a tool to do that type of evaluation of the skills and the person, I highly recommend you check out what we have to offer whether it’s the free tool or the Sales Checkpoint more sophisticated one and also the PXT Select to gain better understanding of the person and for them to understand themselves better as well.

Knowledge is really a valuable asset to have to know what you need to do and to act on that. So if you haven’t already subscribed to the channel, please do so now. I’m going to cover more about this in a future video.

I’m going to talk more about leadership in terms of sales and turn on notifications to get news of new videos that are coming. Thank you for listening and we’ll talk again soon.