Friday, March 20, 2015

There Is No Shame In Faltering In Your Business!


There Is No Shame In Faltering 
In Your Business!
Not Admitting the Issues and Failing to Seek Assistance,
That is a Different Kettle of Fish

By Nick Ashton, CEO, CommSmart Global

Please continue to strive for perfection and between you and me, there is about one person who might have really made it!  

Setting goals, targets and filling out the budgets on spread sheets is all well and good, but it is pure fantasy.  It takes experience, logic and common sense in understanding that it is not you alone that influences the outcome.

As an owner, whose idea it was to go into business in the first place, was all well and good back then.  If it was totally your seed money in the first place, you know that you believed you were in control and you hired who you thought was right at the time.  With little or no experience in this human hiring field, those that you felt good about, friends, friends of friends and on it goes.

Times have changed since those first exciting days and sales or manufacturing boomed, then…

Do you wish to revitalize the engine and the drive?  Of course you do!

This what we do, we create great sales teams!

What does it take?  Analysis of your existing situations.  Each and everyone concerned and making change.  This can only occur if you and your Board have ownership commitment and allow us to counsel you.

Oh, when looking at Talent Acquisition for sales mangers or sales persons, we use our own process, tools and specifically developed methodology for searching, finding and selecting the right candidate(s) for your proper Sales Team(s). And all of our Certified Partners, wherever they are operating, use the same, enabling us to produce consistent high quality deliverable around the globe.

We even guarantee the selections!

ASSESSMENT - No single great team of people can be created and maintained without assessing its members on their ability to deliver results in the specific environment in which they have to operate! This is particularly true for sales professionals.

COACHING - We do not have a catalog of coaching services to choose from but we discuss with our clients their specific needs and objectives and define tailor made programs which can be based on individual or team coaching activities. We can also discuss so called frame agreements or combinations of success based coaching programs.

COUNSELING - We feel in that respect, that in order to bring our Clients’ Sales Teams from being good to being great, they are much more in need for hands on operational “Tips & Tricks” which we teach based on real life case studies. These mentor programs are heavily interactive and the case studies are developed to fit our Clients’ operational environments as close as possible so that the learning can immediately be used in the field.

Come see what we can do… www.commsmart-global.com

Our dedicated services for you that started successfully in Europe and now here in North America.  

If you are located in Ohio, talk to us now and find out what we feel we can do for you.




North America:

Telephone: +1 (614) 655-1247

Europe: +31 6 11 30 3489

Email: ajv@salesmen4u.com


copyright 2015

Tuesday, March 17, 2015


What Has Happen To Your Desire For Success and the Logic Behind It?


The original concept, idea and your creative juices was massive in the beginning, where has your company’s sales performance gone and how can you be great again?

You knew from the start that it would be an uphill battle and your adrenalin was pumping, where has it all gone?

Let us show you how this can be done without rocket science and at an amazingly low investment.

Thomas A. Edison said it best:

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up!

Do us all one favor, before we start ... please clear your mind, be brutally honest with yourself and stay with us. Then take a couple of days to let it “sink in” and think it over once more.

If after all that, and it still makes sense to you and your company, you should do something about it!

Some facts about sales teams

Our longstanding experience in handling sales professionals and teams indicates that no more than 1 out of every 10 sales pros can be called “a (great) sales talent”.

Of the 9 remaining, around half are “average”, some 25% are outright “bad” and only 25% could be called “good”. In other words only 3 out of every 10 salespeople out there are of an acceptable level to any company!

The reasons for “average” or “bad” sales performance are varied but the lack of sound individual “entrepreneurship” is very likely one of the most common.

A couple of years ago Gallup published a very interesting book by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman on the subject “Why do people (Sales staff) leave organizations?” and the conclusions were, to say the least, pretty impressive. The book was all about a survey on the topic conducted amongst more than 1,000,000 employees and 80,000 managers.

We have to admit, to astonishment, that we did not expect the absolute number one reason to be ... the Boss! The study added that "People leave managers not companies!" and further down the line it read: "The manager is the reason why people stay and thrive in an organization and the manager is also the reason why they leave!"

The claim “It’s the salesman, stupid!” is therefore not always borne out in practice. Hence, in many cases the claim “It’s the sales manager, stupid!” could be more appropriate when things go wrong in sales teams.

In B2B sales organizations such as the IT industry or really and company, the attrition rate of sales professionals can be as high as 30% per year during economic upturns and in crisis situations it can still reach the 15% mark! Unless maybe you are Apple, Microsoft, Google or a few others.

That means that every year quite a substantial number of salespeople are leaving their company for various reasons, most of them internal to the company itself! The subsequent cost to any company is huge, can’t be found in the books and can quickly rise to 18 months of lost business for every single sales person leaving!!! This is typically the average time needed for a new replacement B2B sales pro to be found, selected, introduced and brought up to an optimal level of performance ... that is, if the new guy is within the top 30% of all salespeople in the world ... and if everything else in the company is OK!

We feel that, by now, it’ll probably be clear to most, that problems arising from bad or low sales performance can’t be answered simply and quickly in a nutshell!

What we can confirm with deadly accuracy, however, is that the solutions can’t be found in any of the points mentioned in a snap of your fingers!!! It’s a bit more complicated.

These kinds of problems are ALWAYS caused by a set of different issues in the company. They only arise when the total environment surrounding the sales operation is out of balance or even sometimes non-existent and are due, in many cases, to the companies’ unawareness of how essential that environment is.

A sales team is made up of ... PEOPLE! And salespeople do have somewhat different profiles than people operating in other departments. That’s why they’re in sales and not in engineering, support or administration!

Unfortunately for many companies, salespeople require the total environment in which they’ll have to work, to be supportive, motivating and thrilling in order for them to over perform every month and every year, over and over again, without feeling the uncontrollable urge to leave the company for a better “environment”. Only then will that company be able to retain its “performing” human capital in sales and keep the books clear, as far as possible, of dramatic and unnecessary replacement costs.

Can an Entrepreneur assess his/her own company?

No matter what some people say about this issue, our claim is that most people will probably not be able to do this to the extent of discovering the underlying reasons for the ongoing problems AND subsequently defining and implementing the solutions!

It’s really pretty normal because after a while, as the Entrepreneur...
  • you’re too biased by your own thoughts, achievements and surrounding;
  • you can’t be a specialist in all areas which need to be considered and assessed; 
  • you might not have the complete “helicopter view” which is needed to discover the underlying reasons in your company;
  • you probably do not have the time to take a couple months off to perform the assessment and implement the necessary changes;
  • it’s very difficult for you to think “out of the box” in order to find simple but practical solutions;
  • it’s likely that you don’t have the proper tools to pull it off;
  • Etc.;
The result is that often such an assessment is either not executed or not given enough importance and effort, which in turn jeopardizes the change management project that should follow, if any at all!

So, who are you going to call?

We Create Great Sales Teams!


Telephone: 
USA: +1 (614) 655-1247
Europe: +31 6 11 303489

copyright 2015