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.;
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
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