More ProActive Sales Management

Avoid the Mistakes Even Great Sales Managers Make -- And Get Extraordinary Results

William Miller

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780814410912
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Building on the concrete advice and practical, powerful strategies revealed in its predecessor, More ProActive Sales Management provides harried sales managers with a proven method for managing the sales process and their people. Packed with specific, field-tested techniques, this helpful guide focuses on the five primary areas in which mistakes occur: internal team decisions, upward decisions, sales decisions, infrastructure decisions, and decisions regarding the manager himself. Readers will learn how to: regain control of their time • create a proactive sales culture • motivate a sales team • use simple yet powerful metrics • weed out failures quickly • coach and counsel up and down the sales organization • reduce reports to one sheet of paper and 10 minutes a week • forecast more confidently. This book shows sales managers at every level how to manage for great results!

PART 1

INTERNAL TEAM DECISIONS

“If I had my life to live over . . . I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.”

—NADINE STAIR

Coaching, counseling, motivation, and team building are the building blocks for the people side of your job. Ironically, you took the job to help others, and then you find yourself needing help and wondering:

“Why don’t they do as I say?”

“Are they stupid?”

“How could he make a decision like that?”

“I give my children less instruction and get better results.”

Sound familiar? The next six chapters explain some of the team decisions sales managers have made that have given them pause, spun their heads around, and made them wish the weekend was a lot closer than it really was.

MISTAKE
1

We Are a Prospecting Machine!

“Of course my salespeople prospect. That’s what they are paid to do. At least that’s what I tell everyone.”

Reality is a hard state to deal with. Rationalization is so much easier. Even people who aren’t in sales know it is the salespeople’s job to go find customers. Who else? Marketing generates leads, customer service keeps the customers happy, shipping makes sure the customers get what they ordered, finance collects the money, and so on throughout the organization. It’s up to the sales department to go find and close new business.

Sales management agrees. Sales management creates compensation plans, contests, and rewards for salespeople who go out and find new business. They have 33 motivational speeches on why their organizations have to go broader and deeper in current accounts, as well as take business away from the competition. They spend gobs of money on training their sales teams to get new business. Their companies are counting on sales to get new revenue streams from new customers. Someone needs to tell this to the salespeople, because:

Salespeople hate to prospect.

Take a look at the salesperson in Figure 1.1. She’s friendly, has a great smile, and seems stress-free. She’s having fun, right? Prospecting’s cool—and everyone always calls back. Yeah, right. Let’s get real. The fact is, salespeople would rather do anything than cold call—and they usually do.

Sales management doesn’t want to alienate the sales team. It wants to empathize with them. After all, the managers were once in the same place; they too issued the same proclamations:

Figure 1-1

“Marketing needs to get us better leads.”

“The market is very competitive right now.”

“Getting new business is getting tougher and tougher.”

Making these proclamations is a huge mistake. Huge. However, sales management has been known to listen to these voices and:

• Develop a prospecting-only sales department, also known as a lead-generation team. (This is different from a qualifying team, which works quite well for passive prospecting—leads that come into your organization.)

• Compensate salespeople more for generating new business.

• Actually believe that retaining business is harder than getting new business and designing rewards accordingly.

• Measure and reward for overall revenue and not break out new sales to new customers as an important company goal.

• Designate two groups of salespeople in the organization: Hunters and Farmers. Hunters hunt for new business, and Farmers maintain current business. (Great idea, until your competitor sets its Hunters against your Farmers. Then, of course, you have to deal with Trappers and Skinners—way too much classification.)

Sales management beware: Some of this organizational thinking may lead you to make decisions that will come back and haunt you.

THE FACTS

Progressive sales management in successful companies knows that customers churn.

“How did my pipeline dry up?”

“I thought my hunters were hunting.”

“When I looked at it, my salespeople were using less than 5 percent of their time proactively prospecting.”

“I asked my sales team, ‘Who has asked for a reference in the past 60 days?’ No one raised a hand, and the prospecting funnel is empty at the top for what reason?”

In addition, sales managers know that most customers do not buy all they can from one vendor, because they are not aware of the scope of the problems that exist in other departments within their own organizations. Opportunity abounds.

Calling high—that is, calling on people who are in upper management—with questions that let prospects think broad and wide within their organizations, and then creating a culture around this solid prospecting effort, takes sales management years to figure out. Let there be no mistake: The sales team that stops prospecting within its own customer base loses.

LEAD GENERATION VERSUS PROSPECTING

It is important to know the difference between lead generation and prospecting.

Lead generation is the act of targeting resources. It means figuring out where to hunt, what gun to hunt with, what to hunt, and when to hunt. Prospecting is the act of hunting. It means going through many fields and bushes to flush out the game, finding the game, taking aim, and pulling the trigger.

Prospecting = Hunting

A good lead-generation machine is no excuse for a lack of prospecting. Last time I checked, game doesn’t just fall from the sky or knock on the door of the hunting lodge and say, “Here I am. Shoot me.” The Internet has done a good job getting some game to knock on the door, but the really big game is still out there.

Prospecting Machine: A company in which the sales department is doing well.

Nonprospecting Machine: A company characterized by a weak sales forecast, a bad sales forecast, a weak pipeline, longer sales cycles, is closing bad business, or is closing deals based on price because the customer does not see value.

Sales teams, and especially individual salespeople, have the right to expect the company to do its part in lead generation. This could range from efforts to generate potential target markets and prospects, to qualifying teams (Q-teams) that qualify hundreds of leads, working them down to the most likely—the golden nuggets for salespeople to pursue. Great sales organizations have committed resources, up to 20 percent of their sales budgets, to lead generation, be it marketing dollars or sales dollars.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Ebook Instructions
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Internal Team Decisions
• Part 2: Upward Decisions
• Part 3: Sales Decisions
• Part 4: Infrastructure Decisions
• Part 5: Self Decisions
• Epilogue and Call to Action
• Index