How is your sales team doing at meeting your sales expectations? Are they hitting their goals, following the sales process, completing their admin tasks and meeting your activity expectations? …..Sorry, I’m having a hard time hearing that loud, YES! But…
I remember when Angie joined our team. She was just out of college and eager to do her job well. It was her first sales job and she plunged right in. For months she was selling her quota of forty units per month. Being new to sales she would often worry her way to those last few sales to hit her goal. One day I asked her if she would be interested in increasing sales and earning more money. She said, “Of course, I try to but I can’t seem to get past forty.” I suggested we make fifty her new imaginary quota and she went for it. We posted a yellow sticky with the number 50 on her computer monitor to add a little focus. It worked! She started selling fifty that month and it become her new norm. Could it be that easy to increase sales?
The HOW MUCH in this blog title could be describing overpayment or underpayment of your sales team. Where does your pay plan fall? Are you paying your sales people too much or could it be you are under paying them? Creating a sales pay plan isn’t terribly difficult but it’s trickier than finding a simple salary range for non-sales positions. I’ll answer the two most common questions asked of me regarding sales play plans. (1) How much should I pay my sales people? and (2) How should I structure the pay plan?
To plan or not to plan? Time to answer that question again. As the New Year approaches Sales Manager Now has been working on client sales and business plans for next year. In our experience more than half of the businesses we encounter don’t have a current documented business plan. If they do, it’s usually not reviewed on a regular basis. Writing a business or sales plan is one thing, but having a plan that’s useful and used is a different story. Not all business plans work. Jim Horan, author of The One Page Business Plan lists the following reasons why business plans don’t work:
Most of us have heard the definition of Insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” In most sales departments as well as in the company in general, a little “Insanity” usually exists and it is part of my role to shed light on it and make changes that produce different results. Increasing your B2B Sales will not happen by accident or just doing more of what is not working. It is worth stepping back to see what does not work as well as what does. Preston Pond, co-founder of The Center of Organizational Design says, “Organizations are designed perfectly for the results they produce.” Design includes the strategy, structure, culture and execution. Let me provide you with food for thought in these four areas that might provide some light for you to assess your current design.