Is What Your Sales Manager Doesn’t Know Killing You? - Objective Management Group Sales Assessment & TrainingMONDAY, JUNE 22ND, 2009
What’s your sales manager doing? What are your sales people doing? Do you monitor and track their activities? Who holds them accountable for performance? How is your sales team currently doing?
The DNA of a Sales Superstar includes the right behaviors, attitudes, environment and skills. Objective Management Group breaks down four crucial elements in their sales evaluation tests to specifically identify current sales people and sales candidates potential for achievement with a 96% success rate *. Do your salespeople and sales manager accept excuses? If so they are missing the first success element: Responsibility. Have you heard the difference between a crow and an eagle? If you tether a crow and eagle to a stake and then place food just out of their reach, the crow will eventually starve to death. The Eagle? The Eagle will kill itself if necessary to try to get the food. If you’re people are accepting excuses it’s a good guess they’re crows and not eagles. In fact it’s a good guess you may have the wrong compensation plan with too much salary and not enough commission accounting for their earning power. The second and third elements for successful salesperson are commitment and desire. Desire is an individual’s passion for success. Commitment is an individual’s willingness to do whatever it takes. Your best sales people possess both. It allows them to make changes and show improvement while without desire they will show little improvement in skill or ability. Objective Management’s Sales Evaluation and screening test is the only sales test that is able to show these measurements.
The final success element has probably never been more crucial than right now. Outlook; is defined as how the individual feels about them self, their job their company and the market.
Is your sales manager aware of these crucial success elements? Just as importantly is he/she aware which of his sales people possess these success elements and to what degree? More importantly is he/she investing their time in the proper areas in order to maximize sales performance of the team. A great sales manager spends 80% of their time focused on accountability, motivation, growing his team, coaching and recruiting. Those five areas of competency are most critical to achieve sales performance. I’ll break that down into more specific details in another blog, but here’s the most frustrating and disappointing thing for you as an owner or CEO.
Your sales manager can be preventing you from improving your team. How? An “A” salesperson will not work for a “B” manager. They can’t. It’s like an eagle flying with crows. That’s one of the beauties of having "A" players. They attract more "A" players. If you have a “B” sales manager can you see how it’s killing your sales performance? Can you see why you will never attract “A” players to your sales team?
Does it make sense to discover the capabilities and skills of your sales team and your sales manager? What we’ve described in this article, making excuses, not accepting responsibility are symptoms of the problem and not the underlying cause. We need to get to the root of the problem and solve it otherwise if we keep working on symptoms we can gain relief for awhile but the problem always comes back.
Did your father or mother teach you that money was a private matter not to ever be discussed? Next blog we’ll explore the hidden weakness of Money Tolerance and how it may be costing you 30% in your sales team’s performance.
*Success criteria is described as a sales person who meets or exceeds sales goals and remains employed for 1 year or more.
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