Sales management, sales leadership and sales presidency require special diligence this time of year. Actions taken now will assure successful sales results in the coming year. In order to transition smoothly, here are 7 sales management steps that should be completed before the end of the year.
By now, you should have:
- Evaluated the individuals on your team for the year. Unless you have anomalies at the end of the year, your team’s individual outcomes and results are pretty much set.
- (Based on the evaluation) Begun to have meetings with all your people. The meetings are similar to performance reviews, but they’re not the corporate type of review that gets put in the HR file. These reviews put your team members in 1 of four groups. You then have a discussion about what group they are in.
- Met or exceeded sales goal and sales activity requirements group
- Met or exceeded sales goal but currently not at sales activity targets group
- Met or exceeded sales activity targets but failed to hit sales targets (below 100% is failing)
- Has not met sales or sales activity targets
(If you would like information on what the conversation should sound like for people in each of these groups, call me or text me at 513-226-3913. If I don’t answer, just leave a message with your name, mobile number and email requesting, “Where’s Walter?” information. You can also email me at tony@anthonycoletraining.com.)
- Reviewed performance, actual effort and execution effectiveness results against targets for the year.
- Assessed where the choke points are for people on the team who are not succeeding. To do this, you look at the conversion ratios in your sales success formula that was built last year and reviewed every quarter. (Don’t have a success formula? Click here –> Success formula download)
- Revised the success formula for 2017 based on each person’s commitment to performance via the “extraordinary discussion”. (Haven’t had that discussion? Ask Jeni at Jeni@anthonycoletraining.com to send you that information.)
- Conducted an offsite where your salespeople identify personal goals, translate the personal goals into a personal income requirement and translate that into a work plan that you will follow up with every quarter. (Yes, we have information on what that offsite should look like. Even though it’s late to be doing that now, conducting the session in January would be better than not conducting one at all. Let us know if we can help: 513-791-3458)
- Talked to your HR department about additional FTEs for the coming year to grow your sales team and replace the people that are not performing. Think about this: Suppose you had to hire better salespeople (3) but can only grow your sales team by 2 – who would you let go?
These 7 things are the minimum functions for sales management at this time of year. Failure to execute on these 7 steps will pretty much guarantee that your next 12 months will look like the past 12 months:
- Only a few people will meet or exceed the goal
- Most of the people will miss the goal by at least 10% and some as much as 20%
- The bottom 33% of your sales force will represent less than 5% of your new business revenue
- Salespeople that fail will continue to make excuses
- The salespeople that had a “one-off” great year will coast in the next year and live off the laurels of this year.
- Your top performers will continue to be frustrated by lack of attention, support and recognition for their outstanding contributions.
