As you build a world-class sales organization, make sure you are focused on the right things. As a sales manager and business leader, it is not your job to grow sales. It is your job to grow salespeople in quantity and quality every day. The following five initiatives are the main areas to focus on when building a world-class sales organization.
- Finding Good People
- Getting Them to Join Your Team
- Getting Them Trained and Producing
- Growing Them Into Top Producers
- Keeping Them
- Finding Good People The process of recruiting good talent to your organization is not one that happens by chance. Many companies get aggressive about recruiting only when they need to add somebody to their team or replace somebody who has just left. Recruiting is a process, not an event. It must be ongoing and continuous. Can you imagine only going after a new customer when you lose an existing one?
- Getting Them to Join Your Team Now that you have spent countless hours, days, and months hunting your prey, you finally have the candidate in your sights. Once they agree to sit down for a formal interview, have the full expectation that they have prepared and practiced a very thorough and professional presentation for your company, it’s products/services, features, advantages, and benefits. This is only natural when you think about it from the perspective of a sales process.
- Getting Them Trained and Producing Now that you brought new talent onto your team, it is imperative to have a plan to get them “into the game” as soon as possible. We often hear from sales managers and CEO’s that the “ramp-up” time for salespeople is 6 months to 1 year or more. The goal of this initiative is to get those salespeople ramped up quicker and producing results.
- Growing Them Into Top Producers It is my belief that training must be ongoing and continuous. As a company leader, you send your salespeople into battle every day facing constantly changing forces in the marketplace. I tend to use the analogy of sending lumberjacks out into the forest each day to chop down trees. If the axes of your lumberjacks are not CONSTANTLY sharpened, they will eventually have to work much harder to achieve results. Thus, you get turnover and/or burnout.
- Keeping Them The Harvard Business School conducted a survey of top-producing sales professionals that asked them to rank the top five reasons why they stayed in their current positions at their current companies. Here are the top five reasons:
- RESPECT
- RECOGNITION
- POSITIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT
- OPPORTUNITY FOR PERSONAL GROWTH
- MONEY
Jack Daly is a serial entrepreneur, international sales expert, and author of “Hyper Sales Growth” and “The Sales Playbook for Hyper Sales Growth.” Learn more at JackDalySales.com.
