A Sales Guy Consulting Blog

My buddy Ken Granader and Author of How to Build Winning Sales Teams tackles one of the least leveraged levers in getting more out of your sales team . . . rewards and recognition. 

I love the creativity he brings to this. It's great sales advice.  

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Many salespeople will tell you that the only recognition that they want is more commissions.  Truth be told, they care more about recognition than just a commission check.  Successful salespeople like to be commended for large orders, competitive knockouts and love to be stack ranked against their peers.  Great salespeople are true competitors and love to win and to be recognized for it.

 The great thing about recognizing salespeople is that informal recognition can be just as powerful as formal recognition.  Mentioning a big win in a team email or a team conference call goes a long way towards motivating the typical salesperson.

 I always like to use simple and fun ways to reward accomplishments.  Depending upon your team, rewards will vary.  When I was a new manager managing a team of young twenty-somethings, I implemented a putt-for-dough program.  Every time a salesperson got a signed order, they got to “putt for dough.”  In our sales office, we put the ball catcher right at the door of the District Manager’s office.  When you got an order, you putted into the ball catcher from about 20 feet away.  If you made the putt, you got $5 cash.  If you brought in multiple orders or orders for our most expensive or strategic products, you got “bonus putts.”  This little game also brought in soft recognition from the District Manager who would often come out to see who brought in orders and congratulate them.  You would have been amazed at how much that team loved putt-for-dough.  It was a huge motivator and provided great reward and recognition at a minimal cost.

 I have also made a habit of providing sales team rewards.  Many times I will set a quarterly or annual goal for the team (over and above the quota) and if the team wins, everybody wins.  I have taken my teams white water rafting, on hot air balloon rides, golfing, water skiing, go-carting and bowling.  Obviously, the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.  Team rewards are great for getting everyone to come together for the greater good.  They build camaraderie and get everyone in the boat rowing together, so to speak.  Even in companies that I’ve worked where President’s Club trips were part of recognition, I still had team challenges.  Team challenges raise the bar to a higher level and reinforce the idea that just making quota isn’t really good enough—we need to do better than that.

 Other great, inexpensive ways to provide recognition are to have a salesperson who just closed a large deal present the win at a QBR.  They get to talk about how they “Made it Happen.”  They are on center stage and under the spotlight and the less experienced salespeople get to learn from these “win sharings.”  They think to themselves that they want to get a big win like that so that they can share it with the team—it’s another one of those silent motivators. At my current company, if we receive an order of $100K or more, we ring the “large order” gong over our PA system.  That becomes a company-wide motivator and then people go to order administration to find out who closed the order and then congratulate the appropriate salesperson.

Salespeople are best motivated by “carrots.”  If you want them to do more, give them more carrots.  It doesn’t have to be compensation though—commissions are already there for doing their every day jobs.  The carrots I’m talking about relate to getting a fast start on a new product launch, knocking out competitors or generating x number of proposals.  You can focus on the goesintas or the goesoutas.  If orders are flowing, stretch them for more orders.  If orders are lagging, offer incentives for focusing on delivering more goesintas.  The idea is to make it fun and meaningful. 

Salespeople just love to win…the more chances that you give them to win something, the better your overall performance will be.

A client sent us this email yesterday. I love getting emails like this. As a sales consulting company it's our job to make impact and influence our clients persepctives.  

"Keenan, thank you again for your time earlier today. It was a great coaching session. You opened my eyes to how my sales techniques that served me so well in the past need to evolve for selling FlixMaster. 

I'll be honest, I was going into the session today wondering, "what the hell am I going to get out of this?" And came out of it thinking, "WOW! That completely blew my mind."

 You've now got me laser-focused on selling the solution, not the product. And while I may have paid that distinction lip-service throughout my sales career, today truly changed my perspective as I could see the difference in what I had been doing versus what needs to be done."

To me the best part of this email is this quote: 

"I'll be honest, I was going into the session today wondering, "what the hell am I going to get out of this?" And came out of it thinking, "WOW! That completely blew my mind."

I experience this type of attitude often. Sales people, for some reason, have tendency to think they know it all. In particular, seasoned sales people who have been successful for years tend to be resistent to new things.  In a space where learning and growth can be the difference between quota attainment and failure, this type of attidue can kill you. 

How open is your sales team to assess their own capabilities. How well do they assess themselves? Are they accurate? 

How open are you? Do you believe you have a handle on it all? As the head of sales how often do you say; "What the hell am I going to get of this?"  

If you're like many sales leaders, unfortunately -- A LOT! 

If you're open to it, you could have your mind blown. 

Sales has changed. That's all there is to it.  This is a good video put out by Huthwaite, the company that brought you Spin Selling.  

Ignore the dry and almost deathly boring presence of the narrator, Huthwaite's President and CEO John Golden. It's painful, but if you can get past it, there are some good nuggets in it. 

My favorite part come at 3:56 to 4:44 when TAS CEO Donal Daly talks about the death of the relationship sales person. 

Another one of my favorite parts is when Dave Stein of ES Research talks about value propostions. 

Take the time to check out this video, it's worth it. It does a good job of explaining what has changed while you've been busy selling. 

A client and I were talking about 2013 the other day. He told me he his growth strategy for 2013 was going to be through improved sales productivity. His thought process made sense, considering this year we spent a lot of time growing headcount. He is headed into the last part of a wildly successful year of 165% bookings growth.

Looking into 2013 my client sees tremendous opportunity to grow through productivity. In other words, he thinks he can get his existing team selling more.  Considering how new the majority of the team is, I think he’s right. There is a lot of room to grow. But, how much room?

We started talking about how much he could grow and his maximum productivity. I asked what he felt maximum productivity was and how much growth could that could provide.

To get to the answer, we did the following.

We identified the key sales metrics he felt represented sales productivity.  In his case, it was average deal size, number of deals sold in a year and number of sales reps. We then took those metrics and made some assumptions on what we believed were realistic expectations.  We then did the math.  We subtracted this “optimized” number from the 2012 numbers and found the growth rate for 2013.

I know that was tough to follow, so I’ll try to make it easier.

(X=average deal size) x (Y=average number of deals a rep can close in a year) x (the total number of reps) = MP Maximum Productivity

(MP=Maximum productivity) – (CP=current productivity) = P=Productivity growth potential

Once we have this number, the question then becomes, is it enough growth? If yes, proceed. If no expect to hire more people at sometime, or evaluate the underlying average deal size assumptions, number of deal assumptions etc.

This is a simple model. It can certainly be come more complicated. However, I try to keep things as simple as possible.

This model will tell you a few things:

1. What your maximum growth ceiling is. In other words, how much growth/revenue can you get out of your existing team
2. When you need to hire more sales people
3. If your optimizing your sales resources
4. The strength of sales leadership
5. How much money you “may” be leaving on the table

To download a simple sales team productivity calculator click here; Sales Team Productivity Calculator

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Footnote: I’ve intentionally kept it simple for this blog post. There are some additional complexities to be aware of. For example, new sales people must be factored in.  New sales people will not be as productive therefore that must be accounted of in the model. Underlying assumptions must be data driven. If not, it can have an adverse effect on the outcome.

Sales leaders, pull out your 2012 sales strategy right now. Go through it and take note of how much of it is dedicated to sales support and enablement. How much of the budget is allocated to sales improvement or support tools?  How much of the plan focuses on training? How much of the strategy focuses on value proposition development? How much of the strategy focuses on marketing and collateral support? How much of the plan DOESN’T focus on direct go to market and numbers making? If  the plan as good coverage in all of these things, you have a good plan. But if your plan is like most, it’s lacking in almost all of these areas.

The best thing sales leadership can do is support the sales team. In order to do this, you have to build team support and enablement into your overall sales strategy. Like a go to market strategy, critical analysis is paramount.

Take a look at your plan then ask a very simple question. What does my team need today, that they don’t have to make the number? Ask the question over and over. Each answer should then become an initiative. If the answer is nothing, unless you’ve already asked the question, your not being honest with yourself.

Sales teams are not ready made, out of the box organizations. They require care and feeding. The best organizations understand this.

Ask the team what they feel is missing. Ask them what they think would make it easier to make their number. Ask them what you could provide to accelerate sales. Get familiar with the team’s weaknesses and strengths. Identify initiatives that will offset the weaknesses and leverage the strengths. Getting to your number, growing sales, and moving product is more than setting revenue targets and creating motivational rewards and recognition. Getting to your number means getting the most out of your team and that requires support.

Know what your team is lacking, know where it is weak, know where it is strong. Know what could make it stronger and then give it what it needs.

What is your sales support and enablement strategy? Do you have one? You should!

A word I can honestly say I rarely if ever hear in business is, self-confidence.   I do hear it a lot when discussing entrepreneurs and start-ups, specifically when the discussion is about the founders, but what about everyone else?  Why doesn’t the word self-confidence enter the business lexicon?   It should.

Self-confidence is at the heart of performance.  The decisions we make are driven by our confidence level.  The decisions we DON’T make are influenced by our self-confidence.   The impact of self-confidence sees no boundaries, from the board room to the mail room, the confidence people have in themselves impacts organizations.

Executives without it have frozen themselves and their company in its tracks, not moving when they should, not making the investments necessary, not removing the EVP who isn’t making their numbers, or not buying that start-up needed to penetrate new markets.

Sales people without it don’t make the cold calls, they don’t ask for the close, they don’t challenge the customer, they are uncomfortable making the customer uncomfortable, they struggle introducing new products.  Sales people who lack self-confidence can not reach their potential.

Lack of self-confidence isn’t solely an executive or sales person challenge.  It affects everyone.  When people, therefore organizations, lack self-confidence innovation is stifled.  People are afraid to suggest new ideas.  They are afraid to try different things.  They are uncomfortable asking for the extraordinary.   When self-confidence is absent mistakes are made, opportunities are missed, innovation is stifled, and energy and excitement are diminished.

The best leaders I’ve worked for have made me feel I could take on the world.  They’ve known how to make me feel confident in my decisions.  The best leaders create environments that build confidence in its people. They build confidence into their sales coaching. 

Environments filled with fear, politics, fighting, bullying, indifference, unrealistic goals, and that are unaccepting of failure, breed lack of self-confidence.

How confident are you in your decisions?  How confident are your direct reports?  How confident is the CEO?   They all need to be.  Confidence is critical.  Does your organization build confidence in its people?  It should.

To build a good organization, start building confidence.