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.

Do You Have the Guts?

It takes guts to be a leader. It takes real strength to be a leader. Unfortunately, these characteristics scare people, they scare companies. They disrupt the status quo. They challenge the systems. The create chaos. They create unpredictability. Corporations thrive on predictability and the status quo and unfortunately the cost to maintaining the status quo is the loss of great leaders.

Do you have the guts?

We just launched our new eBook: How to Hire "A" players. 

Making your number or "winning" in sales starts with getting the best people. Like a sports team, the best sales team has the best sales people on the field. 

Too often I hear sales leaders lament over their inability to pick the right sales people. They complain that sales people are too good at selling themselves. Confused and frustrated the sales leader ultimately makes a bad hire. This is NOT an uncommon challenge for many sales organizations, but one that needs to be avoided. 

Hiring great sales talent is a skill of the best sales leaders. Developing the skill and a repetable hiring process increases the chances of making your number and increasing sales. 

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If you suffer from the following, this eBook is for you: 

I created this spreadsheet earlier in my career. I designed it to make sure I had the right team in place to execute my sales strategies and to increase sales. Over the years, it has continued to amaze me with its accuracy in predicting performance AND its ability to triage. Rarely has the team or a sales person been above a 7 average and not met their goals.

Building teams out of people requires a focus on the job as much as the individual. Measuring people is easy. It’s an individual exercise. Measuring teams, that’s a little different. To build a good team, you have to focus on the job.

To build a good team requires focus on the entire effort, not just the individual players. It requires an inventory of all the elements needed to be successful. What I’ve found is, by taking an inventory of the role(s) and evaluating the team collectively, gaps are identified. It’s these gaps that impede performance. Identifying these gaps allows them to be addressed and fixed.

Each quarter I would review my team against a similar chart. The assessment matrix is for me. If asked, I will share with individual employees. However, this is NOT meant to be a performance review. I have a separate performance review process. (My team assessment and individual performance reviews are intricately linked). I use this process to understand how each member of my team is performing against the critical elements of the job. I identify gaps and target my efforts toward closing the gaps. I enjoy this exercise. Identifying the gaps is a rush for me. With out this process, I would miss too many revenue impacting and team performance issues.

With amazing accuracy, the lowest scores on the chart have always aligned with the problem areas in my organization. By reviewing this chart (an example chart, not real), I can tell you that this team most likely has no succession planning, which leaves the company vulnerable if someone leaves. They lack a career development process, and some of its rising stars maybe in jeopardy of leaving. This chart tells me there are real people problems on this team that need to be addressed. It also suggests this team is very flexible. By looking at their highest score, Coachability, this team is flexible, agile and responsive. Addressing issues and problems are not a challenge for this team. High coachability gives me confidence the team can respond to the people problems. 

This process is also great for finding the poor individual fits. Not only am I able to see the teams effectiveness, I can see how the individuals “FIT” into the team. Those in red are dragging the team down. The goal is a collective team score of 7.0 or higher. However, to see where the problem player(s) are (those with scores of less than 7.0) is critical. I use the individual scores to help with performance reviews. The goal is to bring the individual scores up, in order to bring the team scores up. 

Every organizations chart should look different. They must be customized for specific roles and positions. Every leaders chart will contain different criteria. Take the time, understand what is critical to make your team successful, put in the chart and then measure it.

Having a view into your team takes the guess work out of it. Knowing the players is great but knowing the team is awesome.

Remember, players score, teams win!