The Successful Sales Manager is where small business professionals who want to become business industry leaders call home. Founded by best-selling author Dustin Ruge, this website was designed to help small business professionals produce higher incomes, command better pay and billings, find better jobs, faster promotions, and more opportunities in their careers.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
In business, a goal without accountability is nothing more than a dream
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Are You Ready For A Record Sales Year In 2016?
Many are nervous, some are excited, and most are NOT fully prepared for what lies ahead. Why? Because sales management is a discipline and a system and NOT a dart board – which is in effect how far too many people in sales treat it. So how can you help avoid the dart board and help prepare you and your team for your best sales year ahead in 2016?
Here is where you can start today:
For sales managers:
Assess your sales
team, set goals, and learn through reflection. The best sales managers know
the power of leverage and also know that success is defined by the results of
your team and not yourself. Because of this, each year I utilized a SALES TALENT SCORECARD to help grade a sales team’s talent growth year-over-year. This will
allow you to better see the “big picture” of your incremental and longer-term
gains in sales talent improvement that may not be captured in your shorter-term
sales numbers.
Start your personnel
planning NOW. The best part of this time of year is that more salespeople are looking for new opportunities and more companies are making
personnel changes than any other time of year. Because of this, you will
typically find more quality sales people looking for new opportunities now so
take advantage of it and get your sales recruiters to source in force right
now.
Set clear goals and
expectations now. So you are finishing 2015, your results are nearly in,
new quotas and sales targets are being released, and uncertainty is in the air.
January 1 is the time to close the door on 2015 and set a new course forward.
It is also the time to set clear expectations of what success will look like in
2016 for each of your sales people and HOW they can achieve it. The more high
performers you have on your team meeting and exceeding these goals, the greater
the culture of “success” and “winning” will permeate all performers on your
team and nothing will get a poor performer to want to move on quicker than
being part of a team culture where they do not fit in. Sales leadership, goals,
and standards start with YOU so set the course, lead the way, and you should
almost never have to fire a salesperson on your team again for poor
performance…they will want out before you get most of them to that point.
For sales people:
Create YOUR OWN sales
plan for success now. The best salespeople know exactly what their time is
worth and treat their time working as time they are selling to others. Most
sales people will work between 1750-2150 hours a work year. If you divide what
you WANT to earn by the hours you will work (1750 to 2150 hours) you will know
exactly what your time should be worth and how best to maximize it in your
work. Don’t expect your company to do this for you since most sales activity
plans are based on “standard” performance levels which a great sales person
will always strive to exceed.
Remove distractions and
stay focused. Now that you should know it is really “your time” you are
selling to others, you should also realize that distractions are simply people,
processes, and places that end up stealing your time away from you. In short,
each time you get caught-up needlessly in time-robbers like office gossip
circles, watching lip-syncing dog videos and Facebook and chasing customers
around that constantly cancel on you; you are wasting your time and time is
YOUR money. The most successful people know their goals and just as
importantly, they know when to say “no” to distractions that move them
away from their goals.
Become an expert at
what you do. People receive more solicitations and are bombarded by more
marketing messages than ever before so naturally they are skeptical when they
encounter new sales people. Remember that people love to buy but hate to be sold
and in today’s digitally-driven sales economy, people want sales people to help
them making informed buying decisions – not pitch and run. Moreover, they want
a trusted adviser and NOT another vendor and one of the best ways you can move
in this direction is to strive to become an expert at what you do. This means
developing a habit of constantly learning, refining your skills, reading, and
asking questions. The minute you think you know all the answers is the minute
you stop growing and learning and should find another line of work.
Remember that top
sales people SHOULD out-earn company executives. When I speak to sales
people, I always start by asking how many of them want to make a lot of money
in business. Most hands will go up. I then ask them how many of them grew-up
wanted to be a sales person. Now most hands go down. So why the disconnect?
Don’t most people know that in most “good” companies, the top sales people will
out-earn most/all of their managers and executives? Well, I am here to tell you
that THEY DO and if you are this caliber of a sales person, this should be your
expectation as well…otherwise you are working for the wrong organization. The
bottom line is that the
top 20% of sales people are far more important to most growth-oriented
organizations than nearly any other role and that is why they earn what they
do. If you are part of the
top 20%, then I can assure you that there are MANY companies who are in
need of your services and the only thing holding you back in yourself. Just
like a top sports performer, you are a free agent and should always let the
market decide your real value and if you don’t actively reach your potential
market of employers, then your own HR managers will determine your value for
you…and good luck with that!
To learn more about how you can help make 2016 your most successful
sales year ever, visit our publications on Amazon.com:
#2016 #sales #recordsales #goalsetting
Labels:
Business Strategy,
Sales Best Practices
Monday, December 28, 2015
Why 88% of New Year’s Resolutions Fail
Did you know?
- The average white collar worker spends around 6 hours a day on email?
- 80% of smart phone users never leave their home without their smartphone?
- People check their smartphone on average 110 times a day, some as much as 900 times?
- The average person now receives around 4000 marketing messages a day, a nearly 700% increase over the past 40 years.
- 58% of adults check their emails first thing in the morning
Welcome to the new digital world of distractions and much
like 88% of New Year’s resolutions, they will lead you to failure in
2016…unless you can learn how to focus!
Like it or not, your world is increasingly full of
distractions pulling us in all different directions. Do you have a hard time
focusing when you are reading? Do you have a hard time holding a conversation
without the urge to check your smartphone? Can you vacation without your
smartphone at your side? Do you have to Google the answer to many questions you
receive? These may be symptoms of, as Nicholas
Carr indicates, your body’s development of an “interruption system” whereby
we trade off concentration and focus for instant and constant information flow.
Many working adults, including myself, have developed this
problem recently in our lives. And here is the scary part; we did not initially
grow up with smart phones while most of our children now do. This problem will
only get worse.
In
my book THE TOP 20%, I write about the important aspects of successfully
dealing with distractions and finding focus in your business life through the
use of goals. As a business professional,
the greatest advantage goals provide
you with is focus. The top 20 percent want to achieve great results and the
best way to accomplish this is by defining goals and staying laser-focused on
them. Good business goals should be reasonable, achievable, written,
executable, and mutually agreed upon by all involved. In developing a
laser-focus on defined goals, successful professionals are not only able to
focus in on what they want, but they are also able to effectively remove all of
the competing priorities and obstacles that potentially stand in their way.
Failing professionals treat sales goal setting in a similar
manner to how the 88 percent of us treat a New Year’s Resolution—we make a
declaration of an objective at the start of each year and then drift back into our
bad habits and results. The primary reason for this failure is a lack of
personal accountability. A goal without
accountability in nothing more than a dream. Most professionals today will
commonly create their annual goals and then never follow up on those goals
throughout the course of the year with the good habits needed to successfully execute them.
When it comes to business professionals, it is important to
understand that inspiration and desire is what may have gotten you started in
your career, but it is your habits that
will keep you going and make you successful. Habits are inherently no
different than business systems, since habits
are systems you create for yourself. Just as you cannot run and scale a
business without systems, you equally cannot grow your own productivity without
good habits.
The problem with habits are in developing the “right” habits
versus the wrong habits. We train both our muscles and our minds to behave in
certain habitual manners based on known stimuli and activities ranging from
sitting at a PC, standing in lines, checking our email, sitting at traffic
lights, etc. Unfortunately for many of us today, this stimuli tends to be
distractions and pauses in activity – we are developing habits to fill our time
and heads with increasing levels of information…most of which has nothing to do
with our goals. This is no different than walking into a room and then
forgetting why you walked there to begin with.
Sound familiar?
The best way to reach
any annual goal is to break it down into daily activities. Without a daily
focus, people are left with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual measurements
that in most cases are too late to effectively measure and manage. This is why
you as an individual need to take this upon yourself.
Finally, in order to be successful you also need to be
able to say “NO” to any competing goals and distractions that can
come your way – no matter how attractive they may seem. This can include saying
“NO” to taking and dealing with bad customers, “NO” to taking business that can
remove you and your business from your primary goals and objectives, and “NO” to
time-robbers like constantly checking social media to see what “everybody else”
is doing, etc.
Other ways successful business professionals I know have
removed distractions is by setting defined reading times each day, setting daily
time intervals for when they will check and receive emails, working out
regularly, eating better, and taking regular technology-free vacations.
What else works for you? Let us know…
To learn more about how you can help make 2016 your most successful year ever, visit our publications on Amazon.com:
#newyears #newyearsresolution #focus
Labels:
Business Strategy,
Sales Statistics
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