The best sales people are not those that have the gift of gab, and the 
best sales managers aren’t the best sales people. Selling and leading sales people are two different skill sets. Being great at one does not ensure success at the other.
If you’re a basketball fan, you’ll remember Michael Jordan, arguably one of the best NBA players that ever played. But being a great player did not guarantee Jordan being a great team president or ever becoming a championship winning coach. Being a great player was simply being a great player.
Although the above seems easy enough to comprehend, it sometimes seems more complicated when you’re growing your team and business. It doesn’t have to be. So to help simplify, and to clarify, how you can build a world-class sales organization, I’ve invited Jack Daly, author of Hyper Sales Growth, to share five steps that will help you win. Below is Jack’s response.
As you look to build a World-Class sales organization, make sure that you are focused on the right things. As sales managers and business leaders, it is not your job to grow sales. It is your job to grow salespeople in quantity and quality every day. The following 5 initiatives are the main areas that must be focused on when building a world-class sales organization:
1 - Find Good People
2 - Get Them to Join Your Team
3 - Get Them Trained and Producing
4 - Grow Them Into Top Producers
5 - Keep Them
Jack expands on each step below:
The process of recruiting good talent to your organization is not one that often happens by chance. Many companies get aggressive about recruiting only when they need somebody to add to their team or when they need to replace somebody who has just left their team. 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?
2 - Get Them To Join Your Team
Now that we have spent countless hours, days, and months hunting our prey, we finally have him/her in our sights. Once they have agreed to sit down for a formal interview, I have the full expectation that the candidate has prepared and practiced a very thorough and professional presentation for our company, its products/services, features, advantages, and benefits. This is only natural when we think about it in our sales process.
3 - Get Them Trained and Producing
Now that we have brought new talent onto our team, it is imperative that we have a plan to get them "into the game" as soon as we possibly can. We often hear from sales managers and CEO's that the "ramp-up" time for salespeople is 6 months, 1 year, or more. It is the goal of this initiative to make sure that we get those salespeople ramped up quicker and producing results.
4 - Grow Them Into Top Producers
It is my belief that training must be ongoing and continuous. As company leaders, we send our salespeople out 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 our lumberjacks are not CONSTANTLY sharpened, they will eventually have to work much harder to achieve results. Thus, we get turnover and/or salesperson burnout.
The Harvard Business School conducted a survey of top producing sales professionals that asked them to rank the top 5 reasons why they stayed in their current positions at their current companies. Here are the top 5 reasons:
- RESPECT
- RECOGNITION
- POSITIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT
- OPPORTUNITY FOR PERSONAL GROWTH
- MONEY
Thanks, Jack, for your insights and 5 steps to build a world-class sales organization. So what are you waiting for? Build your team and go sell – here’s to your success.
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Tue, Jun 16, 2015 @ 09:00 AM
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