In sales, the occasional closing curveball is inevitable. But if you’re consistently encountering unwelcome surprises in the later stages of your sales process, the problem doesn’t lie with your prospects: It lies with you. Asking the right questions along the way will help you identify potential obstacles while there’s still time to deal with them — and meet your quota.
The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity.
Be courageous to be vulnerable; be vulnerable to be courageous.
If you want your best people to stay, you need to think carefully about how you treat them.
You want to get results in your coaching process. So, ask the right questions.
As a leader in a company or organization, it’s important to make sure your team members are staying on track and doing the job to the best of their abilities, but this can sometimes be difficult to gauge unless you have a strategy in place to effectively measure the performance of your employees.
If you want to run a marathon, you can’t expect to get great results unless you train properly. The same goes for sales readiness. In order for reps to perform at the top of their game, they must be trained and then coached to reinforce and eventually master their sales material.
In some ways, the sales force is the most measured function in any company. All salespeople have a number (a quota) assigned to them, and progress toward that number is tracked maniacally. However, anyone who has ever tried to measure the ability of a sales team knows that this number is insufficient to determine whether a seller is actually good or bad at their job. But if you really want a challenge, try to measure the performance of the salesperson’s boss—the frontline sales manager.
It never ceases to amaze us. Bring up the topic of perfectionism in a room full of corporate CEOs, college presidents, or U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen, and you’ll see the same knowing smiles and nods of the head. Moreover, you’ll hear thinly veiled bravado about who among them is the most-perfect perfectionist. Many of them will extol the virtues of seeking perfection, and more than a few will include the pursuit of perfection among their notable strengths. Work environments that foster a zero-defect mentality often exacerbate this veneration of perfection.
If you believe the research, only 55% of salespeople make quota. That means 45% of sales people don’t make their quota, and the reason is we’re flying blind. For years sales organizations have had to use quantitative metrics to determine if a sales person was effective. We’ve measured the number of calls, the number of touches, meetings set, closing percentages, average deal size, emails sent, conversion rates, quota attainment and more, to ascertain a salesperson effectiveness.
