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Mindset Shifters: How to Get What You Really Want in Life

By Jim Cathcart

Think of your mind as a transmission with multiple gears. Each gear is designed for a specific range of performance. First gear is for starting out; fifth gear is for highway cruising at higher speeds. This can be a fascinating thought exercise when you apply it toward a goal.

What is something you want? Write it down right now. Anything: a state of health, an amount of money, an item you’d like to own, an experience you’d like to have, an honor or award you’d like to receive. Just write it down right now or say it aloud.

Wants are the activators of the mind. Emerson said, “Desire is possibility seeking expression.” In other words, things that are possible for you appear in your mind as wishes, desires, or wants. So, the mere fact that you want something is an indication that it is probably possible for you. Not without help or resources or growth, but possible nonetheless.

Once a want is identified, the mind starts presenting you with the obstacles or challenges you’ll encounter. This is done to assist you, not to stop you. But most people treat these as worries and they shut down the achievement process. Remember, your mind is your friend. It’s on your side, trying to help keep you safe while getting what you want. When you start to see obstacles…welcome them! Those are your “to-dos” on the path to success.

To shift your mind into the appropriate “gear” for the task ahead I have listed several concepts you can use to see things from a different perspective (aka mindset). Try these out on the thing you want. You did write something down, yes? Do it now please.

As an example, I’m going to assume you want to become a multimillionaire and you’re not one yet. So the challenge is:

“How do I become a multimillionaire within the next 10 years?”

Once you have your “want” isolated, apply these to it:

  • Combine
  • Separate
  • Reverse
  • Multiply
  • Reduce
  • Magnify
  • Minify
  • Color, Texture, Shape
  • Substitute

Here’s how this might go. How can I COMBINE something with what I’m already doing in order to achieve more? Can I add someone else to the team? Form a Mastermind with a group of fellow achievers? Form an alliance with another company? Gain a license or affiliate agreement to add something to my offers? Can I group other goals with this one and achieve all them at once?

SEPARATE. What if I make my financial goal a separate activity from my career? Could I invest in real estate on the side or start a multi-level marketing side business? Could I take just one of my job skills or talents and use that to make my millions? Should I stop associating with people who discourage me from succeeding?

REVERSE. I’m seeking money but how can I make money seek me? Can I start with the assumption that I’m already a multimillionaire and work backwards? Can I offer a great service or product that would attract more money to me?

MULTIPLY. What if I did five or 10 times more than I’m doing now? Who else could add to or double my impact? What about getting more people on the team? Going after multiple markets at once? Having many parallel operations?

REDUCE. How about just “picking a lane” and doing only one thing? Which parts of my efforts are not paying off much – and could I discontinue them? Can I focus just one intense part of each day on this task? Could I reduce my goal into sub-goals that are more easily achieved?

MAGNIFY. Can I do things on a bigger scale? Go for the gusto of a massive enterprise or global endeavor? Instead of focusing on my job, how about focusing on my industry or profession itself? Not my community but my state or nation?

MINIFY. What if we do a micro strategy and make this a bunch of little successes, then weave them into a bigger success? How can I offer a Volkswagen “Bug” when others are building Pontiac “land yachts” that get 10 miles per gallon? How about focusing on personal computers (like Apple) while IBM is going after corporate installations (mainframes)?  

COLOR, TEXTURE, SHAPE. Is there a different look, feel, size, or function that could be better? Ford initially only offered one color, black, on its Model T and sold millions. USA Today started printing their newspaper in full color and quickly became successful.

SUBSTITUTE. What could be done instead? What if we replaced the traditional wooden back of the guitar with carbon fiber? What if we used private owners/drivers instead of buying fleets of taxis (Uber)? What if we improved the train connections instead of trying to redirect automobile traffic? What if we offered TV news all day long instead of comedies and dramas too (CNN, Fox News)? What if we had characters from our cartoons as the hosts and guides in our theme parks instead of other personnel? (Disney)

Each of these examples involved achievements in the millions of dollars but the successes weren’t rooted in brilliant scientific breakthroughs. Instead, they were achieved through a different mindset – a new approach to the challenge. You can do this every day. Do as R. Buckminster Fuller, the da Vinci of the 20th Century, did: he posed the questions, “How can I look for God’s fingerprint in what I’m examining?” “How can we make the world work better for all the people with only the existing resources and do so through spontaneous cooperation?” That produced breakthroughs of global proportions. Einstein used this technique when seeking the Theory of Relativity, E=MC2. He said he envisioned himself riding on a beam of light at “light speed” and asked, “What would I see?”

Wow. Well, you needn’t change the universe – but it’s OK if you do. Just apply these new gears to shift your mind into more powerful ways of achieving your goals.

Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE is the original author of Relationship Selling and one of the world’s leading professional speakers. Jim is a regular contributor to Selling Power and a certified Mindset Trainer. Contact Jim at Cathcart.com.

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Four Reasons You Need Account Planning for Sales Success

By Mark Donnolo

Mike Barnes, executive vice president with Andrews Distributing – one of the largest beer distributors in the United States – knows the value of account planning.

In April 2013, the company began following a structured account planning process. They collected large amounts of data about their customers’ buying habits and, based on what they learned, changed their sales coverage model. “The minute that we did that, we had the first year of consecutive months of share growth,” says Barnes. “We’re now in our third year and, as we have improved in account planning, we’ve seen our market share grow. We’re in our 34th consecutive month of share growth – and that’s virtually unheard of in our industry.”

Account planning provides a structure to determine what’s important and what’s not when pursuing customers. Below are four reasons account planning can make a difference in your sales organization now.

Four Reasons You Need Account Planning

#1: Competition is out there. You have to know more about your customer, better understand their needs, have a differentiated value proposition, and have an actionable plan to beat the competition. Account plans provide data that pinpoint the market share, level of competition, and the strengths and weaknesses not only of your position but of your competitors – all of which contribute to the predictability of whether or not you can hit your goals.

#2: Account plans coordinate teams. Most individual sales reps are great at the tactical level. But accounts typically require larger coordination – either between accounts or within the same account – depending on its size. Account plans also reveal how well you work together as an organization within the account. How does the sales team work with the technical organization?

#3: Your account is one piece of a larger puzzle. Every company has financial goals, and financial leaders have to demonstrate they have a plan to achieve those goals. But the sales organization – and typically only the sales organization – knows what’s going on at eye level. Account plans help communicate that bottom-up view. The sales organization has an opportunity to discuss what their customers are doing, for better or worse, and offer valuable information about how sales will achieve its goals.

#4: Account plans create accountability. The sales team needs a way to measure its success beyond whether each individual achieves her quota or not. The team needs metrics, goals, and milestones to work toward. Account plans create a record of what an individual is supposed to do – both the actions and the goals – that can be used in performance metrics.

Account Planning Challenges

So how do companies end up starting and stopping account planning so often? We’ve seen the following major challenges to achieving a well-oiled account planning process:

The organization isn’t committed. When a process takes hold at a grassroots level and spreads throughout the organization, it creates a powerful result. Unfortunately, for most companies that see a grassroots account planning movement, it doesn’t gain commitment from everyone and, at some point, leaves a pattern of ad hoc practices that benefit a few teams but has little overall effect on results. Whether the account planning process starts at the top or the bottom, the organization has to have strong commitment from leadership. That commitment has to follow through to sales leadership, sales management, and to each salesperson who has a role in the account planning process.

There isn’t strong ownership of the account strategy. When I work with sales organizations on sales process and sales roles, one of the questions I ask is, “Who owns the account strategy and the account plan?” I expect to hear a decisive and consistent answer across the organization and the accounts it covers. Unclear ownership indicates a lack of accountability and a gap in leadership that can result in sales opportunities falling through the cracks. Designate ownership of the overall account planning process and the plans for each account.

Account planning becomes all about the document. Account planning isn’t about the document. It’s about the client needs, the innovative ideas to meet those needs, a committed plan to address those needs, and the discipline of ownership and execution from the team. Elevate the position of account planning beyond the document. The document merely contains all the hard work, and it will continue to evolve as the work and results progress.

Salespeople would rather sell than plan. Let’s face it: most salespeople love the pursuit. They don’t love planning. The irony is that the most successful sales teams I’ve worked with understand the criticality of account planning and they embrace it. If a salesperson isn’t a planner and thinks incrementally and transactionally, she is likely to get incremental and transactional results. If she thinks big and is intentional about operating according to a big plan, she will make different, longer-term decisions and get bigger results.

Contrary to instinct, the work of account planning will get you further along – and multiples more successful – than trying to pull it off yourself. Investing the time to do a good account plan increases the value exponentially.

Mark Donnolo is managing partner of SalesGlobe, which helps companies connect sales strategies to the bottom line. He is the author of What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation, The Innovative Sale, and Essential Account Planning: 5 Keys for Helping Your Sales Team Drive Revenue.

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What You Need to Create a World-Class Customer Experience

By Amit Gautam

When I meet with our clients or prospects, the problem definition is nearly always very broad. As an example, Brillio recently met with the business leader of a consumer durables company. He told us, in essence, “I want to improve the stickiness of my customers. I want to create a world-class customer experience when they are in our stores. I want to know everything about them and I want to increase sales.”

That’s a tall order, obviously. How would you go about trying to find a solution?

If you are a generalist, you would probably bring in the specialists and hope they could stitch a solution together. In this case, you might want a user experience expert, a digital experience expert, a Big Data analytics expert, and a host of development-specific experts. You’d have tons of specialized expertise sitting around the table: impressive, but (probably) a tremendous waste of time. They simply would not know how to start the process. Specialists tend to look at the world through a narrow but focused lens, while problems like those our clients face tend to be expansive.

In today’s world, where customer experience, speed, and specificity of the solution create the greatest impact, a generalist approach of customer-centricity – by being the messenger or coordinator – won’t cut it. As the face of your firm, your customer-facing team has to create a world-class customer experience by bridging the gap between client problems and what your firm can offer as a solution.

What you need is a versatilist. It’s an awkward word (spell-check hates it!), first used in a Gartner press release way back in 2005. Gartner’s point was a somewhat narrow one: that, in information technology, technical prowess was becoming insufficient for success. Gartner wrote that trends in IT “will lead to the emergence of a new breed of IT professional, the ‘versatilist,’ who will have technical aptitude, local knowledge, knowledge of industry processes, and leadership ability.”

A versatilist would start by asking questions to define the current customer journey and the experience around it. A versatilist would understand enough about the potential solutions and technologies to build an informed view of the company’s current engagement model and experience creation as well as an understanding of the data currently used and its sources. This helps the versatilist create a perspective on today’s reality from the proverbial “big picture” view – then start to create a vision of where to go.

When you have a vision, you can start to create pieces of the solution. For my client in this situation, we started by creating an omnichannel customer experience that would be delivered by an integrated application available on mobile devices, any Web browser, and in-store systems. A customer can launch a shopping/buying experience anywhere, on any device, and continue it anywhere, on any device – including in-store. We also developed customer personas that included social media data, and applied data science to create patterns that drive buying decisions and increase sales. Our solution included everything Brillio has to offer: data analytics, mobility, e-commerce, and cloud.

But the important message here is that the solution was driven not by specialists in data analytics, mobility, e-commerce, and cloud; it was driven by the versatilist approach to understanding the client’s issues. A versatilist must combine enough understanding about the available solutions and enough understanding of the client’s situation and context to be able to create a high-level solution. It should address the client’s problem statement, of course, but it will probably go further.

For the digital services firm, no two solutions look alike, so you need to constantly imagine, solve, and evolve – and only a versatilist can do that. This is how versatilists build trusted partnerships and world-class customer experiences – which is exactly what customers are looking for. They want someone to hear them, create a solution, and then own the outcome and get the solution delivered.

The bottom line: The best customer experience professionals aren’t the folks bringing specialists to the table. The best customer experience professionals are versatilists.

Therefore, be a versatilist!

Amit Gautam is head of Customer Experience for North America at Brillio and a business and thought leader around the impact of disruptive technologies on business outcomes. Amit is part of the leadership team at Brillio, the company that focuses and organizes its service offerings in three major areas. His core strength is to establish vision and drive multi-year growth by developing foresight into industry and customer businesses, run profitable operations, and build a successful and winning team.

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How to Really Measure Your Sales Team’s Call Activity

By Eric Esfahanian

The Pareto Principle – or the 80/20 Rule – is the concept that 80 percent of your effects are obtained by 20 percent of your causes. Your sales force probably proves out the concept as well: about 80 percent of your company’s revenue is produced by 20 percent of your sales team.

Although the 80/20 Rule has come to be expected, you can turn the Pareto Principle on its head within your own organization and distribute performance more evenly and consistently. To do this we have to get back to basics.

Call Activity: Stats Don’t Lie

By enlisting the help of technology and analytics, sales leaders are now able to challenge that conventional sales wisdom and increase the average effectiveness of every rep to drive performance and revenue target rather than simply rely on the 20 percent year after year. But, in order to do this, you must be able to measure your team’s call activity…all of it! At first, it may seem simple, but ask yourself: “Are you able to accurately measure your team’s daily call activity?”

If you’re like 90 percent of sales teams today, the answer will be “not even close.” But technology has evolved and it’s now possible to easily capture sales rep telephone activity from any phone or carrier. Really!

Once you can take a transparent look inside your team’s activity, it might be a shock to discover what is actually happening compared to what you thought was happening or what you have been told was happening or what CRM reported was happening.

If you want to grow your top line systematically, relying on manually generated reports or overly hopeful input from your reps’ CRM entries to measure call activity is no longer adequate (and maybe never was). With automated, real-time, and 100 percent accurate data, you will have a baseline of minimum performance and the knowledge to set realistic expectations for your team and manage to that expectation.

For nearly two decades, Gryphon has captured phone-based sales activity from some of the largest sales organizations worldwide, and found several key performance indicators that are truly predictive of success. These include the total number of calls a rep makes, conversation conversion (contact-to-close), the call frequency (persistence) of the reps, and how many times they are reaching out to their leads before they are “exhausted.”

If you focus on (first) understanding and (then) improving these metrics, you will be amazed at how quickly it impacts your sales team’s effectiveness and your revenue – and how sustainable it will be if you keep it up over time

Turning the Pareto Principle on Its Head

Once you have an accurate standard against which to measure your team’s performance – and set benchmarks to follow – what’s next? Identify the behaviors of your top and bottom performers and get an understanding for how they are succeeding or how they are struggling. Use their behaviors as teaching opportunities for your team.

Train your bottom performers with the techniques your top performers utilize to win over prospects. Not only are you able to coach to proven standards, but you will decrease on-boarding times for new employees.

Listen to Lead

Speech analytics can help you with this as well by providing a completely transparent view into conversations. Once the exclusive domain of call centers or spy rings, advances in secure cloud recording and analytics are now within reach for any rep calling from any device. With this powerful capability, you can ensure your reps are adhering to their scripts without veering too far off message and pick up on notable keywords, confidence indicators, and even the emotions of your rep and their customers during conversations.

With this kind of data and insight into what works and what doesn’t, there is no reason to fail. You are taking control of your team, managing their performance, and are able to forecast with confidence.

For more than 20 years, Eric Esfahanian has been helping clients increase sales and marketing effectiveness with innovative business intelligence technology and processes. As Chief Revenue Officer of Gryphon Networks, Eric is charged with driving growth of Gryphon’s Fortune 500 client base with cloud-based sales performance management solutions that increase revenue and client retention while reducing training/onboarding times for large, distributed sales organizations. Previously, Eric held sales leadership roles with MicroStrategy, Hewlett-Packard and EMC Corp. He received his MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College and Bachelor’s Degree from Boston College.

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Deliver Sales Training Where Your Salespeople Are

By Byron Matthews

One constant in the life of a sales professional is change. Circumstances throughout the sales cycle change often, forcing salespeople to make quick decisions about the use of their time, their talent, and their resources. They make these decisions hoping they lead to closed deals. But what works one week may not be very effective six months down the road.

As a result, it makes perfect sense that sales leaders constantly shift their strategy as well, given today’s tenuous business landscape. Pressure to win and close more deals and drive higher revenue is as great as it’s ever been, so sales professionals must be able to win deals regardless of their situation. This is where sales training comes into the picture.

In fact, sales organizations should alter their training and sales enablement approach to effectively arm their teams with the expertise they need to meet the ever-changing challenges they face. Learning should never be static. In fact, it must evolve and be continually reinforced or it quickly becomes just another box to check during the year.

Learning that is vibrant, personal to salespeople, and current keeps the sales engine humming in the most efficient way possible.

What does vibrant learning look like? Just like it does at home. People expect to learn at work exactly how they learn at home. In other words, they have consumer-grade expectations that, quite frankly are not being met.

Here’s what I mean:

  • People, on average, pick up their smartphones 85 times a day.
  • Eighty percent of Internet users have a smartphone, which means most people deal with multiple gadgets throughout the day.
  • Eighty percent of technology users check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up.

When salespeople are away from work, they can access whatever content they like in an instant. This is the new way of learning – via YouTube, Google, and Siri. And, here’s the important part: Their expectations are being met.

At work? Not so much.

But doesn’t it make sense to give your salespeople the same kind of learning experience when they’re at work?

Sales professionals need sales training to be delivered where they are and applicable to real-world situations. When it’s not, you disrupt your organization’s revenue flow.

Let me put it another way: This slows down the sales engine and, in some cases, it slows to a standstill. And you must do everything you can to keep that sales engine humming.

Every seller needs to learn new selling skills and keep sharp those they already possess, but they’re constantly on the go. That’s why training initiatives that are agile, flexible, and include several modalities that open up options allow each seller to learn at his or her own pace.

Organizations need a mix of sales training modalities to meet the specific needs of their sales team. These modalities should include classroom-led, digital, and integrated learning and a reinforcement emphasis – or any combination of the four – and be delivered any place, any time.

Learning initiatives delivered where sellers happen to be should be a way of life for sales and service leaders because the world is changing – and keeping up with learning is more difficult than it has ever been.

This doesn’t mean wholesale changes must be made year after year. Rather, these changes, or shifts, must take into account the skill level and preferred learning method of every seller. It must be simple, easy to use, and deliver exactly what your sellers need – where, when, and how they need it.

“Perfect fit” learning includes experiences that fit the needs of the individual, the team, the company, and the organizational culture. If your learning doesn’t meet the needs of your sellers, maybe it’s time to rethink the way you do it.

To learn more about how perfect-fit learning solutions can impact your sales, check out The Sales and Service Training Shift Webinar.

Byron Matthews leads Miller Heiman Group’s commitment to championing customer-management excellence throughout the customer life cycle and across the enterprise. His dedication to placing the customer at the core of everything gives Miller Heiman Group its expanded, holistic approach for developing, managing and sustaining long-term customer relationships. Before joining the organization, he served as Senior Vice President of Sales at Aflac, where he led more than 30,000 sales professionals across multiple channels. He also spent more than five years at Mercer as Global Sales Performance Business Practice Leader, where he grew revenue more than 40%.

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Five Mistakes You’re Making with Your Sales Proposals

By Adrian Davis

If you’re like most sales leaders, you have a nagging feeling there is something wrong with the sales proposals your team sends to prospects and customers. You just don’t know where to start when it comes to reworking them.

Here are five things they should stop doing immediately:

  1. Not understanding the target audience. In most cases, the individual receiving the proposal is not the person actually making the decision. Ensure your salespeople have a clear understanding of the approval process and who the final decision maker is. From now on, never allow a proposal to begin with these words: “We are really pleased to have the opportunity to submit this sales proposal.” When people read this line, they immediately disengage from the proposal.

    You need to come out swinging and ensure every line counts. The most powerful word at the start of a proposal is the word, “You.” Ensure your salespeople articulate very clearly the strategic goals of the decision maker and how the current situation is jeopardizing the achievement of these goals. This opening will emotionally engage the decision maker. The needs and objectives of other stakeholders should be articulated within the context of the strategic goal and challenges of the key decision maker.

  2. Not understanding what a proposal is. Most salespeople believe a proposal is a 100-page document. Lacking a clear understanding of what a proposal is creates confusion for the buyer.

    Simply put, a proposal is a request for a proposed course of action. “Will you marry me?” is a proposal. So is, “Will you buy my product/services?” The 100-page documents your salespeople are generating should be thought of as technical appendices. Lower level people will comb through these documents to ensure they understand the specific details. Executives will not read these documents. They will, however, read the Executive Summary or the Transmittal Letter. If those documents are well crafted, your chances of winning will significantly improve.

    Most salespeople fail to realize that the more senior the executives are, the more they want to be told what to do. They tire of people bringing problems to them without any solutions. Your proposals must clearly articulate the problem the organization is facing and then provide a clear course of action.

  3. Not providing a transition vision. When people are confused, they do nothing. Many opportunities stall because the buyer is unclear how the change will take place. Buyers want change – the movement from a current state through a transition state to a future state. The transition state is messy and risky, which is why, without a clear vision of that transition, buyers are reluctant to take the risk. Therefore, a section of your proposal should clearly articulate how the change will be made – reassuring the buyer that you have an approach that will work and that they will feel comfortable with.

  4. Not focusing on outcomes. So many proposals focus on the price and the process. This is not what buyers want. What they really want is outcomes. The prices and the process are necessary evils. Ensure your proposals paint a picture of their new reality. Fire up their imagination about the transformation they are about to undergo. The unconscious mind loves contrast. This section should provide a strong contrast to the needs and challenges identified in section 1.

  5. Not providing a clear next step. You need to keep the ball moving forward. Right now, inertia is working against you. You need inertia to work for you. For that to happen, you need to request the smallest action that will demonstrate real commitment to moving toward your solution. In some cases, this may be scheduling a project kick-off meeting; in other cases, you may need a signature for an agreement.

If you can get your people to stop making these common mistakes, you will improve the number of wins when your opportunities get to the sales proposal stage.

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and DuPont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM), and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).

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Should Sales Leaders Swoop in to Save the Deal?

By Sherri Sklar

Recently I received the following email from a VP of sales, asking for advice about how to bring out the best in his people:

Dear Sherri:

We have a relatively new team and I am noticing that the first-line sales managers are spending a lot of time swooping in to “save” the deal. If they don’t step in, they say we’d lose the deal to either competition or no decision. I know we need to be developing these reps, but they are concerned that, if we take time out to coach and train, we’d lose the momentum we’ve got going with these deals. But, even with the managers stepping in to drive the deals, I’m still not getting the results we need. Reps are getting frustrated that they aren’t more empowered and many are starting to leave. Help! Is there a better way?

Sincerely,

SWOOPING IN SALES VP

Yes, there is a better way. Take note of these simple points that could make all the difference in bringing out the best in your people and their performance:

  1. Embrace a new mindshift about your reps. You, yourself, as the head of sales, have to start seeing your reps as the secret weapon. As soon as you have that vision, you’ll realize you need to do everything in your power to develop and coach your reps into being amazing, trusted advisors for your customers. That’s when the magic begins. Your customers will start to see your sales being able to make an impact on them and their business – and truly look at them as partners and valuable assets to their business. When that happens, you win deals and your reps will make quota.  

  2. Stop the swooping; start the coaching. Along with the new mindset, you need to stop the swooping. By swooping in, the credibility of your reps is being undermined and you are setting a bad precedent for an imbalanced buyer-seller relationship. When your rep has been undermined, your buyer will no longer perceive them as a “trusted advisor” on equal footing with them. Without being a trusted advisor, your company is seen as just a mere vendor, not a company that can make a difference – and, ultimately, not the company they will choose to do business with. Instead, use your and your first-line sales managers’ expertise to coach and guide these reps. You’ll find reps starting to feel empowered – and happy again that you entrust them with the job they were hired to do. They will most likely go through walls for you just because you are showing them you believe in them, you are investing in them, and you care about them. 

  3. Build a first-rate sales management team. One of the most important roles in the entire sales organization is the first-line sales manager – simply by the fact that they have so much influence over the people who report to them. Are you sure you have the right people as first-line sales managers? If the reason these managers are swooping in is because they relish being the hero who saves the deal instead of enabling their reps to be heroes, then it’s time to assess whether you can coach them to be great managers or whether you should return them to the field as reps where they are at their best. Assess your management team, recruit great managers who are outstanding at leading and growing others’ skills, and weed out the ones who aren’t.

  4. Invest in your people. Coaching your reps and sales managers on an ongoing basis is one very important step. Make sure you are also investing in helping them grow their skills in all aspects of what they do by giving them great sales training and sales management training. The last thing you need is people second-guessing how to generate business; winging it will lead to 50 different approaches and 50 different outcomes. Give your organization the tools they need to succeed. By having an ongoing learning environment, your sales managers will be empowering their reps, building their reps’ skills, and equipping and empowering them to perform.

  5. Make it fun. Make it fun to be a part of your organization and to come to work every day. Create an environment where you are not only helping people grow, but also giving them the tools and support they need, along with team mentoring and manager mentoring. One way to do that is by conducting regular team meetings, sharing stories, recognizing great performance, and creating opportunities for friendly coopetition with fun games, contests and incentives.

Changing your approach by creating an environment that empowers your reps – giving them the support they need to succeed – will ultimately prove the better strategy in the long run, enabling you to amplify your results significantly by bringing out the best in your people and the organization as a whole.

Want more insight from Sherri? Contact her at sherri@growthtera.com and join her at the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas on September 18-19, where she will present Sales Planning: Strategies that Leave Your Competition in the Dust.

Sherri Sklar is CEO of GrowthTera, a consulting firm that helps organizations elevate their performance to accelerate growth. For more than 20 years, she has helped companies deliver triple-digit growth, orchestrate liquidity exits, and emerge as market leaders in their field. She has trained, coached, and helped companies expand deal size, shorten sales cycles, build a robust pipeline, and convert stalled opportunities into multimillion-dollar closed deals. Sherri received a BA from Tulane University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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How to Really Motivate and Incentivize Salespeople

By Donald St. Clair

The economics and shifting contexts related to motivating B2B salespeople are staggering. U.S. companies spend more than $800 billion each year on B2B sales force compensation, representing the single largest marketing expense.  

According to a 2012 article (“Breaking the Sales Force Incentive Addiction: A Balanced Approach to Sales Force Effectiveness”) written by ZS Associates experts and published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, customers are also better informed than ever and expect salespeople to be consultants – which is consistent with recent research findings that incentives distract from the creative problem-solving required for such consultative sales roles.

While salespeople face an array of obstacles in meeting customer and organization needs – and as the center of gravity shifts in buyer-seller relationships – it is imperative that sales leaders reexamine how motivation affects sales performance. A recent review by ZS Associates on sales force drivers reveals U.S. spending on sales force incentives – traditionally utilized as the primary sales motivator – exceeded $200 billion in 2010. Certainty concerning how best to use sales force drivers remains elusive, with nearly 80 percent of U.S. companies making significant changes to their sales force programs every two years or less.

Yet, countless researchers and sales managers propose that monetary rewards are the primary motivators of sales efforts. Perhaps not surprisingly, many U.S. corporations employ programs to motivate employees by linking compensation to one or more aspects of performance. Meanwhile, some companies have abandoned such sales incentives, favoring salary compensation plans while citing the detrimental effects of such short-term economic incentives on the long-term relationship building goals of the sales organizations.

Here are two key findings about how to really motivate salespeople, based on decades of successful sales leadership and scholarship relevant to successful sales forces in business markets:

Finding #1: Take money off the table.

In addition to my 23 years of B2B sales and sales management experience, my study and many others have found P4P plans and carrot-and-stick approaches led to decreased well-being levels and diminish feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation. While I agree simple selling tasks (transactional) require incentivizing, selling in today’s B2B world requires creative and conceptual skills. In this transformational B2B sales domain, incentives hinder performance and are the competitor of exploration. Sales managers should pay salespeople generously and equitably and do their best to ensure money is a non-issue. Please do not mistake this as an indictment on all extrinsic rewards. I have found they can be effective if used appropriately and are not linked directly to performance.

Finding #2: Promote purpose.

Rather than bringing in XYZ Associates to help tweak, yet again, your sales compensation plan, focus on how to promote purpose. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. This addiction to incentives is challenging and stifles innovation and the cross-pollination of ideas. After all, we are indoctrinated into this “if/then” thinking – like children. We bribe our children with rewards stating “if” they make their bed and mow the lawn (or other countless chores), ‘then” they will reap a reward. In doing so, we are attempting to control them. If you believe you need to pay salespeople more money to do their job or that, by paying them more, they will perform better over the long term, you – simply misunderstanding intrinsic motivation – are unknowingly creating unsustainable compensation models.

Salespeople are intrinsically motivated by the challenging work and by the ability to improve their customers’ lives. In his book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the concept of the “flow state.” My study uncovered intrinsic motivation (doing an activity because they find it interesting and derive natural satisfaction from it) to be rooted in creative behavior that is often characterized by a “flow state” where a person’s skills are fully engaged in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable, so it functions as an attractor for learning and developing new skills to tackle even more challenging problems.

Specifically, “flow” is defined as a state in which a person is a temporary psychological merger with the activity, which produces positive feelings such as enjoyment and enthusiasm. In practical terms, this research revealed salespeople felt a sense of wholeness when they were allowed to do what they do best – help improve customers’ lives.

Salespeople are seeking genuine relationships where there is no longer an “us” or “them” but rather a “we” (collaborative relationships) – we are all people seeking connection, a sense of belongingness. Sales managers need to transition their thinking into paradigms without incentives or sales goals and encourage salespeople to self-actualize – to grow vertically to a new stage of consciousness. In this new world of B2B sales, sales managers need to decouple sales performance models derived from the share of the customer’s wallet to ones that foster the higher-order development of its sales force.  

In their book Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, authors Deci and Flaste suggest the question sales managers should be asking is, “How can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves?” The ineffectiveness of incentives highlighted above strongly suggests that sales managers need to shift resources and energy toward models that align better with what matters to salespeople – improving customers’ lives! Sales managers need to create systems that feed purpose and promote self-actualization rather than try to drive change through control mechanisms.

Metrics should evolve from frequency and quantity of sales calls to quality of relationships, customer retention rates, customer satisfaction, and other longer horizon metrics. If sales managers are willing to shed orthodoxy and reshape their motivational mental models to fit the new world of sales, they can take full advantage of what the new world has to offer.

Donald St. ClairDonald P. St. Clair is vice president of sales and marketing at OEM SALES in Troy, MI. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.  He can be reached at donald.stclair@case.edu.

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Improve Your Sales Performance with These Team-Building Activities

By Luke Talbot-Male

Common practices and sales pitches nowadays are becoming ineffective because consumers have been overexposed to them over the years.

To help the company achieve their sales goals, revising sales strategies sounds like a great plan – but doing so will be more effective if you have a strong sales team behind it. The team-building buzz is now targeting businesses and companies that aim to improve sales performance and hit their revenue targets.

Why Strengthen the Sales Team?

Functional teams achieve their goals because they are able to communicate well and make collective decisions. Evaluating your sales team in terms of its skills in communication, listening, creativity, decision making, and teamwork will help you find the areas you need to work on. And implementing these “new” sales strategies – and how high your sales can reach using them – depends on your team’s skills. So it will be best if they are geared up for the battle ahead.

Trust and Interdependence

Every team needs to establish trust and task interdependence to improve the quality of its output. Accomplishing sales goals is also dependent on your sales team’s cohesiveness. When the team is working closely together, the variable of having to completely trust each other always comes into the picture. A simple team-building activity that will help you enhance your team’s interdependence and trust is the game called the “mine field.”

You will need to do this activity in a wide indoor or outdoor space with materials like chairs, boxes, or cones as obstacle. Build a maze where a blindfolded person can pass through from start to finish – but strategically create “mines” using the obstacles you have gathered. Divide the team into pairs; one person will be blindfolded and will pass through the minefield while following his teammate’s verbal instructions.

The Good Old Role Plays

There’s nothing old with “experiencing” how to do the different scenarios when pitching sales to your customers. This team-building activity will help you raise sales performance by improving your sales team’s customer relations skills and creative thinking.

Divide your team into groups that will act as customers and salespeople. The salespeople team should be able to brainstorm the best sales pitch they can come up with for the product while the customers team will need to make the act as realistic as possible by asking questions most customers ask. Role playing this act will help you identify the reasons potential customers do not buy your products – and how your sales team can overcome those reasons.

Know Your Team Better

There might be instances where some of your sales team are assigned through various regions and cities and might not have even interacted with each other in person. One of the best “get to know you” games we use for team activities is based on the American television game show To Tell the Truth. We ask all members of the team to state two truths and make up one lie about themselves – and the other members have to guess which one is the lie. Unlike the old-fashioned way of introducing yourself to the team, this game will help you build rapport with your colleagues in a more fun and creative way. Knowing the people you’re working with will help establish great working relationships.

Problem Solving

Your sales team will face a lot of problems that will require them to devise new ideas that are outside of the box. Organizing team events that will require problem-solving skills will help your team enhance their cognitive abilities. Team activities like the ones described above are just some of the team events your team can try to develop their problem-solving skills.

If you want your sales team to experience these super team building events and other team building Melbourne activities, visit our Website today!

Today’s post is by Luke Talbot-Male, founder and managing director of Beyond the Boardroom Australia. Luke has a 20 years’ worth of experience working in Australia’s adventure tourism industry. As the owner of Beyond the Boardroom, he understands the importance of a functional team and his leadership style follows the same principles that are used in every Beyond the Boardroom activity.

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Sales Leadership in The Age of Anxiety

By Adrian Davis

Sales leaders are conducting business in a unique environment of rapid change and immense risk. We face complex national and international challenges.

Predictability provides peace of mind, whereas uncertainty creates anxiety – and ours is an uncertain age. The Information Age is behind us. We are now in The Age of Anxiety.

We are the most educated and well-informed people in the history of mankind. Yet, in some ways, it feels as if sales leadership is being asked to solve insurmountable problems based on events over which they have little control.

What are the top challenges facing sales leadership today? Here are three to consider.

1. Employee Engagement

As our world continues to change, your customers will face more complex problems. You need engaged employees to bring their best thinking to client problems. Otherwise, the spark of creativity will seep out of your business, you won’t be able to inspire your clients, and your business will decline.

Your salespeople are dealing with more stress in their lives than previous generations. This mounting stress is leading to unprecedented levels of depression.

Everyone is trying to find ways to cope. Use of antidepressant medication and alcohol is increasing, and many are turning to extreme forms of entertainment.

Employees struggle to balance their work and personal priorities. People shut down when they feel overwhelmed, and depression is one of the ways that happens. Employers must now also take part in their struggle. That’s why one of our clients specializes in helping large corporations spot depression in employees. Sales leaders must now take an interest in this balancing act.

Another of our clients has an incredible, high-performance work culture. What is different about their high-performance culture is how much they care for each other. They have built a culture that is productive and supportive – and that support extends beyond the work environment. They have developed personal friendships. People feel needed and appreciated. They derive great satisfaction from their work.

Employee engagement will continue to be a key challenge in our changing world. How are you doing connecting your employees to the core purpose of your business?

2. Customer Loyalty

Getting attention is hard enough. Once you’ve gotten it, keeping it is even harder. As your clients’ world changes, their priorities change. As their world and priorities change, they face increasing anxiety – and doing business with you may no longer be one of their top priorities. Commoditizing your services may give them a sense of control and security. Finding a cheaper alternative may give them a false sense of accomplishment. This is especially true if your employees have not been as engaged as they once were.

You must earn your customers’ loyalty. That means your loyalty to your customers has to come before their loyalty to you. Win-win means you win after your customers win – not before. The more successful you can make your customers, the better customers they will be. Take the risk with your right-fit customers. Invest in them. Help them address their current priorities. Grow your business by helping them grow their business.

Remaining relevant to your customers will be one of the greatest challenges your business will face in a rapidly changing world.

3. Effective Leadership

In the simple world of the Industrial Age, leadership was about command and control. We broke work down into discrete units and we employed arms and legs to perform the work.

As the world has grown in complexity, we have realized we need people’s heads and hearts as well. We needed to put the discrete work units back together. We now ask our employees to own their work and we gave them the autonomy to make appropriate decisions. As the pace of change accelerates, we need employees who care about their work. We are now asking employees to bring their heart to work – and not just their arms, legs, and mind. We need arms, legs, head, and heart – we need entire human beings to show up.

We humans are complex creatures, aren’t we? Managing complex people in a complex, fast-changing world requires a different leadership style. The command-and-control style of the Industrial Age no longer works. People check out when they feel exploited or undervalued. Command and control ignores the internal lives of employees. It used to be about getting the job done. Period. Today, it’s about outcomes and results. You need people who commit to outcomes. People who commit to outcomes need a leader they can respect. You need to be humble but decisive. You need to be calm, cool, and collected as you navigate your company in a sea of anxiety. Your people need to see your heart. You need to be transparent and humble but not soft or weak.

Your leadership needs to extend out to your clients and suppliers. Personal development must be a key priority for you. As the pace of change and increasing complexity heats up, character flaws will show up. When character flaws show up in leaders, followers can be unforgiving. You must commit to personal growth in The Age of Anxiety. As those who depend on you see you grow, they will also grow.

Three Key Sales Leadership Challenges

Our key challenges are:

  1. Keeping our employees engaged
  2. Keeping our clients loyal
  3. Providing leadership

If you’d like to explore a program to address these challenges with your team, reach out to me for a complimentary consultation.

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and DuPont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).