Jack Daly(^)
WRIGHT
Give us your top three areas for sales management excellence.
DALY
Three is not easy, but we’ll give it a go. My first one is that
minimum standards of performance need to be negotiated with each
individual salesperson. Quite frankly, I think that’s a mouthful right
there. I go into companies and I ask what the minimum standards are
and frequently I get one of two responses: either they don’t have them
or every salesperson has the same minimum standard. There are two
key words in the sentence I just gave you. One of those is
“individual”—customizing the minimum standards for a salesperson
based upon his or her capabilities for a moment in time in their specific
territory.
The second key word is “negotiate.” You can’t effectively dictate
a minimum standard to a salesperson because you’ll miss the most
important ingredient—their buy-in. People will fight for the goals they
set. So getting my salespeople involved in agreeing on what their
minimum standard is step number one. Along with minimum st andards
is measuring their performance against those standards, and giving them
feedback on how they’re doing and what needs to take place going
fo rward to improve. Things that get measured get done and se tting
minimum standards of performance is the first criteria.
A subset of minimum standards is this: when we look at sales
performance we see the bottom quartile of most companies” sales fo rces
are producing less than 6 percent of the sales. So if a company has a
sa les force where the bottom quartile is producing less than 6 percent
(and I might mention here that the top quartile is very often producing
more than 60 percent), and they were asking me as a consultant for
advice on how to improve the company, I would recommend that they
find something e lse for that bottom quartile to do or suggest that they
be let go. Anytime when I have taken that action, I found that
performance ha s gone up and, in fact, the response of the rest of the
workforce is, “What took you so long?”
In minimum standards, which is the first of the three acts of a sales
manager, the thing I would suggest is four words—hire slowly, fire