Inheriting a Sales team: Now what do I do?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Oct 12, 2009 @ 01:33 AM
Today's post comes from Bangkok, where I'm doing some sales consulting for Frank, who's just inherited a sales team that in the past has been effective, but now the numbers are dropping and the company is concerned. Frank was brought in to run Operations, and has a sales team where two reps are over-quota performers and the rest are functioning below par.
There are other important issues Frank needs to address, some of which are in the area of team communication. The team has never been formally trained, and there is no current training budget. The top performing rep refuses to share the reasons for his success with other members of the team. The result of these two issues is that there are no best practices to be shared because they have not been codified.
This post is potentially important to all of you. If you're a telesales rep, you may one day be promoted to managing a team of inside sales people, and I guarantee that you won't be moving into a "perfect" situation, because there are none. If you're currently in Management, you may be dropped into a situation where most of your inherited reps are functioning at a rudimentary level, and you'll either have to grow them or dismiss them. And in today's austere world, you may have no money to hire us to help solve your problem through one of our telesales training courses. So what are you going to do, and where do you start?
As I told Frank in our consulting session, two of the first things to look at are what makes his best reps successful, and how their behaviors can be factored into creating a meaningful set of key performance indicators for everyone else. Let's look into this further:
1) What behaviors constitute top performance? Frank's top rep constantly blows out his quota numbers, but won't share his best practices. So Frank's going to have to "go along" on sales calls to observe and log best sales practices. This means listening to calls or going out on joint sales calls (his reps are hybrids, and work both on the phone and face-to-face). From this, Frank should begin to cobble together a list of best practices. He may not have to completely reinvent the wheel, because he can start with my 20 Characteristics of a Superior Sales Rep article, and build from there.
2) Which key performance indicators need to be exceeded for a rep to be constantly over quota? Frank's business is advertising sales for a publishing company. His top reps already know how many calls and appointments it typically takes to make a sale. And Frank already knows what the average sales price is. From this, he can derive a list of KPIs that will indicate how many calls a rep has to make each day to meet his or her monthly quota. The dilemma or course is that superior reps take fewer calls to meet quota, but Frank is starting from scratch. So Frank will have to build a different KPI list for every rep. He wants everyone to meet quota, but clearly, his junior-level reps are going to have to work either harder or smarter to get the job done. After reading my blog article on How to build better KPIs, Frank will be on his way to deriving his own KPIs.
In a perfect world, Frank would have inherited a sales team with already meaningful KPIs established, and all his team members would be in agreement as to what behaviors make them successful salespeople within the context of what they're selling. Obviously, this is what superior sales training does, but he's walked into a situation in which "hire and fire" is the norm, and sales training is seen as an unnecessary expense. He's trying to change that. Eventually, we may be able to come in and train his team. Until we do, I've given him some valuable ideas on what he can do in the meantime to increase sales performance. I imagine many of you reading this post have a similar dilemma, and many of the rest of you will too, eventually. Many sales managers are brought in to solve a problem: there are no "cushy" sales management jobs. Sometimes the hardest part of solving any problem is knowing exactly where to start. If you're not facing this dilemma today, print out this post and add it to your Best Management playbook. You'll probably be faced with a similar problem sometime in your future. As your sales management career evolves, so will the size of the issues with which you'll be dealing. And that's why you're getting paid the big bucks, right?