3 Must-Do Sales Management Tactics

NY Report recently produced a workshop featuring legendary sales expert, Jack Daly. At the event, Daly provided three hours worth of actionable tips for improving sales. Below are three of those ideas that can make a difference in your business.

1. Customize Sales Goals
There are many ways to calculate sales goals for your staff. However, Daly suggests customizing these goals to hold individual salespeople to different standards, based on the potential of that individual’s territory. This standard can be changed as business conditions in the territory change. He also believes minimum standards of performance need to be negotiated with each individual salesperson. Standards of performance not only include results, but sales activities such as calls and prospecting. If you dictate minimum standards to your salespeople, you miss out on the most important ingredient in sales success—buy-in. People will fight for the goals they set themselves.

2. Rank Your Salespeople
At least once a month, rank your salespeople, and publish that ranking so that everyone can see the results. Across industries, the top 25% of salespeople produce more than 60% of the sales. The bottom 25% of salespeople produce 6% of all sales. Daly suggests letting go of the salespeople who are consistently in the bottom quarter. According to Daly, not only do the lowest performers “suck at sales,” they are also energy vampires — hurting the rest of the sales force.

The ranking is also a good catalyst for individual discussions with the members of your sales team. For example, if your number three salesperson drops to number nine within a month, chances are that the drop had nothing to do with business, but can be attributed to a personal issue. If you don’t get that personal issue on the table, that person’s sales may continue to fall. You also want to talk to the salespeople who are moving up in ranking. Find out what they are doing to improve, because it may be something everyone else can do to improve, too.

3. Inspect the Baskets
The most successful salespeople call on fewer prospects and get more business. The key is that they identify the high-opportunity accounts and call on them more frequently. Selling is the transfer of trust; people do business with the people they trust. Customers grow to trust the people they know, and they get to know the people they see more frequently. If you call on too many people in the marketplace, then no one gets to know you and, therefore, no one can build trust with you. To help salespeople focus on these high opportunity accounts, Daly recommends a process he calls “inspecting the baskets.”

According to Daly, every salesperson—regardless of industry—has to maintain three “baskets.” These baskets represent prospects (people who have never bought from your company, but you want them to), customers (people who bought from you once or buy occasionally, and have bought some, but not all, of what you offer) and clients (people who buy from you regularly and buy a lot). What do your salespeople have to do to move the prospects to the customer basket, and the customers to the client basket? The best situation a salesperson can get into is to build a clientele.

Have a meeting with each salesperson, and rank each prospect based on the size of the potential sale. Next, go over how many times each salesperson made contact with the high-ranking prospects over the last month, and how. Discuss what is standing in the way of that prospect becoming a customer. Repeat the process for the customers in order to find out what is standing in the way of the top customers becoming clients. Then, go over the status of the clients and try to find out what is standing in the way of the clients giving you even more business.