How to Motivate Sales People - seviourbooks.com · How to Motivate Salespeople without spending a lot of money 1 Introduction You don’t need me to tell you that having a team of

How to

Motivate Sales People

without spending a lot of money

Robert Seviour

www.seviourbooks.com

How to Motivate Salespeople without spending a lot of money

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted for resale or use by any party other than the individual purchaser who is the sole authorised user of this information. Purchaser is authorised to use any of the information in this publication for his or her own use only. All other reproduction or transmission, or any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage or retrieval system, is prohibited without express written permission from the publisher. © 2012 Robert Seviour

Index

Introduction....................................................................................................1

Fast track / key actions overview .................................................................2

You might think that paying them well is all it takes ..................................3

Ways to pay salespeople ..............................................................................5

Points to consider..........................................................................................6

What’s the alternative to paying a lot of money?........................................7

What is motivation?.....................................................................................10

What the men with beards have to say – theories of motivation.............11

The Benefits when Salespeople are Highly Motivated .............................17

This is what you have to do ........................................................................17

The qualities of a good sales manager ......................................................21

How to listen.................................................................................................24

Incentives .....................................................................................................28

Fun ................................................................................................................28

Sales meetings.............................................................................................30

The enjoyable sales meeting ......................................................................31

You have to recruit the right people...........................................................39

The qualities of a suitable salesperson for your product.........................45

Burnout.........................................................................................................45

Dealing with ‘difficult’ salespeople ............................................................48

Inspirational quotations ..............................................................................56

About the author ..........................................................................................58

Other titles by Robert Seviour ....................................................................58


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Introduction

You don’t need me to tell you that having a team of energetic, capable and motivated salespeople is going to be good for your business. An effective sales force is a huge competitive advantage. You may make great products or provide fine professional services but without enough customers, your company won’t last long. If you are reading this because your sales team’s performance is disappointing, that’s usually a symptom of weak leadership or inadequate support. And be aware that for the company, firing the sales manager might look like a quick solution. As business owner or sales manager it’s your responsibility to maintain and increase sales volume, motivating the sales people is one of the main methods of achieving this. Money is the conventionally assumed to be the key stimulant - but there’s less of it around right now and it’s not the only, or even the best way to incentivise to produce a really strong sales force. As long as pay is sufficient for normal needs, appealing to and satisfying each individual’s internal drives is a more effective motivator. That’s mostly what this manual is about, understanding and creating the conditions which catalyse strongly positive motivation. To succeed at motivating your sales team, you need to possess appropriate personal characteristics and your own efforts must also be supported by people with other roles in your organisation. The extent to which that will occur depends very much on the style of the company and the personalities of those who direct it. Achieving change in this area may involve you in some challenging negotiations! Since effective salespeople tend to be independently-minded, strong characters – they have to be or they wouldn’t put up with the harder parts of sales work for long – they don’t take kindly to being told what to do. Unlike the army, you can’t issue an order and get unquestioning compliance.

If only!

No, you have to employ carrot, stick and a good deal of psychology to lead a squad of big, tough egos. On the way you’ll need an open mind, self-discipline and persistence. Got those ingredients in stock? Then let’s bake this cake – read on. Robert

“Be motivated – that’s an order”


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Fast track / key actions overview

You want the core ideas now? - Here they are right on this page. The rest of the book explains how to do what’s required and the reasons. To turn a slack sales team into an energetic, enthusiastic sales dynamo:

Remove the demotivators and Install positively motivating factors.

Both actions are necessary, since if you leave the demotivators present, your efforts with positive actions will be unproductive. De-motivating Factors – (as seen by salespeople).

• Dealing with difficult / unpleasant / demotivating people / Arguments.

• Inadequate recognition / A critical boss.

• Unrealistic expectations / Unclear goals / Work overload / Projects or tasks that never end / Fruitless efforts / Bureaucracy.

• Problems with pay

• Delays, mistakes, nasty surprises, bad cheques.

• Personal worries (the salesperson’s) about job security / finances / family relationships / health

• Lack of confidence / Self doubt / Lack of training / Bad experiences in the past.

Instead put in place Positively Motivating Factors

• A decent pay package with a liveable basic salary plus commission.

• Let the sales people always know how they are doing compared to each other with openly published weekly or monthly sales figures.

• Your team is proud to work for you. A big part of this is that neither you, the company, nor the sales people in dealings with their customers have anything that you / they need to apologise for.

• Company management who really understand the needs of the sales team and the difficulties implicit in sales work.

• Public recognition – sales people flourish on it - compliment your salesperson in front of senior management, clients and the other members of the sales team.

• Open, friendly and positive communication between management and the members of the sales team.

• An interesting and / or worthwhile project / Goals / Challenge.

• The opportunity for employees to grow along with the company.


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You might think that paying them well is all it takes

But high levels of pay, apart from being expensive, have another serious drawback - in the absence of other motivators, big sales commissions will attract some of the most skilled but unscrupulous salespeople on the planet who are prepared to cut corners, misrepresent or use high pressure methods to get sales – at any cost. You only need to look at the recent investment banking and pensions mis-selling scandals for examples.

If you are running a reputable company and care about your clients, you can’t employ people who tend towards dishonesty.

Let me tell you a true story – in the early 2000’s I worked for a while in a business belonging to a friend I’m going to call him Mac here, (not his real name). Mac is a skilful salesman and has made a lot of money with his business which installs replacement windows. I had known him socially for a number of years but before working for him I wasn’t aware of how he operated, I am now. One afternoon, a salesman returned to the company showroom from a sales appointment and Mac asked him how it had gone. Phil, the rep, said that he had got the order and a cheque for the deposit. This was for a large number of windows to go into a block of flats in an expensive area of South West London. The contract value was substantial. Mac was happy at the news, then he asked Phil a question, which puzzled me for a moment, ‘Did they get a good look at the sample?’. Phil said that the client hadn’t. Mac replied, ‘Good, we can give them the cheap version’, confident that the agent for the block of flats would be unaware that what was fitted was not the same as the sample Phil had shown him. By installing lower quality, less expensive windows, Mac increased his profit on the transaction by several thousand pounds. Strangely, Mac despite the deception, was rather proud to have obtained this order because one of the residents of the apartment block was a well-known entertainer whom Mac liked - he made a point of telling us all. Another example of unprincipled selling - from my personal experience. For a few months I worked in an offshore financial consultancy. Described like that the activity sounds legitimate and they traded under a name chosen to convey an impression of respectability. The reality, as I progressively discovered, was that this was a ‘boiler room’ operation, based on intensive cold calling of any and every possible prospect, then signing clients up for whatever deal paid most commission. The front office was dressed to match what a customer might expect from a serious company, but just one door away was a scene from a Hollywood crime movie – a crowd of workers, squeezed into a small room pitching on


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their phones. There wasn’t enough space or furniture for everyone, the manager told me to ‘hot-desk’ any temporarily vacant place. When it came to the ‘Two confirmed appointments per day’ that new recruits had been promised in the recruitment drive. The manager simply said, ‘Who said you were going to get that?’ and handed me a phone book, saying ‘Call anyone’. Why would the sales crew put up with all this? – because the earnings could be enormous, far more than in any other company I have been involved with. One day, a representative, nicknamed ‘Ex’, told the other salespeople to clear out of the reception area which we tended to hang around in (it had some comfy sofas and we could chat up the receptionist) when we weren’t phoning or out on a sales pitch. Ex had an important prospect coming in to the office for a meeting and he wanted to ensure that our premises conveyed the impression of a serious financial consultancy. We moved in to the back room and shortly after heard Ex greeting his client. 40 minutes went by, then the door opened with Ex standing there looking pleased, ‘Just made 11 grand’, he said. That sort of money was not unusual. Another of the top earners was legendary, he had operated in several other countries comprising the continent we were in, and had needed to make a quick departure from each because of serious threats from clients whose money had evaporated after doing business with him. I didn’t stay once I had grasped the reality of the operation – but it had taken quite a while because the bad parts only became clear little by little. This was a sales role where there was nothing to recommend working for the company other than the possibility of (maybe) making a quarter to half a million dollars per year. But if that is what you want, you’d have to be prepared to say whatever would induce prospects to entrust their savings to your care. To sustain an operation of this type, recruiting has to be continuous because people also quit at the same tempo. A few will stick, and if you get a chance to learn their true histories, you will often find that they have a persuasive reason for staying away from their home country.


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Ways to pay salespeople - as a source of motivation

I have worked for all the ways that sales people are paid - a fixed salary, a mix of basic plus commission and commission only. I preferred commission-only, but that won’t suit everybody or all sales situations. The basic problem - few sales people are willing to work on straight commission, and the ones who you pay fixed salary may produce few sales Factors to consider

• Keep the formula for calculating pay simple, e.g. ‘If you sell X amount, you get paid Y dollars’. The more you complicate, the lower the incentive.

• How long is your sales cycle – the time it take to achieve a sale (and then get paid by the client)? Since you know the sales cycle and what it takes within your business to get a deal closed, how would you want to be compensated?

• What is your company's market position? How strong is your brand? What is the market demand? How rich is the territory? How does your product or service compare with your competition, is it better, cheaper, more complex? How much advertising do you support it with?

• The best salesperson in the world can’t sell a poor product. Make sure that those who produce / deliver what salespeople sell deliver the product on time and as ordered. Many sales are sabotaged through sloppy work at the delivery point.

• Consider converting your salespeople from fixed salary to straight commission (in such a way that their earnings can increase) once they have proven that they can sell well. It provides more incentive.

• Put all expected goals and the payment plan in writing. Ensure that it states clearly how pay and commissions are calculated. Make utterly certain that your people are paid what they are due, exactly on time. (I quit two jobs where I was the best salesman because of bouncing pay cheques in one case, and difficulty getting the boss to write them in another).

• However you pay, it won’t make a poor sales person into a good one. Fire bad sales people, if you have given them a fair trial and they aren’t producing satisfactorily. Do so immediately if you know a salesperson is misrepresenting to customers or otherwise behaving dishonestly.

• Non-financial incentives can be effective – extra holiday, better environment, more interesting assignments, etc.


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Comparison of payment methods

Advantages Disadvantages

Fixed salary Easy recruiting. Loyalty. Appeals to older (experienced) sales people.

Less accounting needed.

Little incentive to hustle.

Basic plus commission

Suits long sales-cycle (capital intensive) products / consultative sales. Also needed for new (unknown) companies. A 30% / 70% basic / commission mix is fairly typical. Experienced reps might demand higher base salary. Beginners might work mostly on commission.

Tricky to find the optimum split between basic and commission.

A base salary should cover reps' basic living expenses – rent & food but no luxuries.

If you hire a poor performer for a long sales cycle product, you waste a huge amount of money before you find out.

Commission- only

Attracts money-hungry people – some of whom are amongst the most capable and motivated sales people.

Suitable for products or services with short sales cycles

Makes recruiting hard. High ‘churn’ of sales people. May have low loyalty to your company or quit in difficult sales periods

Some of these sales people may be unscrupulous / dishonest / ruthless. If you have seen the movie Glengarry Glenross, you’ll know what I mean.

Points to consider

Be careful if you calculate commissions / pay based on the profit of a sale if the salespeople are free to vary the price as they choose. This invites unscrupulous ones to overcharge customers as a way to increase their commission – I’ve seen this in home improvement product sales, where the practice might be to split the overcharge 50/50 between the rep and the company. The reverse situation is when the rep is permitted to reduce the sale price to get the job, (sometimes described as “buying the order”). To deter discounting by the salesperson, pay commissions based on profit (margin), not the contract price. (If the commission is paid on contract price, and the salesperson, for example, cuts the sale price by 10%, this reduces his or her commission by 10%, which is likely to be acceptable to the rep. However the profit on the job for the company at the normal price may have


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been, for example, 30%, so if the price is reduced by 10% this reduces profit by 1/3 – this may not be acceptable to the company.) By contrast, if commission is paid as a percentage of profit, using the values from the example above, the rep also loses 1/3 of his commission, which may deter price-dropping as an easy way to obtain the order. Expense, frustration and wasted Opportunity - if your company sells a long sales cycle product and it turns out that the salesperson you have hired is a poor performer, after any period of grace, when it is beyond doubt that he is not achieving adequate results, you will have had a much expense, lots of frustration and few orders. See my ‘How to Hire a Really Good Technical Salesman’ manual for the best way to avoid this. Think it over carefully before reducing commissions - you might want to reduce outgoings but before reducing commission amounts, realise that you may kill a lot of the sales peoples’ drive or they may quit. The ones who stay might just be content to take it easy until retirement.

What’s the alternative to paying a lot of money?

Since offering massive commissions can lead to trouble, let’s look at another approach to generate motivation. I’d say that the ideal is to create an environment where people enjoy working and to pay them a liveable basic, plus commission to provide an incentive to make an extra effort. To go down that route, we need to know what factors contribute to people enjoying their work and a simple way to find out is by asking the question: ‘What are the things that make you feel good at work?’ This is what they answer:

• A sense of achievement / accomplishing goals / feeling that you’ve made a positive contribution.

• Feeling valued / appreciated / recognised / trusted and respected by colleagues.

• Enjoying what I do.

• Positive working relationships.

• Being part of a motivated team.

• Seeing people develop.

• Making progress in my career.


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No one mentioned money. Surprising eh? In the long term people care much more about how interesting the work is, how managers and other people in the company deal with them than they do about what the job pays (as long as they can earn enough to cover their necessary outgoings). The two strongest motivators are a feeling of achievement and recognition for your efforts. You have to eliminate the demotivators, as well though – and we can find out what they are by asking another question, this time it’s:

‘What things make you feel bad at work?’ This is what people reply:

• Negative experiences with colleagues / working with difficult / unpleasant / demotivating people.

• Boring work

• Lack of security

• Problems with pay

• Lack of recognition or praise / feeling undervalued / being taken for granted / lack of acknowledgement

• Negative feedback / a critical boss

• Not working in a relaxed atmosphere

• Feeling isolated / lack of support

• Long hours without any achievement in sight / unclear goals / fruitless effort / work overload

• People undermining you

• Internal politics and the associated unfairness / hidden agendas / bureaucracy / red tape / pointless paperwork / arbitrary / unnecessary rules & policies.

• Dishonesty / hypocrisy / prejudice.

• Micromanagement / perfectionism.

• Incompetence of others / other departments.

• Barriers to career progression.

Recognition is the fuel of motivation


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• Constant “firefighting”

• Lack of training

“Negative experiences with colleagues” stands out as the #1 demotivator

It’s the feelings

• In the two lists above, three times more demotivators were cited than positive factors; consequently employers and managers need to be vigilant about many issues if they are to keep their staff happy.

• I’m not arguing that money has no role in motivating, but how people feel about their work and the people they interact with there is equally important.

To motivate we need to be aware of, understand and work with feelings.

��


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What is motivation?

Before exploring further it’s about time that we got clear on what we mean by ‘motivation’. Everyone knows exactly how it feels when motivation is present or absent, and there has been over a century of academic research and debate on the subject, can we now describe it in simple, clear words? From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Motivation is a term that refers to a process that elicits, controls,

and sustains certain behaviors. . . According to various theories,

motivation may be rooted in a basic need to minimize physical pain

and maximize pleasure, or . . .a desired object, goal, state of being,

ideal, or . . . less-apparent reasons such as altruism, selfishness,

morality, or avoiding mortality. Motivation is related to, but distinct

from, emotion.

Simple and clear, hardly! Let’s have another try:

mo·ti·va·tion Noun: The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a

particular way. The general desire or willingness of someone to do

something.

That’s a bit more like it – “The general desire or willingness of someone to do something”.

And so is this:

‘Motivation energizes our thinking and fuels our enthusiasm’.

‘It controls our decision to persist at a goal’

Let’s fish a while longer and see if we can find something useful about the causes of motivation:

www.businessdictionary.com/definition/motivation.html

Definition of motivation: Internal and external factors that stimulate

desire and energy in people to be continually interested in and

committed to a job, role, ...

Ok, enough already, let’s now condense the keywords out from what we have found.

Reasons for acting in a particular way

Desire or willingness to do something

Internal and external factors that stimulate desire and energy

That will do nicely as a summary.

Seeing as our purpose is to find ways to enhance motivation, what clues have we discovered for where to start looking?


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Incentive theory, Drive-reduction theory, Cognitive dissonance theory, Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy theory, Douglas McGregor's theory X and theory Y, Herzberg's two-factor model of motivation, Alderfer's ERG theory, Self-determination theory, Goal-setting theory, Intrinsic motivation and the 16 basic desires theory, Kurt Lewin's Force Field Theory, Edwin Locke's Goal Theory and Victor Vroom's Expectancy theory.

If you answered ‘Internal and external factors that stimulate’, good show, old bean. ☺

What the men with beards have to say – theories of motivation

Don’t worry, I am not going to lay some complicated and unlikely academic analyses on you, but it won’t do any harm to take a look at a couple of the most widely accepted theories One reason for the subject being so poplular with researchers is that motivation interests educators because it strongly affects how students learn. For max realism, imagine the next few items voiced in a

generic foreign accent ☺

Frederick Herzberg's Two-Factor theory proposes that ‘Respect for me as a person’ is a prime motivation and that job satisfaction is caused by motivators such as challenging work, recognition, responsibility, but that their absence doesn’t cause dissatisfaction.

By contrast he labels as ‘Hygiene Factors’ such aspects of work as status, job security, salary and perks which he claims don’t motivate when present but when absent do cause demotivation. I don’t know why Fred thought that boring work doesn’t cause dissatisfaction – maybe he never worked on an assembly line, I have. The next feller’s concept is easier to buy into.


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Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow says that people are motivated to satisfy groups of needs in an ascending order, starting with the essentials of life – the ‘Physiological’ layer above. Once these are taken care of your focus and desires move to the next higher level, and so on all the way to the top of the diagram. If a particular level is not satisfied, the subject feels little motivation from the levels above it. In developed society, for most people the lower three levels are satisfied, hence it is the higher ones which are likely to be the source of motivation for our purposes. You’ll notice that money does not feature in this model either. Although it is needed to satisfy the lower levels, its influence declines above the middle of the diagram. Instead abstract considerations take the focus – achievement, self-esteem, a sense of belonging, respect by others. IMHO, good old Abe should have spent a little longer thinking up a better label for the summit of the diagram than ‘Self-Actualisation’ – I doubt that anyone reading that term for the first time has a clue what he means by it, a shame, since what he’s on about is good stuff. So what is Self-Actualisation?

Imagine that you have led a blameless existence*, worked hard, saved your money, gone to bed early**, and you hardly ever poisoned a pigeon in the park. Job’s going well, been there 15 years – but now a shadow of boredom falls across your life. Then it gets worse, you’re spending evenings at the gym, enter a trance when you spot a Harley and people complain that you sigh too much. ____________ * No I can’t either ** I was in bed by 10 last night. But at mIdnight I got up and went home – ha ha!


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What’s up? You have all the usual stuff (too boring to list) that consumer society says will make you happy. Why the dissatisfaction? Abe’s theory offers an explanation, and I buy it. He says what’s happening is that the small but potent clump of grey matter you carry around on top of your shoulders, has begun posting terse, unsettling messages to your subconscious, which ask, ‘Is that all there is?’ . . . And you don’t have a good answer.

Is that all there is?

‘Self Actualisation’ is Maslow’s rather opaque label for the mysterious force responsible for the dissatisfied feelings which are taking control of your middle aged existence. But do not panic (German accent optiona), zese feel ings are normal, since dissatisfaction is a characteristic achievers of all sort possess to some degree. Going back to the Maslow diagram, for most people who are making a reasonable living in the developed world, the lower levels – physiological, safety, and I hope friendship* are comprehensively taken care of. We spend little time thinking about them. Thus your subconscious, free of concern about the lower tier issues, and ill at ease with doing nothing, now takes a aim at the upper level issues, recognition and self-actualisation. Recognition, we’ve talked about earlier in these pages, it’s an easier idea to get a handle on, whereas self-actualisation is more slippery. Are you prone to CouldaWouldaShould attacks? They’re when you wonder, ‘Maybe I could have made more of myself’, ‘Really I should have had a career in (insert the sort of superior activity you daydream about)’, ‘I woulda had a nicer house, more money in the bank’. Those occur when the urge for self-actualisation is calling on you. I’ve seen it expressed elsewhere as ‘the desire to be all that you can be’**.

____________ * Although, on reflection, I wonder if poorer people don’t tend to have more friends ** Interestingly, (at least I think so), this phrase was used in recent times as a recruiting slogan by the

British Army.


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Epiphany One day at a meeting I showed the attendees a calculation intended to demonstrate that we all have enough time in a week or a month to make progress towards our goals. It was as I was doing this that I realised that at age 46, (then) I had already used up 2/3 of the three score and ten years that the Bible allots us. ‘Blimey’, I thought, ‘if I am ever going to do what I want to do, I had better get busy’. Realising urgency is one thing, part two is harder; what precisely is it that I, or any recipient of similar thoughts, really wants? A lot of answers could be candidates here, many would have the quality of being what each each individual considers ‘worthwhile’. But isolating a particular future objective and expressing whatever it is in clear words is hard, and we may well find ourselves stuck in a dissatisfied fog that has provided cynics and humorists with much material.

"Life is full of misery, pain and tremendous suffering, and it's all over much too quickly." Woody Allen

There you have it; when our more urgent and easier understood needs are satisfied, it’s not enough, we are impelled search on for that will-o-the-wisp, self-actualisation. Returning to the theme of today’s symposium, the relevance of all the above to ‘How to Motivate Salespeople’ is that there is a limit to the motivation which derives from obtaining material things - successful people reach that point well before their careers are over. To motivate these individuals, you must help them isolate and identify what would make them feel fulfilled and, if it’s possible, show them how doing what you would like them to do, is going to bring them closer to their particular goal. Stick and Carrot I liked this model so much that I named my company, Stick and Carrot Sales Training. It’s simple to understand and its validity can be demostrated with examples. ‘Stick’ is a label for all those things which we want to stay clear of, the negative aspects of life that we dislike or scare us. ‘Carrot’ is the opposite and represents all the items that attract us, which we enjoy and want more of. At my ‘Selling for Engineers’ seminars I explain this and then ask the delegates, ‘Which of these two forces do you think is the stronger?’ There’s usually a mix of replies, with few people feeling confident about their answer. So I begin to give examples so that they can work this out for themselves. ‘Do you drive a car? Is it insured? Do you enjoy paying for that?’, I ask.


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Of course most people possess a car and have insurance, but they take no pleasure in paying for it. I ask, ‘So why do you do it then?’ The replies are variations on ‘You have to’. I follow with, ‘What would happen if you didn’t buy insurance?’ Typically they say, ‘You’d get trouble, either with the law or if you were involved in an accident’. In essence, we feel that we must do those things which keep us away from problems. For the next stage I ask, ‘Is there some item that you would like to own, but haven’t yet bought?’ To make it easy, I suggest, ‘Perhaps some medium expensive, techie gadget’. Most of the delegates can think of some device which fits the description. Then I continue, ‘I assume that you can afford this thing, so why is it that you haven’t bought one yet?’ That question is rhetorical, I answer it myself: ‘Isn’t it because you can manage OK with what you have at the moment – there is no urgency?’ And there you have the distinction between the two forces, ‘Stick’ and ‘Carrot’. Both have the power to drive behaviour, but the stronger one is ‘Stick’. I support this further by describing the style of language used by governments when they want you to pay tax. They don’t rely on ‘Carrot’ as an inducement – you don’t see letters from the Revenue which say, ‘Dear Jim, we’d like to ask you to support our fund for building schools, hospitals, mending the roads and keeping you safe from crime and invasion – any contribution you can make would be gratefully received’. Nope, instead, threats are the preferred method, ‘Payment must be received by . . . penalties apply if you are late’. In our context – dealing with sales people - the extreme form of ‘Stick’ is to threaten to fire them; a powerful but risky tactic, which I would consider only for those who consistently fail to perform and are dragging others down with their whinging. Despite its power, there are obvious drawbacks to ‘Stick’ on its own, inevitably it gives rise to negative feelings. The best way to deal with that problem, yet not lose the potential that ‘Stick’ has, is to couple it with ‘Carrot’ and apply both ‘Stick’ and ‘Carrot’ together for maximum traction. This means that there must be both a reward for taking a specified action and a ‘punishment’ if it is not performed. An example: at one company I used to have to attend sales meetings every Monday morning. The session began by the reps announcing their sales figures for the week that had just finished. ‘Three sales for a total of £10,000’


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or perhaps five for £16,700’ and so on. If someone had particularly good results, there would be a round of applause and praise from the boss. You can imagine then, that on the occasions when I had a good week, I took real pleasure in announcing my numbers – and by contrast, the embarrassment I felt when I had not got a single order. My behaviour was very much shaped by the twin drives of ‘Stick’ and ‘Carrot’.

* * * That’s three ways to think about what stimulates motivation - with this knowledge a sales manager has the tools to motivate sales people.


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Maybe I really should do something now to sustain your motivation so that you keep on reading and ultimately using some of what you are now learning. Therefore, lets take a look at . . .

The Benefits when Salespeople are Highly Motivated

• A high-performing sales team generates greater profits, leading to company growth, more jobs, improved pay for employees, product development, makes a pleasant, well-equipped workplace possible.

• Motivated employees work harder and are more productive. Their motivation rubs off on others.

• Morale will be high and so will employee retention.

• If your team is doing well, It’s exciting.

• Your employees enjoy working for you, recommend your company and strengthen your brand.

But how to achieve this desirable state?

This is what you have to do (see lists on page two and implement reguired measures)

Got that? . . . Oh you want me to spell this out for you? Let’s begin at the beginning; if there is a bunch of things that people don’t like about working in your company / or for you, it’s not likely that they are going to be very motivated. Therefore, task #1 is to detect and remove ze demotivators.

Ja destroy zem.

Done that?


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Step #2. Now just add in all the touchy-feely motivational stuff to make them all nice and warm and cozy and you’re finished. Where’s that Napoleon brandy? Er, unfortunately, stating what’s needed and doing it are different things, (sigh) so we will just have to revisit task # 1 and go through it’s many, frequently tricky, elements. Perhaps you are not cheap or lazy, but I am, so I’d begin our project by looking for worthwhile things you can do which don’t cost much in money or effort. For convenience, I’ll pull a few items off the top of the ‘Demotivators’ list we had on page eight and we can have a go at finding ways to deal with them.

1. Negative experiences with colleagues / working with difficult / unpleasant / demotivating people.

2. Boring work

3. Lack of security

4. Problems with pay

5. Lack of recognition or praise / feeling undervalued / being taken for granted / lack of acknowledgement

6. Negative feedback / a critical boss

Numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 will give us some challenges, for sure, but #5 is one we can implement easily and free. And with just a little effort, diplomacy and self-restraint, #6 might be tackled – no costs there either. This might be a good moment to remind you that #5 – which is about giving people the recognition that they crave and merit gets you points in both the ‘removing demotivators’ and ‘supplying motivators’ categories. Telling people that you appreciate the work they are doing, their efforts and results and thanking them for it is just about perfect as a cure-all wonder fix. Yes, that’s nearly right, except that one important refinement is called for – it would be rather nice and certainly far more effective if you can manage to say those words of gratitude with . . .

SINCERITYSINCERITYSINCERITYSINCERITY.... Perception is everything in these matters, not yours fool, theirs. If your words are perceived as being genuine and sincere they are dynamite (good dynamite, that is), but if what you say has all the heartfelt feeling of a checkout person’s ‘Have a nice day’ you’re doomed, they’ll see through your phony act and laugh behind your back.


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Once you have neutralised the demotivators, it’s time to focus on the things that make people feel good at work. To save you having to look them up – here they are again:

1. A sense of achievement / accomplishing goals / feeling that you’ve made a positive contribution

2. Feeling valued / appreciated / recognised / trusted and respected by colleagues.

3. Enjoying what I do.

4. Positive working relationships.

5. Being part of a motivated team

6. Seeing people develop.

7. Making progress in my career.

How to deal with Item #1? - if people know what the objective of the company is and see it as worthwhile, then playing their part and contributing to that forward progress will deliver a feeling of satisfaction. It follows then that the company management must let the salespeople know what the objective is and supply regular updates on what progress is being achieved.

If your business is a new player in a particular market and you are ambitious to grow, then it is easy to see how this aim can be a source of motivation for the sales force. At the other end of the scale, supposing that your company is the brand leader in a certain field, then maintaining that position and in so-doing demonstrating your superiority to competitors could also be a motivator.


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Sales competitions or entry to a club of the top salespeople are devices which can stimulate extra efforts and bring out the best performance levels.

Item #2 – show appreciation, recognition and respect

A simple ‘thank you’ for effort and good work goes a very long way, you’d think that would be obvious, but there are people, a lot of people, who rarely say thank you – at least not in the work context that we are considering. As it happens, my dad was like that and with due allowance for the distortion inherent in a teenage perspective, I can’t remember Father ever saying anything complimentary about my efforts during the time that I worked in his business. I bore him a grudge for 40 years over this. I’ve just about got over it now, but it coloured my relations with him all that time. To show appreciation, find something, I’m tempted to say anything - but that wouldn’t be right because it can’t be a trivial point – about the individual, their work, private-life activities, appearance, family which they will enjoy hearing from you. A tip which has wide applications; ask people about the things that they are proud of, that could be their children, hobbies, achievements and so on - you’ll learn a lot. I realise that with this I’m reprising, the words of Dale Carnegie, author of ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. Another, latter-day, authority has a message along the same lines, Dr. Steven Covey, with his ‘Emotional Bank Account metaphor. I’ll use that idea to illustrate the point: Suppose you are always doing things which irritate another person, as time goes by, a considerable backlog of annoyance will have built up in that individual. If things continue in the same way, there will come a time when they will react strongly and probably tell you in colourful language that they’ve had just about enough of your bad behaviour. Now let’s wave a handy magic wand and reverse what is going on; this time you are forever doing little kindnessess, showing an interest in this person’s work, their life and saying nice things. After a period they will feel a debt of gratitude towards you – the accumulation of much good will. In the first case, you have built up a large debt in your emotional bank account with that person, in the second you have done the reverse and you now have a substantial credit. To eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive (lyrics from an old song) build that positive emotional bank account with anyone you wish to have a motivated attitude. Easy, n’est pas?


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What if you don’t feel any spontaneous good thoughts about the person in question. Well, it’s your choice now, which do you want, someone who has a positive regard for you or one who has no particular liking or respect for you? I’m wasting my time if you opted for the second choice. Clearly, as manager, you need your people, at the very least, to accept to do your bidding even if they aren’t overjoyed by a particular task. So always be building the funds in your emotional bank account, by showing an interest – genuine please. Your credit with that person will come in handy when you need it. This might be a good moment to consider some other qualities which a good sales manager needs.

The qualities of a good sales manager

He or she must be able to

• Inspire, motivate, encourage, train, and coach.

• Hire the right people and retain them.

• Be well organized.

• Set an example and command respect.

• Be a good communicator and listener.

• Open to feedback from the sales team.

• Treat everyone fairly.

• Maintain a positive attitude, stay enthusiastic.

• Set appropriate goals and help their teams achieve them.

• Support team members with problems outside of work or if there are difficulties with other parties in the company

• Suppress their ego and let team members have the glory.

• Hold worthwhile meetings.

• Work well with personalities they don’t naturally relate to.

• Discipline and when necessary, let employees go.

Phew, exhausting just reading through that list, let alone fulfulling it! I think I’ll stick to being a salesman ☺


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Choosing a sales manager

If you are the boss, do you already employ a sales manager? Are you considering hiring one? Some points to consider: It’s going to be expensive if you get it right - and worse if you don’t! Sales managers are paid a lot*, which is fine as long as sales volumes and profits are correspondingly rich, but if the new manager fails to deliver and you part company after a while, you face the costs of locating a replacement, but more than that you should include the value of the time wasted inducting the unsatisfactory individual and the business opportunities he or she has missed. Most sales managers have previoursly been successful salespeople – hardly surprising, since without personal experience of selling it’s unlikely that the candidate would be taken seriously by either upper management or their people, the ones who actually get out there and dig for business. So far so good, but is it reasonable to anticipate that a good salesperson will make a good sales manager? They might, but even with brief review, you can see that the two jobs differ and require somewhat different personal traits and skills. Example: ‘aggressiveness’, an attribute which features in most US recruiting for salespeople, and a desire to do things ‘my way’, may be incompatible with managing others.

Salespeople service accounts and make sales; sales managers achieve the same ends but working through other people. The focus of salespeople is selling whereas for sales managers it is developing strong salespeople.

Sales managers also need to be able to plan and produce accurate paperwork – neither is of much concern to salespeople. Further, part of the role of the sales manager is to co-operate with other departments; HR, finance, production, senior management – areas where most salespeople have little experience and where they may meet frustrating, slow-moving bureaucracy. ____________

* Hardly surprising given all the tasks they need to be competent at

Hire in a hurry, regret at leisure


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The sales manager has to stimulate other people to produce good results, not just herself. Previously the motivation which provided impetus for successful selling was uniquely hers, applied to herself alone. Now she has to discover the sources of motivation for the other members of the team to obtain good performance from them. Well developed people skills and a desire to help others will be required for the sales manager to develop and coach sales people in the multiple aspects of sales work - finding prospects, making presentations, closing, negotiating and so on. I’m not saying that a good salesperson can’t be a good sales manager, simply that you will only be certain about this when you see the teams’ sales figures and get some feedback from them about their new manager. Choosing a sales manager who you feel comfortable with isn’t hard, you can trust your own intuition. But knowing whether they will be successful is a different matter. The usual steps of interviewing, examining past performance, checking references and running a psychometric test provide no absolute guarantees. One problem with interviewing is that all of us feel most comfortable with people who are similar to ourselves, that’s nice but not much good as a standard for choosing the best candidate for a job (unless, perhaps, if you have been an outstanding sales manager yourself). A further, obvious, weakness of the interview is that sales people are likely to be able to sell themselves very well in the initial meetings. But maybe the person you get to know over the longer term will turn out to be rather different from the impression you formed on day one. Past performance is taken as the standard indicator of what the candidate will deliver in future, but this too has it’s limitations. The data relates to a different time, market conditions may not have been the same, the product could have been different in type or pricing, possibly sales were helped by effective or expensive advertising. Written character references are unreliable too, it’s unlikely that any candidate would supply anything other than favourable ones. (I’d suggest speaking to previous employers in person or on the phone – it’s far more likely that you will get candid, useful information this way, since you can pick up, nuances in the way people talk and in their body language. Ask, ‘Would you want to employ this person again?’ And watch/listen for clues. Psychometric testing has some value, you can certainly use it as a negative screen, to rule out an individual with clearly inappropriate traits. But I’ve found that once you are experienced in taking these tests, after a while you get a pretty good feel for what answers will give you a good score (despite built-in


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measures which aim to prevent this) – so cheating is a possibility. Identifying good candidates All that negativity above was rather depressing, but it just reflects that hiring good sales managers is hard. Bottom line - look out for energetic people with a positive attitude, a strong desire to succeed and who take responsibility for their performance.

* * * Now let’s go to one of the fundamental abilities needed for sales motivation: you remember the premise that to ignite inner drives in a person you need to know what it is that they deeply desire? Here’s how you find out what that is.

How to listen

I have a friend who rarely listens to anyone for more than a few seconds, then he will cut in and deliver his, ususally lengthy, opinion on whatever topic we have begun with. I like him despite this irritating habit because otherwise he’s intelligent, knows a lot and is very friendly. But not paying attention to what other people say and think is definitely a problem – I would say mostly for him. This behaviour isn’t uncommon, and now I think about it, I realise that I have a second friend who is also a minimal listener. In both cases, because I respect their intellect and knowledge, I can manage to tolerate their self-focus, but not for an unlimited time. After an hour or so, I have really had enough, despite the fact that what they have to say is usually very interesting or entertaining. I hope it’s obvious to you that if a person does little listening compared to the amount that he or she talks then they are not likely to understand or even be aware of the ideas, concerns, feelings of those that they are in ‘conversation’ (not really a valid word, under the circumstances) with. Just to make sure that we are both on the same page here, if you want to enhance motivation, in a nutshell, what you mostly need to do is to show the party you are talking to that they can get what they want – whatever that is, tangible or abstract – by doing what you want them to do. If that’s your strategy, then you need to know what is in their box of dreams, maybe it is a brand new Porsche, but perhaps it’s just more important to them to be acknowledged the effort they are contributing to your organisation. You need to pin down precisely what it is that delivers a dose of good feelings to the subject, if you muddle ‘new sports car’ up with ‘thank you speech from

Find out what they want. Show them how to get it.


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the boss’ you’ll undoubtedly get a result, but it will either be less effective than if you had pitched the reward the right way around, or it will be a lot more expensive than it needed to be. The two people I was referring to a moment ago happen both to be scientists – and a sample of two, is not much of a basis for a generalisation, but what the hell – in my experience, clever, successful* people (not just scientists, of course), are at far higher risk of being self-obsessed, lousy listeners than those on the ground floor of human society. How come these and other jumbo egos can be successful then? – they compensate with much higher than average focus on the tasks they work on. But business or career “success” doesn’t mean that they are good at everything. A revealing indicator is to have a look at their family relations - you’ll uncover a lot of unhappiness in those near to them. We need to know what our subject cares about. In the absence of E.S.P. we’ll have to resort to asking. Let’s try this, ‘Jim, I need to know your values and what you care about so that I can motivate you. Briefly please, I’m rather busy’. Um, it’s a start. Better would be to open with, ‘Jane, I like the way you dealt with that problem last week, how did you figure the solution to it?’ – and then listen, without interrupting. Note to the hard-of-listening: listening is the act of receiving verbal information. To do this you must suppress your own desire to talk, keep your receiving equipment switched on, and your mind recording. For good measure, I’ll repeat the reason for this – YOU CAN’T HOLD OUT A ‘CARROT’ , IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A ‘CARROT’ LOOKS LIKE. And the way to do this is by listening intently in an un-pressured conversation.

____________ * Who is clever and successful? – it all depends on your values - broke, average guy with a happy family beats rich, lonely genius, to my mind. (Homer Simpson V. Mr Burns)


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The professional listener’s toolkit

You are convinced and intent on becoming a listening pro? Très bien, mon ami. You’ll need some tools, here they are: Numero un – Open Questions - bold type, because they are so important.

What’s an open question? - - - - - that was, ha ha ☺. How can I tell? – - - - there’s another one.

Open questions, provide an opportunity for the person with whom you are talking to say what they think. They have the opposite effect to closed questions, which are best suited to finding out facts or obtaining confirmation. The two best words for beginning an open question are the ones in my example above – What and How. Stick these on the front of your enquiry and the chances are that you will hear a lengthy, informative reply. Assuming that your open question does trigger a response containing clues about what our subject cares about / what matters to them / is important / worthwhile, (Can we agree to just call this ‘carrot’ for brevity, from now on?). Your job is to spot and acknowledge whatever this ‘carrot’ happens to be. ‘Gustavo, that was great that you managed to get in to see the boss of

Mammoth Corporation. did you do it?’ Stage direction: Now shut up and listen. I don’t know how my imaginary example would proceed, as Gus goes on to talk about accomplishing something which others consider difficult, but it is rather likely that he will feel pride at being able to do it. Here you have an opportunity to say something nice – ‘Big G, I wish everyone here had your talent’, for example. Please remember to keep your ‘Sincerity’ control set on full, when you do this - hang on, that is a touch cynical. What I mean is don’t come out with clichés ‘Good job’ style, if you can manage it. Say something original, in your own words which show your respect and thanks for your colleague’s good work. Ka-ching, you have money – or rather, a credit in your ‘emotional bank account’ with this person. This is good, do it again at the next opportunity.


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How to Listen – intermediate level You’ve asked an open question or two and you have listened carefully to the replies – very good. Now feed back to me in a summary what your subject just said and highlight what for them were the important bits. If you can do this without hesitation, deviation or repetition*, bravo, I’m impressed. For everyone who has a little trouble with re-stating the subjects thoughts and opinions, it’s important for you to develop ability in this. You can practise when you have a conversation with anyone, it doesn’t need to be at work, try it at home or in the pub, anywhere. The sequence again:

• Ask an open question

• listen attentively to the answer

• spot what matters

• then re-state in your own words what the subject just said.

Example: You are talking to your team member Paula who is getting good results.

‘Paula, what’s the best way to (do something or other that she is good at)?’ (Paula speaking to you): ‘I like to (some specific action, for example), that deals with (a typical problem, for example)’. You: ‘That’s a good idea. (Restate the specific action which Paula just mentioned to you). I’d like to share that point with the other team members, if that’s ok with you?’

Using the approach that we have been looking at, you will obtain an idea of the things that are important to the individuals in your team. Now, where possible, show them that they can get what they want within your business. That is a sophisticated strategy, here are some of the more commonly found ways to stimulate sales teams.

____________ * Catch phrase from a long running UK radio show


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Incentives

You can give prizes each day or week for different aspects of the job. One incentive which appealed to me in an American company was called a SPIFF, standing for Sales Performance Incentive. We were a large sales team and worked together in a big office. Each day the SPIFF would be offered for something different, such as a $50 bill for the first sale of the day, or for the greatest number of sales before 12, noon, for example. With a little imagination you can think up all sorts of similar mini competitions.

• Most new contacts in a day/week.

• Most revenue generated.

• Best conversion rate.

• Least cancellations.

By this device everyone in the team has a chance to be a top performer in some category. In line with what I have been telling about finding out what the sales people in your team really want, here’s what I experienced with one company. The manager / owner asked me directly what prize I wanted to win and he set a sales figure as the goal. At the time* I didn’t have a colour television, so he said, bring in £30,000 of business this week and I’ll buy you one. So I did and he did. That incentive really spurred me on, not so much for the money value itself, more because that item was a luxury which in the normal course of events I had put off buying. To get given it was nice. Competitions need to be well thought out because they can work as a disincentive if it becomes apparent early on that a handful of people are likely to win the prizes and the remainder of the sales force has little chance.

Fun

Perhaps fun isn’t a term which you would normally associate with any aspect of sales work, but let me put you wise ☺. Did you have to sing hymns at school assembly in your youth? I did and it really had no appeal for me, so can you imagine having to do something similar at a sales meeting? Unlikely, I agree. Well it is something that I have experienced and rather incredibly, it worked as a kind of motivator. ____________ * Early stone age


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The scene is the American company which I have mentioned previously, the time 8:00 in the morning and all the sales force, 60 of us, is gathered together on the sales deck. We were required to sing the company song. The words were written each day by a different team member but they always revolved around the apartment suites we we sold and the people there. The tune would be something well known, of the Old McDonald’s Farm variety. That sort of thing makes me cringe, and I don’t do a lot of singing at the best of times, not even in the shower. The strange thing was, that when the ordeal of being part of this awful choir was over, I felt rather exhilarated. We all did. Funny eh? At the time I rationalised this by thinking, ‘That’s the worst part of the day over’. That company was really very good at using original ideas to lift our mood, here’s another one. Once a week, someone in our group would put together a little act to entertain the others. I remember a young British saleswoman with a singing voice of stage quality; and she amazed us with her impressive performance. But the best of these routines was by Russ and Staz, two good-looking Latino guys who built a piece around the Flintstones’ Yabber Dabber Do song. Silly stuff, but it put us all in a very good mood right at the start of the day. Contrast that with how you feel whe you finally reach your office after a long commute through jammed up traffic. It doesn’t always work out the way you hope with motivational initiatives though, take for example the annual sales conference or a fancy dinner with speakers. I didn’t enjoy events of either kind. The trouble with the award ceremony at the sales conference was that it dragged on far too long, besides which I didn’t know the people from other regions, so putting my hands together for a long series of strangers was tedious. There was a dinner once in a renta-stately-home-baronial hall-serving wenches, kinda thing and we, the sales team, were instructed to attend wearing dinner jackets. So I hired one for first and only time in my life and that evening drove to the venue with my wife. I thought the scene was ridiculous, a variegated bunch of salesmen and their not especially glamorous partners, poshed up in penguin costumes in a mock middle ages dining hall. Add some squirm-making speeches by management and if I could have run away unseen, I would have done. I told a friend my opinion of the event, ‘Like a darts match in the Louvre’. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.


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Sales meetings

Ask any salesperson if they enjoy attending sales meetings and it’s a safe bet they will say that they don’t. Why? Because sales meetings are seen by most people as a boring, unnecessary, waste of time, which they could better use to be out selling and earning money. So why have them? And if they do serve a purpose, how do you avoid the sales team thinking of them so negatively?

The purpose of the sales meeting

The sales meeting is an opportunity to:

• Encourage and inspire the sales team to perform well.

• Show recognition for good performance.

• Communicate relevant information.

• Build better sales skills through mentoring and training.

• For team members to get to know each other and share ideas and experience.

• Introduce new recruits.

These functions are worthwhile, so why don’t people like attending (sales) meetings? This is what they complain of - ways that a sales meeting can go wrong

• They’re boring not fun. Many reps feel that they have heard it all before.

• There’s no clear agenda, discussions meander off to irrelevant topics.

• Only vague performance goals, inadequate feedback.

• The focus is on administrative details, paperwork, policies etc.

• Too many long-winded, tedious PowerPoint and Excel presentations.

• The sales manager picks on people because of poor sales numbers and embarrasses them in front of their colleagues.

• It’s one-sided, the sales manager does all the talking and the sales team isn’t involved in the meeting.

• One of the sales reps takes over and dominates a large part of the meeting.


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• Weaker members of the team start complaining, then the meeting degenerates into a moaning session. This does nothing for motivation, of course.

• The meetings drag on longer than expected, past the stated time.

The enjoyable sales meeting

Yes, that does look like an oxymoron, but let’s stretch our powers of imagination and consider what it would take to make the sales team look forward to sales meetings. By strictly omitting aspects of the meeting which make people uncomfortable, and highlighting any that people might enjoy we might arrive at this list. Everyone enjoys:

• Recognition for a job well done.

• Being inspired and energised.

• A challenge (not too easy & not impossibly hard).

• Learning new, useful skills.

• Increasing their earning ability.

• Respect for themselves as a person.

• Helping others.

• Relaxing and having fun.

• Being thanked for their efforts or contribution.

Using these pointers, let’s see if we can construct an agenda for a meeting which people actually enjoy and which leaves them feeling capable and energetic. Recognition for a job well done - Praising the top performer of the week / month / quarter isn’t going to be hard, but see if you can spread the good feelings wider by using other measures of activity, which could include, the amount of prospecting / number of contacts / number of sales appointments / best closing ratio / highest order value / greatest number of orders / biggest improvement since last period / fewest cancellations and so on.

Your manner is important when you are offering praise. Direct eye contact with the person you are speaking to and a normal tone of voice, don’t try being funny, ironic or artificial – sincere is the keyword here. When you have asked someone to give an account of something they have achieved, when they finish, initiate a round of applause. Even if this doesn’t come naturally to you (Brits have some reluctance in this area compared with


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our North American colleagues) make the effort. Once you begin, the others will join in and the individual you are applauding will be gratified by this. Being inspired and energised - What inspires? I have always felt most energetic and capable when something has recently gone right, and in this context, that would be having closed a worthwhile deal, which took some effort to achieve. A way for the sales manager to employ this source of motivation is to ask one or a few of the team members to think about and then present to the others an account of their best sales moments, telling what they did and how the felt. Apart from being a source of inspiration, this is highly likely to produce some very funny moments – the one proviso is that the sales manager needs to manage the proceedings so that the meeting does not go way off track.

Oratory of the best kind is highly inspiring, maybe you have a talent for it. A very good way to find out without any risk of looking foolish in front of your team is to attend Toastmasters meetings. They are everywhere, a few minutes on the web with your favourite search engine will locate a group in your area. For those who don’t already know, Toastmasters is a long standing, international organisation which trains people to be competent public speakers. The way they do it is exemplary, you aren’t thrown in at the deep end, expected to be polished, quite the reverse, you begin with very simple exercises and the feedback you receive is always encouraging. If you have any doubts about attending, I suggest that you go, you will be very pleasantly surprised. After a year or two with Toastmasters, you will definitely be able to deliver a persuasive and convincing speech – there are applications for this in many business areas, including motivating your salespeople.

Hope - I am going to admit to a character flaw, I have a depressive nature, there are days when I think that the word ‘manic’ might well be added to that description – my glass is then not half empty, it’s worse than that, I’ve probably emptied both the glass and the bottle(s) ☺ When I’m down; everything looks pointless and hopeless. But the moment something goes right, I’m unrecognisable from the previous description – full of energy, goal oriented and ready to take on a challenge. I, and other people of a similar nature can be big achievers, but that all stops when what Winston Churchill called his ‘black dog’ take over. The fix is to get or do something which gives you hope, then a remarkable transformation occurs.

A challenge (not too easy & not impossibly hard) - If you want your team to be motivated, it’s your job to make sure that the challenges you put in front of them are achievable in their eyes, challenging yes, but not impossibly difficult. Because if that is how they are seen, people quite reasonably are tempted to think, ‘Why bother, I’ll never do / win it’. (Which is why I don’t play the lottery – but it’s hard statistics supporting my choice, not emotion). Here’s an example of turning a desirable but unlikely goal into a believable and achievable one. (Have you come across the positive-thinker’s phrase, ‘If


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you can believe it, you can achieve it’? It’s rather well-worn, but true nevertheless. Just think about the opposite – if you don’t believe something is possible, there’s no way you will put in enough effort to make an attempt work. There you have a self-fulfilling prophesy.)

At a Monday morning sales meeting early in my career, our sales manager asked me how much money I wanted to earn in the coming week. Not knowing what was coming, and with a certain amount of bravado, I told him the figure of £1000. (This was in the early ‘80s when that amount was about 4 or 5 times what an average worker was paid).

Ian, the manager said, ‘Ok, let’s make sure that you do earn that much. What is your average sales value?’ I answered ‘£3,000. And how much commission do you make on that?’ The commission rate for what I sold, depending on lead source, was 10 or 12 per cent. Ian said, ‘Let’s call that 10%, for simplicity. So your average commission would be about £300 per sale. So to make £1,000 in a week you will need to have at least 3 sales. Let’s call it 4 to be on the safe side.’ His next question was, ‘What is your closing rate’, meaning on average, how many sales appointments do you have to have to get a sale. My answer was, ‘Three’. Ian went on to say, ‘Ok, then to earn your £1,000 you are going to need to have about 12 appointments through this week, which you can manage if you do two a day’. Next he asked me, ‘ How many contacts do you have to make (this was door to door selling) in order to get an appointment?’ I had found through experience that I would usually get one appointment from 30 customer contacts. ‘So then you need to make at least 60 contacts a day in order to have your two appointments. Get started’.

I did. I worked the plan, just as Ian had laid it out for me and by the following Sunday, I was almost there. That day, was a hectic scramble driving around West London, contacting various remaining potential customers but by the evening I had done it. The following day, at our regular sales meeting, I took some pride in announcing what I had achieved, then three days later, my commission payment of just over £1,000 was deposited to my bank. (That was the fastest paying company in my whole career, another motivating factor).

Above all, this exercise showed me that each element of the sales cycle will have its performance number and when combined, you can forecast with surprising accuracy what the outcome will be. That message has never left me since. If you get nothing else out of this book, remember my story and make it into your own.

A great phrase, which has helped me a lot: ‘Plan the work, work the plan’. Why this approach is effective is that by separating planning, which means thinking about what a task entails, and doing, you free yourself from the unnecessary mental load of wondering ‘what should I be doing now / next whilst you are working.

In computing terms, you are more likely to have problem-free operations if you close down all the programs you don’t need, instead of leaving multiple unused ones running in the background.


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(Too good to leave out – the value of “unachievable” goals) – I’m going to tell you about this because, it’s a great mind-stretching exercise and it can lead to some exciting breakthroughs. The cliché phrase in the field of goal-setting is ‘demanding but achievable’, but here is an alternative version. Pick a level of achievement which is way beyond the results that you are getting now. As a very basic example, say that you earn an average income, then let’s make the ‘couple of orders of magnitude bigger’ figure, that of say the top 1% income bracket in your country. Maybe that would equate to 100 times what you are earning now. Here’s the part with the magic, you ask yourself, ‘What would I have to do to reach that top level?’ If you rule out silly answers and stick to what happens in the real world, you will find that you arrive at some very stimulating and fresh thinking. If you get stuck, ask yourself, ‘What would a mega-successful person in the same league as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Donald Trump etc, choose to do?’ Give it a try. Note that you can use a similar question when you are coaching someone, ‘Maria, what would you have to do to (hit your target, etc)?’. If necessary, break the big goal down into small chunks so that each step is easier to think about.

Learning new, useful skills – I’ll give you an example of a skill that I teach to delegates at my ‘Selling for Engineers’ seminars (and engineering students at a handful of universities). There would be many other topics you could choose to work on with a sales team, this is just to give you an idea as a starting point. I call it Professional Questioning, and for brevity, I’ll just give you an outline, here. (Comprehensive instructions are contained in the ‘Selling for Engineers’ manual) If you want to find out what might be the motive a prospective customer has for purchasing (beyond the obvious considerations, such as ‘he hasn’t got one’, or ‘she likes it’, a good approach is to investigate with some questions.

‘Mr /Mrs Customer, what made you consider getting / using one of these (product / service)?

Listen attentively to the answer he gives. Let’s suppose that his answer contains more than one part, eg

‘My old device is very slow in loading up and my friend showed me his new machine which has a clearer screen than mine.’


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You can find out which of these points is the more important in the customer’s mind just by asking:

‘Mr Customer (you don’t need to keep repeating his name, I have done so only to make it easier for you to follow). If you could have only one of those improvements, which would you choose?’

Again listen attentively to the answer. You can repeat the process using ‘How’ and ‘What’ questions – open questions – and listening attentively to the answers that you get until you have a good idea of what aspects of the product or service the customer values. The next step is to feed back a summary of the customer’s opinions to him or her.

‘To re-cap Mr / Mrs Customer, you said that the reason you are thinking of getting a new machine / trying this service is because you would like to have (factor 1) also (factor 2), but you aren’t interested in (consideration 3). Would that be a fair summary?

Now shut up and listen to the customer’s reply. With this ‘Professional Questioning’ approach, you quickly get to know the customer’s buying motives and if you have a product or service which fits the need well, your next step is to present that and show how it corresponds to what the customer would like. If you have got that far, a closed sale should be near. Professional Questioning is an example of a skill which I certainly did not have when I began my sales career, I learned it somewhere along the way in the great deal of study that I did about selling in those days. There are many other facets of sales work that you could teach the sales team. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert in all aspects yourself, draw on the knowledge of your people with the most experience. To give you some ideas for skills you could feature:

• How to make appointments on the phone.

• How to make the most of your territory.

• Time management.

• Dealing with objections.

• Getting add-on orders.

• Asking for referrals. And so on.


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Increasing the team member’s earning ability

Everyone wants more money, no one wants to work harder (excluding the really sad cases) – what’s the answer? A certain Signor Vilfredo Pareto, has it. Pareto’s Principle is also called the 80 / 20 rule. The dude himself was interested in how society’s wealth is distributed; he discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. He went on to realise that the same or similar disparities exist in all aspects of human endeavour: and that’s where there is a lesson for us. Did you realise that you waste most of your time? Yes, I’m addressing you Madame, Sir. And I do mean waste –

1. To use, consume, spend, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly.

2. To cause to lose energy, strength, or vigour; exhaust, tire, or

enfeeble: Disease wasted his body.

3. To fail to take advantage of or use for profit; lose: waste an

opportunity.

4. To destroy completely.

Don’t come at me with your ‘tosh and piffle’ amigo. It is a fact that we waste most of our time on this planet and I shall demonstrate that to you right now.

A day is comprised of 24 hours; how much of that time do you use to take you closer to your objectives? (And if you now admit that you don’t really have any objectives, I rest my case).

We can arrive at a net figure for ‘time spent on activities which directly contribute to reaching your goals’ by subtracting all the time spent on other things from our initial 24 hours.

Sleeping – the big one. Let’s say 7 hours ( I don’t need as much as that, but my sons are dormant for closer double the number). Showering / eating / getting dressed / reading the paper / watching the news / travelling to work / having a coffee / greeting colleagues / waiting for computer to come to life / reading emails / taking phone calls / attending meeting / lunch / shopping / fixing computer problem / listening to unhappy colleague / smoking a cigarette X n (where n is a large number) / feeling tired so take a nap / staring blankly out of the window / watching something illicit on the computer / worrying about money problems / now it’s time to head home, but the traffic is really bad / car needs a service so call in at garage / teenage daughter is in distress because one of her friends said something to upset her / dog needs to be taken to the vet / throw something to eat in microwave / collapse exhausted on sofa / watch TV / snooze, wake up cold at 1:30 am crawl upstairs to bed / sleep / wake up late . . . AND REPEAT.

Now subtract the time taken for all these items, and your own additions to the list, from 24 X 60 = 1440 minutes and you are left with the period you actually spend on activities to bring you closer to your objective.


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By the way, I’m not picking on you particularly, just showing you (a) that if you want to accomplish something, you need to plan it into your schedule in such a way that it does get done. And (b) that the day teems with distractions which aren’t very important, many of which you could cut down on and then use the time freed up to work on the thing you want to do / make / get.

80 / 20, meaning 80% non-contributing and 20% contributing activities, following the long list of distractions we considered above, looks far too generous for the significant and worthwhile side of the equation. Maybe all you managed to really do in the whole day was make a couple of phone calls which set in motion or dealt with something of value. Time taken 10 minutes.

If that happens to be a bit closer to reality, then you haven’t even spent 1% of your day moving closer to your desired goal.

Do you surrender and admit that you are a self-deceiving loser and I have got you bang to rights? Well ok, truth is that it takes one to know one – I’m not so much better ☺.

Enough of the sermon – we want to earn more money without working any harder, right? So here’s how to do it: examine your day, look at it in small chunks, maybe increments of 10 minutes and notice what you are doing in that time. If you are a home worker like me, how often do you get up, go to the fridge to see if a cold sausage is lurking at the back of the shelf? This you can eliminate - there isn’t going to be one, because you snacked on it last night.

So instead of letting yourself be diverted, think about how nice it is going to be when the goal is accomplished (finishing this bloody book, in my case) and do something which will take you, even by a very small amount, in the right direction.

How to eat an elephant? One chunk at a time.

There’s even more to Vilfredo’s insight. The 20% side, the useful things we do, are especially potent. Identify them, pick them from the morass of time-frittering moments of the day, then do more of them.

In a sales job, right at the top of the list of valuable activities is closing more of the sales appointments that you have (improving your closing ratio). Think about it, it’s the same amount of work more or less if you get a sale or lose one. But the difference it makes to your income is not equal. Say your average closing rate is one in three (I know that closing rates vary substantially across different business situations, but bear with me for the example). Assume that you improve your closing ability a little by learning better techniques and that out of a dozen presentations instead of getting 4 sales, you achieve 5. What’s this going to do for your pay? (To keep it easy for illustration purposes, I’ll work this through as though you are paid on a commission-only basis). By closing one extra deal, you now are paid on 5 sales instead of 4, that’s translates to 25% more in your pay cheque.

And what did it take to get this extra money? Not doing one more days work, it wasn’t that, instead it’s just knowing and using a little extra professional skill. That isn’t extra labour, it’s just being better at your job. Once you have


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invested a little time to develop the expertise, you will be paid back over and overt again. That is working smarter, not harder. Here we have a piece of the good stuff, the 20% which is moving you towards your goals.

I’ve explained how you can have more without working harder, so run with this or reject it, it’s your life, just be clear that there’s enough time to accomplish anything you really want. . . And please strike the phrase, ‘I don’t have the time’ from your vocabulary forever – I’m allergic to it.


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You have to recruit the right people

There is a limit to what can be achieved through external motivation, some people do not have what it takes for sales, that’s obvious. When hiring you can never be certain that you have a winner the best you can do is to choose suitable candidates more often than not; consider the points below. I have no qualification in psychology, but from 30+ years involved with sales, it seems to me that the internal drive which is found in really good sales people derives from ‘dissatisfaction’. You can probably spot signs of this when interviewing if you ask good open questions and then listen attentively to the answers you hear. Previous job history may provide clues – explore how the candidate felt about the places he or she has worked at previously. Whether dissatisfaction is a desirable trait all round in a person, I’ll leave you to ponder, but when it comes to selling, or for that matter any competitive activity, becoming satisfied, means that you are taking a break from the dogged effort required to be a top performer. You can see the problem clearly if you substitute another word for ‘satisfied’ and replace it with its near cousin, ‘complacent’, which depicts the opposite to the kind of internal motivation wanted. Despite this, the person needs a positive outlook. Someone who feels good about what they are doing will sell more. To succeed, you have to be able to ride out flat periods maintaining the quality and rate of your work. A tendency to depression can lead to a downward spiral when things are not going your way. Energetic – you can compensate for many limitations if you are energetic. A phrase from guru Tony Robbins, ‘Massive effort brings massive results’. Another quality which is vital in a sales person is quick wits since sales conversations cannot be scripted in advance and the sales person needs the ability to manoeuvre skilfully around customer sensitivities or objections. Wide general knowledge, or at least to have had a lot of contact with people, is very useful too. This brings with it the ability to relate well to most individuals. Building empathy is easier if you have experiences in common. Self-confidence – self doubt is poison in sales work. The real world is tough enough without your mind generating extra problems to deal with. It is critical to have a character which is robust and assertive and can surmount difficulties with strong resolve. All of the above is of little use if the sales person is not a good listener. No doubt this would seem counter-intuitive to people who think that delivering a sales pitch at maximum flow rate is how to sell – I have a mental picture here of market vendors or tv home shopping channel types – in reality, being able to listen intently is the best way to get to know the reasons a client has for


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being interested in buying. If you are doing the majority of the talking, you close off this important information channel. But when it is appropriate to be doing the talking, a good communicator is needed, someone who can express himself clearly and convincingly. Less significant, but good to have, are a pleasant appearance and speaking voice. Accents, either regional or foreign are not a handicap, but speaking indistinctly is. Accuracy with arithmetic, and ideally strong ability in mental arithmetic, is highly useful. Often in sales work, there is a need to quickly figure out the price limitations that one has to remain within. Fiddling around with a calculator is a poor substitute for being able to maintain a reasonably accurate mental picture of where one is getting to in financial calculations. The next quality is highly desirable but somehow tends to conflict with certain of the other qualities we have looked at. Being well-organised helps you to get the most results from your efforts. However it is no use to have a highly ordered individual whose neatness in that area leads to minimal outbound sales effort. A clue, don’t expect good selling from someone who spends most of their day sitting in front of a computer. Age doesn’t matter much, (nor does directly similar work experience) I’ve known exceptionally good salespeople at both ends of the age spectrum, from 18 year olds selling real estate to seniors selling cars and business or investment opportunities.

Let me give you a picture of some of the individuals I was thinking about as I wrote the lines above: Here’s a man who has been a top producer for 25+ years – Stefan, who came to live in Britain from the former Yugoslavia, had a degree in philosophy, and initially spoke only the most basic English. His first job in the new country was as a driver for a man who ran a replacement window company. Stefan very quickly saw that sales people working in there were making good money, so he asked to be allowed a chance to try out as a rep. In those days when he introduced himself to customers, he had to apologise for his minimal grasp of English, but that did not stop him closing strongly. His special method, which I have never seen anyone else use to quite the same degree, was to stand out from the ordinary in a number of ways. First of all his appearance was unusual because of the way he dressed, typically he looked as though he might have been on the way to a concert - formal dark suit, white shirt and a bow tie. Later when he had money, he bought the most expensive clothes and accessories, I remember him wearing a leather jacket bearing the label Dunhill, not something I would have wanted to put on to go to a sales appointment, even less when accessorised with his habitual bow tie.


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He also had a taste for prestige automobiles, at the beginning he used to drive a very old, but large Mercedes - as time went on the model became ever newer. Again, I would have felt inhibited in arriving at an appointment in a car which would almost certainly be superior to the customer’s. What offset this ostentation, was his very solicitous and formally polite manner. He would kiss the hand of ladies and flatter them with compliments in a way which most native Englishmen would find unnatural and embarrassing. All told, he was a one off – but I haven’t yet told you his major strength - Stefan would not give up. It didn’t matter what objection was thrown at him, he would charmingly discount it and continue insisting that the prospect should buy. Under conventional circumstances, doing this would rather quickly irritate, but Stefan would regularly get away with it due to his unique manner. Product-specific knowledge can be learned fast Don’t limit the people you interview to just those who have direct experience with your type of product or service. Product knowledge can be learned fast by a motivated person. Trying to teach someone to sell who has encyclopaedic knowledge of a subject but little sales aptitude is less likely to work out well. Don’t pre-judge Here’s a question for you – would you give a sales try out in your business to a recent immigrant with had a limited grasp of your language and no relevant experience? Think about it. Realise that preconceptions of who makes a good salesperson could be limiting you. What taught me this lesson, was employing two people who, at first sight, seemed unpromising. One was a middle-aged French woman, an amateur sculptress, the other, a young Pakistani man who lived in a sqat. Both turned out to be not only very good canvassers for my business, but also highly reliable. Their high levels of motivation compensated fully for any weakness that I might have anticipated. Two more examples of young people with a gift for sales. I worked at one time for a real estate developer with a luxurious beach-side apartment building. The large sales team was made up of several nationalities, although most were Americans. As a Brit, I quickly made the acquaintance of the others from my country, one of these was Michelle, a young lady of about 18 for whom this was a first job and Stewart, a Londoner of a similar age. To me, both seemed unlikely for the role. Michelle was pretty, but apart from that didn’t appear to have any particularly distinguishing characteristics. My initial impression of Stewart was not favourable at all, just a rather annoying, average-looking late teenager. I was soon to learn just how wrong it is to pre-judge. Neither of them took long to be amongst the most productive sales people out of around 60 (this was a big sales operation and highly


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successful). I don’t know what it was that Stewart did which was so effective for him, but in the case of Michelle I found out her sales secret first hand. I had been working at this location for a few months and my sales performance, which initially had been rather good, had declined. I didn’t like that, but didn’t know what to do about it. Closing harder didn’t seem to help and I didn’t have any other tricks. The manager, who paid careful attention to the running sales figures, came over and spoke to me. He said, ‘Accompany Michelle when she makes her next sales tour with a prospect’. So I did and I was surprised to see how different her presentation was to mine. Both of us covered the same topics, but hers sparkled with enthusiasm, she described every aspect of the property with excitement. In hindsight it’s obvious that it helps if you let a prospect see that you really like what you are selling. I wasn’t doing this to anything like the degree that Michelle did, but I changed that the next time I went on a presentation and bingo, I got my first sale in quite some time. A further example of a very good salesperson from an unlikely background: One of my clients for sales training was a long-established, traditional engineering company making parts for the aircraft industry. They were in decline and when I visited, that was obvious from the look of the place. The offices and machine shop resembled what I had known in my first job some 40 years before - gloomy, untidy and depressing. The sales manager took me in to the archive to show me customer records going back to pre-war days. It was clear that some new initiative was urgently needed. I asked to meet the sales team responsible for bringing in business and was amazed to find that currently they had jus one young man, who spent most of his time in the office. There had been an outside rep, but he was now retired. I suggested as a first step that the sales manager hire a couple of part time telesales people to contact old customers. A few weeks elapsed, then I got a phone call inviting me to come down and help the new recruits get started on their phone sales campaign. Both of the new people were women in their late twenties, one had sold press advertising previously, the other had been in the police force. Joining us was a lady who had initially been a welder, but had gained so much knowledge of the company, its customers and the products that she had been tasked with assisting with incoming sales requests. The three of us sat around a table in a meeting room and quite quickly worked up a phone script, ‘Good morning, my name is . . . I’m calling from (The Aircraft Parts Company), could I speak to your purchasing department please?’ When put through, the reactions we received were one of three categories; ‘We hadn’t heard from you for so long, we assumed that you had gone out of business’ or ‘We don’t have a requirement at this moment, but get


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your rep to drop in to see us next time he/she is in our area’. Best of all was the third type of response; ‘Do you have any of part number XYZ123 in stock, we need some urgently’. A couple of hours on the phone produced half a dozen requests for a visit and 3 immediate orders for product - and this achieved by two young women with no prior experience of the aircraft industry. At the other end of the age range, I have a friend in Vancouver, Canada in his late sixties who has a very high closing rate for an expensive financial newsletter. It costs around $1000 for 12 issues per year, the people who accept to pay that are wealthy and independently-minded, not an easy sell. But Brian makes a handsome living in this niche field. The reason; he knows his subject inside out, he is an expert and his prospects get to realise that fast. He inspires confidence and what he says is easy to believe, a million miles away from some awful ‘canned’ sales script that the average telemarketer will subject you to. Academic qualifications are less important than sales & people skills A mistake which is often made is to attach too much value to a candidate’s academic qualifications. While there are some fields in which it is essential to be able to discuss technicalities at the level of a specialist, more often, a person with sales aptitude will do sufficient study to be able to reply to the questions that he or she may be asked. For many products the number of things that people want to ask about is quite limited and if initially the rep doesn't have a good reply, it's always possible to say, 'I'm new and I don't have the answer to that question, but I'll ask my colleagues and get back to you later today'. Not the best possible response, but not necessarily a deal-killer either. Once a person has been asked such a question - and then discovered the answer - that reply will remain clearly remembered and available for when the next person asks it.

The sales director of a well-known multinational company once asked me in conversation which I thought was the better degree as qualification for a sales career, 'Arts or science?'. In an instant, this remark told me that the man had no understanding of what sales is about. He might as well have asked me if reps would sell better if they drove red cars rather than blue ones. What matters most of all in sales work is energy - the amount of business that you win is proportional to the number of attempts you make. My experience is that individuals with superior levels of education tend to be pretentious and view prospecting as beneath them. That attitude negates the value of any greater knowledge. As A. Nonymous once said, 'If knowledge brought wealth, all the professors would be millionaires'. I could go on with more examples, but to summarise, the traits to look for to find a motivated sales person:


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• ‘Dissatisfaction’ – always wanting more, and prepared to work to get it.

• Positive outlook.

• Energetic

• Quick-witted.

• Wide general knowledge, or has had a lot of contact with people – hence self-confident and able to relate to anyone.

• Assertive able to handle rejection and abrasive clients.

• A good listener and communicator.

• A pleasant appearance and clear speaking voice.

• Ability in (mental) arithmetic.

• Well-organised.

The person with strong ambition is more powerful than the one with all the facts.


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The qualities of a suitable salesperson for your product

We’ve just looked on the previous page at the traits which are generally appropriate but across the spectrum of tangible products and intangible services, the qualities needed in a sales person vary in degree depending on the complexity of the product and the market place it is sold into. Attribute Simple product Complex product

‘Hungry’ Very desirable Less relevant

Assertive Desirable Important

Prior product knowledge needed

Little or none for ‘box on shelf’ products

Up to PhD level in some industries

Positive outlook Important Important

Quick-witted Less important Important

Wide general knowledge Less important Important

Self-confident Less important important

Able to handle rejection Less important Important

A good listener and communicator Important Important

A pleasant appearance and clear speaking voice Important Important

Ability in (mental) arithmetic Less important Important

Well-organised Less important Important

Can be stimulated by external motivation? Yes Less

Burnout

I suppose that any job which requires strenuous mental exertion can lead to burnout, but sales is an extreme case requiring a tremendous amount of resilience and persistence* to overcome the obstacles which inevitably appear. Multiple factors combine to cause very high levels of stress. From prospecting to closing, you have to be energetic and sharp, and there is no respite; last month’s or last year’s figures are history and however good do nothing to make today and tomorrow’s work easier. There is no furlow from the energy input needed.

____________ * Which is why there will always be high-paying jobs in sales.


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Can you picture this scene, it’s late afternoon, already dark outside, some of the other guys have already left for home, business has been slack recently and recently you lost a good order which was seemed to be almost in the bag? But you aren’t going to make your sales quota if things continue this way. You ought to make some more calls, talk to people who aren’t expecting you to be phoning them and be positive and persuasive. How do you do that - find the enthusiasm and drive needed to throw off sloth and negativity and morph into the eager and convincing person who is capable of the job? It takes a very convincing reason running in your head to do this when the excuses for quitting are piling up nicely. That person in the office, could reckon that he’s done enough, abandon work for the day and head off and later, maybe after a few drinks, quitting for the day will seem reasonable, inevitable. On the other hand, she could choose to stay on, make two or three more calls or drive a few more miles, reach a decision-maker and achieve some definite progress towards a deal.

What determines which of these paths is taken is the ‘self-talk’ of that salesperson, the monologue running though our heads all the time we are conscious. This silent voice continuously reviews the world around us, our tasks, worries, hopes and ambitions and shapes the decisions we make and the actions we follow through with. Burnout is something I am familiar with. The symptoms; you don’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning because there seems to be nothing good in your life, everything seems futile, no aspect of work is attractive and most likely, you’re close to broke. While you are doing well, and high with the good

feelings which success brings, sustaining motivation and the required work rate is achievable, the problem comes when one or two things go wrong and you begin to feel that the load is becoming too much for you. In mild cases a rest, or the diversion which a holiday brings, may be enough to restore a person. My experience is more extreme – Now and then I would enter a period of very black moods where everything about my life seemed futile. When this occurred there was no point in being in sales, I couldn’t give the product away. I felt that I absolutely had to get away from selling for a while and do something creative where I could see an end product. (I’ve admitted it before, although when firing on all cylinders I’m a good salesman, I don’t make a

Feelings and beliefs influence thoughts, thoughts determine actions. To positively influence peoples’ motivation a sales manager needs a very good understanding of their feelings and thoughts.


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good employee because I’m restless. There are plenty of others without my defect though.) Action is the antidote Things are not going to get better of their own accord, that’s sure. So whether you feel like it or not, to overcome burnout you must be active in areas which will tend to make something good happen. If you were able to be objective about your situation – which, of course you won’t be, since burnout is to a large extent a product of a distorted perspective – you could consider what answer you could provide to the question, ‘What are you doing to make things better?’ If your response is, ‘Nothing’, then don’t expect sympathy or improvement, only serendipity could possibly fill the gap otherwise and the odds on it doing so are unfavourable until you begin implementing things which can improve your chances.

An example: my son qualified recently as a graduate engineer and has been looking for a job. He began applying to companies and for about six weeks had no positive replies. As time went on, he put less work into his efforts until the point came when he didn’t get out of bed until lunch time, and when I looked into his room later in the day, he would be watching YouTube movies rather than doing something to progress his job search. We had a talk and discussed some of the points that I have mentioned above. But, if you know the old proverb, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink’, you’ll appreciate there is a limit on what a parent can induce a child to do. Nevertheless there came a time when my son decided that he had had enough of waiting for the phone to ring and changed his strategy. He began contacting 75 companies a day and sending in his resume. Bingo, that produced a crop of interviews, and now they were from companies which were eager to hire someone with my son’s particular expertise. As soon as these positive results were coming in, my son’s mood brightened, he wanted to talk with me about what was happening and wonder of wonders, he got up early of his own accord eager to get started on the next day’s work. I’ve described Charlie’s behaviour because this was happening in real time while I was writing these words. My own periods of slump had a different context but the pattern of behaviour was exactly the same. To break out of a slump – don’t change the formula and start trying a totally different approach (I was often tempted to do this), instead just perform the basics well, with energy and enthusiasm. Lots of prospecting and strong presentations.- that’s what will get you back on track.


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Dealing with ‘difficult’ salespeople

Let’s start with what you can’t do, which is to be passive and let them ignore your authority. Nor is it advisable to be aggressive, since this leads to escalation of the problem and bad feelings, not resolution. The way to behave which is most likely to bring about a good outcome is to be assertive. I have found a lot of help in understanding the dynamics of interpersonal conflict and what to do about it in the writings of Eric Berne, a Canadian psychologist who devised a theory about communication between people. He gave his theory the name Transactional Analysis. If you find that you often have to deal with difficult people, or if doing so upsets you a lot, I suggest that you read Berne’s book, Games People Play, here there is room only for a very brief description of his principles:

Berne proposes that people communicate in three styles, Child, Parent and Adult.

Child – in this state people express their feelings, sometimes by shouting, in irrational, emotional, ways. The Child is in control when reason is overwhelmed by anger or unhappiness. Parent – this mode, often with a patronising tone of voice, is authoritarian, controlling and uses pre-judged thoughts and attitudes absorbed when we were young from our parents, teachers, and the other authority figures around us. Adult - is when we process the data of a situation objectively and our manner is calm and reasonable. It leads to solutions to problems based on the facts not emotions or our pre-judged thoughts. To achieve an equitable outcome, aim to be in the Adult state to deal with problems, but be aware that if someone interacts with you using the Child mode, you may find yourself reacting in the Parent manner, without being aware that you are doing so. In resolving conflicts it is valuable to notice the states that people are in, including your own.

An example: ‘The way you spoke to that customer was hopeless. You are always doing this, you never get it right’. - There are easy clues here about what mode this comment is in – the language is disapproving and aggressive. This is Parent to Child.

If the reply goes something like, ‘Why are you always criticising me? Shut up and leave me alone, you are a horrible person’. This is the language of Child mode, which has been sparked by the aggressive Parent style of the first speaker.

By contrast if an Adult manner is adopted, perhaps like this, ‘Gordon, can I suggest another way to respond to customers like that which you might find helps . . . ‘ it improves the chances of the response you get being a useful one instead of just a negative emotional outburst.


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Here’s another tip, which helps with difficult people of all types - to regain control, ask a question.

There is a special power to asking questions, it is that any person who is asked a question can’t avoid thinking about it. Give this a try in any situation where you would like to put your opinion across but are not finding an appropriate opportunity. You can start with a preliminary question, ‘May I ask you a question’’* Even if you are face to face with an angry person, spewing a torrent of invective, you can take the initiative when there is a suitable pause, by asking ‘May I ask you a question?’. Once it is your turn to speak again, be assertive not aggressive. This is a most important distinction. Assertiveness is when you make your case in a way which is reasonable, unprovocative and well-founded. Assertive people state their opinions, while still being respectful of others. Aggressive people attack or ignore others' opinions in favour of their own. Don’t allow yourself to be provoked and don’t counter attack, all you get from that is to alienate the other party. Try to phrase your next remarks also as a question, so that you continue to have the stronger position. An example: one of the sales people often arrives late at meetings, which means that either he misses the announcements that you make at the beginning of the session or you have to bore everyone else by repeating what you have already told them. To deal with this, you could take the offending party aside and ask,

‘Brian, I notice that you have been late getting to the meeting on several occasions, do you realise that this is causing a problem for me and the other team members?’

Most likely Brian is going to now offer an excuse of some sort. Your next remark, phrased as a question could be:

____________ * which might be answered by a logical smart-arse with ‘Do you have another?

Negative emotion is the biggest killer of motivation.”


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‘Brian are you prepared to help me run the meeting so that it is useful for everyone?’

I don’t know what Brian is going to say now, but in any event, you can probably continue with:

‘Can I count on you to be on time for the next session?’ That was a series of questions – if you contrast the effectiveness that you obtain this way with similar content phrased as statements, I think you will find that the question style is more effective. Give it a try, you’ll find it surprisingly useful as a technique. You might want to teach this idea to your sales team since there are many applications in conversations with customers and prospects. Here’s one; everybody in sales work will from time to time encounter a prospect who wants to take control. You might, for example, find that the prospect asks right at the beginning of your presentation, ‘How much is it?’ Since there are good reasons for not stating a price early on in your sales pitch you need a diplomatic way of dealing with the customer’s reasonable question. Here’s what you can say:

‘Mr Customer, of course you’d like to know what the price is, that’s perfectly fair, but if it’s ok with you, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions first. The reason is that there are several options and versions of this product and the price differs quite a lot depending on which model is appropriate for your situation. I don’t want to guess a figure, because it could be too high or too low and that wouldn’t be helpful for either of us. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to just run a number of options past you and then I will be able to give you an exact figure. Would that be OK?’

Put that script into your own words and style, so that you can say it naturally. Then you have a very useful tool available to deal with difficult customers. It’s the same ‘power of the question’ at work that I was referring to above. They’re not involved / listening during meetings – with any sizeable group of people, there will always be some who seat themselves right at the back of the room, as far away from you as they can make it. What does this exhibition of body language tell you? – That they don’t want to be there.


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Or maybe you are sitting around a board room table and there’s someone who directs his gaze at anywhere other than you and he’s also fiddling with a pen or a sheaf of papers. This piece of body language differs from the previous example but the message remains the same – bored, uninterested, don’t want to be here. There are so many irritating things that people can do when you aren’t holding their attention, how about clicking away on their computers, having whispered conversations with someone next to them, reading something which has no bearing on the meeting or leaning forwards and resting their head right on the table? All intensely annoying for the speaker; what can you do about it? Well it’s question time again – ask them something such as, ‘Joe, what are your thoughts about this point?’ Either way if Joe agrees or disagrees with the matter under discussion, once you have asked a question of this sort, he will be brought back into the dialogue. It’s important to act early when people are displaying signs of being bored or uninvolved. Bear in mind that it’s quite possible that the reason for their behaviour may be valid, so listen to what they have to say with an open mind. They disagree and argue about some aspect of company policy

The response which works best whenever there is disagreement is to consider what outcome you really want and then operate in a way which tends to help this come about. Ok, so what outcome do you want as a sales manager? – simple, you want the team to operate in a way which increases sales and makes customers happy. Based on this, you need to avoid generating bad feelings in team members, so it’s a good idea to avoid having a heated row when someone objects to some aspect of company practice. You have a number of options; one for occasional use is ‘Agree and ignore’. You’d better choose carefully before using it because it does nothing to fix an underlying problem, but it can be handy when the point raised is trivial. You respond to the complaint like this: ‘

Margaret, that’s a good point and I’ve got something to tell you about that in a moment. But first there’s something we need to get out of the way. If I forget to come back to your question, please remind me.’

Ok this is a bit sneaky, but if Margaret does not bring up the point again, perhaps it wasn’t that important, so don’t make a problem for yourself, just ignore it. Of course if she does revert to her question, you have to hear it out seriously.


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A more thorough approach to someone’s disagreement is to employ what I term ‘Professional Listening’ – First, let the other party talk without interruption. As they do this make a serious attempt to understand the key points that they are making. If there are several, you can have the speaker prioritise them for you by asking, ‘Which of those points would be your main concern?’ When they have finished speaking, the next step is to run a re-cap by them. ‘Kevin, if I have understood correctly, the issues you are concerned about are . . . Issue #1, and #2 and #3. Have I got that right?’ Doing this has a good effect because it shows that you have taken Kevin’s concerns seriously. Your re-cap also provides an opportunity for Kevin to correct any misunderstanding you may have. Now you have to choose what to do about the issues raised and your possibilities will vary according to what the matter is about and how much influence you have in your company. It’s important to take feedback of this sort seriously because for example, the sales force has more contact with customers than other company departments and the issue raised could be important or bring some improvement to your business. Here’s another good tip – when you find yourself in a situation where another party would like you to be able to fix something which is a problem for them, but you don’t have the means or authority to implement the appropriate action yourself, there’s a dilemma. You could take the easy route, which is to say something implying that you will take action, but with a weasel word or phrase embedded which lets you off the hook in case what’s wanted doesn’t actually come to pass. That would be something along these lines: ‘Doug, that’s a good point, I’ll try and get installation (or whatever) to make some changes like you said’. Did you notice a little word in italics and red ink in the last line? There’s a reason for bringing it to your attention. ‘Try’ according to the dictionary means, ‘making an attempt with the implied possibility of failure’. But trying is good, isn’t it? - you might think. Yes in one sense it is, when it genuinely means making an effort to do something. But we’ve come to use it as a way of offloading our personal responsibility, and that doesn’t add value. It’s clear to see in a sentence such as, ‘I tried to get them to issue your pay cheque . . . but it’s going to take another month’. Implication – I’ve done everything I could, now it’s out of my hands. For the person who wants the action to occur, this doesn’t help much, she’s still waiting. This is a hard discipline, but you make your words far more powerful when you eliminate, or at least reduce, the number of times that you employ weasel words. Instead, look for ways to say ‘I will . . . ‘ Going back to the example with Doug’s concern about an installation matter, instead of saying ‘I’ll try’, a better


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alternative would be to say, ‘I will go and see the installation manager and tell him what you have just told me’. That small word ‘will’ makes all the difference because now you are obligating yourself, far more than you do with ‘try’. In consequence, Doug feels that you have taken his concern seriously, not just fobbed him off with a half-hearted, insincere response. They affect other team members negatively - so tell them that their behaviour is causing a problem. Make sure that you do this in the Adult mode we discussed previously. Be careful about your tone of voice, neither aggressive nor condescending – sound calm and reasonable. They’re slow / uncooperative with paperwork or reporting – I am not going to be a hypocrite here, I don’t much enjoy record keeping and when I was forced to submit activity forms each week, detailing the number of prospects I had contacted and the results, I rebelled and simply made up likely figures. Years later, my attitude has changed; what I now realise is that it is very easy to deceive yourself and that record keeping is a tool to help you be aware of your work rate. Looking back at diaries I kept years ago, in which I noted my sales appointments, it is clear to me now that the size of my pay cheques was roughly proportional to the number of contacts and presentations that I made. Lots of prospecting meant plenty of money whereas few customer contacts led to meagre pay. As a sales manager you want to know how much work is being done at the input stage of the sales process, because if it is insufficient, there is no magic which will compensate later on. The equation is simple, the number of sales you achieve and their value is proportional to the number of times you make a sales offer. If you have members of the sales team who are reluctant to keep and submit their activity records, explain to them that knowing accurately how much work you are doing helps them be successful and make more money and that without this data, it is easy to deceive yourself about your numbers. Unfortunate incidents with customers – No company wants it’s representatives to upset customers, but sometimes it happens. The golden rule for how to deal with it is to get clear on what outcome you want; most likely it is to appease the customer and not lose a productive sales person.

Personal attention from a senior company official with an apology and a possibly an offer of appropriate compensation may satisfy the customer. With the representative, point out in a non-aggressive way that the incident has take time, effort and possibly money to fix and that a repetition won’t be tolerated. Very likely a lesson will have been learned and the party responsible will be more careful in future.

I’ll admit that I’m talking from experience, since I got myself into trouble on two occasions by getting angry with customers. The first incident was when I went


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on a sales appointment to a household where I knew there to be a married couple, but when I had asked if both parties would be there for my survey and presentation, the wife had said that she was the decision maker and that I would be dealing with her alone. So I went along and explained about the product, took some measurements and worked out the price. Then I asked lady if she wanted to go ahead and place an order. She replied that she had to discuss the matter with her husband.

This annoyed me, since she had previously told me that she would be the one to make a decision. To cap matters, my extensive sample kit was spread around her living room and her baby was busy depositing finger marks and drool over it. When I objected and asked, reasonably politely that she keep her little angel under control, she turned nasty and told me to leave. I did, but once outside I delivered my opinion of her in good volume through the letter box slot on the front door.

I thought that was the end of the matter, but no. At the next sales meeting, my boss showed me a note from head office detailing my offence and suggesting that I be reprimanded. So I received a telling off and I believe the irritating woman was given a bunch of flowers.

If you spend long enough in sales, sooner or later you are going to hear someone say,’Buyers are liars’. I’m not recommending you think that, but I can see how it probably originated.

Another time, with a different company and product I called on an architect at his home office. The device I was selling operated on valid scientific principles and so I treated this prospective customer to a mini-lecture on how it worked. Somehow he didn’t like me talking to him like that and told me to go. Once outside I retaliated by kicking over a plant pot by the front door. This led to another complaint letter and talking to.

I was young then. Now I see that if I had behaved differently, instead of getting into trouble, I might have made a sale with each of them and been paid for my time instead of wasting it.

There’s a fine line between ‘independently-minded’ and ‘trouble maker’, don’t be surprised if you find yourself having to reprimand some of your better performing salespeople from time to time. I’ll close by telling you about one more episode of bad behaviour, but this one I got away with. It was a Sunday, and as you’ll appreciate, a motivated salesperson will even sacrifice what ought to be a free day in order to hit target. So that morning I had made my way to a customer’s house in a West London suburb. I wasn’t feeling at my finest because the night before had only finished a few hours previously – if you grasp my meaning. I began my pitch, got out a couple of samples and hoped that whatever the outcome it wasn’t going to take too long. I had an urgent need to get my head down. The customer was an American guy, he offered me a coffee. As I sipped it I felt an irresistible urge to throw up, but I managed just in time to


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enquire where his bathroom was and reach it. Several very unpleasant minutes passed, I rinsed my face and returned shakily to the customer. He didn’t seem to have realised the predicament I had been in and – thank goodness – placed an order, leaving me free to pack up and hightail it back to chez moi. I swore, ‘Never again’, and I didn’t . . . until the next time.

* * *

Well I’m done now, over to you. Thanks for buying my book. Cheers, Robert


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Inspirational quotations

Great quotes inspire, entertain and remind us what really matters:

Management means helping people to get the best out of themselves, not organizing things. Lauren Appley I praise loudly. I blame softly. Catherine the Great

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Rudyard Kipling

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe No other trade or profession has more opportunity for one to rise from poverty to great wealth than that of salesman. Og Mandino

For every sale you miss because you're too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because you're not enthusiastic enough. Zig Ziglar

To succeed in sales, simply talk to lots of people every day. And here's what's exciting- there are lots of people! Jim Rohn I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature. John D. Rockefeller

Everyone lives by selling something. Robert Louis Stevenson

A smart salesperson listens to emotions not facts. Unknown

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. Vincent T.

Lombardi

The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph! Marvin

Phillips

Develop the winning edge; small differences in your performance can lead to large differences in your results. Brian Tracy

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't - you're right. Henry Ford

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments. Jim Rohn


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Success demands singleness of purpose. Vincent Lombardi

Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep. Denis Waitley

Confidence and enthusiasm are the greatest sales producers in any kind of economy. O. B. Smith A salesman, like the storage battery in your car , is constantly discharging energy. Unless he is recharged at frequent intervals he soon runs dry. This is one of the greatest responsibilities of sales leadership. R. H. Grant

One hundred percent of the shots you don't take don't go in. Wayne

Gretzky

A gossip talks to you about other people. A bore talks about himself. A brilliant conversationalist talks to you about yourself. William King

One possible reason why things aren't going according to plan is that there never was a plan. Ashleigh Brilliant

Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future. Ashleigh Brilliant

Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about. Ashleigh Brilliant

Our meetings are held to discuss many problems which would never arise if we held fewer meetings. Ashleigh Brilliant

When you're going through hell... keep going! Winston Churchill

If you don't do it, you'll never know what would have happened if you had done it. Ashleigh Brilliant

Knowledge and ego are directly related. the less knowledge, the greater the ego. Albert Einstein


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About the author

Robert began his working life as a mechanical engineer at a company in the London suburbs. More by accident than design he later spent 10 years in direct sales, a period in which he had a love/hate relationship with selling and the companies he worked for. Using that experience he formed his own sales-led business ‘Robert Seviour – Energy Control Systems’ which installed ‘smart’ heating controls for large houses and small commercial premises. In 1988 Robert sold the business and accepted an invitation to become North American agent for a manufacturer of epoxy adhesives and composite materials. Five years later he was asked to return to the UK and help another technical company develop their sales. This business was an installer of high-tech communications equipment. Robert coached them in the process of customer acquisition. The success of this operation led to an invitation to repeat the sales course for all divisions of the organisation, including security systems and aerospace equipment. This was followed by sales training courses for large and small organisations throughout the UK, Europe and the USA - many well known companies, including Schlumberger, British Aerospace, IBM and Scottish Power. Robert enjoys travel, has lived in six countries and apart from English, speaks fluent French and German. He remains open to new challenges.

Other titles by Robert Seviour

How to Hire a Really Good Technical Salesman

Prospecting for Engineers

How to Create Powerful Technical Sales Literature

Selling for Engineers

Details of these books and sales seminars at www.seviourbooks.com

Robert can be contacted at [email protected]

How to Motivate Sales People - seviourbooks.com · How to Motivate Salespeople without spending a lot of money 1 Introduction You don’t need me to tell you that having a team of

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