How to Make Sense of Sales Force Turnover

Do you have a high turnover in your sales force? Below is a good blog from the Harvard Business Review by Andris A. Zoltners, PK Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer

How to Make Sense of Sales Force Turnover

Imagine a sales leader who’s looking over data from exit interviews with salespeople who’ve left his company in the last year. Among the departing reps, 32% left primarily because of their relationship with their first line manager, 27% left primarily because of inadequate pay, and 21% left primarily because of the lack of promotion opportunities

The question: What should the sales leader do to fix this problem?

Is it time to upgrade the first line managers, enhance pay, revisit promotion opportunities–or some combination of the three?

There’s more to the story than meets the eye here. Let’s dig a bit deeper and try to understand who is leaving for what reason.

Consider the following additional facts:

60% of the people who left for reason #1 (relationship with manager) and 73% of the people who left for reason #2 (pay) were in the bottom half of performance rankings.

70% of people who left for reason #3 (promotion opportunities) were in the top half of performance rankings.

Most of the salespeople who left because of pay and first line managers were bottom-half performers. Companies often hope that low performers will find better opportunities elsewhere, so this turnover isn’t necessarily a problem. Indeed, perhaps the current pay plan and managers are having exactly the desired effect.

Promotion opportunities, on the other hand, may need attention if the company hopes to hold on to more top-half performers.

Turnover statistics only become useful when they are linked to salespeople’s current performance and future potential. Current performance is visible in most sales forces using metrics such as territory sales growth and quota attainment. Future potential is more opaque, but is usually assessed by managers through the performance management and review process. Salespeople who depart will fall into one of the following three performance segments. You’ll want to implement different solutions, depending on which segments account for high levels of turnover.

1. Low performers with low potential: These are bad hires, plain and simple. If many sales force departures come from this group, you’ll want to find ways to upgrade the applicant pool, and enhance your candidate selection and attraction process.

2. Low performers with significant future potential: The solution for reducing turnover among this segment lies in helping salespeople become successful through development and coaching and giving salespeople warm leads so that they can taste sales success, which is the ultimate motivator. We find that there is high turnover among new salespeople across many industries, primarily because they just can’t get off the ground. Training and support that enable early success can work wonders.

3. Turnover among high performers: Autonomy, appreciation, recognition, pay, long-term incentives, inclusion on a company task force, and sometimes, even employment contracts with a non-compete clause can play a role in controlling turnover for this group.

First line sales managers are key in diagnosing sales force turnover problems and identifying and implementing solutions for reducing turnover among all three performance segments. Managers are the ones who have to figure out if a low performing salesperson has future potential or not. They are the ones who must coach and develop a salesperson to realize his/her potential. And they are the ones who can find the right motivators for holding on to high-performing salespeople.

How To Sharpen Your Problem Solving Skills

Below is a blog post from John Morgan. How are your problems solving skills?

How To Sharpen Your Problem Solving Skills 

Every single successful person I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting is highly skilled in problem solving. Your creativity in solving your problems is an essential factor in determining your level of success.

Depending on how big the challenges are that come your way, there’s a certain level of panic that kicks in. This is a problem because panic leads to a closed mind. An open mind is critical to creative problem solving.

So how can you improve your problem solving skills?

I’m so glad you asked, otherwise this post would have been awkward.

You have to change your approach to solving problems. Forget about how you’ve done it in the past. Wrap your mind around a new paradigm that will instantly change your results…

Stop looking for the right answer and start looking for the right question.

What are some different ways you can look at the problem you face? Don’t ask a close minded question that won’t lead to a strong outcome. For example, why is this happening to me? is NOT a question that will solve whatever problem you’re facing.

Instead, ask questions such as what can I gain from this? or how can I use this to my advantage?

When you start asking yourself different questions, you immediately start thinking of different answers. The more questions you can ask the better. Multiple questions from different perspectives will cause you to create solutions you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

The best part of this is that the questions you ask yourself do not have to be complex. In fact, the more simple the better. Write down a problem you’re facing in your life or your business.

Then list out some simple questions that will cause you to think of this issue from a new perspective.

Here’s some examples right off the top of my head:

- What is the problem?
- What assumptions am I making about this?
- How can I get more information about this?
- How will I know it’s no longer a problem?
- What will happen if I ignore it?
- How can I improve because of this?
- What are the good things about this problem?
- Is it really a problem?
- Who can help me solve it?
- Why is this important?

Those are simple questions that can get you started. I’d love to see what questions you come up with! (You can let me know in the comments below). Remember to ask yourself questions that force you to look at the issue from a different perspective.

Instead of focusing on the right answer, focus on the right questions. We too often spend time looking for the right answer to the wrong question.

How to Turn Your Best Customers Into a Growth Engine

Are you building a community of customers? Below is a blog post from Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing.

How to Turn Your Best Customers Into a Growth Engine

I’ve said repeatedly that building a vibrant community is the most important objective of any business these days.

While this may sound like some social media laced feel good sentiment it’s actually quite practical.

Making your business customers, prospects, suppliers and partners feel like important members of a bigger community simply makes long-term business sense and is the key to long-term growth in ways that you not have even considered.

Many businesses get the idea treating customers in ways that make them want to return and refer, but you should also look at your best customers as collaboration partners able to help you formulate plans for growth.

Creating new products and services and making plans for growth is tricky adventures. Why not systematically involve your customers in every decision you make? Why not create new products and services with your customers? Why not include them in content creation and marketing campaigns?

Why not get your best customers to tell you what they need and then help you create, iterate and perfect it?

Below are five steps that can help you build systematic community involvement into your growth plans

Champion personas

The first step is to segment your business customers into personality types. Not every customer group is right for this approach and you may likely have completely different segments, such as B2B and B2C, and may need to build entirely different approaches for different segments.

Additionally, you’ll want to identify customers groups or types that are more open to this level of involvement. One of the best places to look is for customers that already refer or evangelize what you do. Can you identify them specifically or can you at least come up with a description of common characteristics?

These are what I refer to as you community champions. This is the first group to focus on as you try to expand your community reach.

Ongoing mining

Next you’ll want to dig in and figure out what this group might be lacking. This is sometimes a little tricky as if they really knew they probably would have told you by now, but I find that posing a series of questions around what they wish they had, what they can’t find or what doesn’t seem to work, even about your current offerings, is a good place to start.

After you do this you’ll want to audit your content, touchpoints and revenue streams in an effort to identify a handful of potential growth and involvement opportunities.

Many times you can find ways to involve your customers by simply creating content opportunities such as guest blogging, case studies and video testimonials.

Consider events you might create where your customers can do some of the education. Host peer-to-peer roundtables and let your customers facilitate discussions among prospects.

Consider additional revenue extensions where your champion customers could moderate other customer groups and help add ongoing value.

Innovation circles

Once you’ve established some working rapport with your community champions get them involved in helping you build, test and refine new offerings.

Create what I like to call innovation circles to use to build with your customers. Take rough product, service, packaging and pricing ideas to your circles and get feedback. Then with this feedback create a beta test group that agrees to help you get it right. Then use these testers as case studies and early evangelists for your now much improved offering.

You don’t have to stop here either. You can use this same approach for all of your marketing initiatives, copy and positioning.

Accountability tracking

The final piece is the glue that holds this entire approach together and keeps your community champions coming back for more.

You must create a way to religiously track the results your champions are getting from their relationship with your organization as well as their greater involvement in the community.

This just makes good business sense, but it will also help reinforce the value you bring to the table over and above the somewhat empty claims of good service and low pricing used by your competitors.

One of the best ways to build this into your community is through game mechanics. Create ways for your community champions to participate in contests. Get them to compete with each other. Teach them how to help each other through tangible acts such as linking swapping, sharing and guest posting.

Make the use of your progress and services something they must report and even incentivize them by creating awards for people who come up with new uses and best documented results.

Partner platform

One way to take this notion up a notch is to teach a group of strategic partners how to do the same and then start cross-pollinating your communities.

When you create a common language and process, such as “innovation circles,” you make it easier to teach the methodology and create even greater participation as you and your partners are promoting the same approach.

Imagine how much more value you can bring to your community by building this kind of best of class partner platform, Further imagine how interested potential partners will be to learn how you plan to shine the light on them throughout your vibrant customer community.

Your customer champions want to help you grow and, while making referrals is one powerful way to involve them, when you take a formal approach like the one described above you’ll not only make it easier for them to refer you, you’ll create a team of business partners eager to help you plan and grow.

How to Turn Your Best Customers Into a Growth Engine is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

 

The Truth About 50+ Year Old Salespeople

Here is a great article from Steve Martin who writes the Heavy Hitter Sales Blog. Who do you prefer when you hire salespeople, someone young or more senior?

The Truth About 50+ Year Old Salespeople

Over the last couple of months I’ve spoken to a number of experienced sales leaders and senior sales reps who were contemplating their next career move.  Many feared their age might become an obstacle so I thought I would post this article.

It’s still hard times for salespeople and sales managers over 50 today. As companies have downsized, they find themselves five times more likely to be let go when compared to their younger counterparts. They also have a more difficult time finding new jobs because younger sales managers have five basic fears about hiring someone older than themselves:
They are Un-coachable. Younger sales managers fear older salespeople are set in their ways and won’t take their directions.

They aren’t Technically Savvy. Younger sales managers fear they haven’t ingrained technology (smartphones, tablets, e-mail, and web-based sales force automation) into their daily working routine (nor are they up-to-date on the internet, blogs, texting, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).

They are “Washed Up.” Younger sales managers fear older reps are burned out from too many years “carrying the bag.”

They Have a Poor Work Ethic.  For a variety of family, personal, or health reasons, younger sales managers question how hard they will work.

They Really Want My Job! Perhaps the biggest fear of a younger manager is that he is hiring someone who may upstage him in the eyes of senior management in order to fulfill an ulterior motive of taking over his job.

Given these fears, I would like offer five factors sales managers should consider when choosing between younger and more senior salespeople.

1. Do you have to Sell to the C-Level? The C-level Executive sell is based upon establishing credibility and trust. Who do think has an easier time establishing rapport with senior executives; a 26 or 56 year old salesperson? 

2. It’s about relationships, not Rolodexes. Never hire any salesperson solely based on the Rolodex (if you’re under 30 you might have to look this word up) of customer contacts they claim to possess. Hire the salesperson who has a successful track record at penetrating new accounts and proven their ability of turning aloof prospects into close friends.

3. Wit. Most companies make previous experience in the same industry their main criterion for hiring. Since these salespeople command the industry nomenclature, they are assumed to be qualified candidates. A more important hiring criterion is how candidates respond to pressure. In other words, how quick-witted or fast on their feet are they, what is their ability to learn quickly, and are they able to solve complex problems in real time? In this regard, don’t judge a book by its cover and assume a little gray hair means a lot less grey matter.

4. Sales is a Mentor-based Profession. Sales organizations are mentor-based environments. Inexperienced salespeople don’t know what they haven’t seen for themselves. Usually, it’s through the “school of hard knocks” that they gain their experience. Unfortunately, this takes time. The entire team can benefit from emulating salespeople who have accumulated a reservoir of experience working with customers.

5. Who Do You Trust? Peek into the cockpit as you board your next commercial flight. Chances are you are putting your life in the hands of one of the 70,000 airline pilots that are over 50 years old.

The post The Truth About 50+ Year Old Salespeople appeared first on Heavy Hitter Sales Blog.

How to Listen When Someone Is Venting

What do you do when someone is venting? Below is a blog post from the Harvard Business Review by Mark Goulston.

How to Listen When Someone Is Venting

Disclaimer: It’s probably not a good idea to read this before you eat.

I still remember how it felt when, as a medical student, I drained my first abscess in a patient. We called the procedure “I & D” which stands for “Incision and Drainage” (I told you not to read this just before you eat).

When you do an I & D, you locate what is the most protruding and bulging part of the abscess, wipe it off with alcohol, than pierce it with a scalpel. At that point the pus comes out first, followed by any blood. After this procedure, you may put the person on an antibiotic. Over time, the wound heals from the inside out. If you don’t drain the abscess first, and just start with the antibiotics, the undrained pus may prevent the wound from healing.

Today as a practicing business psychiatrist and CEO advisor, I’ve noticed that when you’re faced with an upset customer, client, employee, shareholder, child, parent, spouse, friend, it can actually feel like they’re bulging with emotion and about to explode. Your instinctual and intuitive reaction may be to try to calm them down, urge them to cool off, suggest it’s not worth getting so upset about. And sometimes that may work. But in cases where they’re really upset, you may need to drain their emotional abscess just as you would have to do with a physical abscess. In those situations, asking them to calm down before they’ve vented will be about as useful as skipping straight to antibiotics before cleaning their wound.

And yet a lot of people don’t know how to listen to someone venting. Usually, people take one of two attitudes. Option 1 is to jump in and give advice — but this is not the same as listening, and the person doing the venting may respond with “Just listen to me! Don’t tell me what to do.” Option 2 (usually attempted after Option 1) is to swing to the other extreme, and sit there silently. But this doesn’t actively help the person doing the venting to drain their negative emotions. Consequently, it is about as rewarding as venting to your dog.

The way to listen when someone is venting is to ask them the following three questions:

1. What are you most frustrated about? This is a good question because when you ask them about their feelings, it often sounds condescending. And if you start out focusing on their anger, it sounds as if you are coldly telling them to get a hold on themselves, which may work, but more often will just cause the pressure inside them to build up even more. However, asking them about their frustration is less judgmental and can have the same effect as sticking a scalpel into their abcess. Let them vent their feelings and when they finish, pick any of their words that had a lot of emotion attached. These can be words such as “Never,” “Screwed up,” or any other words spoken with high inflection. Then reply with, “Say more about “never” (or “screwed up,” etc.) That will help them drain even more.

2. What are you most angry about? This is where their emotional pus drains. Again let them finish and have them go deeper by asking them, “Say more about _________ .” Don’t take issue with them or get into a debate, just know that they really need to get this off their chest — and if you listen without interrupting them, while also inviting them to say even more, they will. If you struggle to listen when someone is venting because intense negative feelings make you feel upset yourself, try this: Look them straight in the left eye (which is connected to their right emotional brain) and imagine you are looking into the eye of a hurricane, allowing whatever they’re yelling to go over your shoulders instead of hitting you straight in your eyes.

3. What are you really worried about? This is like the blood that comes out of wound following the pus. It is as the core of their emotional wound. If you have listened and not taken issue with their frustration and anger, they will speak to you about what they’re really worried about. Again push them to go deeper by asking them: “Say more about ___________.” After they finish getting to the bottom of it, respond with, “Now I understand why you are so frustrated, angry and worried. Since we can’t turn back time, let’s put our heads together to check out your options from here. Okay?”

As I have written before, when people are upset, it matters less what you tell them than what you enable them to tell you. After they get their feelings off their chest, that’s when they can then have a constructive conversation with you. And not before.

How to Ask Better Questions

I finally had the chance to read a great book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Dan Pink. This book will be included in my recommended reading list. Below is an excerpt from the book.

Learn how to ask better questions

In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask. The folks at the Right Question Institute are trying to correct that imbalance. They’ve come up with a method that educators can use to help students learn to ask better questions-and that can assist even those of us who graduated back in the twentieth century.

Before your next sales call, or maybe in advance of that awkward upcoming meeting with your ex-spouse or annoying boss, give RQI’s step-by-step Question Formulation Technique a try.

1. Produce your questions.

Generate a list of questions by writing down as many as you can think of, without stopping to judge, discuss, or answer any of them. Don’t edit. Just write the questions that pop into your head. Change any statements to questions.

2. Improve your questions.

Go through your list of questions and categorize each one as either “closed-ended” (questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no,” 0r just one word) or “open-ended” (questions that require an explanation and cannot be answered with “yes” or “no,” or just one word). Then, looking over the two types of questions, think about the advantages and disadvantages of each variety. Finally, for a few closed-ended questions, create an open-ended one, and for a few open-ended questions, create a closed-ended one.

3. Prioritize your questions.

Choose your three most important questions. Think about why you chose them. Then edit them one more time so they are ultra-clear.

Through this process you can identify a trio of powerful questions that you can ask the person on the other side of the table. And those questions can help both of you clarify where you are and where you should be going. Find more information on this at: http://www.rightquestion.org

Five Creative Uses for Google Alerts and More

Below is article from Lifehacker about using Google alerts. I’m an avid user and have over 50 alerts setup ranging from:  my company’s competition,  the non-profit board I’m involved in, family members, vendors, industry related topics. If you’re interested in my list of alerts, please leave me a comment.

Five Creative Uses for Google Alerts 

Google Alerts is one of Google’s hidden gems. It’s a really powerful tool to keep track of trends, interesting topics, or anything really new that appears on the web. If you’re not using it already, here are a few creative ways to get started with it.

Google Alerts may not be one of Google’s most popular services, but it’s definitely one of the most useful. When the service gave us a scare earlier this month , many worried it was on the chopping block next to Google Reader. I put out the call on Twitter to see if anyone actually used it, and was surprised by some of the ways many of you put it to good use. Alerts is back now and working better than ever, so Google was probably just monkeying around under the hood. If you’re not using it though, now is a great time to start. Here are some clever ways to put it to work.

Perform Automated Vanity Searches and Find Out Who’s Talking About You 

One of the best uses for Google Alerts is to keep track of how often people are talking about you on the web and what they’re saying. One common refrain I heard when I talked to people about how they used Google Alerts was that they used them to find out what people were saying about the company they worked for, their non-profit, their startup, or about them personally (or their blog). One startup founder I spoke to even said it’s a great way to get a service that PR companies charge for entirely for free .

Whether you’re trying to find out whether people are gossiping about you personally or you want to know what people are saying about your company, Google Alerts makes performing automatic vanity searches a snap. All you have to do is type in your name or your company’s name in the search query field. Tell Alerts whether you want all results or just the high quality ones, when you want them delivered, and how you want them sent to you (you can have them sent via email or have Alerts generate an RSS feed for you to subscribe to. If you’re really obsessive, you have all results delivered to you as they happen, but depending on your popularity, you may want some mail filters set up in advance.

Stay Up to Date On News from Far Away 

If you’re an expat living far from home, or just someone who’s moved away from their hometown but still wants to know what’s going on in your old neighborhood, Google Alerts can help you with that too. Just modify the search terms for the name of your hometown, your home country, or if you want really specific results, your zip code. Like any Google search, you can add as many search terms as you like to narrow the results, and put long names in quotes to get exact matches.

One of my friends living in New York uses Alerts to stay on top of the news where he grew up (and where his family still lives) so he can get crime alerts for his parents’ neighborhood, and he finds out whenever someone he went to school with makes the news—for good or ill—before it’s plastered all over Facebook.

Follow a Trending Story, or Get a Snapshot of Events On Your Own Time 

Right now, many of us are absorbed with the investigation into the bombings in Boston. Others of us are following the ongoing conflict in Syria. However, watching the news all day or being inundated with a never-ending stream of reports—some of them inaccurate and bound for retraction—is just too much to deal with. Google Alerts lets you take control of the news stream and get up to speed on a specific topic when you’re ready. Tweak the search terms for the issue you’re following, and change the “How Often” to once a day for a simple digest. Once a week may be too much for a story that’s actively developing, but once a day is fine for those of us who don’t have the time to stay glued to the latest news reports.

Prefer to drink from the fire hose? “As-It-Happens” is always an option, and Google Alerts will feed you new news stories and search results of all types as soon as they index them. It’s not as fast as social media like Twitter or Facebook, but it’s pretty quick. To stick to reports from news agencies, make sure to change the “Result Type” from “Everything” to “News” or “Blogs.” You may also want to change “How Many” to “Only the Best Results” to weed out the cruft. One friend on Twitter noted that he uses Google Alerts to deliver a kind of “morning snapshot” of events that occured overnight , which I thought was pretty creative.

If your news-gathering has less to do with current events and has more to do with entertainment, tech news, or you have a specific public figure, politician, actor, or personality you want to follow (without being creepy), Google Alerts is perfect for that as well. You can even set up a Google Alert for new videos released by your favorite comedian or YouTube channel, get them delivered via RSS, and watch them as they come out without having to check their channel manually. Of course, you can also use it to harvest as much information as possible about your favorite celebrity’s public statements and appearances, but come on, don’t make it weird.

Search for Coupon Codes, Discounts, and Promotions 

Google Alerts is great for information gathering, but it’s also a great bargain hunting tool. You can set an alert for coupon codes or discounts to your favorite retailer, and then sit back and let the bargains come to you. Not all of them will be of particularly high quality and you’ll still have to sift through the results to find something useful. Even so, you’ll hear about new coupon codes as soon as they hit the web, and you’ll get first dibs on using them.

This is especially useful if you’re trying to grab a discount code that’s only valid for a few hundred uses, or if you want a 10% off code for your favorite web hosting company or domain registrar . Just set the search term for the type of discount you want (taking care not to be too specific), set the result quality as broad as possible, and let Google do the work for you.

Go Job Hunting 

If you’re unemployed or just looking for a better gig, you can use all the help you can get. Google Alerts lets you search for job openings and have results delivered right to your inbox so you can jump on them and apply immediately. Sure, you can scour job boards, but the benefit of using Google Alerts is that you can target your alerts specifically to the companies you’re interested in working for. You can even tailor them directly to the types of jobs you’re looking for—and since every job site and public company website is indexed by Google, you’ll probably be the first person to hear that the listing has been posted.

There’s a great guide to doing this over at The Undercover Recruiter if you’re thinking about giving it a try. After all, your job search will see more success if you target specific positions and specific companies with targeted resumes and cover letters that are relevant to the opportunity you want. Google Alerts lets you stalk your future gig with minimal effort, then strike first when the time is right.

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In any case, Google Alerts is probably one of Google’s most under-utilized tools, but it’s also one of the most powerful. There are alternatives and competitors you can use in lieu of (or in addition to) Google Alerts, like Talkwalker Alerts (which earned high praise from Search Engine Land ) and Mention . If you can think of a useful search that you perform on a semi-regular basis, Google Alerts can automate it for you.