Appendix A
Putting It All to Work for You—A Review
Now that you understand the five steps of this process much better, let's see what it looks like when you put it all together as a more relevant scenario for you, the business consultant. Let's watch a play called “The Sale That Wasn't a Sale.”
You: Hi, Mr. Smith, thanks for calling and making time to meet. You said you wanted to talk about something you read in one of my articles. Which one was that again—The Problem with Salespeople Who Suck?
The Client: Yes, Mr. Jones, that's right.
You: Call me Johnny, please. What exactly does your company do?
The Client: Sure, no problem. We're a local manufacturing company that makes injectors for locomotive diesel engines. We do about $25 million a year. I called because I was reading your article on what drives poor sales performance and I wanted to talk with you more because we've got some really horrible salespeople right now and they're killing us!
You: Well, glad to talk about it. By “some,” how many poor sales people are we talking about, and by “killing us,” just how bad is it?
The Client: It's bad. We only have seven regional sales people covering the entire country. Four of them are rock solid and been around kicking butt for quite a few years. The other three are horrible, and can't sell a damn thing.
You: Let me ask you two questions. What percentage of the overall sales of your company are these three responsible for, and how much below quota are they—literally as in how many dollars have they lost you?
The Client: Collectively they represent 20 percent of total sales and I know I should probably have an exact number, but I would have to say they are roughly $5 million below quota between all of them.
You: Ouch! Okay, so last question. What do you think is causing their horrible sales performance?
The Client: I don't think we do a very good job of training our salespeople. I also think that some people are just natural-born sales stars, and others are not.
You: Well, you may be right about the sales training, but I definitely agree with you on the natural-born salespeople part. In my experience I've worked with thousands of sales companies over the years and while sales training is definitely important, the much bigger piece to the puzzle is finding salespeople who have the right natural talents and strengths for selling, like aggressiveness, self-starting ability, competitiveness, assertiveness, and believe it or not emotional intelligence.
The Client: I think you're right with some of these folks as I know for a fact that two of them are nowhere near as motivated or have that same hunger I see in the other reps. Crap, so if these three we've spent a ton of money training don't have some of these natural talents, what can we do? How can we fix it? Do you provide sales training and how much do you charge?
You: Oh, there's a whole lot we could do, but before I could talk about how to fix that problem of sucking sales, and even think about price, I'd need to know if I'm right and the reason you are down $5 million in sales is because these kinds of hallmark sales strengths are damn near absent from some of your salespeople, or what. Before we start talking solution, I'd like to make sure I'm right and actually measure these traits in your sales staff. Why guess when we can know, right?
The Client: So what's that going to cost me?
You: At this point, it's not going to cost you a dime because until I know what the real cause of the problem is, I don't know if there's anything I can do to help and what that would cost. Don't get me wrong. I'm not avoiding your question. It's just way too early to talk steps or price until we see what's really driving the poor performance, which could be different for each person. Trust me, when I know what the problem is I will be more than glad to propose some solutions and even more glad to quote you a big fat consulting fee for fixing it. Don't worry about that.
The Client: Oh, I don't doubt that. So what's the next step?
You: I'd like to confirm this diagnosis, if you will, by having your entire sales team, all seven, complete a free sales diagnostic profile. This way I can compare poor sales performers with top folks, to see what differences there are. The profile takes about 15 minutes to complete online, is so valid it will scare you, and it measures all the key sales traits I need to see in order to understand why they aren't selling. Once I get those back, let's schedule a short meeting to go over the results and I'll tell you what I found. All I need you to do is have your admin send each of the reps a link I will provide you when I get back to the office. Then we'll talk. Does that work for you?
The Client: Hey, if it doesn't cost me anything, but could help me figure out why I've lost $5 million, why not! When do you want to meet again to go over the results?
You: Well, I can meet this coming Friday if you can get them to complete the instrument by Thursday evening.
The Client: Well shit, half of them aren't busy doing any selling anyway so don't worry about that. I can promise you they will complete it by then.
You: Hi, Mr. Smith, how has your week been?
The Client: It sucked. We're still losing sales, what can you tell me? I'm dying here!
You: Here are the profiles of your sales team. Even though there's a ton of information in there, that's all stuff I would use in training or coaching, so there's way too much to go over in the time we have here. That doesn't matter though, because the point of this meeting is to see if we were right or not, and if there is a big natural talent gap between the best and the worst. And there definitely is!
The Client: Okay, again you're killing me here. What's the difference specifically?
You: Let's look at Frank's page four, which summarizes the core talents. See this bar, the Decisiveness one? Frank's got a 15, which means he can't make a decision to save his life. Your top four sales people all have above an 85 here. Susan and Gunther have slightly higher levels of Decisiveness than Frank, but still way below your four rock stars. Also, see how Frank and Susan are super high in this dimension called Stability? Most great salespeople are actually low here, which makes them love fast-paced, dynamic environments where everything is constantly moving and exciting. Your top sales guys have low scores here too, meaning they love chaotic, seat-of-the-pants, sales environments. Frank and Susan, on the other hand, hate that kind of pace. They like to take everything very slowly, have lots of time to think things through and not be pushed or rushed to respond. In your sales do you find it's vital to be able to think on your feet and handle whatever is thrown at you, or are your sales much slower paced, calm and nonaggressive?
The Client: Our sales are anything but slow or nonaggressive. It's like combat out there some days, and our folks have got to be able to spin on a dime and completely change course because our customers or suppliers are constantly throwing curve balls.
You: Yeah, all three of your low performers will basically suck at handling that kind of environment. Look, overall there are several other things like resistance to aggressively close, being too empathetic, and a lack of a high sense of urgency in all three bottom folks, yet none of those problems exist in your top performers. I'm about as confident as I get that these traits are completely undermining their ability to effectively sell your products to your customers.
The Client: So what do we do about it? Can you train them to get better in these areas, or should I just fire them?
You: Here's what I've done with other clients in similar situations, and it's worked very well. First there is some training that I can provide that will help each of these salespeople leverage what natural talents they do have. They don't all need to be complete copies, or exactly the same. I can help them learn those weaknesses better as well, so they won't let them get in the way as much. Outside of that, the real key is to make sure that when you do hire new salespeople for whatever reason, you identify these traits early on so you're not left trying to retrofit someone who wasn't a great fit in the first place. I recommend you focus on the training part first, and I would include all seven salespeople because they all have some short or long list of strengths and weaknesses that they could improve on. Once we get done with that, let's discuss hiring when you're ready. My training program costs $5,000 per head, so you'd be looking at $35,000 total, payable in three equal payments.
The Client: Damn, that's kind of expensive!
You: I appreciate that it's expensive. I also think it's a hell of a good deal when you consider it's only about 0.7 percent of the sales you've already lost this year, and we need to get this fixed before you lose that much again next year.
The Client: Point well taken. Okay, so how do we start?
The end—or just the actual beginning...