Sales Managers need to know how to pick up their sales teams in a tough environment. They don’t just need advice… they need solid answers. Well, I’m here to tell you that there are answers – there just aren’t easy ones. Being a sales manager means taking a seat at the grownup table. To do that, you’re going to have to take these challenges, and this economy, head-on. You can get your staff selling again, but not by holding their hands and telling them everything is going to be all right in the morning.

4 Things You Must Do To Motivate Your Sales Team

1. Stare Into The Unknown:

There’s a fine line between being encouraging and ignoring the elephant in the room. It doesn’t do you or your staff any good to pretend that things are going as great as they ever have if that’s obviously not the truth. If your department or company has seen better times, acknowledge that, and then get working on ways to get past it. The best leaders aren’t usually the ones who just parrot motivational phrases – they’re the men and women who can face a tough situation head-on and keep pushing forward.

2. Create A No Excuse Zone:

Repeat after me: a slow economy is not a good enough reason to take an hour off, much less a month, a quarter, or a year. Yes, it’s harder to make a sale right now. But if this business were easy, everybody would be doing it, and we all get paid like top producers.
As a sales manager, it’s your responsibility to set the tone from the top. Don’t let economic conditions, the actions of your competitors, or even products and ideas forced on you by upper management become excuses to hide behind. Don’t make them yourself, and make it clear that you won’t accept any from those working under you. Let your producers know that you expect results, not explanations.

3. Fire The Losers:

In every sales department, there are men and women who complain too much, have no initiative, or just can’t sell. I bet you can think of two or three right now, and I bet that small handful takes up a disproportionate amount of your attention, not to mention your stress level.
Here’s a secret: you don’t need them. These whiners certainly aren’t contributing much to the bottom line when things are tough, and why would you want to waste a good territory on one of them – or any territory for that matter – when the economy picks up and sales are better?

Failing to cut the dead wood out of your staff is just plain laziness. Every day that you keep someone who isn’t willing or able to sell at a high level, you’re losing money and customers. So let them go already, and go find someone who has the drive and talent to get the job done.

4. Embrace Action:

Sales aren’t going to come to your department from nowhere. Create an attitude and atmosphere where action-making – making things happen – is the focus. Don’t let your team get away with eight hours of complaining, shuffling their papers back and forth, or doing busy work. Make sure that each person has a concrete action plan (whether it ‘s so many calls, a certain number of meetings, or some other activity that’s going to lead to new sales), and that they’re following it every week.
Not only will this force your producers to keep looking forward, but it will help to shift the focus from all of the bad news and destructive thinking that could otherwise leave them stuck in place. They don’t have to worry about busting a sales quota; they just have to be sure to get their work done. Sooner or later, if they follow this approach diligently enough, good things will start to happen.

Sales Management Points

It’s true that there are a lot of economic and market forces that make it tough to sell right now. So what? It hasn’t been easy to find new customers and commissions for somewhere around the last few hundred years. Your sales team can get over the mental hump, but only if you help them find a way. Use these tools and attitudes to motivate your team, and you might just find that business is tough… but it’s still out there.

The economy might be tough all around, but there are still men and women opening up big accounts every day. They do it by following four simple rules – tips you can use to grab new accounts today.

If you haven’t heard, the economy is tough right now. Even if you haven’t lost your job, seen your salary go down, or watched your investment portfolio dwindle into a skeleton of its former self, you would still know that we are in a “bad” economy because it’s on the news every day.

So as salespeople – the ones who do the most to make the economy “go” – we must be hurting, too… right?

Well, I’m certainly not going to tell you most of us aren’t. Business is down, and that means smaller commission checks for nearly everybody, or at least those of us have kept our jobs. Still, not everyone is having a rough ride in this current recession-to-recovery cycle; there are actually salespeople out there who are using the turmoil to earn more than ever.

Here’s how they’re doing it:

By not being pulled into the lull. If you saw a weather report that called for rain, would you definitely pack an umbrella? You might, or you might decide you aren’t going to be outside out very long, or that the weather reporter from your local station is often wrong. And what about if you started your daily commute and didn’t actually see any rain? Would you still pull out your umbrella?

You wouldn’t, of course, but many salespeople are treating the recession as a certainty, when in fact they would barely be affected if they weren’t reading about it every day. In other words, because they assume that the economy is in terrible shape, they don’t even bother looking for new clients – even though there are buyers in the market. Meanwhile, the top producers keep doing what they’ve always done, and getting paid like they always have.

By refusing to give up or quit. In the regions and industries where things have taken a definite turn for the worst, the best salespeople are simply refusing to pack it in. That might sound crazy, until you realize they’re just taking a bigger piece of the smaller pie.

As buyers get fewer and farther between, weaker salespeople are being washed out of a lot of industries. They might not have been selling much individually, but put together, they make up a huge number of unattached buyers – men, women, and companies just waiting to be sold.

By finding clients in transition. Turbulent economies mean changes in location and leadership; both of these often mean a review in buying procedures. When a new CEO or vice president is brought on board to deal with a tough market, who do you think is calling to congratulate them and make the first big sale? It’s not the account executive who’s sitting in his office worried about what the stock market is doing.

By acting like trustworthy professionals. No, cold calling for quick sales isn’t working these days… but being a respected authority still is. Sales superstars aren’t being squeezed out of their commissions because their clients still need them – they can give the insight and advice companies need to make smart decisions in lean times.

There’s never been a worse time to be “someone selling something,” and there’s never been a better time to be one of the world’s best salespeople. Recessions and recoveries are real, but how bad they feel to you is going to depend a lot on what you’re willing to put into your sales career.

Sales Training Mistakes: Only Teaching Product Knowledge

Product knowledge is critical to your sales team’s success, but it’s not the end-all be-all solution to your sales training needs. Try to integrate the facts and details of what your company sells into regular meetings, and then use your intensive training time to teach skills that will help your staff turn what they know into new accounts.

When my son was young, he was fascinated by sports cars. Like a lot of boys his age, he liked to look at the models of the shiniest ones in the toy store, or point them out when we would see one on the street. Over time, he started to pick up assorted facts and statistics: this one went from zero to sixty miles an hour in so many seconds, another one had an engine with this many horsepower, and so on.

Now here’s a question for you: how successful do you think my young son would have been at selling sports cars at that age?

The obvious answer is that he wouldn’t have been able to do that job – children are usually better in the door-to-door cookie and candy type industries – but the truth is that he was almost as qualified as many salespeople that some big companies send out into the field. Granted, he didn’t know anything about sales, but he sure had plenty of “product knowledge.”

And that, of course, is the problem I want to highlight here. To many sales managers, training consists largely of getting the sales staff together in a room and forcing them to memorize marketing brochures and technical specifications. So long as the sales team knows all about the great things the company sells, and can explain all the ins and outs, the rest will take care of itself – or so the thinking goes.

Those of us who have worked as professional salespeople for a while know better. Being able to explain specific features is important, but it’s not nearly as critical as understanding the sales process, knowing how to read and react to different buying personality styles, and qualify potential customers. In fact, I would go as far as to say that product knowledge accounts for only about a third of a salesperson’s success – and sometimes even less.

Besides, product knowledge is more about memorization than it is skill. For that reason, it makes sense to do it in smaller increments, like morning or weekly meetings, rather than all at once in a sales training session. We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much information, so don’t try to cram too many facts and details into your producer’s minds at once.

Product knowledge is critical to your sales team’s success, but it’s not the end-all be-all solution to your sales training needs. Try to integrate the facts and details of what your company sells into regular meetings, and then use your intensive training time to teach skills that will help your staff turn what they know into new accounts.

Sales Training Mistakes: One-Sided Sales Training

If you are choosing sales training based on recommendations from senior management, what’s hot in your industry, or what your trainers are offering at the moment, you could be missing an important piece of the puzzle. By asking your producers what they need to learn, you make it easier to find programs that can help you improve the bottom line quickly by bringing in new customers.

Who decides what topics you are going to train your salespeople on? If you are like most organizations, the decision is probably a combination of input from senior management, some impressions about what’s current or trendy in your industry, or which programs your sales trainer happens to be offering at the moment.

A lot of the time, there’s nothing wrong with that approach, and it can be a great starting point. The only problem is that every once in a while, companies end up with programs that aren’t doing them or their sales team any good, because they’re a poor fit for what’s actually going on in the field.

The simple solution: ask your frontline producers what they need help with once in a while.

When you take that step, a funny thing can happen – you might just find out that what your team needs isn’t what you had planned on giving them. Even though a good sales manager usually has an ear to the ground and can tell what kind of issues are coming up with prospects and clients, there are always going to be day-to-day problems that are best known to the men and women who are making the calls, going on client visits, and getting feedback on proposals.

Granted, you might get too many variations in your answers to be meaningful. While one newer salesperson is struggling with prospecting, perhaps another could stand to have a refresher on product knowledge, and a third wants to work on closing the negotiation techniques. You might not be able to accommodate all of them, at least at the same time, but you will gain a better perspective on where each of your salespeople is at the moment, so you can go back later to get more training or just address the issues individually.

Just as likely, though, is that you’ll discover your sales team is facing a common challenge that they’d like some help with, or that one person’s suggestion will trigger agreement from the others. This is exactly what you should want from your training – a chance to work on whatever it is that’s holding your business or division back from bringing in even more customers. It’s more important to get the sales training your group needs than it is the program you had in mind, or the one that’s hot the moment.

As a business owner or supervisor, you should have a good feel for the pulse of your sales team. You probably have a strong idea of what sort of training they need already, and it could be that current market forces or industry changes mean that you don’t have much of a choice anyway. But try to ask your sales staff what sort of programs they want from time to time. The answers might surprise you, and they could be the key to increasing business in a hurry.

Sales Training Mistakes: Buying on Price

Every sales manager teaches his or her team to sell value, not price. But many forget the difference when they search for sales training. By buying on price alone, they don’t just get a bad deal – they waste time and money.

If the first thing you learn in selling is that it takes persistence, the second thing might be that nearly every customer or client thinks your price is too high. It doesn’t matter what you sell, where you sell it, or who you offer it to – people are going to beat you up over price.

Of course, any good salesperson knows that price is only part of any solution, and it’s rarely one of the most important ones. What usually matters in the end isn’t the figure on the invoice, but what your clients are going to get for their investment. Value, as we explain time and again, is the thing to keep your eye on.

Salespeople who can’t understand this idea, or can’t get past their client’s objections, can be a major frustration. It isn’t only that they’re costing your company big money by giving away your margins, but that they don’t really understand what selling – or even buying – is all about. At the end of the day, it’s never about what you paid for something… only what you received in return.

This is something we all know, but it’s interesting how quickly that knowledge can fly out the window once we’re on the other side of a buying decision. I know lots of veteran, tough-as-nails sales managers in all kinds of industries who wouldn’t blink for a moment at a price objection. They’ve been through them dozens of times before, and won’t give an inch on the bottom line because they know that value is the most important thing. And yet, when it comes to choosing a person or company to come in and train their sales staff, what’s the first thing they do? That’s right, they shop on price.

Sales training, more than anything else you buy for your company or department, is all about value and results. A six-figure training program can be a far greater value than one that costs a tenth as much, if it leads to a lot of new prospects and customers, better client retention rates, or some other improvement in your sales team’s performance.

Not all training is good training, and even an excellent program might not be the right fit for what your sales team needs. By choosing an option based on price, you’re only increasing the odds that what you get is going to be a complete waste of time and money. You want a trainer who has been successful in his or her own career, understands your industry, and is going to take the time to learn what your needs and challenges are. It’s very rare that that person is going to come at a bargain-basement price.

Remember, sales training isn’t really about the program at all – it’s about where your sales team is going to be three months, six months, and one year down the road. With that in mind, think like a top sales performer and not a first-time buyer. Pay attention to prices, but look more closely at what you are actually getting for your money.

Buying (or Creating) Training That’s Boring

Boring sales training is never effective, so make sure you’re coming up with topics and ideas that appeal to your sales staff. You’re never going to get your time or money’s worth otherwise. If you want to get the maximum impact, talk to them about the one thing you know they are interested in – making more money.

For those of us who were raised on classrooms with beige walls and long lectures, a stroll through a modern high school or university might come as something of a shock. In many parts of the country, textbooks are being supplemented – or even replaced – with software, video, and other training aids. What’s more, the material today’s young people are learning from isn’t littered with references to Dick and Jane, but real world applications of the issues they are studying.

It isn’t just technology that’s driving these changes; it’s the realization of something that’s simple yet profound: people need to be interested if they’re going to learn.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s very hard to pay attention when you’re bored, and it’s very easy to be bored when the information is not put in an interesting way. Even so, companies will devote all kinds of time and money to sales training that resembles those old-style lectures. But as helpful as the tips and techniques might be to your producers, it’s never going to make any kind of impact if it isn’t engaging them and holding their focus.

There are lots of ways to make your training more interesting, and a few of them – like using technology, making it more interactive, and choosing the right time slots – will be recurring themes in these articles. But for the moment, I’m going to skip past all of that and mention a technique that’s pretty easy to put in play, but lots of sales managers forget about: make your training practical.

Few salespeople want to spend a day learning about “Advanced CRM Retention Techniques,” or “Profit Forecast Utilization,” but I’ve never met a single producer who wasn’t interested in making more money. Show your sales staff that you’re going to present them with some practical, real-world ways to increase the size and frequency of their commission checks, and I guarantee you’re going to have a captivated audience.

In fact, making your training about profits doesn’t even usually mean changing topics, but simply framing them in the right context. Try to avoid heavy jargon: the best salespeople prefer simple language. Instead of “margin improvement,” teach them about “selling at higher prices.” Likewise, “maximize customer value” becomes “making more money off of your best clients.” Too many companies, and trainers, get so caught up in sounding professional that they forget to say what they really mean.

Boring sales training is never effective, so make sure you’re coming up with topics and ideas that appeal to your sales staff, because you’re never going to get your time or money’s worth otherwise. If you want to get the maximum impact, talk to them about the one thing you know they are interested in – making more money.

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