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Earlier this week, Keenan and Mike Weinberg, two world-class sales trainers/consultants, joined me on #BizLockerRadio to talk about creating high performance sales teams (Listen HERE, or download on iTunes).
I don’t use Keenan’s first name (Jim) because…well…he’s just Keenan.
One thing is for sure, I’ve had dozens of stellar guests on my show, but this episode was crazy good and absolutely PACKED with great insights into the worlds of sales and sales management.
In addition, I was quite honored that Mike chose to announce the upcoming release of his brand new book on our show! The book is entitled “Sales Management. Simplified. The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from Your Sales Team,” and it is scheduled to be published in October 2015 by Amacom. When you have an established business you can invest in professional staff training from places like Impel Dynamic, but when you’re just starting out you need to make the most of as many of these affordable resources as you can, to teach yourself and then your staff. It is also always good to take on board as many different approaches to business skills as possible, throughout your business’ life cycle.
Here is Mike on his new book:
“As busy as I am, I did not want to write another book. But just being as transparent as I could be, I felt like I had to. Because I’m running into all these sales management issues that we’re talking about today in all kinds of companies. Whether they be giant fortune 500 companies or my little $10 million neighborhood SaaS Company. And it’s sales leadership.
We can coach the sales people to death. We can give them great targets. We can sharpen their story, help them run better discovery sales calls, improve their presentations, take back control of their calendars. All the stuff I preach in my first book – which I absolutely believe in.
But, if we don’t get the culture and the talent mix and the sales leadership piece right, we are not going to build the kind of long-term, sustainable, high performance sales teams that so many companies want.”
And that’s what we talked about on the show – the challenges of creating high performance sales teams, and the systemic and culture issues that typically prevent companies from achieving that objective.
I wanted to share a couple of the highlights from the show, but I want to encourage you to listen to the entire podcast.
These guys don’t pull any punches. If you want the truth, and enjoy hearing it unvarnished, you’re in the right place.
“We get called into companies that have sales problems and they want us to help fix their sales team. But the truth is, when you pull back the covers and you spend a couple of weeks with them, and you start looking what’s going on, very often, that sales problem isn’t a sales problem.
It’s a role definition problem. It’s a culture problem. It’s an anti-sales environment. It’s a leader that doesn’t understand what’s going on sales wise. Or there’s lack of clarity. There’s all these things that point back to the people that hired us, not to the sales team.”
Mike Weinberg
The question is why is it so difficult to find high performance sales teams?
It’s a very important question, and to listen to these two guys, finding one is about like trying to win the lottery. Even the really good sales teams have to deal with so much change – in markets, products, people, technology, and more – that it’s an uphill battle for a sales manager to keep his/her head above water.
But Keenan and Mike had some very interesting things to say about what prevents most companies from creating a high-performance sales team – insight you probably don’t hear in most of the conversations on this topic. Luckily, to form a good sales team, firms can rope in a Sales Performance Training Company, which can assist in the up-gradation of those crucial selling skills in their employees.
This is a problem that’s rarely discussed out in the open, but saddling a sales team with a growth number that is pulled out of thin air – with little basis in reality – can be a significant challenge in creating high performance. Here’s Keenan:
“I sit with more teams that go, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to go 20 percent this year, we’ve got to go 15 percent this year. We’ve got to go 27 percent…’ And I go, where the hell did you get that number? Where did it come from? And who decided it? And selling what products?
And all of a sudden, I start breaking it down for them, and they just picked that number out of the freaking sky! They have no clue.
So what happened? You get some guy with some girl, who now is responsible for that at their level, running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to figure out, ‘How the hell am I supposed to get 25 percent growth when our industry is only growing 3 percent?'”
Sound like an excuse? Maybe. But this situation can easily lead to a cultural issue that can dominate a company, and that issue is fear.
When salespeople become more concerned with the “number” – a number that might have little basis in reality – than with working the sales process effectively, the fear of not reaching that number can create serious issues.
More from Keenan:
“Everybody is freaking afraid they’re not going to make the number. They’re afraid to look bad in front of their boss. They’re afraid they’re going to miss the big deal. They’re afraid of Wall Street. They’re afraid. Everybody’s afraid.”
Question: Is fear having an adverse impact on your sales organization?
Mike can go from zero-to-60 in a heartbeat (much like his Porsche) when you ask him about the issues that prevent high performance. From his perspective, many sales managers are doing just about everything except creating high performance in their organizations:
“I’ve got public company clients that readily admit, they spend more time internally getting ready for their quarterly business reviews for their executives and presentations they make to up-the-chain sales management, than they spend time preparing for presentations to clients and prospects.
And in the name of being lean or whatever it is, I see companies asking sales management to do five different jobs. And it’s not right.
I mean, you can’t keep throwing work on someone’s plate and burying them in crap and thinking they’re going to produce. They don’t spend enough time on high value activities. They don’t work in the field with their people. They don’t mentor them. They don’t run good sales team meetings. They don’t meet one on one. But they got a whole pile of work to – 80 hours a week of work. But it’s not working. It’s not on topics that are going to move the needle for revenue.
That’s why we don’t have high performing teams.”
Which means that while Keenan quite often attributes high performance failure to “fear,” Mike sees time as the underlying cause. After all, it takes time to train, coach, mentor, and evaluate performance. It takes time meet with reps, make joint sales calls, and review critical sales reports for clues to performance issues.
A tough job all by itself. But with five?
Question: Are your sales managers buried in bureaucracy?
“The largest deficiency I see across sales people in general is business analysis and discovery. The average sales person does not either know how to, or know to begin to assess their customer’s business for the applicability of their products and services. They don’t understand their customer’s workflows; they don’t understand their customers, their contacts of their business. They don’t understand their pain point. They don’t understand how their customers do their job and how they’re measured.”
Jim Keenan
Regardless of the root causes of failure, high performance is a function of leadership and player performance. Sure, it takes a viable product, effective marketing, and other things, but sales managers have little, if any, control over those things.
What they do control is their own personal impact and effectiveness, and the quality of the people they hire and train.
Both Mike and Keenan are vocal advocates of one-on-one coaching. Which is music to my ears, of course, since I wrote a book entitled “1-on-1 Management: What Every Great Manager Knows That You Don’t.” Writing a book can be very rewarding but getting a publisher on board can be particularly challenging which is why self publishing is an increasingly attractive option for authors.
The practical advice that came out of this interview was absolutely priceless. Here is Keenan:
“First…you have to have a coaching cadence in place. So if you have a coaching cadence in place that sets up a time that you meet with your sales team, your direct reports, at the same time – I recommend every six weeks – every six weeks, for at least an hour. And you meet with them on developing their skills. And at the end of it you write them a note that says what you went through, what you recommended, what you saw.
It’s just coaching. Not performance review, it’s coaching.
So that by doing that, you’re constantly coaching. It’s in the system. And they know it’s coming every six weeks, right? In addition to that, I believe what I call the ‘freedom box.’ And I’ve written about this on Forbes. What I say to people is, ‘Look, you give your people as much freedom as they want. You tell them what the goal is, and say, borrowing, breaking rules, and doing something, inappropriate, the world is your oyster.’
As they cannot, or as they start too frail, if they’re not making their number, or they’re missing their goal, you shrink the freedom box. You take away their chances to make decisions. And if it gets too small, then you put them on a plan and you boot them.”
Take the time to read about the “freedom box” in Keenan’s article in Forbes. That idea, coupled with the concept of a “coaching cadence,” a regular review meeting to evaluate progress and work on critical skills is a very powerful equation for producing better sales results.
Mike weighed in on this concept:
“That one thing, that one practice — that coaching cadence, as Jim calls it — of a regular formal meeting, one-on-one, sales manager to sales person, I’ve seen that behavior alone transform [a] sales culture from one that wasn’t focused on results at all to one where everybody got it.”
One-on-coaching. So simple that you would think every sales manager in the world practiced the habit.
But you would be wrong.
However, it’s an idea that two of the very best sales consultants in the world teach their clients.
I’d be tempted to listen.
Especially if you’re team doesn’t fall into the high-performance category.
Kelly Riggs is a business performance coach and founder of the Business LockerRoom. A former national Salesperson of the Year and serial entrepreneur, Kelly is a recognized thought leader in the areas of sales, management leadership, and strategic planning. He serves clients ranging from small, privately held companies to Fortune 500 firms. Kelly has written two books: “1-on-1 Management™: What Every Great Manager Knows That You Don’t” and “Quit Whining and Start SELLING! A Step-by-Step Guide to a Hall of Fame Career in Sales.”
