In his book, Leadership Secrets of the
Rogue Warrior, Richard Marcinko, the founder and first Commanding
Officer of SEAL Team Six, the U.S. Navy's first counter-terrorist
unit, wrote, "When you're a warrior, death is always looking over
your shoulder. And we all knew there was just one way to improve the
odds of survival: train, train, train."
The sales arena isn't the
battlefield, and your salespeople don't have "death" looking over
their shoulders. However, the specter of "failure" is ever-present.
And, while you are not a SEAL team leader, you are a sales team
leader, and part of your responsibility is to help your team members
hone their skills, refine their strategies, and increase the
effectiveness and efficiency of their performance. In other words
... train, train, train.
How much time and effort do you
devote to helping your team members improve the odds of their
survival? How do you monitor their performance and assess their
training needs? And, how do you measure their performance
improvement?
Without specific benchmarks of
performance, you can't do any of those things.
So, which elements of performance
should you monitor? Conventional wisdom suggests results - the
number of completed prospecting calls, the number of closed sales,
or the amount of generated revenue, for instance - as appropriate
benchmarks of performance.
But are they?
Some salespeople work long and hard
to achieve the results that others achieve with much less effort.
So, while results - specifically, poor results - may indicate the
need for training, they don't tell the whole story. They don't
reveal the efficiency or effectiveness of the efforts applied or the
amount of resources expended to achieve the results. Consequently,
they don't pinpoint the specific areas in which training will be the
most beneficial.
So, if looking only at the end
results is not the best gauge for determining training needs, on
which aspects of performance should you focus? To answer that
question, you must first identify the structural components of the
process that lead up to the results being monitored.
Suppose you use "closed sales" as a
performance indicator. The anatomy of the process leading to a
closed sale might look like this:
-
Prospecting activities lead to...
-
Conversations with decision makers,
which lead to...
-
Appointments where opportunities are
uncovered and developed, which lead to...
-
Generation and delivery or proposals
and presentations, which lead to...
-
Buying decisions and completed sales
-
The origin of poor results - too few
completed sales - may reside at any step.
By monitoring each element of the
process over time, conversion ratios - how often a salesperson moves
from one step to the next - will emerge. Ratios for top producers
and veteran salespeople will be different than those of
middle-of-the-pack producers and new salespeople. Those statistics
provide valuable information regarding performance and reveal areas
for training.
Let's compare the activities of two
salespeople - Mary and John - and the ultimate results each attains
from initially investing three hours making calls to prospects in a
targeted group.
-
John: 40 calls; 24 conversations with
decision makers; 11 appointments scheduled; 6 presentations made;
2 sales completed
-
Mary: 66 calls; 28 conversations with
decision makers; 9 appointments scheduled; 4 presentations made; 3
sales completed
-
John is put through to the decision
maker 60% of the time. His appointments-to-conversations ratio is
46%; presentations-to-appointments ratio is 55%; and his ultimate
closing ratio - sales-to-presentations - is 33%.
-
Now, let's look at Mary's numbers. She
is only put through to the decision maker 42% of the time. Her
appointments-to-conversations ratio is 32%, and her
presentations-to-appointments ratio is 44% - all less than John's
ratio. However, her ultimate closing ratio is 75%, significantly
higher than John's.
If we look at the "numbers" typically
monitored - prospecting calls completed and sales closed - Mary is
doing just fine. Her prospecting number is high, as is her closing
percentage. The numbers suggest that John, on the other, needs to be
shipped off to prospecting boot camp and then enrolled in
presentation skills training.
What's the real story?
While Mary made slightly more than
one and a half times the number of calls as John, she only got
through to a few more decision makers than he did. Since both were
working from the same prospect list, either John was incredibly
lucky ... or Mary needs to hone her "getting-past-the-gatekeeper"
skills - a more likely explanation.
The numbers also suggest that John
and Mary are at opposite ends of the "qualifying" spectrum. John
invested more time in his conversations with prospects than Mary -
thereby speaking to fewer people - yet, he scheduled more
appointments than she. Ultimately, however, he closed fewer sales
than she did.
The explanation: John was "begging"
for appointments. He needs to be more selective in weeding out the
suspects from the prospects earlier in the process. Mary, on the
other hand, was too selective. She was "over qualifying" prospect s.
She was asking for a commitment - or too big a commitment - too
soon. And, when she received any form of pushback, she abandoned the
opportunity.
When you look beyond the "results"
numbers and examine the "conversion" numbers (and the practices from
which they are derived), it no longer makes sense to send John to
prospecting or presentation skills training, or to give Mary a pass
on training. Both can benefit from training that focuses on how to
better qualify opportunities, starting with the initial contact with
a prospect and continuing through the selling process.
So, if you're going to "train, train,
train" to ensure your team's survival (and you should), make sure
your efforts are directed at the aspects of performance that will
bring about the greatest impact.
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