In fact, if you violate some of the principles discussed below, there is no amount of sales training that will overcome those inherent problems.  Let’s take a look at some of the problems that you can address, next week, that will improve the productivity of your existing sales team without putting anyone through the cost, expense and inconvenience of a one- or two-day sales training “blitzkrieg”.

• Increase selling time: Over the years, many organizations have required salespeople to do many non-sales tasks.  Without exception, the number one sales productivity inhibitor is this incessant move, on the part of many managers, to have their salespeople conduct non-sales tasks.  In this regard, my rule is Salespeople should sell, and everyone else should do everything else. Give your salespeople more selling time, and they’ll sell more… it’s just that simple.
• Hiring mistakes: You can’t win a Super Bowl championship, if your team is made up of 150-lb. football players.  Many managers and CEOs hire good men and women in hopes that they will develop into good salespeople.  Small-to-medium businesses, which are the backbone of our economy, can’t afford to continue this practice.

  If you’re hiring a salesperson in the near future, before you write the offer letter, make sure that he/she can do the job the way you want them to do it and will do the job the way you want them to do it.  If you skip this, you will be one of the large number of companies that has made the half-million-dollar hiring mistake, when it comes to bringing salespeople on board.

• Alignment: It’s amazing how many companies sell with a complete misalignment between their marketing messages displayed on their website/brochures and/or during their salespeople’s presentations.  Make sure that your company “sings from the same hymnal”.

  In other words, align your marketing messages and value propositions throughout the sales cycle, from your website to your brochures to your business cards to the presentations that your salespeople make, as well as the elevator speeches that your non-sales but customer-facing employees are charged with presenting to customers, when they encounter a customer.

• Lead generation: Now, this is an area where the CEO of a company can dramatically impact his team’s ability to produce revenue.  In today’s world, it’s virtually impossible for salespeople to keep their funnels and pipelines full without assistance from a dedicated sales-ready lead-generator.

  In many organizations, this dedicated resource is a full-time Business Development Coordinator.  In others, it is a closed-loop marketing system.  And, in yet others, it’s a combination of those two functions.  Regardless of how you solve this problem, make sure that your company produces an adequate flow of sales-ready leads to fill the funnels of each of your salespeople and to keep them full at all times.

  In the 21st century, it is a waste of time (more often than not) to charge salespeople with prospecting, using 19th-century prospecting techniques.

• Lack of accountability: Many CEOs wring their hands over the poor performance their sales team produces, yet there is a reluctance on the part of that very same CEO to hold the sales team (collectively and/or individually) accountable for the quality and quantity of activities undertaken by the sales team.

  Frequently, CEOs react painfully when they’re accused of being a micromanager.  Holding your team accountable for the quantity and quality of work is no different when you do this for your sales team as when you do it for any other function within your business.

• Compensation: Many small-to-medium businesses overpay for underperformance.  Now, I don’t mean to infer any negative feelings with this statement.  I believe that this phenomenon of overpayment for underperformance is a result of operating without a documented sales process.

  Therefore, management is forced to pay salespeople to do things that salespeople either don’t do very well and/or aren’t very profitable for either the salesperson and/or the company.  Make sure that your sales process is 1) very well-documented and 2) followed religiously by your sales team.

  You’ll find that this activity, in and of itself, improves the effectiveness of a sales force by as much as 17%, according to some industry experts.

• Forecast management: Failure to understand why you and your team win opportunities, lose opportunities, and/or have opportunities postponed is a key contributor to repeating flawed strategies in hopes that, through this repetition, your results will change.  Obviously, this is applying the definition of insanity to your sales organization.

Overall, when you start investigating the quantity of sales time available to your team, why the time is what it is, as well as how to improve the amount of time available to your team, you’ll find that your top and bottom lines will go up.  Combine this with a dedication to the one missing ingredient that I have failed to mention so far in this article, which is sales practice.

Regardless of your team’s experience, you should hold practice sessions (a.k.a. role-playing) with your team regularly.  The CEO who ensures that his/her sales and marketing operations are managed in conjunction with the recommendations in this article is the CEO that’s well on his/her way to enjoying a company that produces predictable and profitable results.

Good Luck & Good Selling!!

My offer to help began what I eventually perceived to be a bit of a technological nightmare. Now I hasten to point out that the technology of bulk email marketing is quite simple and proven. Where things really got complicated was in the area of comparing pricing and services based on published plans from the various email service providers.

Candidly, it was maddening. For instance, the term “softbounce” is a very common term in email marketing. The complexity comes in under the definitions of various email marketing services.

You see, one of the differentiators of email marketing services is their claims of deliverability. How deliverability, and in the case soft bounces, are calculated vary infinitely. If there is no standardization of the methods under which these measurements are calculated, it is, therefore, impossible to ascertain which service is superior.

Another area of deliverability I found very perplexing was the ways in which various emails providers benchmark their deliverability. For instance, provider A claims they have X percent deliverable, however, once you peel back the details you will find that their percent is based on a percent of the total emails sent. Consequently when you are comparing a percent of a percent versus an actual percentage it gets to be complicated and mathematically impossible unless you are will to do a lot of “algebra” to understand which service is superior to which.

Then, this exercise really became fun when I contacted the various email service providers and asked them why they charge me for all of the emails sent. You see I’ve been in the marketing game long enough to know that even back in the days of “snail mail marketing” some percentage of every mailing never got delivered. In other words the perspective receiver had moved, address was incorrect, title was incorrect, names where misspelled, whatever. In those days we paid, and many companies continue to pay for mailings that don’t get delivered to the recipient. This is an absolute waste of money.

I reasoned that here in the 21st century and utilizing the power of computers one could differentiate between emails that are sent and emails that are actually received. However, none of the companies that I interviewed were able or willing to offer any rationale or reason as to why we would have to pay for emails that weren’t delivered.

It gets even worse when you realize that the purpose of an email marketing campaign is to bring prospects to your website. Now I really had some fun when I said” would you charge me for only those emails that produced the result my client desired”? I got a few chuckles over the phone some long awkward moments of silence and no positive responses. Most email marketing services believe this is either impossible and/or would be disastrous to their business.

I was however able to find one service that operates strictly on this principle and I’m here to tell you folks that I was surprised, shocked, amazed, and most importantly delighted at the simplicity of their program. Instead of presenting tons and tons of metrics volumes of reports analyzing anything and everything… except the most important thing; a new company called Pay Per Visit Email only charges for those emails that actually deliver the reader to my clients website!

This is a blessing! Stop and think about it if you’re using email to drive traffic to your website why would you pay for email that doesn’t get delivered? Or why would you pay for email that gets delivered but doesn’t drive traffic to the website?

Pay Per Visit has solved both of these problems. If you are interested in email marketing that is cost effective and conserves your budget you should certainly navigate over to the Pay Per Visit website. Let them show you how you can save money while increasing the effectiveness of your email marketing. One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed when I contacted them is the fact that they didn’t offer any training.

That’s right this is a technology tool that is so simple that there is no training associated with it. Compare that level of simplicity and that level of focus (delivering readers to the website) to the tons and tons of metrics complexities and measurements and percentages that other services offer. The level of information that the services provide could lead one to believe that they recognize that they aren’t doing the job that their clients actually want (delivering readers to the website) therefore their providing volumes upon volumes upon volumes of useless information designed to mask the fact that the real job, delivering readers to the website, is not being completed.

Should you have interest in this program contact Pay Per Visit Email at their website and I’m sure you will be delighted with the results they deliver. As always I wish you…

Good luck and good selling,

Gil Cargill

Studies have shown that as much as 87% of our business-to-business generated leads are never pursued.  That means that 87% of the buyer’s energy, effort, time and talent that your company expends on marketing is wasted.  This 87% leakage factor is extremely expensive.  This problem can only be fixed by implementing a closed-loop marketing system.  Cargill Consulting Group’s LeadMinder service will plug the leaks in your sales funnel and/or pipeline.

There are many reasons why leakage occurs but, most often, leakage occurs as a result of a phenomenon I have nicknamed “the gap of good intentions”.  Salespeople intend to follow up on all leads; unfortunately, many non-sales tasks are injected into their daily lives.  These non-sales tasks come from managers, customers, coworkers – you name it.  Regardless of the source, most non-sales tasks require immediate attention.

The more non-sales tasks with which your team is confronted, the less time they have available to follow up on good leads.  Consequently, these leads fall into the gap of good intentions.  As soon as that lead hits the gap of good intentions, your cost has gone up.  Tragically, there is very little or no potential for revenue to be generated from that particular lead.

Other studies have shown that most customers are not ready to buy until they have been touched seven or eight times.  By a “touch”, I simply mean a phone call, fax, email, face-to-face meeting and/or letter.  Unfortunately, most salespeople can’t follow up on opportunities at anywhere near this level.

Still other studies show that some sales – particularly, the more complicated technological sale – require two, three or even four dozen touches before a new customer is ready to sign a contract.  Once again, the typical salesperson cannot follow up on an opportunity at this level.

There are many reasons that suppress the ability of the sales professional to follow up.  Most impactful of these is the typical commission plan.  Take a look at your commission plan and I think you will agree that, in all probability, your plan encourages your salespeople to focus on next month’s next quarter’s business.  Unfortunately, most customers aren’t ready to buy in that period of time.  Here again is another contributor to the gap of good intentions.

Some studies show that as many as 94% of all salespeople abandon their efforts to gain new business after only four attempts.  Yet again, the typical customer isn’t ready to make a commitment to a new vendor and/or new product/service with any fewer than eight attempts.  When you add it all up, this is a conspiracy of circumstances that robs your business of its ability to generate revenue and profit at the levels you would like to see.

The only cure for this problem is for someone other than the salesperson to be responsible for follow-up.  This is where you have a golden opportunity to get into the lead-minding business.  Lead-minding, simply stated, is nothing more sophisticated than staying in touch with everyone who says “not now.”

If you were to stay in touch with all of the leads that your company generated through tradeshows, direct mail, websites, et cetera and stayed in touch with those opportunities perpetually, I am sure you would agree that your top line would go up dramatically.  It is the inability of the modern sales force to stay in touch that is creating this profitability conundrum.

We must solve this problem by assigning this follow-up to someone other than the salesperson.  In this regard, I believe that salespeople should sell and everyone else should do everything else.  Let me repeat that: “Salespeople should sell and everyone else should do everything else.”

If you have a team of salespeople who are fed nothing but high-quality, nurtured leads that are ready to buy, your salespeople will never allow an opportunity to fall into the gap of good intentions.  Most lead-generation programs produce leads that, at least from the salesperson’s point of view, are premature, poorly incubated and not yet ready to buy.

Producing volumes of leads that are not yet ready to buy or change is doing nothing but exacerbating the gap of good intentions problem.  Worse, your salespeople get frustrated, and it contributes to reduced morale on the part of your sales team.  I suggest that you employ a tool or a team of people to nurture your leads.  Nurturing your leads is as simple as sending a well-written business letter to a prospect every month.

Please note: I am an advocate of sending letters as opposed to emails or postcards.  Emails and postcards are, in my opinion, the lazy man’s way to nurture a lead and, unfortunately, most customers in today’s world have email spam blockers that prohibit emails from getting through.  I have also found, and this was reinforced by a study published recently by the postal service, that a well-written business letter has 38% more impact on the buyer’s mind than an email.

When you combine the fact that most buyers will never see your email and, even if they do, it is 38% less effective than a letter, then the argument for sending business letters is very sound and extraordinarily productive.  I suggest writing one letter a month to each of your prospects.

Now, I don’t want to begin to claim that I am invented this concept.  Rather, the first documented incident of a sales professional utilizing this stay-in-touch approach to marketing was written in 1965.  It was documented in a book written by Joe Girard called, “How to Sell Anything to Anybody”.  Joe Girard, in my opinion, is the grandfather of nurture- or direct-marketing.

Joe created a closed-loop marketing system that was manually managed and manually powered but extremely effective.  Joe sold new cars from a Chevrolet dealership in Detroit.  According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Joe Girard set a sales record back in the 1960s that still stands!  What was Joe’s secret?

Joe simply stated that he sent a postcard, manually addressed and handwritten, to everyone he ever met.  The content of those postcards was, by today’s standards, quite humorous.  However, what Joe was doing was staying in touch with everyone who said, “Not now.”

He developed a manual system to close the gap of good intentions and keep it sealed permanently.  By staying in touch with everyone who indicated any degree of interest in buying a new car at any point in the future, Joe Girard was able to become the world’s number one, all-time record-holding car salesman.

To put it in perspective, his W-2 in the mid-60s selling Chevrolets was well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Also, if you wished to buy a new car from Joe Girard, you needed to wait roughly six weeks to get an appointment with him.  Contrast that to the amount of top-of-mind awareness your current sales and marketing efforts are generating.

Not only should you attempt to fill the gap of good intentions, but a properly designed closed-loop marketing system will also ensure that you have obtained and, more importantly, maintained top-of-mind awareness with all desirable decision-makers in all of demographically desirable accounts, all of the time.

In subsequent articles, I will show you how to develop your own closed-loop marketing system.  The key is getting in touch and staying in touch with all decision-makers at all times.  When you can achieve that, you will never again ask the question, “Why does marketing cost so much?”

Rather, you will say, “How can I invest more money into my marketing and sales efforts to produce even more high-quality, nurtured leads that will close in a short timeframe?”  You will find that, as a result of doing this, your sales team’s morale goes up and your top and bottom lines improve, as do the W-2s of your salespeople.

Most importantly, and this almost seems ironic, but your cost of sales will decrease, while W-2s and profits increase.  The reason for that is, by closing this gap of good intentions, you are taking a very inefficient and, therefore, costly process and turning it into a very efficient and, therefore, profitable process.

Give it a shot, and I look forward to your comments in this regard.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!

By constantly focusing on what’s next, you will be able to align your organization’s resources to capitalize on the new opportunities coming down the pike.  I don’t believe there has ever been a time in the history of sales where so many new products, services, concepts, etc. have been available for us to market.  Unfortunately, many of us are rooted in following the best practices of the “good old days”.

The best practices many of us follow were first established back in the 19th Century!  In today’s environment, those best practices could drive your organization’s productivity and profitability down.  So, let’s take a look at some of the next practices that are producing incremental profit and success for many business-to-business sales organizations.

• Dedicated Prospecting Department:  Without doubt, one of the next practices that will significantly impact your sales results is to have a dedicated prospecting department.  The purpose of this department is to 1) build a database that is accurate and 2) book appointments for your sales team.
• Territory Analysis:  Past best practices have caused many sales representatives to create and manage a book of business, which provides them with a satisfactory income.  However, this practice does not encourage salespeople to go out and find new accounts.  Therefore, I suggest you separate all of the accounts in your marketplace into two huge categories: active accounts (those people currently buying from you) and prospects (those who are not).
• The territory plan that seems to work very well as a next practice is to assign all inactive and/or prospective accounts to a different set of salespeople.  The job of these people is to open these accounts and get in the door.  By “building around” your existing team, you are able to create much greater territory penetration and, ultimately, profit.
• Compensation:  A next practice for compensation is to create compensation plans that pay the sales representative relative to the growth he/she creates within their territory.  This may be a pay-per-click compensation and/or a plan that pays against the percent of quota or goal.  Absolute comp plans (those that pay a percentage of every dollar coming in the door) contribute to the stagnation of an organization’s growth.
• Recruiting:  A next practice that should be embraced is the need to constantly recruit new salespeople.  Get out and find salespeople in all areas.  Bring them on board and show them how to make money for themselves, as well as for you, as quickly as possible.  This may require that one of your next practices is the creation of a novice training program.

The world is changing very rapidly.  Dwelling on best practices is a mistake.  Rather, let’s start looking at next practices, get out ahead of our competition, and enjoy the future as it comes at us at unprecedented speed.

If you have any questions regarding these concepts, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!

When you have the ability to help your customer achieve a permanent improvement in one or more circumstances within their business, then your pipeline is indeed a list of potential new deals.  Following are some questions that I suggest you examine for each opportunity in your current pipeline.  If you can’t answer these questions, then you don’t have a pipeline but, rather, a pipe dream.

Is there an opportunity?  Are you working with an organization that has a real opportunity to address real needs, and will they do it in a timeframe that makes sense for your company?  Do they recognize that improving or remedying the situation will have a tremendous impact on their business?  Are you talking to all of the people who have the ability to authorize a release of funds, a change in processes, a change in vendors, etc.?  If not, you may not have an opportunity.

Can you compete?  Sometimes, circumstances are such that competing for the opportunity is not feasible.  Would you need a level of sales support that cannot be provided due to scheduling and/or other conflicts within your organization?  Or, is the opportunity of such a magnitude that your organization cannot handle it by itself?

There are many issues that can impact an organization’s ability to compete.  You need to clearly understand all those issues as they apply to your organization as well as to the potential opportunity you are reviewing.  In the event you cannot compete, you should withdraw the opportunity from your pipeline.

Do you want this customer?  Should you actually win the opportunity, will it significantly advance your goals as well as those of your company?  If not, you need to reconsider this pursuing this opportunity.

Once closed, will the opportunity be profitable?  One of the quickest ways to go out of business and/or experience sales burnout is by pursuing deals that are unprofitable.  Not only do you incur the cost of pursuing the deal (hard dollars plus your time), but you also have the heartache of waking up one morning with a new customer who is not capable of providing your organization with the level of profit you need or desire.

Or, on the other side of that coin, you have closed a deal that requires far more support than you and/or your organization is prepared to deliver.  In that sense, you have worked hard to lose money and, now that you have lost some money, your relationship with this customer will continue to cost you money.  Obviously, this is not the way you want to go.

A very sharp and, indeed, a cynical eye applied to each opportunity going into your pipeline will keep some of these problems out of your life.  Make sure that you screen all opportunities going into your pipeline against this standard.

In summary, being skeptical about opportunities is a very valuable strategy for sales organizations.  Only work with those opportunities that will work with you in the form and fashion with which you and your organization are best prepared to work.  Establish very clearly your description of and criteria for an ideal opportunity and, most importantly, avoid changing it to allow unproductive and/or unprofitable opportunities into the pipeline.

By adhering very closely to this rule, you will prohibit bad opportunities from getting into your pipeline and you will give yourself more time to go pursue good opportunities.  At the same time, you will eliminate one of the major causes of sales burnout and sales stress.  Pay attention to what gets into your pipeline, and you will never have to suffer the frustration of realizing you have only a pipe dream instead of a viable pipeline.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!

Traditional sales training doesn’t work for several reasons.  First, selling is a team sport.  Consequently, if we only focus our training and development efforts on our salespeople, we are missing a significant component of the productivity and profitability that could be generated.  Even if a sales team is highly skilled, highly motivated and incredibly well-managed, they will not produce optimum levels of profit if an organization’s operations and administrative staff are performing the functions of a “sales prevention department”.

Most companies spend little or no energy to improve the skills and proficiency of their non-sales, customer-facing employees, who have the ability to accelerate or decelerate sales at unprecedented levels.  A world-class sales organization should not only train its salespeople, but it should also train all of its non-sales employees who have any opportunity whatsoever to interact with customers.

Make sure that all your non-sales, “customer-facing” employees have the ability to articulate your company’s value proposition.  Make sure they understand that, although they are not directly in sales, they have the ability to “un-sell” an account at least ten times faster than a salesperson can sell the account.  This is one reason why traditional sales training fails to produce the results senior management expects.

Another is the fact that you can train your salespeople in any one of a number of popular sales-training methodologies.  However, if they are improperly hired, poorly coached or incorrectly compensated, then your training dollars will be wasted because they won’t produce the uptick in productivity or profitability that you’re looking for.  Now, that may sound critical of the sales management team but, in fact, I am very sympathetic to today’s sales managers.

Most sales “managers” have never received any training in how to manage or coach salespeople.  More often than not, these managers come from the sales ranks and, after having received their promotion, are told to do the best they can.  They are literally forced to learn on the job, using the time-tested but highly unpredictable and unprofitable method known as “by hook or by crook”.

The combination of all the reasons above serves to stress the importance of training the entire company – not just the sales team – how to find, acquire and retain customers more proficiently.  Only when the proper message can be delivered, via an effective training method, to the proper employee and in the proper timeframe can one be assured that your training dollars will produce an uptick in productivity and profitability.

If you’re thinking about training your salespeople, I suggest you make sure that you have the bandwidth to train your entire company.  Look around you.  Isn’t it ironic that some of the lowest paid employees (i.e., receptionist, administrative support, etc.) receive the least amount of training yet still have an extraordinarily large amount of customer interaction?  Your goal should be to have your entire company trained and operating as a unified team in order to predictably and proactively find, acquire and retain new business.

I hope I have impressed upon you the importance of improving the sales productivity of your entire organization, utilizing some “untraditional” sales training concepts.  When the challenges of productivity and profitability are dealt with as a cohesive team, then and only then will you optimize the results they produce and start generating the profits you deserve.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!

Inquiry Defined

Inquiries are responses to your marketing efforts from an individual or organization that may have interest in creating a relationship with your company.  I say “may”, as the conversion rate from inquiries to transactions is traditionally low.

However, research shows that anywhere from 45-63% of all inquiries eventually purchase products or services identical to that which they inquired about.  Unfortunately, this process takes anywhere from six to eighteen months, and the typical salesperson is neither able nor willing to nurture a relationship for that long.

To rectify this situation, I suggest keeping all inquiries within the marketing department, until the inquiry has been completely profiled and the decision-maker has agreed to an appointment.  By my definition, an inquiry does not become a lead until the customer has committed to a calendared appointment.

Again, the typical salesperson cannot stay in touch with a growing list of inquiries to ensure they are positioned with the prospect when the prospect is ready to buy.  This can easily be remedied by creating a nurture-marketing capability that uses regular emails, postcards or any number of marketing strategies to maintain top-of-mind awareness with all inquiries until they commit to meeting with a sales rep.

Lead Defined

As mentioned above, a lead is an inquiry that has committed to a meeting with a member of your sales team.  Once leads are distributed, the sales reps must be held accountable for managing those leads.  Some studies show it costs as much as $200 (and, in some cases, even more) to get one qualified lead into the hands of a salesperson.

Research done by the Dartnell Institute indicates that fully 90% of all salespeople abandon leads after their fourth attempt to advance them through the sales cycle and that the vast majority of customers will not be ready to buy until they have been contacted anywhere from eight to twelve times.

Therefore, although the marketing department may have given the salesperson a very good lead, the salesperson is not trained or managed to ensure that all leads are pursued until they either buy or signal an absolute decision to turn down your organization’s offer.

Summary

You can eliminate conflicts between sales and marketing by holding salespeople accountable for every lead assigned to them.  If you use a CRM system, all your salespeople should track and report on all leads weekly.  You would never allow haphazard management of any other $200 asset and, when you consider the lifetime value of new clients, poorly managing a lead that could potentially become a client would be financially catastrophic!

Your sales and marketing teams must have a clear understanding of the definitions of inquiries versus leads and should ensure the sales team understands whether they are receiving inquiries or leads from your marketing efforts.  Once definitions have been agreed upon, communicate to all members of the sales and marketing teams how they will operate.

Establish some sort of a nurturing capability within your organization so that no “raw” inquiries are ever distributed to your sales force.  This may minimize the volume of leads going to the field, but the quality of leads will improve dramatically and that, in turn, will improve morale and eliminate conflicts between sales and marketing.

Lastly, hold your entire sales team (whether direct or indirect) accountable for proper management and reporting of all leads.  All salespeople should indicate any progress, or lack thereof, on all leads on a weekly basis and should provide management with a regular win/loss/postpone report on each lead.

If your organization generates leads for independent channels, establish rules clearly stating that any dealers, VARs or agents who do not provide updated reports will no longer receive leads from your organization.  That may sound harsh, but leads are too valuable to not be pursued diligently and consistently.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!

First, the man or woman selected as a sales manager was probably selected because of their sales ability.  I am confident that they were not selected because of their administrative or paperwork-shuffling abilities.  However, many companies have incorrectly eliminated this valuable resource of sales support from their organization.  Consequently, the most talented, most productive and most profitable sales representative is promoted into a position of being an ineffective, and frequently very frustrated, paperwork administrator.

These managers should take heart and have a meeting with their bosses in order to negotiate a different deployment of their job.  I would love to see all sales managers involved in very consistent and proactive coaching of their sales teams.  Without doubt, the team performs better when managers coach.  Following is a coaching structure that I have laid out for you.

The first step to implementing a successful coaching program is to identify which one of your employees needs the assistance.  Sales managers who try to work with the entire team to dramatically improve the performance of their entire team frequently encounter a “top stop” on their ability to impact the organization.  This is due to the simple fact that today’s sales manager has so many things to do that they may be able to only barely squeeze some coaching into their life.

So, take it easy on yourself and identify your worst performer.  After you have done that, identify the causes of their performance problem.  Then, you need to develop a coaching program to help that individual start moving towards higher levels of productivity and profitability.  Before you do that, however, make sure that you have a genuine conversation with your employee.  This conversation should focus on how the employee feels about his/her performance.

If the employee feels that they are doing a fantastic job, then you have the challenge of synchronizing your evaluations.  Coaching will not work under any circumstances where the employee feels that they do not need or, worse, don’t want any coaching.  However, assuming that the employee does want the assistance and/or feels that they can benefit from some coaching, then you are ready to launch the program.

An intensive coaching program should last for anywhere from four to six weeks.  I have labeled this an intensive program because you will be working with one employee for a short period of time to address a few weaknesses.  Don’t try to fix everything all at once.  After all, I believe it is virtually impossible for an employee to do <u>everything</u> incorrectly.  Consequently, let’s focus on the biggest issues first.  Once you have diagnosed the cause of the problem, you then must write a “prescription”.

The prescription could include time in the field with you, time at their cubicle (in the event that you are a telemarketing company), sales practice with you and/or conducting role-playing sessions with other members of the team.  Regardless of the prescription, once it is written, you owe your employee a commitment of time to make sure that the prescription is followed.  Assuming that that is moving forward properly, then you will be in the great position to monitor their progress.

At each step along the way, you may have to give your employee some verbal encouragement.  Remember, they are working through a process of change.  Frequently, any progress can be retarded or eliminated in the event that the manager isn’t cognizant and/or doesn’t acknowledge the effort and progress that the employee is making.  Conduct regular plan-and-review sessions with your employee during this four- to six-week period.  Again, make sure that you distribute an appropriate number of “atta girls” or “atta boys” to your employee.

If you were to look in a dictionary back in the 17th century, you would find that the definition of a coach was “a vehicle intended to move very important people from one place to another”.  In that regard, I think your employees are the very important people and that you, their sales manager, should be the vehicle that moves them to sales success.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!

I have to admit that I have had to take a crash course in both of these technologies.  My good friend and strategic partner, Maggie Strevell at Naper Solutions, has been my tutor.  Her lessons have been augmented by input from my son, Edward Cargill, who has his Master’s Degree in Computer Science.

The reason I say I’ve had to gain a crash-course education in this is because I have sensed, for quite some time now, that it is an extremely powerful method of gaining leads.  As you will know if you’re a consistent reader of my newsletter and/or blog, filling the funnel is my passion.

I read an article several months ago indicating that fully 80+% of all business-to-business product or service searches start on the web.  That’s right; you read it correctly.  Eighty percent of your prospects, who don’t know your organization, will start a search for products and services like that which you sell on the web.  Therefore, I believe that your web presence has to become part of your sales and marketing arsenal.

It’s no longer sufficient to have a website that is just pretty.  Frankly, pretty doesn’t matter.  Now, in this environment where there’s a lot of noise and hype regarding SEO and PPC marketing strategies, one must be very careful to avoid the charlatans.  Those charlatans are those people who constantly spam you, promising to put your website at the #1 position.

Following, please find some of the lessons I’ve learned (some at my own expense) prior to meeting Maggie and taking input from my son.

• It’s easy to promise a #1 position.  It’s easy to get there, but it is very difficult to stay there.  Consequently, be very careful before engaging an SEO or a Pay-Per-Click service provider who promises the #1 position but doesn’t show you how they’ll get you there and, more importantly, how they’ll keep you there.
• The secret sauce is in the background.  That’s right; keywords, tags, links and many other variables (which I, to this day, don’t clearly understand) are evaluated by the search engines before ranking your website.  You can spend a ton – and, I repeat, a ton – of money on keyword advertising via the Pay-Per-Click route and not gain the results you want.  Once again, the important and only consideration is whether or not your Pay-Per-Click and SEO advertising puts leads into your funnel.
• 87% of those leads are never properly pursued.  That’s right; nothing can be more wasteful of your marketing dollars than engaging the services of a Pay-Per-Click or SEO provider and failing to follow up on all leads until they “buy or die”.
• It ain’t easy.  The aforementioned charlatans make Pay-Per-Click and SEO sound very easy.  It’s not.  In order to optimize and maintain an optimum position, your website needs to be worked on constantly.  This is one of the lessons that I learned the hard way.  You see; even optimizing a webpage is not enough.  There must be a long-term strategy to maintain that position which includes great content and link building.  Any position below the first page is a virtual waste of your time and money.
• Inspect the results.  You should know if a lead came from an organic result, paid ad or referring website.  Examine where your leads are coming from, tracking a keyword to a sale.  Examine the number of leads generated by your website and timely follow-up activity.  In addition, make sure that whoever is managing your website not only provides you with analytics but also helps you understand what metrics are important to improving your lead-generation strategy.

As a result of her tutoring, Maggie Strevell of Naper Solutions has helped me understand web marketing and has upgraded my website’s position in the search engines.  She has offered my clients a free service to evaluate your website without charge.  That’s right; she’s offering a free website evaluation to any of my readers.  If you’d like to take advantage of this, please contact Maggie and tell her that you read Gil Cargill’s blog.

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!

James Obermayer, Executive Director of the Sales Lead Management Association, says that sales pipeline leakage is one of the key contributors to profitability problems.  Jim has published several books on the need to plug the leaks in your sales pipeline or funnel.  You can find a ton of useful information regarding this topic at the Sales Lead Management Association website, where you can download very detailed reports examining this phenomenon.

Simply stated, fizzling will stop when you plug the leaks in your pipeline.  One of the best ways to do that is to have a fully automated closed-loop marketing system working for you.  An automated closed-loop marketing system will maintain top-of-mind awareness with all of your prospects and customers throughout every phase of the sales cycle.  That, in turn, prevents leakage and fizzling.  Make sure you plug your leaks and hold yourself and your team accountable for the satisfactory, professional, yet persistent pursuit of all qualified opportunities.  As always, I wish you…

GOOD LUCK & GOOD SELLING!!