HOW GOOD IS YOUR SALES TEAM?
By Bob Lanza
All owners and managers of sales organizations should be spending time dwelling over
the question, how good is my sales team?
 What process do we follow to select members of our most valuable asset?
 How effective are we at identifying quality prospects?
 Do we utilize multiple sources to search for prospects?
 What methods do we use to have on-going dialog with prospects?
 How do we determine who we will get face to face with?
 Are we asking the correct questions and obtaining the proper information to
provide a recommendation the prospect wants?
 Are we selling on margin?
 Are we leveraging the proper testimonials to convince our prospects we are the
least risk solution?
As you begin to answer these and other questions a clearer picture will develop. Are you
an owner/manager who is in denial? Perhaps because numbers are being hit you are
looking the other way. There are a host of issues that can dupe you into thinking that
things are okay.
1. Strong brands create a weak sales force!
You may be obtaining business in your region due to a strong brand created by a
corporate marketing machine and national account team. Though there is nothing
generally wrong with this it creates a weak sales effort on the local and regional level
as the branch becomes staffed with “service-oriented” staff and not ”business
development staff”. I have countless examples of larger entities that are wondering
why they cannot obtain the larger margin boutique business.
2. Low price/small margins can create a weak sales force!
Out in the staffing market there are plenty of firms whose strategy is to be the lowest
priced option. My intent is not to stand on a soapbox and comment on any firm’s
pricing strategy. Organizations have succeeded for years being and promoting
themselves as the low price option in their market or industry. If this truly is how
someone decides to gain market share then there is not much orientation or training
we need to provide the sales team. Basically just get out there and extract your
client’s current pricing and beat the rate/fee.
3. Lack of strong competition can fool you.
Some of you out there who are working in the large metropolitan areas probably find
this hard to believe. If you are operating in a large city in the United States, it is not
unusual to have hundreds of competitors who are providing the same services as you.
I have witnessed over the past five years several rural and suburban markets where an
organization had a nice percentage of market penetration only because their
competition is so bad. Once their competition ups their game or a new competitor
moves into the market they can lose market share dramatically.
4. You are in a service or sales maintenance mode.
This could be the worst virus to infect the building of a high performance sales team.
I have seen many successful organizations that balance between selling new business
and filling the job orders they have. When they have no job orders they sell. When
they have job orders they service. This is okay. Much of this boils down to the goals
of the organization and the ownership. Unfortunately, I have witness cultures where
selling is something you do when there is nothing else to do. What we fail to realize
is that when you sell today you are really working towards business 3-5 months from
now.
Review these top four points and discuss them with your team. Try to do an honest
appraisal of your situation to determine if these may be affecting your staffing
organization. Then look at your team and review the numbers that you hold them
accountable for. After your analysis you may decide to re-establish goal setting and other
targets. If you are not already doing so you should be stressing full margin selling. Also
make sure that your team understands what margin is and why it is so important. It is
shocking how many staffing organizations have a mystery around gross margin. If I ask
ten frontline staffing employees to explain to me how there firm establishes gross margin,
less then half will provide me with a full or correct answer. It’s all about margin.
Other steps you should be taking:
1. Monitor the competition - In the big world of business well-run companies know
what the competition is doing. The academics call it competitive intelligence. Coke
knows everything that Pepsi is doing. Wal-Mart is on top of Target. Microsoft has
teams of people who are watching everything that Apple does. So why do we know
very little about our competition. Sure we may know some basic surface stuff, but
are we in touch with how they are positioned in the market. If you want to find out
what your team is made of, assign each one of them one of your competitors and have
them present their findings in the next sales meeting. We spend a great deal of time
in the IMPACT for Staffing Sales Program on competitive intelligence.
2. Observe salespeople in the field - This is an absolute must if you are to have a handle
on the performance of your team. You must be in the field providing valuable inprocess coaching. Many staffing owners/managers are only providing the end-
process measurement of monthly sales. By just looking at the end process you could
be too late for any course correction.
3. Look for year after year improvement - Your people should be showing some
improvement year after year in their gross margin. If not, then we need to look under
the hood and perform a diagnosis of all critical points.
4. Monitor marketplace trends - In the movie, Other Peoples Money, Danny DeVito
plays a tough Wall Street shark who is involved in hostile takeovers. During one of
his speeches to a group of employees he says,” There were once good people in this
country that made great horse and buggy whips then the automobile came.” If we
have a blind eye to what is happening in our market we will wake up one day and
wonder what happen. There is nothing exciting about going after increase market
share of a decreasing market.
5. Develop stats that are relative to driving new business - A frequent questions I am
asked by staffing owners/managers is what are acceptable activity numbers to hold
my group accountable for. I do not have a one size fits all approach to this question.
Number of calls, number of face to face appointments, number of new client visits,
number of networking opportunities, new job orders generated etc. all are noble
pursuits to increase business. What I always recommend is that you come up with an
average to a certain activity based on the level of experience. A new rep is geared
towards prospecting activity while a more experienced rep may be steered more
towards orders and horizontal/vertical account integration.
Take the time to review your business development efforts. In a time where most
services are in a heavy maintenance mode, very often we overlook the other main artery
of our staffing organization - the sales force.