The Dangers of a Good Sales Economy

July 24th, 2018 // Christian

When sales are easy and profit is high, how hard do you work on refining your sales and training processes? Gut Check: If your honest answer is not at all because we are too busy selling, you are setting yourself up for long-term failure.

In my 20 years of sales leadership, I’ve seen the same story time-and-time again. The economy comes back. Sales start to flow. Your best people start earning big bucks. And everyone stops focusing on the new guys. Nobody minds the inefficiencies in the sales process. Customer follow ups and relationship go by the wayside. They’re all just “too busy.”

For the teams I lead and consult for, this doesn’t cut it. And there are good reasons why:

• Good leadership yields good results. “69% of high-performing salespeople rated their sales manager as excellent or above average.” This statistic from the Harvard Business Review is coupled with more than half of respondents agreeing that “outside of setting my quota, my sales manager plays a key role in determining whether or not I make quota.”
• Investing in your team and teaching them to invest in themselves increases employee retention, and millennials know this. A report from online training company Udemy showed that, “95 percent of millennials say lifelong learning and professional development are critical to their long-term success.”
• Helping your whole sale force grow, top-to-bottom, improves productivity.  A separate study showed that it pays to, “narrow the gap between the top 15% or 20% and the rest of the sales force. Companies that use the tactic well have found that, while even top sellers do better, reps in the lower quartiles show dramatic improvement, with productivity jumps of 200%.”

Always be Preparing for Rain and Drought

Recessions and booms are a truth for any economy and the companies in that economy. Great company leaders don’t spend time hoping for one or the delay of the other. They plan. Part of good planning is preparing the discipline of what activities we will do when sales are down. When we are calling our customers, putting together wish lists, remembering birthdays and other important days. But part of great planning is preparing your people to keep up these disciplines when things are good. Encouraging your top performers to take the time to work with each sale, even if it means handing off some sales to their junior sales people.

Especially if it means handing off some sales. Remember what we learned above. Giving them learning opportunities improves retention. Closing the gap between the lower performing sales people by increasing their sales increases sales across the board. Even for the high performing people.

There’s no one, universal plan for improving sales. But there are core disciplines and activities that keep sales people happy and growing. You’ll have to work out what that means for your company. And if you like, you can always call on me for advice. You can also attend one of our Intro to Smarketing courses to get to know us better.