Brief Philosophy On Sales
It’s easy for sales to feel like nothing more than some organized chaos. It’s easy to get lost and
begin to feel like you’re some rock star going with the flow. While natural talent gets by for a
while, it’s true that there is more method than madness with sales, especially if you want to be a
long term and consistent performer. It’s not as romantic as we all once thought and it turns out
there are perfect ways to calculate and organize your progress as a sales representative. There
is no science that will predict exactly how much you’ll make or how many deals you will write but
there 100% is science to keep you on the right path and achieving a baseline consistently.
Dipping a bit under that baseline or going to the moon will be determined by nuance, level of
attention, and the extra, but there is no sales career without a baseline.
Call Volume and Performance Evaluation
If you have a lost sales rep on your hands, they may have become the embodiment of external
locus of control. Like dealing with a schizophrenic patient, the only thing you can do to start is
reassure them of reality with proof. The best place to begin evaluating the progress of a sales
agent is in their daily call volume. It’s commonly understood that to have a successful sales day,
you need to dial the phone a minimum of 100 times per day. This information is outdated with
new dialer tech and other tools so realistically hundreds of calls should be made a day but at a
minimum: 100 calls should be made daily. If you pull your sales agents’ calls to find less than
100 dials a day, you have identified the problem right away. Sales is truly a numbers game; if
the rep doesn’t even make 100 calls, this means they did not even create enough opportunities
to see real results in the first place. How could they close any deals if no deals are opened? The
next ratio to observe is calls attempted vs quotes (or proposals) generated.
Save Them From Themselves
Think of your struggling sales rep as a person who has been possessed by an unreasonable
spirit. This unreasonable spirit is cunning and self destructive and will hide itself out of plain
sight. Maybe the sales agent made 200 calls in a day but did not generate a single quote,
proposal, or at least generated way fewer than 200 calls should have produced. The answer
you’re looking for is likely in the call recordings. Pull calls and listen. You’ll find that your rep is
making a poor attempt to open calls. When someone answers a sales call, they want
enthusiasm; they want to hear the excited voice of an expert they can trust. If your agent is
sounding mopey or defeated in the open, that is exactly why they aren’t making deals. The
agent might as well be calling everyone and telling them not to work with him. This is an even
more severe and costly situation too. With the rep that makes no calls, at least they don’t touch
the leads. Sales reps who dial 200 leads just to sound like they are dying of a terminal illness on
every call, are literally burning your leads and wasting your money. They are making it difficult
for your qualified reps to get deals as the leads who answer the phone are declining and
hanging up. Listen to call opens and train your reps on strategies to sound more enthusiastic
and to separate them from their competition!
Conclusion
Show the rep the call recordings so they can hear the lack of enthusiasm and teach them to
correct it. You’ll be amazed to find how many times your sales reps hang up on a lay down!
Show them their lack of call attempts if that’s the issue and let them know to step it up or step
out the door!