Tag: Sales Management

According to CSOinsights.com less than half of inside sales teams make their revenue goals each month.  If you’re a business owner or sales manager of an inside sales team, then I’ll bet you can relate.  So what differentiates the half that makes their numbers from the half that doesn’t?

Obviously there are many factors and each company is different, but there are 5 common mistakes I regularly encounter whenever I work with companies who are struggling to consistently make their revenue goals.  If you can avoid these mistakes from the beginning – or correct them now – you can immediately begin to get better results, and that means you can begin to make your revenue numbers. 

Here are the 5 mistakes to avoid when building or developing your inside sales team: 

1)      Not having a clearly defined sales process (DSP). Nearly every struggling sales team I work with lacks a clear definition of what defines a successful sales cycle.  While they may know they have to cold call or prospect to generate a lead and then call that lead back and close the sale, what is missing are the exact benchmarks (best practices) of what defines each step.  Without this clarity, it’s difficult to teach your reps how to consistently close sales (which is why they don’t half the time). 

Not having these benchmarks – and so not being able to identify, verify and teach each step successfully – leads to many of the problems inside sales teams have.  If you haven’t taken the time to identify your DSP, then this is job #1 for you.  

2)      Not having a training program that teaches your sales reps exactly how to succeed in the selling situations they encounter day in and day out.  Think for a moment about your Top 20% sales reps.  Isn’t it true that they seem to intuitively know what to say and what to do to close sales faster and more efficiently than the other 80% of your team? 

Many sales teams I work with may have a structured training program in place (and I say ‘may have’ because some don’t) but most of them don’t have a sales training program that teaches their sales reps exactly what to say and what to do in every selling situation to be successful (think scripts here).  In other works, the best practices of their DSP are not the focus of their sales training, and this is why their teams struggle to win sales.  

Job #2 for you is to script out your best practices and make sure every member of your team has the core selling skills needed to succeed in the selling situations they face every day. 

3)       Measuring the wrong metrics of your sales team.  While most managers and business owners can tell me how many calls their reps are making, how many opportunities they are getting, what their close rates are, etc., what they can’t tell me is what really matters: What their reps are saying during their calls.  Don’t get me wrong, those other metrics are important to know and track, but they do not drive sales!  How your reps are qualifying their prospects, how they handle objections and what they are doing and saying to move a sale forward is what drives sales.  And that leads me to number four: 

4)      Not recording calls. This is perhaps the most important thing a sales manager can do – record all sales calls and listen to both sides of the conversation.  Knowing exactly what is happening during a call is the only way to know what’s wrong and to know how to fix it.  This is the first thing I ask for from a company who hires me to help them.  If you are not recording your calls, then you need to start today. Trust me, you’ll learn more in an hour of listening to calls than you will in a year of trying to figure it out without doing this. 

5)      Not hiring the right sales reps to begin with.  Not everyone is cut out for inside sales, and that includes reps with inside sales experience. You absolutely have to have criteria in place that will help you identify who is likely to succeed in your sales environment.  That includes profiling your top producers, but it also includes assessing the level of sales skills your hiring candidates have.  

Also, one of the biggest determinates of future sales performance is past sales performance.  That’s why it’s often a better choice to hire reps without experience and put them into a structured program (see items one through four above) and training these new reps to succeed in your environment.  Also, get in the habit of slow hiring and fast firing – most companies do exactly the opposite! 

By avoiding the five mistakes above, you can save hundreds of hours of frustration and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales and unnecessary expenses.

Every sales team has them: sales reps who consistently miss their quota, don’t appear motivated, or, when you try to help them, do better for a while and then drop back down into underperformance.  As a manager or business owner, it’s frustrating trying to get these underperforming reps to do better.  And as a sales rep, it’s also frustrating not making quota and being under the gun all the time.  What can you do about it?  Read on, I’ve got some suggestions for you.

To start with, I’d like to share a somewhat shocking study with you.  In their book, “How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer,” Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney compared results from hundreds of thousands of assessments that were conducted over several decades with actual sales performance measurements and concluded:

1)      55 percent of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else,

2)      Another 20 to 25 percent (of salespeople) have what it takes to sell, but they should be selling something else.

I don’t know about you, but when I read those statistics I almost fell off my chair.  As I thought about it, though, I began to compare those results with my actual experience.  I work with a lot of companies and a lot of sales teams, and as I’ve written over and over again, almost all sales teams have the 80/20 rule going on: the Top 20% of the producers are usually generating about 80% of the revenue and income, while the bottom 80% are struggling to make quota.

And isn’t that true in your sales organization as well?  If you’re like many inside sales teams, you’re constantly trying to get your underperformers to produce more, but how much real success do you have?  Again, sad to say, many bottom 80% producers simply don’t improve that much and that’s why most companies are constantly hiring and replacing reps.  When you look at it that way, the numbers from the conclusion above begin to make sense…

OK, so what’s the solution?  I mean, you can’t just fire 55% of your sales team.  The good news is that there are steps you can go through to train and raise performance, and once you go through these steps you’ll know who can become a productive member of your sales team and you’ll have the structure in place to onboard new reps more quickly and efficiently.  Here they are:

1)      The first thing you need to do is to give every member of your sales team the specific tools and training they need to be successful.  Many companies I work with, including the sales managers themselves, just don’t have specific, effective sales skills, techniques, scripts to give to their sales reps.  As a result, while their Top 20% seem to intuitively know what to do, the rest of the team struggle because no one is training them how to be successful in their sales environment.

The solution is to take the time to develop a “Defined Sales Process” by identifying what steps 80% of your successful sales go through and defining the best practices at every step of this sales cycle.  Once you have defined your best practice sales process, you need to:

2)      Script out the best practice techniques and turn these into your company’s training program.  In other words, you need to give each of your reps the exact tools and techniques and scripts they need to successfully navigate every step of your sales cycle. Next, train and reinforce these skills with every member of your team.

You see, before you can properly evaluate who can make it and who can’t, you have to give them the training on your best practices first.  Only then will you be in a position to know who has the talent, motivation and work ethic to succeed in your sales environment.

3)      Once you’ve defined your sales process, turned it into your company training program and actually trained your reps on it, it’s now time to objectively evaluate each member of your team to see if they have what it takes.  I use the word objectively here because it’s now up to you to record your reps, create a “sales process or script” grading form to measure adherence to your best practices.  At this point your reps either are or they aren’t doing what you know it takes to succeed.

The good news once again is that after about 90 days of measuring, coaching and managing reps to adhere to your new best practice sales process, you’ll have a very clear idea of who is going to make it and who isn’t.  At this point you can begin replacing those reps who clearly won’t.

4)      Now that you have your DSP in place, a solid training program that teaches the most successful best practice techniques, you will be in position to hire and quickly train and evaluate your new sales reps.  With this kind of a proven system in place, you’ll get a lot more production out of your new reps much faster, and you’ll have a very clear idea of who isn’t going to make it much sooner as well.  This will make you more money and save you money and frustration at the same time.

There is obviously a lot that goes into building this kind of structure, but it’s well worth the time and effort.  In fact, according to CSOInsights.com, sales teams that have and follow a “Defined Sales Process” average more than 33% in production and revenue than sales teams that don’t. 33% – now that’s significant!  Just ask yourself how much that would mean to you and your company’s bottom line.

There are many ways to go about creating a defined sales process and training program and one of the best ways is to break down what your Top 20% are doing.  They obviously have figured out the best way to do it, so why not copy and adapt what they are doing and saying?

If you’d like to know of more ways, simply visit the link below.  Regardless of how you go about it, making this your number one priority is essential to evaluating and dealing with your underperforming reps.  It’s also the way you’re going to build and grow a multi-million dollar producing sales team.

Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales, if the Best Selling author of “The Real Secrets of the Top 20%” and “The Ultimate Book of Phone Scripts.”  Voted one of the most Influential Inside Sales Professionals two years in a row by The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, he is recognized as a leader in the industry.  Mike’s core selling skills webinars and onsite sales training programs are packed with proven skills and techniques that make an immediate impact on your bottom line

Mike also works as an executive coach with business owners and sales managers, and does complete phone script development.  To learn more about how Mike can help you and your team succeed, visit: www.MrInsideSales.com/managementtraining.htm

If you’re in inside sales management, then you know all about metrics.  In fact, whenever I consult with new clients the owners and managers automatically begin showing me their call monitoring reports.  They show me metrics on how many calls a rep is making, how much average time each rep spends on the phone, what their conversion rate is, and on and on.

When they ask me what I think, I tell them I think they’re measuring the wrong things.  Now don’t get me wrong – those things are important and they should be monitored.  The problem though is that those metrics are not what drive sales.

You see, it isn’t the activity around the sale that’s important (and that everyone measures), but rather, it’s the activity during the sale that matters.

In other words, as a manager you need to know exactly what and how your reps are responding and dealing with their prospects and clients while the sale is going on.

There are two times to monitor and coach this:

1)      You can either monitor your reps while they’re actually on the phone with a prospect or client, or:

2)      You can record the call and spend time reviewing and coaching your rep as you go over their performance.

Both of these methods will give you the most important information of all: Are your reps using the best practice approaches to successfully handle the sales situations they run into 80% of the time when trying to sell your product or service?

You see, if your reps either don’t know how to best handle these sales situations, or if they simply aren’t using effective techniques and skills, or worse, if they just don’t have the talent or willingness to consistently use proven best practices, then it doesn’t matter how much time they spend on calls, or how many calls they make or how many leads they get out.

Again, it’s how they perform during a sales call that matters most.  And your number one goal as a manager is to know how each of your reps perform while in the sale, and then to teach them the most effective, best practice techniques to win more sales.

Once you’ve given your team the skills and techniques to succeed in your selling environment, and you’ve trained them thoroughly on them, then managing simply becomes a job of coaching adherence to these best practices (see numbers one and two above).

Again, it isn’t the activity around the sale that’s important, but rather, it’s the activity during the sale that matters.

If I were to ask you what the most important thing a sales manager can do to drive business, what would your answer be?  Hire the right reps to begin with?  Properly train them? Keep them motivated?  Help them close deals?  I’m sure you thought of these and many others, but I wonder if you thought about the one activity I’m going to share with you today.

That activity is to monitor and ensure adherence to best practice selling techniques.  You see, in  a nutshell, a sales manager’s job is to give his/her team the most effective core selling skills or best practice techniques, and then monitor to make sure their team is using them on each and every call.

It’s like a professional sports coach.  What do they do?  They design the best plays and then coach each athlete to use the best techniques and skill sets on every play.  That’s why they study and break down game film so much.

It’s the same with recording calls.  As sales managers your most important job is listening to (monitoring) your sales reps during the sales process to make sure they are using the most effective skills.  The bottom line is that if they aren’t making their numbers, it’s almost always because they are delivering poor presentations to unqualified leads.  And that is a direct result of not using best practice core selling skills.

So…the biggest mistake sales managers make is monitoring and measuring the results (the revenue numbers) rather than the sales process itself (the actual skills used to drive those results).

If you want to improve the sales performance of your sales team, then you need to stay focused on and monitor what is driving those results – what your reps are saying and doing during their qualifying and closing presentations. 

And here’s how you do that:

Start scoring adherence to your scripts (or outlines or presentations, etc.).  Break down each script into sections and assign a number value to them that add up to 100.  Then listen to the recordings of your reps and score their adherence to following the script.  Anything under a 90% adherence and you’ve got work to do. 

Bottom line – by staying focused on the most important part of the sale – adherence to best practices – you?ll avoid the biggest mistake most sales managers make, and in turn you’ll become one of the few managers whose team actually make their revenue numbers. 

How great would that be?

If you found this article helpful, then you’ll love Mike’s NEW book of phone scripts, "The Ultimate Book of Phone Scripts."  Buy now and get over $500 worth of free bonuses from top sales trainers like Tom Hopkins, SalesDog, Stan Billue and many others by taking advantage of this Special Offer: https://mrinsidesales.com/booklaunch.htm  Find out why Brian Tracy calls this the best book on inside sales available today!

Do you have an underperforming inside sales team?  Talk to Mike to see how he can help you and your team reach your revenue goals.  To learn more about Mike, visit his website: http://www.MrInsideSales.com

If you are a business owner or sales manager responsible for getting your team of sales reps to make their numbers or achieve sales quotas, then I feel your pain. If you’re like many of the sales managers and owners I work with, then I know you’re being pulled in many different directions. You’re busy; you have endless meetings to attend to, reporting to do, and on top of it all you have many different personalities to deal with on your team, and each of them have different skill levels, motivation levels, etc.

It can seem like an overwhelming job.

Add into that you’ve probably never had any real sales management training or reinforcement, and your actual sales training that you are supposed to give your team probably isn’t very highly developed either. I can just see you nodding your heads and thinking, “Yeah, you got that right. Now what?”

Well, here’s what. Sales management is actually real easy and straight forward if you break it down to its three most important elements. If you concentrate on these three keys and actually make it a priority to implement them, your job will get so much easier, and, more importantly, you and your team will actually start closing more business and making their numbers.

Here’s what they are:

1) Define your sales process best practices. Provide your team with clear, easy to follow best practices as far as sales techniques and skill sets go for your specific sale. Give them the specific scripts and rebuttals to follow, specific qualifying questions, proper closing tools, and make sure they are unambiguous.

In other words, identify what actually works in your selling cycle and what the best approaches are and then develop them into a solid selling system and make it company policy that this is the best way to handle every part of your selling process from the first call, to qualifying, to leaving voice messages and emails, to getting back to your prospects to closing the sale and handling objections.

You absolutely must make this selling system clear enough for anyone to understand and follow. Once you have this, then:

2) Implement and monitor the use of your best practice system. Think of a great football team. What do they do? The coaches come up with the best game plan (the system), and then they teach it to their players and practice every formation, every play and every technique. They drill it in over and over and they watch film of each practice and game to make sure their players are following the plan and using the best technique.

And that’s what you need to do with your sales team as well. Once you’ve given your team the best practices, it’s up to you to train them on it and reinforce adherence to it. You do that by observing your sales reps as they are on the phone with their prospects and customers. You record their calls and review them with them, and then you make sure they are using the best practices. If you do that – actually get your team members to use the best practices that you know work – then they will without a doubt get better and make more sales.

3) Discipline your team members when they aren’t following your sales best practices. First, let me say a word about discipline. Discipline comes from the Greek word that means “to teach,” not “to scold or make others feel bad.” The proper role of a teacher, coach or sales manager is to point out when a student or sales rep isn’t following the proven tools to succeed, and then to help them, or “teach” them to do it better. And that’s where your skills as a manager (and where your time) will be most efficient.

You can do this in your one on one’s with a rep, and you can do this in sales meetings where you can play recordings of reps who are doing it correctly, and you can do it by feeding lines to a rep while they’re on the phone, or by instant messaging while you’re listening in, etc.. The bottom line is that it’s your job to give your team the right tools to succeed, manage them to implement them, and then to monitor and teach them to use them.

If you implement all three of the above keys in your selling environment, you will see the quickest and easiest return on your time and investment. If you miss one of these keys, then you will spend all your time wondering what’s wrong, and your frustration with the team, with your company and with your efforts will only get worse.

Look at your current selling environment and see which one of these keys is missing. Once you find it, you’ll now know what to do!

If you found this article helpful, then you’ll love Mike’s NEW book of phone scripts, “The Ultimate Book of Phone Scripts.”  Get over 220 Brand New Scripts to help you easily get past the gatekeeper, set appointments, overcome objections and close more sales. Visit: https://mrinsidesales.com/ultimatescripts.htm to find out why Brian Tracy and Tom Hopkins call this the best book on inside sales available today!

Do you have an underperforming inside sales team?  Talk to Mike to see how he can help you and your team reach your revenue goals.  To learn more about Mike, visit his website: http://www.MrInsideSales.com

I consult with a lot of business owners, and I hear a common complaint: “The sales team isn’t making their revenue numbers and my sales manager doesn’t seem to know what to do to get them to improve.  What should I do?”

After reviewing their sales processes, their training program, sales scripts, etc., I always ask the same question: “How much production is your sales manager generating per month?”  And I almost always get the same answer – “My manager doesn’t sell.”

That’s not good.

The problem with many sales managers is that they aren’t expected to get on the phone and sell.  And the problem with that is how can they teach and coach something they aren’t doing themselves (or worse, that they can’t do)?

Now I know there are differing opinions on this – some say managers need to manage from the sidelines (like coaches), need to be involved in higher level responsibilities, need to attend endless meetings, and need to be able to set revenue goals and get their team to achieve them.

I agree with some of this (except the endless meetings part!), but the most effective and respected sales managers and V. P.’s I work with all lead by example.  They have a personal quota and they keep their skills sharp and refined because they are on the phones closing prospects and clients every day.

Because of this, they have a real understanding of what it takes to get the job done, and so they are in the best position to teach this to others.

Here are the top 5 benefits of having a selling sales manager:

1)      Sales managers who actively sell have an up to date, intimate understanding of what techniques, skills and strategies work in your selling environment.  And having this first-hand knowledge means they can teach it to others.

2)      Because a selling sales manager has this immediate experience of closing sales, they are in a much better position to help their team members close business as well.  They can easily do a TO (take over) when a sales rep needs help.  This not only teaches the rep how to handle selling situations, but it often saves a sale as well.  This is what your sales manager must be able to do, and it is a crucial part of their job.

3)      A selling sales manager commands the immediate respect and confidence of his/her sales team.  A sales manager is a leader of his team, and the best way to lead is by example.  Sales reps respect and follow a leader who can help them close sales and achieve their goals.  They’ll also work harder for them.

4)      A confident sales manager grows a confident and productive team.  Nothing is better for a sales manager than to have him/her demonstrate, to themselves and others that they have what it takes to successfully close sales.  A successful selling manager isn’t afraid of setting production goals because he knows he can achieve them (and he knows what it’s going to take).

5)      As a business owner, you must have the confidence that your manager knows exactly how to accomplish your company’s revenue goals.  The most accurate way to determine this is by having the sure knowledge that he knows how to do it himself.  This experience is invaluable and will ensure that the goals you set are reasonable and reachable.

A common problem I run across when working with companies is an unreachable, unrealistic revenue goal set by the owner that has no real buy in by the sales manager.  It is this disconnect that causes friction, undermines morale, and often leads to unmotivated, underperforming sales teams (and managers).

All this can be avoided when you have an experienced, hands on, selling sales manager who can give you honest and accurate feedback about production goals and the ways to achieve them.

There are other benefits of having a selling sales manager leading your team, but I hope this short list has convinced you.  Believe me, the fastest way to make your sales manager better is to make sure they are on the phones closing business part of their day.

If you would like to know more ways to help your sales manager (and your team) better, visit my Management Training Page here.

If you found this article helpful, then you will love Mike’s bestselling book on what it takes to become a Top 20% producer: “The REAL Secrets of the Top 20% – How To Double Your Income Selling Over the Phone.”  (Recommended by Jeffrey Gitomer!)  Get a Special Offer and read about it by clicking here: http://www.mrinsidesales.com/secrets_and_CD.htm

Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales, works with business owners and inside sales reps nationwide teaching them the skills, strategies and techniques of top 20% performance.

He offers a FREE audio program designed to help you double your income selling over the phone, as well as an internationally acclaimed FREE Ezine. If you’re looking to catapult your sales, or create a sales team that actually makes their monthly revenues, then learn how by visiting: http://www.MrInsideSales.com

Can you name the one or two best sales managers, or business owners you ever worked for?  If so, how did they make you feel?  What qualities or traits did they have in common, or which ones do you most try to emulate in your own company?  

I work with a lot of business owners and managers, and I can tell you that the most successful ones all have at least four core characters in common.  Many of them possess other qualities as well, but these four “Secrets” as I call them are always at the center of their power and charisma.  

As you read through them, ask yourself which ones you currently have, which ones you’d like to strengthen, or which ones you can develop.  Once you master them all, you will be able to lead any team and any company to greatness. 

Here they are: 

#1:  Unbounded Optimism.  Ask any great leader to describe the future, and they will always tell you it’s a wonderful place.  Leaders are extremely goal oriented, have clearly identified what it is they want and what they are willing to sacrifice to get there, and they radiate an optimistic glow because they already live there in their mind’s eye.  

Because people want to feel good about themselves and their futures, they naturally gravitate to winners.  People want to work for and, in fact, work harder for people who are optimistic.  Plus, optimism is contagious.  A great leader can often turn an organization full of negativity around, and the excitement they inspire can result in greater morale and greater results.  

If you’re in a position of authority, ask yourself if you’d want others to catch your attitude.  If not, then focus on ways to become optimistic – you’ll be a much more effective leader when you are. 

#2:  Rock Solid Confidence.  Great leaders are convinced they can do anything they set their minds to.  I love a saying of Napoleon’s: “The improbable we’ll do at once.  The impossible will take a little longer.”  A leader’s attitude is: Whatever the challenge, we’ll find a way to overcome it.  

Confident leaders create confident followers, and a company, family, or team with an “I Can” attitude is unstoppable.  The confidence of a great leader always inspires the best performance of his/her employees, and their team’s success just adds to and confirms the leader’s confidence.  

#3:  Integrity.  In a recent survey about what qualities employees wanted from the managers and business owners they worked for, integrity was the most desired trait people picked.  Integrity, including honesty, fairness and consistency of attitude and action, are traits that build confidence in a leader and that build loyalty in the people who report to them.  

Leaders with integrity genuinely care about the company they are building or the job they are doing, and this helps everybody feel as if their work has meaning and makes a difference in people’s lives.  Most people spend a third of their lives at their jobs, and while we go to work for a pay check it’s the intrinsic satisfaction someone gets from their work that helps them feel fulfilled.  Leaders with a high degree of integrity help foster this feeling by setting the example. 

#4:  Decisiveness:  All great leaders are decisive and committed to the actions they take.  This doesn’t mean they act capriciously, on the contrary, they fully weigh out and think through their options, but the key characteristic is that they aren’t afraid to make a decision and implement a plan of action.  

Most employees tell many tales of bosses who are afraid of making a decision, or who frequently go back on them, and this habit of hesitation undermines their authority and the confidence of everyone in the organization.  Leaders, on the other hand, may not always make the right decision, but they can be counted on to make a well thought out one, and then to take action on it.   If facts change or results warrant it, they are flexible enough to reevaluate and make another decision.  

If you’re in a leadership role, don’t shy away from decisions.  Evaluate the data at the time and the relative need of making a decision and then choose the best course of action and commit.  Making a decision – even if it’s the wrong decision – is better than making no decision at all. 

If you are in a position of authority and wish to become an effective leader, then find ways of developing or strengthening these four characteristics in yourself.  Remember, everyone is counting on you for guidance, and it is your ability to lead that will determine the ultimate result in your team or company.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn?t it? Stan Billue, a top telemarketing sales trainer in the late 80?s, claimed that he had a sure fire technique that could double your sales in 90 days if you just followed it. So I did. And it worked!

The technique? Record your calls. Everything that you are doing right, and every area you need to improve in will be revealed to you in just a few hours. By being able to calmly listen to your qualifying/closing calls all the way through, here are just a few of things you?ll hear that you?re probably missing:

1. What your prospect?s true buying motives are.
2. What your prospect?s objections are.
3. Whether or not you listened to these and answered them.
4. Whether you were listening at all.
5. How often you talked past the close.
6. How many objections you created.
7. Whether you heard their objections and answered them and then confirmed your answer and asked for the order?or just kept pitching!

Everything will be there on tape and you and your manager can then go about correcting your technique and immediately improving your success on the phone. The bottom line for all sales teams and sales reps is that if your fundamentals and techniques are wrong, then you will keep getting the same results — you won’t make quotas, you will be frustrated at the end of each day, and you won’t improve. Period.

You must correct the fundamental problems. And to do this you must first know what they are! Recording your calls is the fastest, easiest, and best way to do this. All highly successful companies do this all the time. Start listening to the next on hold message you get and I’ll bet you hear, ?Please note that this call is being recorded for training and quality assurance.? Guess what they are doing with these recordings? They are using them to train and improve their inside sales teams!

Without a doubt, this one technique was the most important thing I did that catapulted me into the Top 20%. I relentlessly recorded myself and began improving in all areas and on each and every call. I listened to them at lunch, on the drive home, with my manager, etc. Because of recording myself, I literally doubled my income in 90 days. And I never looked back.

For managers and business owners, recording your sales reps is the single most important thing you can do to increase revenues. Among other things, if you:

• Want to know why someone is in making sales? Record them and you’ll have your answer in a day.
• Want to see if your training is working? Record them before and after see how many reps are implementing your training.
• Want great sales training material for your next meeting? Record your top reps and play the good parts in your next meeting.

Bottom line — if you want to double your sales and income selling over the phone, and want the fastest most effective way to do this, then go to Radio Shack today (or search online) and have a recorder in place tomorrow. Start recording and listening to your tapes, correcting your fundamentals, and watch your closing rate and income soar.

How much time and money do you devote to your company’s sales pipeline? Think about the resources, the software, the meetings, the forecasting, the managing and measuring you do, and the time and effort you give it. If you’re like most CEO’s or VP’s or sales managers, your sales pipeline is your life blood. It’s what you run your company by; it’s how you make decisions, and often times it even drives your stock prices.

While the pipeline is a vital part of the sales process, it is also where the most fundamental mistake is made, and this mistake costs companies millions (if not billions) of dollars every year.

The problem is that most companies spend too much time, money and energy on measuring and managing the pipeline rather than managing and improving the quality of leads that go into – and ultimately come out of – the pipeline.

In other words, most of the leads that go into your pipeline are never going to close, should never have been put in and, as a result, your company wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars generating and then chasing, and measuring and managing leads that will never close. That’s the real problem.

Ask yourself: "What is my sales department’s closing ratio?" I’ll bet you can answer that, can’t you? A typical company will report that it takes an average of 50 cold calls or contacts with decision makers to set 15 appointments out of which 10 will turn into proposals or pitches which will result in 1 or 2 sales.

And once this metric is established (as measured by the sales pipeline, of course) the sales strategy is set – to get more sales, you just have to set more appointments. And if you want more appointments, then you have to get your sales team to make more calls! Suddenly everyone works harder, goes out on more appointments, and…and…the desired results don’t come, do they?

And here’s why: until you address the fundamental problem- the quality of leads that go into your pipeline – you won’t improve your close ratios or your sales. Remember, you can’t close an unqualified lead, so stuffing more of them into your pipeline isn’t going to get you the results you want. In fact, it will just cost your company more money, frustrate your managers and wear out your sales team.

You’ve got to stop managing your pipeline and start training your sales teams how to generate more qualified leads. That’s the only real answer.

In fact that’s the secret of all top sales producers. Look at your own top reps. What are their closing ratios? I’ll bet they are the highest in your company, aren’t they? They would never consider setting and running 15 appointments because they don’t have the time to waste. They would rather spend their time qualifying (I call it disqualifying) out the non-buyers so they can spend their time finding, qualifying and working with real buyers. And they know how to do this because they understand sales. Unfortunately, 80% of your sales team doesn’t.

And that’s why sales training is your only real answer.

But sales training is what most companies don’t do well. In fact, if you want to know how well your own sales training is working, simply shop your sales team. Either call in, or get on your lead list and have some of your reps call you. Try throwing them some objections and see how they do. If you’re like most companies, you’ll be appalled by the results.

Again, this is the real problem. Until you solve this basic problem of training your sales team, having them generate and stuff more unqualified leads into your pipeline won’t get you the results your company needs. That’s why most companies end up spending so much time and effort managing and measuring the pipeline. It?s something they know how to do.

If you want to get out of this unproductive cycle and actually start improving your sales and revenues, then here?s what you need to do: Get back to the basics of sales training and redefine what makes up a qualified lead. Identify all the elements and create a qualifying checklist. Make your reps fill it out completely before any leads are generated. If you’re not sure of a lead, have a manager re-qualify it for them.

The bottom line is you must train your sales force (and sometimes your managers) how to find and qualify real buyers. The more of these you identify and put into your sales pipeline, the more meaningful it will become.

So take the emphasis off managing your pipeline, and start training and managing your sales team. If you do it right, I guarantee you it will finally give you something you’ll be happy to measure – more sales!

I have been consulting with a lot of sales managers and business owners who need and want sales training, but they are concerned that the training might be wasted on some of their sales reps (sometimes as much as one-third of their team) because this portion of the reps are either resistant, or simply unmotivated.

?Why should I spend the money if one-third of my sales reps are going to tune out?" They ask me.

While I understand this is a reality for some sales teams (sad but true) what I remind these managers and business owners is that the training isn’t for ?this group", but rather for the other part of their team that is actually going to use and benefit from the training.

The improvement this part of the team makes will not only pay for the training in a week, but it will continue to pay dividends weeks and months after the training. Let me put it another way:

Here is a test — let’s say you are a sales manager and you have 10 sales reps. Three of those reps are at 80% of quota, four are at 65%, and three are at 30%. Who should you spend the most time with?

Most managers say they should spend 70% of their time with the four reps at 65%, and 30% of their time with the other 30%. That’s wrong.

The correct answer is you should spend 60% of your time with the three reps at 80% of quota, and another 30% with the four reps at 65%, and just 10% babysitting the other three reps at 30%. Why?

Because you’re going to get the greatest return if you can get the three reps up to 100% of their quotas (and they will be more capable and motivated to do so anyway), and if you can move 65% up to 75 or 80% – great, but the three reps at 100%quota will be your biggest return (and easiest to do).

The other 30% — let’s face it, most of these reps aren?t even going to be there in six months, are they?

So the bottom line is that training always pays off and is worth it, if you’re focusing on who is going to benefit, and how that?s going to pay off for you.

So rearrange your time and resources and concentrate on the winners on your team who are going to give you the biggest return. Provide them with the training and resources they need. Remember, they are the ones that make it all worthwhile.