Moving the goal posts.

I'm a big believer in uncapped commissions. Why should the sales person not earn more if the company is earning more? Every company knows how much each incoming pound is worth to them why should the sales people be any different? I am an advocate of flat percentage commission schemes. If you sell £100 of product the sales person gets £10 if he sells £1 million he gets £100,000.

However often this doesn't fit into the business model the company has created. Sales people are paid on hitting target. They are paid for reaching KPI's. In the eyes of the sales people (and often they are right) these schemes are used as a way of paying them less. Once they reach the target it shifts. If they are making 100 calls a day to make their KPIs they suddenly find they need to make 120 before they can earn.

Not reaching KPIs or revenue targets should be a discplinary/training issue.  Docking wages is lazy management often brought in by those that don't understand how to maximise the motivation of their staff through a sense of ownership and personal achievement.

Creating business relationships. Not selling.

All men are born equal. But in sales there is a strong danger that the sales person becomes subservient to the costumer. This is NOT the best way to sell. It shows a lack of belief in yourself and a lack of belief in the product. Customers will pick up on that and bend you over when it comes to price.

If your yield (value by product) is lower than your colleague's 9 time out of 10 this is the problem.

The clients should respect you as an equal. You are providing them with a service or product that helps them do business. Without your product their business is worse off.

Are you using phrases like "I'm just calling..." "would it be alright if I called you back at..."?

You are not just calling. You are calling.  You will call them back at.... If that time isn't suitable they'll tell you. Don't ask their permission you are an adult. feel free to say "when would it be best to get back?" but don't give them the option of saying no. Your product is good. It's so good that they should take the time hear about it.

I heard one of my best guys say. "you are really going to like this. Put an hour aside this week and I'll show you why." Perfect.

Its all about confidence confidence in your self and confidence in your product. people are attracted to confidence. It is much easier to build rapport if you know beyond doubt that your product is the best and offers value for money.


I'll talk another time about building confidence and price analysis but for the time remember....

YOU'RE A TIGER. :)

Sales people earning enough money?

Do you want to earn £1000s? Hungry sales people wanted! Uncapped bonuses! That's what the adverts say but what happens when your best sales people start earning 'enough' money. No one can earn enough money? Not true. A survey recently put the price of happiness at £50k a year http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/06/earnings-pay-happiness-research.

Once people are earning £50,000 a year more money doesn't make them any happier. There is a real danger here for sales people. If they are happy with the amount they are earning their activity drops when their activity drops their sales drop off and when their sales drop off their earnings drop off. Not a huge problem then because they will just start working again to get back up to that mark? Not true. Firstly there is a cost of motivation for the other team members to see a high flyer taking their foot off the gas. Secondly once someone has slacked off it is very difficult for them to pick things back up again and that is when you get the burn out.

The mark is not £50k for everyone. For some it maybe lower, for most sales people I imagine it is higher but a mark exists and if you look around your sales team you may well spot those that have reached it.

I was unfortunate enough to have seen a very successful IT sales person in his early 40s living a nice lifestyle, nice house, nice car, membership to the right golf clubs etc crash and burn to the point of homelessness. He was earning enough money. He stopped working as hard and sure enough the sales dropped off. He found it difficult to ramp up his activity. He told me he was going to bed at night thinking "tomorrow I'll graft" but tomorrow never comes and neither did the grafting until it was too late. Then he was desperately selling. Clients can smell desperation and want no part of it. My guys don't sell. They create business relationships (something I will go into another day). Its impossible to create a relationship when you're on your knees.

So as a sales person how can you prevent yourself falling into this trap and as a sales manager how can you prevent your staff falling into it? Paying less is not an option. What else can you come up with?

Building pride and a sense of ownership in the business is how we try to do it combined with ensuring your targetting is SMART. If you don't know SMART. Stop reading blogs and look it up.

Sales incentives.

It occurred to me today that coming up with sales incentives isn't the easiest thing to do. So I figured I would share my thoughts and any other sales managers with a similar problem may take heart that they are not the only ones.

I have a team of 7 sales people. The newest has been here a week. The longest serving 6 years. My longest serving sales person creates 30% of our revenue.

Now sales people out there will be crying out "obviously he is the one that should win Sales Person of The Year" and before I was a manager I would have agreed but that would miss the point of incentives. I want to motivate the whole team and if there is going to be a clear winner of the incentives scheme before it has even started the others will not take anything from it.

So my solution...
I started by looking at the things I wanted to increase. Sales activity, yield and of course revenue. I decided the best marker to use was money that the company hasn't seen before. So all new business will automatically count however my top guy has 70 clients to manage and doesn't do much new business. His revenue comes from increasing the spend of existing clients. So if a client spent £10,000 with us last year and this year they spend £15,000 then £5000 will go towards their total on the incentive scheme.

That doesn't necessarily increase the number of calls and visits the sales guys are making so to be included in the scheme they must have hit their KPIs for that week.

I think this is a fair scheme and hopefully will increase the activity and as an automatic consequence the revenue. I'll tell you if it worked this time next year.