5 Fundamentals for Turning Low-Performers into Sales Super-Stars
One of the great and productive functionalities of CRM is the ability for sales managers to track the activity levels and performance benchmarks of their team members. If reps are not conducting or managing enough phone calls, follow-ups, and sales meetings, you will know about it-and so will they.
blog10_graphicHaving this indispensable tool to monitor key metrics makes it much easier to do your job as a sales leader. It also allows you to verify and ensure, with a realistic and reasonable degree of certainty, that all your reps are doing theirs.
What if your sales reps each perform the same level of activities and yet a handful of ultra-achievers consistently out-perform the others?
Even more puzzling, is why you might have top-performing reps that conduct fewer activities than the lower-performing or target-challenged reps!
The answer of course, is that activity level alone is not enough to ensure successful or even consistent outcomes. The key then is to look beyond the activity level to identify and diagnose just how well those activities are being executed.
The quality of activity execution is equally if not arguably more important to any rep’s success than the quantity of activities.
There are 5 fundamental elements for turning those B-team under-performers into sales super-stars.
- Prioritizing activities
- Knowing what to say
- Knowing what to send
- Knowing when to follow-up
- Knowing what to do next
Which of those elements cause under-performance for your team?
Prioritizing activities
Do reps know exactly what is needed for each prospect in the pipeline? How do they determine what should be acted upon and accomplished, and which are the highest priorities on that particular day.
What to say
Do reps know what questions are more apt to stimulate or build a prospect’s interest-based on persona-and lead them to engage in a productive, quality-driven conversation?
What to send
Do reps know the most effective combination of voice messages and emails to generate and reach optimized response rates?
When to follow-up
Do reps have access to an auto-generated list of follow-up calls that need to be made each day – and can they easily move through that list with minimum effort and maximum impact?
What to do next
Do reps have access to an auto-generated list of calls to know precisely which contacts need a 2nd, 3rd, or subsequent contact attempt?
These are just a few questions you can ask to determine and strategically evaluate why performance outcomes are lower for some reps than for others. (Download the Revenue Optimization Checklist for more on this subject)
High-performing reps are demonstrably better at prioritizing and managing hundreds of follow-up activities through their own ability to ‘calibrate’ all the moving parts. While the low-performing reps, simply apply a less coordinated or even reactionary focus on meeting baseline expectations for required activity level. Activity level as a management metric should certainly be the first step in measuring any rep’s performance.
However, it is the vastly influential second step-assessing how, when, and what activities are being calibrated and how effectively they’re completed-that will provide the needed insight for coaching. Turning those ‘second-stringers’ into revenue generating dynamos requires far more than just playing an activity ‘numbers’ game.
