In his book, “Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior”, Richard Marcinko – the founder and first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, the U.S. Navy’s first counter-terrorist unit – wrote, “When you’re a warrior, death is always looking over your shoulder. And we all knew there was just one way to improve the odds of survival: train, train, train.”
The sales arena isn’t a battlefield, and your salespeople don’t have “death” looking over their shoulders – however, the specter of “failure” is ever-present. And, while you are not a SEAL team leader, you are a sales team leader. Part of your responsibility is to help your team members hone their skills, refine their strategies and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their performance. In other words: train, train, train.
How much time and effort do you devote to helping your team members improve the odds of their survival? How do you monitor their performance and assess their training needs? And, how do you measure their performance improvement?
Without specific benchmarks for performance, you can’t do any of those things.
So, which elements of performance should you monitor? Conventional wisdom suggests results – the number of completed prospecting calls, the number of closed sales or the amount of generated revenue, for instance – as appropriate benchmarks of performance.
But what are the structural components of the sales process that lead up to the results being monitored?
Suppose you use “closed sales” as a performance indicator. The anatomy of the process leading to a closed sale might look like this:
- Prospecting activities lead to…
- Conversations with decision makers, which lead to…
- Appointments where opportunities are uncovered and developed, which lead to…
- Generation and delivery or proposals and presentations, which lead to…
- Buying decisions and completed sales.
By monitoring each element of the process over time, conversion ratios – how often a salesperson moves from one step to the next – will emerge. Ratios for top producers and veteran salespeople will be different than those of middle-of-the-pack producers and new salespeople. Those statistics provide valuable information regarding performance and reveal areas for training.
So, if you’re going to “train, train, train” to ensure your team’s survival (and you should), make sure your efforts are directed at the aspects of performance that will bring about the greatest impact.
Dave Harman is an associate with Sandler Training. He has over 30 years’ experience in sales and sales management with Fortune 500 companies as well as small, family-owned organizations. He has held positions from sales to senior management with companies such as Conoco/Vista, Amresco and Ohio Awning, and owns his own business. He earned his MBA with a concentration in Marketing from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. You can reach him at [email protected] or (888) 448-2030.
