This week, I'm giving a talk called "Economic Recovery: Growing Revenue and Share During a Recovering Yet Volatile Economy" to a group of NSI partners in Redmond, Wash. These tend to be the larger-sized Microsoft partners, but the message is applicable for any size partner organization.
About 18 months ago, while we were helping our clients create their 2009 budgets, we asked them to create their revenue and expense pro formas, reduce projected sales by 25 percent, and then redo their pro formas again. This exercise was designed to help the clients gain a perspective on what changes or cost reductions they might need to make if expectations weren't met. This helped everyone manage their business well during the past year.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on February 02, 20100 comments
If you think you did great in January, or that there's no more work to do, ask yourself: "What else could I have done? Why didn't I exceed my sales? Did I have enough top talent in place?" While short-term success is critical and must be your focus, a larger lesson needs to be considered.
In coaching our clients, we're more interested in looking at September's sales goals than January's. If your revenue curve for 2010 ramps up during the second half of the year, then you must actively recruit and hire now to ensure you have the necessary salespeople in place to achieve your objectives. Many sales leaders get caught in the trap of having to achieve increased levels of sales dollars with either not enough salespeople on the team or with increased expectations for the existing sales team's productivity levels (which might be below-par to begin with).
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on January 25, 20100 comments
The role of the sales leader at this time of year is to focus on building or maintaining a great atmosphere of success, dedication and fun. All the marketing plans should be in place, sales systems completed and training planned for the next 90 days.
Here are several actions you should focus on:
- A shared sense of mission or purpose. Your overall sales goals and "theme" for the year must be reinforced each day, each week, and in every way. Do you have your 2010 theme on posters in your sales areas? Does each salesperson have their "goalboards" hung in their cubes? (These are pictorials of where salespersons rank according to their sales/activity goals, and pictures of your annual sales trip or other goals they have based on their 2010 salesperson business plans.)
- Clear and attainable goals. Everyone needs a quota, but high-performance sales teams have "stretch goals," as well. These must be realistic. Are your compensation plans or sales contests designed to reinforce the stretch goals?
- Frequent objective feedback. A sales leader must find the time to coach, mentor and provide insights to keep their sales team focused and constantly improving. Reinforce the positive actions as well as the need to fix the areas that need to be improved. A great phrase you should always use: "If you had an opportunity to make that sale call over again, what, if anything, would you do differently?"
- Positive rewards for appropriate performance. Do you have a first-quarter sales contest to start the year off properly? Having a yearly sales incentive trip is a must. Now is the time to design your second-quarter contest to build sales activity and required pipeline to ensure your summer will be successful.
- Timely support and help when requested or needed. Sales leaders gain respect when they provide the atmosphere of "being there" for their team. When a salesperson walks into your office or calls you on the phone, your first response should be, "How can I help you?"
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on January 19, 20101 comments
Every holiday for the past 20-plus years, I have sat down with my wife to discuss the previous year and think about the upcoming year. We consider what we've accomplished and what we want to accomplish during the coming 12 months. Certainly, we've experienced difficult economic swings along with the positives. And always, there are new challenges.
We've saved these as written documents, and whenever I reread our goals from years past, it makes me appreciate life more fully. However, the most important thing to learn from this exercise is that there are no unrealistic goals -- only unrealistic timeframes.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on January 06, 20100 comments
It's Dec. 14 as I write this, meaning there are only 17 days left to exceed your numbers.
What? Well, if you count Saturdays and Sundays, you can still work to ensure that your year-end numbers will be hit. Maximizing time, increasing sales strategy sessions and focusing on every opportunity can make the difference at this time of year.
I can recall one year, on Dec. 27, we'd been told that a PO had been approved...but we hadn't received it by fax or mail. We called our contact who confirmed it was in purchasing and had been approved. We then asked him for the purchasing agent's name and phone number to follow up. When we called the purchasing agent, we learned that he was taking his year-end vacation time.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on December 14, 20090 comments
During the last week, after many conversations with various organizations and spending some time monitoring my LinkedIn groups, I've noticed that many people are concerned with 2010. After talking to various individuals and probing some chat rooms, I realized that, as usual, the critical success factor that many are finding missing is consistent sales.
However, what was causing the lack of volume or profitability in sales was unique to each organization. I heard comments regarding marketing, lack of salespeople, no sales training, compensation plans not working, no leads, salespeople not working hard enough to win, etc. The list could go on.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on December 07, 20090 comments
At the recent Atlanta Sales Leadership Summit, we held breakout sessions titled "What Can We Do Now To Boost Sales in the Next 90 Days?" I've compiled the following list of tips from the various teams that participated. As always, the key is to "execute brilliantly."
If you have questions or have other ideas you'd like to add to the list, send me an e-mail at [email protected] and I'll compile them for next week's blog.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on November 30, 20090 comments
In challenging times, average sales managers tend to get exposed -- they can't hide. So why is the average tenure of a sales leader less than 18 months?
The reason for failure is simply that many sales leaders don't fully understand what their real job is, or have never been trained effectively to lead, manage and motivate their organizations.
The Top Sales Experts Roundtable, which takes place this Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 11 a.m. Eastern time, will address the challenges of sales management with a prescriptive approach to defining the duties and responsibilities of the position. I and four of the top sales leadership coaches in the world will discuss what really separates top sales leaders from the sour cream.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on November 16, 20090 comments
In challenging times, the mental strength of our sales teams is key. Positive reinforcement and recognition are important factors in building a high-performance team. Sales compensation and great sales management are important, but now Top Sales Experts is making it easier for you.
Strategic sales management means learning to use tools, sales training and emotion to build energy into their sales organization. This easy-to-use program can do it for you. As a member of this worldwide group, I wanted to share this unique opportunity -- and it's free!
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on November 09, 20090 comments
In the past few blogs, we've been covering various topics to prepare sales leaders for 2010. The strategic sales leader is already thinking of compensation, sales training, budgeting, and hiring and recruiting for next year.
To help our clients fully understand all of the components of job sales management, we've compiled a whitepaper describing the purpose of and the steps necessary to build a high-performance sales organization. Below is an excerpt of the document (to download the entire article, go here):
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on November 03, 20090 comments
These past five days, I've had relatives visiting -- and it's been great! We enjoyed lots of great food, golf and the beginning of fall in East Tennessee. My sister-in-law is very successful in sales and we spent many moments discussing her career and mine, and talking about everything from cold calling to various sales management topics. Even though she's considered a "top performer" in her industry, she's still focused on net-new business development -- one reason she's still a top performer!
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on October 26, 20090 comments
Last week, I received a call from a firm with 700 salespeople in a somewhat commodity market. The person I spoke to was in charge of the firm's sales training programs; we discussed a variety of programs we've created to develop sales certification programs for other sales training organizations. When I asked this person why he was considering the need for sales certification when most organizations are cutting back on sales training, he told me that in their tough industry, sales leadership felt that building a higher-quality sales team can separate the firm from the competition and add value to their sales offerings.
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Posted on October 19, 20091 comments