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The 80/20 Selling System™ for building top-performing sales teams
The solutions we help clients implement with the greatest frequency form the core of the 80/20 Selling System™. These include:
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“55% of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else” and “Another 20% to 25%
have what it takes to sell, |
Wow! These are some sobering statistics! They say straight out, in plain English, that more than half of the people working in sales should be doing something else for a living! How did these people manage to land sales jobs in the first place? Why weren't they "weeded out" during the recruiting process?
Most of these hiring mistakes result from the fact that most hiring decisions are based solely upon SUBJECTIVE information. After all:
- What is a resume? It is a job applicant's subjective description of his or her capabilities and experience, written for the sole purpose of convincing the reader to invite the job applicant to an interview.
- What happens during interviews? Interviewees attempt to answer questions in a manner that makes the best impression. Meanwhile, interviewers form personal opinions about interviewees' qualifications.
According to Lou Adler, author of Hire With Your Head:
"More errors are made during the first 30 minutes of an interview than at any other time. Emotions, biases, perceptions, stereotypes and first impressions are powerful human forces that profoundly affect individual judgment." |
I'm not suggesting that subjective information is useless. Subjective information is a valid and valuable component of any "people decision". However, if decisions based solely upon subjective information produce an undesirable result 80 percent of the time (remember the 80/20 rule?), doesn't it make sense to consider making a change?
We can help you add quality OBJECTIVE information to your sales hiring decisions with specialized sales assessment tests. Unlike most sales assessment tests, our tests aren't limited to personality and behavioral traits. They also identify:
- How quickly the individual learns (a critical factor in sales training)
- How precisely and effectively the individual communicates, both verbally and in writing
- How talented they are at asking questions and picking out important pieces of information from the answers (crucial for effective opportunity qualification and maximizing account penetration)
- The individual's selling style (Consultative, Relationship, Hard Closer, etc.)
- The individual's relationship preference (Hunter, Farmer, Hybrid)
- How effectively the individual will prospect for new sales opportunities
- How comfortable they are asking for orders (i.e. closing sales)
- And much more!
Click the following link if you would like to learn more about how our specialized sales assessment tests can help you consistently recruit top sales performers and improve the performance of your existing salespeople.
Sales and Sales Management Compensation
How to Develop an Effective Sales Compensation Plan
More than 40% of the questions we receive from 80/20 Sales performance website visitors pertain to sales compensation. The #1 question is, "What commission percentage is typical for selling _______________?"
If you are looking for a "magic formula" for sales compensation, we're sorry to have to disappoint you. It simply doesn't exist. We have yet to find a reliable resource that can provide information such as:
"For a sales job in (X) industry in (Y) geography, the total target compensation is (Z). This compensation is made up of (A)% base salary or draw, (B)% commission, (C)% bonuses, and (D) % other incentives."
With that said, there ARE specific questions and concepts that can help you develop an effective sales compensation plan. Click the following link if you would like more information on how to develop an effective sales compensation plan.
Sales and Sales Management Training
Sales and Sales Management Skills Training
Our president, Alan Rigg, is a professional member of the National Speakers Association. He is equally adept at delivering live, in-person presentations and remote presentations (teleconferences and webinars) using internet and telephone technologies.
For more information, visit our sales and sales management seminars, workshops, webinars and teleconferences page.
Teaching New Salespeople to Become Productive Quickly (Onboarding)
After you hire a new salesperson, what's the next step? Usually it's training to familiarize the new salesperson with your company's portfolio of products and services, plus teach the salesperson how to sell these products and services in the manner that your sales team's collective experience has proven to be most effective.
How can you get your new salespeople "up to speed" in the shortest possible amount of time, especially if your company has a large portfolio of products and services? What is your company's process for onboarding new salespeople?
Let's delve a little deeper:
- Does your company's process for helping new salespeople become productive rely on the availability of busy sales managers and/or equally busy senior salespeople?
- How much time can these busy individuals make available to spend with new salespeople?
- Over what time frame does this sharing and learning take place?
- How much time do new salespeople spend "twiddling their thumbs," waiting for an experienced individual to become available to work with them?
- For how long do you pay out salaries and benefits before new salespeople begin to generate an acceptable return on your investment?
Your company's process for training new salespeople does NOT need to be held hostage to the limited availability of busy, experienced salespeople and/or sales managers. Instead, you can make it possible for new salespeople to teach themselves most of what they need to know and do it in an accelerated time frame. This can be accomplished by developing the kinds of training tools described in this article and reinforcing them with audio or video recordings of experienced salespeople performing important steps in the sales process.
Our president, Alan Rigg, has a unique ability to help clients identify, extract and document the information that is most critical to helping new salespeople become productive quickly. If you would like to explore the possibility of securing his assistance to develop customized training tools and audio/video recordings to accelerate the productivity of your organization's new salespeople, give us a call or send us an e-mail. We will be happy to schedule a no-obligation telephone appointment.
Sales Activity Inspection
Inspecting the Quantity and Quality of Your Salespeople's Activities
When salespeople produce results, it makes perfect sense to inspect those results. You can do it by asking questions such as:
- How much revenue is each salesperson producing?
- How profitable is this revenue?
- How does each salesperson's performance rate when compared against quota?
- How does it rate when compared against the performance of other sales team members?
What do you do if you don't like the answers to these "results inspection" questions? What do you do when a salesperson shows some flashes of ability, but their performance is not consistent? How do you determine what the problem(s) might be? For that matter, how do you determine whether a brand new salesperson is performing enough of the right activities to meet their 30, 60 and 90 day performance goals?
To answer these questions, you need to inspect your salespeople's activities. Activity inspection provides an "early warning system" for many sales performance problems. Plus, when salespeople's activities are inspected regularly and consistently, it helps create and reinforce your company's sales culture.
Effective sales activity inspection processes are described in detail in Chapters 16 and 17 of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance. If you would like additional assistance, contact us to schedule a no-obligation telephone appointment. We will be happy to discuss your current situation and suggest strategies for improving the effectiveness of your company's sales activity inspection processes.
Eliminating Stalled Opportunities from Your Company's Sales Opportunity Pipeline
What is the condition of your company's sales opportunity pipeline? How many of the opportunities have been stalled at the same step in the sales cycle for weeks…or months?
Your company bases very important decisions on sales forecasts and the opportunity pipeline. If they are inaccurate, or if opportunities do not close in predictable time frames, it can wreak havoc on vital financial measurements such as revenue, profit, and cash flow. This makes maximizing the accuracy of sales forecasts and opportunity pipelines critical to your company's success!
An effective process for eliminating stalled opportunities from your company's sales opportunity pipeline is described in our FREE Special Report, How to GUARANTEE the Accuracy of Your Salespeople's Forecasts and Opportunity Pipelines.
If you would like additional assistance, contact us to schedule a no-obligation telephone appointment. We will be happy to discuss your current situation and suggest strategies for:
- Separating reality from fiction and fact from opinion when analyzing sales opportunities
- Focusing your time and attention on helping your salespeople advance sales cycles with REAL prospects
- Helping your salespeople determine how much prospecting activity will be required to generate enough real prospects to consistently make their numbers
Strategic Sales Planning
Growing Sales Quickly with a Predictable, Repeatable Sales Process
A key challenge for many sales organizations is they do not have a clearly defined way of doing things. Each salesperson is a "one off" that goes about selling in his or her own way. Is it any wonder that these organizations suffer from "80/20 sales performance?" How do you replicate successes and increase sales rapidly without a predictable, repeatable sales process?
The process we go through to help organizations develop comprehensive strategic sales plans includes the following steps:
- Review the organization's current sales approach, tools and processes.
- Meet with the members of the organization's leadership team to gather their perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the sales function.
- Meet with or survey the organization's sales team members to gather their perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the company's current sales approach, tools and processes.
- Identify key characteristics of the company's Ideal Customers.
- Identify the tactics that need to be implemented to attract
more Ideal Customers and maximize penetration of existing customer accounts. (This can get into a lot of
detail, but "the devil's in the details" and MUST be
addressed!)
- Identify key activities that salespeople must be able to execute to
achieve their sales objectives.
- Identify what needs to be done in terms of training tool development,
training delivery, post-training practice and reinforcement,
etc., to prepare the salespeople to effectively discharge
key activities.
- Identify how sales management will inspect the quantity and
quality of the salespeople's performance of key activities.
- Discuss observed salesperson performance with sales management
and compare their observations to each salesperson's
comprehensive sales assessment test results.
- Develop individualized training/coaching/mentoring plans for each salesperson in an effort to help them achieve maximum performance.
If you would like to learn more about our strategic sales planning services, give us a call or send us an e-mail. We will be happy to schedule a no-obligation telephone appointment to discuss your company's specific situation!
Other Important Information
We offer consulting services in two different ways. The first is traditional hourly consulting. You pay us our hourly rate (or day rate) and we work with you, your executive team, your sales managers, your salespeople, or whomever else you would like us to work with to get the job done.
The second way we offer consulting services is through our 80/20 Sales Leader membership website. At present there are two levels of membership available: Silver and Gold.
- A Silver membership entitles you to attend two monthly Open Q&A (question and answer) calls and a monthly Guest Expert call. All three calls are hosted by our president, Alan Rigg.
- A Gold membership entitles you to attend the monthly Open Q&A calls and the monthly Guest Expert call, plus call in twice per month for brief, one-on-one consultations (10 to 15 minutes each) with our president, Alan Rigg.
Regardless of whether you are a business owner, executive, sales manager or individual salesperson, an 80/20 Sales Leader membership will provide you with access to a noted sales and sales management expert at a very attractive price!
Sometimes the needs of our clients require us to do consulting work. However, we are rather "reluctant consultants" because we are NOT trying to build a consulting business. As a result, we look to accomplish knowledge transfer as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Who would you rather work with - a consultant who wants to make you reliant on his or her assistance on an ongoing basis (in order to maximize billable hours), or a consultant who wants to make you self-sufficient as quickly as possible? If you would prefer to "learn how to fish" rather than have the fishing done for you, give us a call!
Schedule a No-Obligation Telephone Appointment
Would you like to explore how the 80/20 Selling System™ can help you end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance? Give us a call on our toll-free number or send us an e-mail. We will be happy to schedule a no-obligation telephone appointment to discuss your company's specific situation!
80/20 Sales Performance
6901 East Chauncey Lane #3057
Phoenix, AZ 85054
Toll Free: (866) 531-3917
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