The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

We've spent a fair amount of time recently on this blog talking about your best accounts... the ones you should be spending the most time with. One way to do so, we've suggested, is to fire your crappy accounts

Frustrated that your email open rates are so low? Or are you happy that your open rates are above average, but you want to boost them further?

The leaves are turning beautiful shades of red and gold (well, not here in Florida, where the leaves just turn brown and it doesn’t happen until February), so it must be the time of year when thoughts turn to annual sales planning, to making next year markedly better than this year.

(Oh, the leaves don’t make you think about planning? If they trigger thoughts about turkey, click here. If they spark thoughts about skiing, look here. If the leaves prompt thoughts of romance, you must be confusing fall with spring.) 

I thought I’d approach the topic of annual sales planning by offering my favorite all-time quotations about planning. Which ones speak loudest to you?

Think before you act.

—Aesop

Belly flop. The phrase itself conjures painful memories. You start off with the best intentions... and somehow, along the way, something derails you. Instead of a dive with a tiny splash, you end up landing flat, with a huge splash, and welts on your belly.

Belly flops aren't just for swimming holes. Think of the last really great idea you had. Now, was the execution flawless? Maybe. But if not, you need some guidance. Even if your manager focused more on empathy than accountability, you need to make sure your next great idea doesn't flop. Below is the critical path document that helps big ideas become polished products.

Every sales organization has a product or a service—or an entire product line or category—whose revenue they’re not quite happy with. Management then proceeds to focus on it, to direct extra effort to increasing revenue related to that relatively weak item or category. Make sure you mention those widgets to every client and prospect, they’ll advise. Be certain at least one frammus is a part of every proposal, they’ll demand. Tweet to everyone you know about our skyhook service, they’ll request. Management will, of course, start closely measuring all activity and results related to sales of this particular product, publishing and distributing those metrics widely and frequently throughout the organization.

They’ll move the needle. Revenue will tick up, but usually by less than what they hoped, less than what they projected. Reasons for the disappointment are often plenty, but one will remain undiagnosed, and thus it will be repeated again and again.

Approaching new prospects with a customer-needs focus used to be the smartest thing you could do. No longer. 

Today it’s the only thing you can do, the only way to win an appointment with a decision influencer. 

Rewind back to the 1990s. It was that recently that prospects needed to meet with a salesperson to learn about the products and services that company was offering. Yes, there were brochures, and sometimes a company would make a brochure available by mail to prospects, but to get questions answered and to learn about specific applications, buyers knew they needed salespeople.

Today, that notion is downright quaint. Product information, answers to most questions, insights into specific applications via case studies, and user reviews/raves/rants are all found online. Prospects learn almost everything they need to know faster, and with more accuracy and reliability, on the web than they do from salespeople.

They can make a buying decision quicker, easier, and with less annoyance without a salesperson than with one!

As a result, it’s pretty rare these days that a salesperson can get an audience with a buyer to talk about what he or she is selling. What used to be the path to a weak deal at a dirtball price—talking about what you’re selling—is now even worse: It just gets your email, your voicemail, and you deleted.

I’m not the kind of guy who tends to do a victory dance when he finds his point of view vindicated. But I came close the other day when I read about the Princeton University study that put the kibosh on Malcolm Gladwell’s famous—and utterly misleading—assertion that all it takes to be successful in any field is 10,000 hours of practice.

I knew Malcolm Gladwell was wrong the moment I heard his crazy claim. The 10,000-hour nonsense is the central theme, the activating idea, in Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, published in 2008. Gladwell observed that the best NHL players grew up on the ice in Canada; most were skating by age three, and they had something like, umm, 10,000 hours’ practice by the time the NHL scouts came to watch them play. And he noted that Bill Gates grew up in a rare (for that era) environment where he had access to computers from an early age and was able to devote, hmm, 10,000 hours to try his hand at programming these new contraptions and get good at it. The Beatles? You guessed it, 10,000 hours in the basement or in empty or crowded dance halls in Liverpool. It’s not talent, Gladwell kept repeating, it’s simply 10,000 hours. 

That was his axiom. And the corollary? You—yes, you!—can be as successful as John Lennon, Bill Gates, or Wayne Gretzky… if you simply commit to 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell specifically claimed that his observation about practice time proved that all that talk about talent was just wrong. Perhaps even more surprising than Gladwell’s allegation was that so many people fell for it, hook, line, and career. Pundits wrote about it, teachers preached it, and young people rearranged their life to fit in 10,000 hours of practice. That’s 5 years of 40-hour practice weeks, if my arithmetic is right. Most didn’t last 10,000 hours. Is that why they’re not gazillionnaires today? Not exactly.

Sales staff turnover is expensive. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t heard many times before. The Center for Sales Strategy published an ebook on this subject last year, revealing for many just how many different line items—and how many hidden costs—are driven up every time a salesperson departs, whether on their own or at your behest.

So I’m not out of line to ask: If so many sales managers are so aware that turnover is a giant expense undermining effectiveness and profitability, why don’t they take more measures to reduce turnover? Here’s what a smart manager would do—and what his savvy boss would require—to reduce sales staff turnover and bring the velocity of that revolving door down to a crawl.

1. Hire the right people in the first place.

Seems so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning. But on this very day, sales managers across the globe will make more bad hires than good hires. That same ebook offered several steps that can help companies reverse those crummy odds. Follow them! The result will be alignment—alignment between (a) the talents, habits, preferences, and inclinations of your salespeople and (b) what you need them to do in order to be successful in your organization. If you have employed such people in the past, you know how delightful it is that you don’t have to hound, bribe, or threaten them to take the right actions. Having such a person on staff need not be the rare exception. If you use a validated talent assessment interview to select your sellers, your staff could be composed largely of people who are in near-perfect alignment with your needs and expectations.

2. Hire the right managers for them.

There are only two kinds of prospects who agree to see you: the ones with lots of extra time on their hands and the ones who are tantalized by what you have to offer. The former are tough to find these days, and when you do you often discover that they don’t have any spare cash to go with their spare time. 

And so our task as salespeople is to tantalize the prospect enough that he or she will be motivated to carve out a block of time in their busy schedule. Salespeople who ask for only a sliver of time, instead of an ample block, set themselves up for failure by positioning themselves as unimportant and inexpensive and by leaving themselves too little time to launch a successful relationship. If you need plenty of time with the prospect, figure that the prospect will need plenty of tantalizing before agreeing to invest that time.

Most salespeople attempt to tantalize their prospects by dangling their product in front of them. Fewer tantalize their prospects by dangling their process. See which one is more like the approach you use…