Eliminating the Pajama Culture
One way to get that urgency instilled in your remote staff is to set the same mindset and standards for them as you do for your on-site employees. In a sense, you’re then melding your office and virtual environments and making them a unified wholeThe Harsh Reality of Waiting
The wrong way to create urgency is to wait for some exterior force or event to create it for you. For despite everything that’s taken place in the last year, nothing has been enough to create the urgency needed to bring us back to pre-covid productivity.Urgency is a Public Relations Campaign
The primary thrust of your message should be to instill (or re-instill) a sense of purpose in the recipients of your PR messages. What are your buyers trying to achieve with your product or service? How will your products and services help them do that?The Inconsistency of Urgency Creates Ups and Downs
The real problem you’re up against is that business production—and even living itself—has sunk into a lower level that has become “the new normal.” At first, when you’re trying to push urgency, you’re going to be up against that lower level that people have now accepted as routine. If you take even a casual look around, you’ll see that this lower level has become a cultural phenomenon.What Attributes Does a Sales Manager Need?
Despite the fact that a sales manager is often promoted from being a top sales rep, a sales manager is not going to succeed without possessing certain skills and attributes in addition to being a great salesperson.We do believe that great salespeople are not born, they’re trained. This is no less true of sales managers and, like salespeople, they will have to put in the work to become trained.
Sales Management: Evaluating Your Team with Precision
One of the top challenges of sales management is being able to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members.Unfortunately, for many, it can be a guessing game. Looking over a sales team, one knows that a few reps do great, the majority can go either way—some months up, some months down—and there are those that never seem to make quota no matter what. The truth, though, is that the actual reasons sales reps are not succeeding can be accurately pinpointed.
Sales Management and The Right Metrics
A crucial component of sales management is having the right metrics for monitoring your sales team.Not having this information, all you can do is scream at the rep, “SELL MORE!” Unfortunately, that almost never works. There is a far more accurate and better solution.
Sales Management: Yes, You Have to Manage
This is the part of the job where “being a boss” comes into play. It’s the part where many sales managers either overdo it, acting like drill sergeants, or underdo it because they’re afraid to “act like an ogre.”There are some things about management that you should fully understand so you’re able to comfortably perform its functions.
Sales Aren’t Happening! Everybody Panic!
There is no greater nightmare for a sales manager than when sales just stop happening!Without having any clue as to what’s going on, a sales manager will have a tendency to come down hard on their salespeople when sales slow down. Much of the time this translates to yelling and screaming. At the very least it usually means speaking harshly to the reps.
The Foundation for The Close
As detailed in our book, the sales process, with Research as a critical stage, is built step by completed step. Each builds upon the other as a foundation, and the close sits upon that foundation. The close will either happen or crumble based on how well that sales process is done.Lack of a Sales Process is A Profit Killer
When a sales team doesn’t have a reliable sales process, a salesperson, to make the sale, is constantly having to go back and try and fix things they messed up. If they don’t have that skill, it will be very hit-and-miss.Turning the Sales 80/20 Rule Into 20-60-20
We found that if we focused on that middle 60 percent of salespeople, we could change an entire company. Getting that middle 60 percent to become consistent put pressure on the top 20 percent to produce more to stay on top.The 8 Core Abilities
As covered in the book, our research uncovered that there are 8 core abilities that all successful salespeople—yes, that top 20 percent—have in common. We have isolated these abilities and call them The 8 Cs of Selling.Desperation and Compromise Kills Your StaffX
In the last blog, we covered creating an excellent staff experience to attract new staff and keep the ones you have. But desperation and compromise in hiring will eventually kill that StaffX that you’ve worked so hard to create.Leading With Standards
There are people who have lowered their working standards throughout the pandemic. Here at SELLability, we’ve witnessed this ourselves with companies that are having increasing trouble finding competent staff.It’s an issue that, right at the moment, is sweeping through the whole society. Job market standards are being lowered so that hiring can occur. But doing so only results in a lower standard throughout the business community—a new, lower standard.
How do we solve it?
Don’t Wait
With this month’s blogs, we’ve laid out all of the necessary changes that you should make to set and maintain standards, so that standards are raised throughout the business world. There is much to do!Now that you’ve seen what you must do, we’ll say this: don’t wait!
Today’s Crucial Company StaffX
With this month’s newsletter and blogs, I’m probably coining a term*: “StaffX".If you’re in the IT or software industry, you may have heard or seen the term “UX” which is an abbreviation for “user experience.” Well, StaffX would, then, be an abbreviation for “staff experience”
From The Supply Chain Crisis Comes Opportunity
In the earlier blogs this month, we discussed ways of navigating through this crisis for yourself and your prospects and customers. Now let’s turn around and look at it from a whole other angle—that the crisis will provide opportunities for you and your business.Consumer Reaction to Scarcity
You as a business should conduct your own research regarding scarcities and act accordingly. But on the other side of the coin, consumers will react to news of scarcity based on whatever information they receive. For your prospects and customers, one source of information is going to be your company.Scarcity: Perception Versus Reality
One of the phenomena of a supply chain crisis is that specific individuals will take advantage of scarcity by manipulating prices and forcing people to buy through fear of shortages. But when it comes to shortages, there is perception versus reality—that is, scarcities can be falsely reported with much of the public believing a scarcity exists.Don’t Yield to the Temptation of Price Manipulation
One negative aspect of the supply chain crisis is price manipulation. While in such a crisis, there are those who will attempt to take advantage by madly raising prices. You should not be one of those.All or Nothing
A major aspect of guidance for a call center is full commitment from both sides—the company and the call center. What does this full commitment look like?All too often that commitment on either or both sides is weak. The company is tentatively hiring the call center, not sure if such a relationship will work, and ready to pull the plug at the first doubt. If the company is not all-in, it won’t necessarily take all the needed actions to make the partnership work.
Calibration is Key
Once standards are established for a call center, as we discussed in this month’s first blog, it becomes a matter of constant calibration of call center agents to those standards.In general use, the term “calibration" means to determine or check the accuracy of an instrument against one that is known to be accurate, or against a specific measurement. An example would be calibration of thermometers in incubators holding premature babies—making sure the correct temperature remains constant. In this case, it simply means listening to calls and correcting and adjusting an agent to the standards you have already set, if required.
The Call Center is an Extension of Your Team
In our first blog this month, we discussed the necessity of setting and enforcing standards for call center agents. Now we go one step further and examine the fact that when you hire a call center, you should consider it an extension of your own team. Most companies will set standards for their own team as regards to customer service. It, therefore, makes sense that a company would want to hold agents in any call center it hired to the same standards.Demanding Standards for a Call Center
Will outsourcing to a call center improve customer service?. Increasingly, today, companies are looking at call centers as an alternative to in-house customer service. The question is, will outsourcing improve your customer service? The answer: only if you guide it there.To start with, you must demand the standards of a call center, standards that will equal or exceed the ones you require of your own customer service.
Without Necessity, There Are No Solutions
Another way that technology can become lost is, interestingly enough, when the necessity to solve problems disappears or is greatly reduced. Exterior agencies, such as the government, slip in and solve various issues for an organization or for an individual. No matter how problems are solved exteriorly, however, no real forward progress or innovation is made without it being propelled by necessity.Technology Lost Through Inaction
One more way that technology can become lost is through the utter inaction that resulted from the pandemic. Through the worst part of the lockdown, people were sitting home, and businesses reduced their services, hours, and delivery. Pandemic restrictions caused inaction in the general society.Pretending You Know Has a Ceiling
One way that technology becomes lost is through employees or staff who “pretend they know” when in truth they don’t know. They may actually believe they know everything already and as a result, aren’t able to learn anything new. This is the kind of person who will max out—they will hit a ceiling as far as what they can do and produce operating with that mindset.How Technology Gets Lost: Losing Valuable Staff
In reacting to the pandemic and the shutdown, many companies strayed from the routine activities that caused them to win in the first place. This resulted in the successful technology of their operations—simply put, how they did things right—becoming lost.The first way that this occurred stemmed from businesses losing valuable long-term employees. Unfortunately, they took all their invaluable skill and knowledge with them as they left.
History Predicts the Future after Coronavirus Pandemic and the Resulting Economic Crisis. Part II
HISTORY serves two major purposes:
- To predict the future through the past
- To guide what should be done to meet the future.
History must be based on facts without opinions, guesses, or spin, on real and factual data.
HISTORY’S SECOND PURPOSE: To guide what should be done to meet the future.
