How ARE They Doing?

If you’ve already set clear expectations for your sales staff, you will be monitoring their performance regularly.

For most sales managers, the best indication of a sales person’s success is the dollars they bring in.  If they are not reaching sales targets within the agreed time, you’ll need to gather some information on what is or isn’t happening BEFORE you take any action.  It may be that they are never gonna make it, OR that they require a little more support from you.

There are three main ways to monitor someone’s performance:

Ask them some questions.  They may already know what is not working.  Keep the questions as open as possible to hear what THEY think and avoid leading the conversation in the direction you think it should go.  Keep an open mind and listen.  Discuss with them where they are getting “stuck” in the sales cycle.

Keep good statistics – have good systems for capturing results at EVERY stage of the sales cycle – not just the end.  Sales is a numbers game for the most part; knowing how many potential clients you need in the pipeline to produce the revenue required means recording the results of all client contact.

Observe their behaviour – listen in to a couple of phone calls, go to a couple of sales appointments, read a couple of proposals.

Once you’ve looked at where they are getting stuck, it pays to understand why, before you make a plan on what to do about it.

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