The theme this week is about trusting in proven sales processes. Check out the article I wrote for salespeople (Trust The Process - https://go.sellingeffectiveness.com/9.16.LI.AM), and for managers on actually enforcing what is expected (You Get What You Tolerate - https://go.sellingeffectiveness.com/LI.9.17.AM).

People Will Be People

But people will be people, which means they are motivated by what is in THEIR best interest. Not yours, not the company’s, not the customer’s. Hopefully they do what is right for everyone involved, but when push comes to shove you can’t rely on that. You can trust all you want, just remember to verify.

What do you have in place to ensure your teams – salespeople and leadership – are following the company’s required and suggested sales process?

Questions for Each Sales Channel:

•Telesales

If you have a telesales team (salespeople who sell over the phone) – are all the calls recorded? Do managers have the ability to listen in (and Whisper/Barge)?

•Video Sales

If your team sells via video calls (like Zoom) – are all meetings recorded? Do managers have all the links for all meetings so they can ‘pop in’ to live meetings and see how they go?

•Retail Sales

If your team sells in person, in a retail location – do you have a system to capture videos and audio of their interactions?

•Outside Sales

If you have outside salespeople, who go to someone’s location (house, office, etc.) to sell – how can you capture those meetings for review later?

Common Responses

Know what I hear a lot when I ask these questions of business owners and sales leaders? No – we don’t have anything like that in place.

They might throw in a ‘our salespeople know to follow our process’. And sometimes I get a ‘we have that in place, but we don’t know how to check it’.

Excuses are like butt holes. They stink. So stop making them.

If you don’t have technology in place to capture interactions, then you are at the mercy of your team’s feelings about your sales process and compliance.

If you don’t have processes in place to inspect what you expect, you are playing a dangerous game with the life blood of your business – your revenue.

Accountability for Leaders

You might want to say that that is what your managers/leaders are for – to make sure that everyone is selling the way the company wants them to sell. But your leaders also need to be held accountable.

Don’t trust that they will inspect what you expect. Even if they aren’t doing things maliciously, they are still human and most likely overwhelmed [https://go.sellingeffectiveness.com/9.11.LI.AM].

By the way, there are nearly unlimited tech tools available now to monitor, coach, hold your team accountable, and train them. There is no longer the excuse of ‘I can’t be everywhere at the same time.’ That is just another excuse, and I already told you how I feel about excuses.

I am not saying it will be easy to implement ways to hold everyone accountable or provide sales interaction feedback. I am also not saying it will be cheap. But I will say it will be worth it, no matter the time, resources, and cost to put it in place and use it.

How can I say that? Well…look at the total cost of getting that system in place, divide by your average target sales ticket price (target = what you want, not what the team is necessarily currently doing), and that will tell you how many additional sales they need to make. Do you think with the right coach, accountability, and leadership oversight can get the team to generate that many more deals over the next 12 months?

Reality Check

[If the answer is no – then you have the wrong team, or they are already operating at capacity, you have no new salespeople, no plans on expanding…so not sure why you would be reading articles to improve your sales operation. All of that could be accurate, but I am being sarcastic – of course your team could do more! And it’s possible you might need some or all new team members once you start really watching and inspecting what you expect!]

No more excuses for how you and your leaders can lead based on what is actually happening, not what you hope is happening on the sales floor and in your team’s sales interactions.