Keep Score in Sales

This is the Momentum podcast. This week I met with a friend of mine who runs a successful company, has a relatively new sales team because he made some changes in the structure of his team, the management of his team, and he's getting inconsistent results with the team. And I think he has five or six salespeople. But regardless how many salespeople you have, if you have over three, I'm going to share with you the insight I shared with him that always make sales teams perform better. I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast made for Empire Builders Game Changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Should we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will? We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution. And we always will be. If you've been listening to my podcast, you know that I've been doing this for a while and I've seen so many different situations within companies, and sometimes there's this consistent situation that has a consistent solution, in fact. Today I want to share with you how you can make any sales team more productive and. It's funny, you know, I shared this with my friend that I met with this week. I met with a friend of mine who has a sales team and he's getting inconsistent results some days or some two or three days in a row. They do really well. Then they have a week where they don't do well. Then they have two or three days where the team is doing well and it's inconsistent. And I've been brought in more than once to consult with a company who's having issues with their sales team and really with their overall sales process. And one of the first things I do that always improves sales and makes me look like a hero. And you can do right now if you have a sales team and if you don't have a sales team yet, you should still listen to this podcast because once you have more than three people in sales, this is the key to maximizing the productivity of your sales team. And it's actually relatively simple. You create a scoreboard where you show the productivity of each salesperson and you staggering them. That means you put the first person on top and the person who's not doing that well on the bottom. And you show that scoreboard every single day, stack ranking and scoring, your sales team will show the team who's actually doing well and it will show them what is important daily sales. And here's what happens to salespeople. If somebody goes into sales. If somebody is on your sales team, you can just make the assumption that they're a somewhat competitive person. And when I say somewhat competitive, really good salespeople are really competitive. And if you create a scoreboard where you're showing who's in first place, every person on that sales team is going to want to be in first place. And here's what I see over and over again. In companies with sales teams, they collect sales data. They just don't create a scoreboard. In fact, most of the time the information is there to create the scoreboard to show the sales team who's doing best. But for some reason they don't put it together and they don't display it on a daily basis. In fact, every morning when you have just said, in fact, twice, I don't know why I'm in fact mood, I need to stop doing that. If you have a sales team, you should be having a daily huddle with your sales team and meeting with all of them and talking about the day before and showing the results of the day before and showing them what's important to you that they actually sell on a daily basis. And when you create a scoreboard, here's what happens. Several things happen. Number one, you know who's doing really well in sales. And so you can start asking them, what are you doing that's different from the people around you? You can start mining your own sales team for best practices as to what's converting in your specific company, what's making people buy, or what's encouraging people to buy in your specific company. The second thing that happens is that sales people know where they stand. You know, if you're not displaying information as to how the team is doing, a salesperson might think, Hey, I'm doing okay. I'm getting a few sales here and there. You know, I'm converting. I've gotten sales this month, I'm making a decent paycheck. But until they see the comparison that, hey, a decent paycheck is half of what the top salesperson is actually doing. They don't really know how well they can do. And that creates an entirely new perspective on your sales team. When somebody sees that someone's ahead of them, it creates a new possibility. It creates this effect where they say, Hey, I can do better. And when you create a scoreboard, you create this lateral pressure on the sales team. Now, I've talked about lateral pressure versus top down pressure before. So here's what top down pressure is. Top down pressure is from management. Top down pressure is when you're telling people they need to do better. Top down pressure is when the motivator for any team is that the person in charge is saying, Hey, you need to do more here, you need to do better here. But when you create a scoreboard and you show comparatively how salespeople are doing against each other, you immediately create what I call lateral pressure. And lateral pressure is, Hey, I need to do as well as the other people on this team. I actually need to go talk to the guy who's in first place and find out what he's doing that I'm not doing. If he can do it, then maybe I can do it. And you create this environment where just by showing the score on a daily basis, you show the salespeople that they can do more. So I can remember distinctly when we did this in the company that we ran before the company I'm running right now, we used to have a pretty large salesforce. There were ten or 12 people, in fact, one of them on call whose last name is now called Witty. I was at my birthday party this weekend and we inevitably, whenever we're around other people, it comes up that she was on my team and it comes out that she used to sell for us. And I remember when we stack ranked the sales team, how quickly she ended up on top because she's hyper competitive and she's an amazing entrepreneur and she wants to be in first place and she wants to show what she can do. And she did. She was actually on a team and it was kind of interesting because she was the single female on a team of male sales reps. We tried to hire women, they just didn't apply. And we finally found Cole and very quickly she was in first place and it created this environment where every single salesperson sold better. Because all of them saw what she was capable of. And it did exactly what I've been saying. On on. You know what I just shared with you? It showed other salespeople what is possible. I heard more than once sales people asking, cool, like, hey, how are you doing that? How is it that you're getting the higher numbers? Can I listen to one of your calls? Can I listen to one of the recordings of your calls? And just by putting this scoreboard in place, it improved all of our sales results. In fact, if you have a cheese, I just did it again. Why am I, in fact, so much? Sorry, I would cancel that. If you're in a situation where you feel stuck in sales, you might want to listen to my last podcast. 822 called Get Unstuck in Sales, where I show the process in the script and how you create a sales system so your salespeople can sell. And this is a tactic that will help you with the entire team. It will make your team more productive. I've seen it over and over and over again, in fact. Oh, my gosh, what am I doing? I've seen it over and over again. For example, when I was a consultant and I would be brought in like I shared earlier, we would install this scoreboard and almost immediately sales would get better. And people would say like, Oh, you know what? Alex really knows what he's doing. Consulting. Like, our sales are already improving, things are already getting better. We made the right decision and what I did was relatively simple. I put a scoreboard in place and then I made sure that the sales manager was talking to the team about the scoreboard on a daily basis. I made sure that every person on that team had perspective as to where they stood against everybody else. And it just created an environment that actually plays into what sales reps need. They need a competitive environment, but without a scoreboard, there is no competition. You know what? How we share with people is, can you imagine having the team that you're coaching, playing any sport, any sport in the world, but you don't keep score? How would that team do? They wouldn't have perspective as to whether they're winning or losing. They wouldn't have perspective as to whether they're doing well or not. When you put the scoreboard in place, now you have that perspective. Now you have that clarity, you have that visibility to what performance actually means in your company. And so if you have a sales team of over three people, don't complicate this make this easy show on a daily basis. Who is the top performer in sales and shows? Top performer means they are selling the most. You might want to include some other metrics like how many calls they attempted, how many calls they were on, how many calls they actually closed, and what their conversion rate is, and then show what that conversion rate means. What is that total dollar amount that they're selling? And you will see your entire sales team improve. You know, one of the disciplines that we teach is creating a performance culture. And if you want to create a performance culture, you have to have three things. In fact, I'm going to do a podcast on this next. This will be the podcast that follows. This one you have to have three things get to go into some detail. In the next podcast. You need clear outcomes, clear scoreboards and what we call transparency and clear accountability. And if you're not getting the results that you want from your sales team, chances are they don't have perspective as to what those results really mean. And this is a simple way. This is a quick way to put measurement in place so that everyone knows where they stand. And you play into that competitive nature of salespeople. If you are growing a business and you want help in scaling your team and not having to do everything yourself and understanding how to create a performance culture across all of the departments in your company, maybe don't have departments, maybe just have a small team. If you want to create a performance culture with the entire team. Reach out to us. Go to simple operations dot com. Fill out the form that's on the homepage. Jump on a call with us and let us show you how we've helped. Dozens of companies go from 7 to 8 figures and hundreds of companies go from either six or early seven figures to multiple millions. There's a system and a process that you can use. And remember, process, structure and routine will set you free as an entrepreneur. Even though we resist process, structure and routine. Let us show you the systems and the structure that actually works for visionary entrepreneurs like you and I, so that we grow our team, we trust the people around us, we get the results we want and we don't feel like we have to do everything ourselves. Go to simple operations dot com, fill out the form. We look forward to talking to you.