with intensive coaching and the willingness of the sales professional, resulted in great success. Today, Elisabeth is FTI’s number one salesperson, with $10 million in sales this year.
Sales Management
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This one-time assessment tool will give you the insight you need to help your professionals meet their mark. A number of qualified consultants distribute the SPQ tool, and I encourage you to bring one in. After the initial assessment, don’t hesitate to give your people personal coaches if you believe they have the potential—and the heart and attitude—to be successful.
QUARTERLY REVIEW.
The quarterly review is essential to developing
your people and ensuring that they are properly supported and given
the tools to perform at the top of their game. At FTI, we use an MBO performance development tool. This quarterly review based on revenue and skills and examines two critical areas: (1) actual revenue and sales activity versus quota and (2) progress in achieving set development objectives or an evaluation of competencies in relation to identified skill and knowledge areas. Within the performance evaluation, manager and peer feedback is included.
Like any performance-based evaluation tool, the quarterly review is used as a coaching tool not only to assess areas that need improvement and potentially further training, but also to determine when a sales professional is ready to achieve more and take on more responsibility. Remember, superstar sales professionals are aggressive; if they are not continually challenged and provided with growth opportunities, they will seek out a more challenging position with another firm. The quarterly review should not be viewed as simply a report. It is a powerful interaction between you and your team. It provides insight into where each salesperson is performing in the key categories for success and enables you to remove obstacles, provide resources, make mid-course corrections, and celebrate success.
Tracking
Two definitions of tracking are: (1) to search by following evidence until found and (2) to observe or plot the moving path of something. These definitions apply to sales tracking, as sales tracking does provide “evidence” of what is happening in the sales process and helps a manager to forecast and “plot.”
However, too often, tracking becomes synonymous with monitoring. If you institute activity-measuring tools because “I’m tracking you,” it’s useless.
Tracking should be used to improve performance—to leave people better than you found them. It is this philosophy that leads me to include tracking in this Building and Managing section.
Tracking serves many purposes:
• Enforces accountability: Encourages ownership and responsibility.
• Helps professionals “analyze the game”: Provides insight into the sales process. Just like a baseball pitcher analyzes his game and the game of his batter, tracking gives sales professionals stats to measure their progress objectively and relative to others.
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The Front Office: Driving Sales and Growth
• Motivates: Brings another level of competition to the sales organization and the entire firm.
• Forecasts and provides utilization data: Helps practice leaders to manage staff and provides insight into the sales organization’s performance.
Justifies existence of sales organization.
• Coaches: Enables managers to identify key areas for growth so they can help sales professionals get to the next level.
There are two types of tracking:
1. Coaching: Sales activity presented in weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings between the sales professional and the sales manager; it focuses on improvement.
2. Public tracking: Sales activity presented in a weekly and monthly report card format to the entire firm and sales organization; it informs, motivates, and inspires competition.
Tracking, if set up and managed appropriately, can help sales professionals to analyze their game. If you’ve developed a sales organization with a culture in which tracking and coaching are intertwined, your sales professionals will want to use a tracking tool and will be hungry for their weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews. Remember, tracking is about improving performance, and your job, as a manager, is to repeatedly ask, “How can I help you improve?” Three key tracking tools are instrumental to successful coaching and are useful to any firm.
TRACKING TOOL 1: ACTIVITY-BASED SALES MODEL.
The activity-
based sales model helps the sales professional and the manager track the sales process and, more importantly, identify what things in this process are within the sales professional’s control, and thus are able to be improved, and what things are outside their direct control. Exhibit 4.4 is an example of the activity-based modeling tool used at FTI, Inc.
This activity-based sales modeling tool enables sales professionals and managers to evaluate their performance metrics on a regular basis. Examine this model, looking at each metric, the detail surrounding this metric, and, most importantly, whether this metric is within the span of human control; that is, can the sales professional impact this metric significantly?
To gain the full benefit of this activity-based sales model, it is essential that you incorporate this analysis into regular progress meetings with sales professionals. Using the model as an analytical tool, a manager can act as a coach and help sales professionals to analyze their individual game. Two example cases illustrate the combined coaching power of the activity-based sales model and the sales manager.
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The Front Office: Driving Sales and Growth
Example Case Number One: Joan, a new sales professional, doesn’t have enough appointments. Why? During her quarterly review, you and Joan
analyze her numbers. Does her lack of appointments come from an inability to articulate the company’s value? Fear of the phone? Not asking for the appointment? Calling the wrong people? Through this dialogue and analysis, you can put together a coaching plan for Joan. In the meantime, as Joan is acquiring new skills, you can help her to positively inf luence the metrics she does have control over—in this case, the number of dials.
Using the modeling tool, you can determine how many additional dials Joan must make to book enough appointments to reach her revenue goals.
After suggesting this short-term solution, you can then implement a coaching plan that will help her to reach the standard rep appointment close ratio of 30 percent.
Example Case Number Two: Gary, a veteran sales professional, does not particularly like call canvassing—who really does? When you sit down to your quarterly review, you see that Gary’s dials number is very low—well below the standard rep minimum of 100 per week. While at first glance you see a need to discuss (in negative terms) this number with Gary, the modeling tool shows that Gary’s appointment closing ratio is at 40 percent, exceeding expectations, and his closing ratio is also high. Gary will clearly meet his quarterly sales quota. As a manager, you can use the sales modeling tool to show Gary how much more money he would be making if he increased his dials by just 10 or 20 calls, motivating him to achieve more. You can also pinpoint Gary as an effective closer and turn to him when there is another professional who needs coaching in that particular area.
The activity-based sales model is an essential tool; it has value for both the sales manager and the sales professional. It helps managers see how they are going to grow the business and develop a strong sales team, and it helps sales professionals get to the next level.
TRACKING TOOL 2: WEEKLY REPORT.
The weekly report follows a re-
port card format and lists a subset of the categories included on the activity-based sales model. The weekly report focuses on letters of engagement (LOEs) and provides highlights of prospect accounts. Sales call reports, which are entered into the contact management or CRM system, are automatically aggregated into the weekly report (see Exhibit 4.5).
TRACKING TOOL 3: MONTHLY PIPELINE.
This detailed and high level
tool forecasts revenue by sales professional and details the prospect company, stage of sales cycle, date contact initiated, forecasted revenue and probability of close, factored revenue, and a quarterly revenue pipeline.