“Patience is a virtue, right? Too much patience is stupidity.” Lou Piniella, Cubs manager, after shaking up the lineup of his run-challenged club.
We see it happen all the time – sales managers who are afraid to shake things up on their sales team who end up keeping mediocre performers when all signs indicate they should let them go. Yes, patience is a virtue. And yes, it’s the sales manager’s responsibility to make sure they do everything in their power to create an environment for sales people to succeed – from daily coaching, to joint sales calls, to frequent role play, to motivating, to investing in sales training, to listening to calls and debriefing, and supporting their sales team in every way possible.
But as Cubs manager Lou Piniella put it this past weekend, “…too much patience is stupidity.” When should your sales manager draw the line and make the difficult decision to let a sales person go? What criteria should they use leading up to that decision? How do you make sure your sales manager is doing everything they can to avoid the mistake of letting a potentially strong producer go?
1. Manage Daily Behaviors, not Results – we advise our clients to focus on the daily behaviors that lead to sales results, rather than the results themselves. This is especially important when a sales person is struggling. You can monitor this by looking at what your sales managers are measuring. Do they know the number of call attempts, referrals, or introductions each sales person generates every day/week/month? How many turn into conversations? How many conversations turn into face-to-face meetings? How many meetings turn into proposals? If your sales managers focus on the day-to-day activities that lead to success, the sales results should follow.
2. Three Strikes and You’re Out – as your sales manager monitors specific activities, have them set clearly defined activity goals for the sales person in question. Since the activities monitored should be within the sales person’s control and are measurable, set specific targets. The first time they miss a target (for the day, week or month, as appropriate), that’s strike one. If they get to strike one, talk about what happened and coach them through whatever challenges or difficulties caused them to miss the target. If they get to strike two, the sales person gets a day off (unpaid) to get their head on straight and to think about whether or not they want to be in their position. If they reach strike three, it’s time to let them go.
3. Recruit, recruit, recruit – we tell our clients that a decision to recruit is not a decision to hire. If you are constantly recruiting sales talent, you’ll never be held hostage by mediocre performers because you’ll have a strong pipeline of sales candidates available. It is extremely difficult to implement the “three strikes and you’re out” rule if you don’t have a recruiting system in place. Most sales managers we evaluate recruit on an “as-needed” basis only.
No matter how long you’ve run your company, chances are you’ve had sales managers hang on to a struggling sales person a little too long. Follow these three simple steps and you can make sure their patience doesn’t breed mediocrity in your sales organization. Need help? That’s what we do – just e-mail mike@intelligentconversations.com to schedule a briefing.