Sales Manager Mag

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How do You Measure Potential?

I believed the best brief for a good workshop was a clear understanding of the organizer’s goals and an insight into the team. I knew we couldn’t cover the entire topic but if we focused on specific valuable behaviours, we would significantly lift productivity.

Since none of us are perfect in any part of our sales process, every team can lift their performance in every area. All these needs can’t be solved in one workshop. So a major problem is created when the organizer can’t select one topic from all the group needs. How do you identify the one or two needs that offer the biggest immediate potential?

How to select the topic

One solution could be to ask the team where they needed help. But this seldom produces a realistic assessment of their potential gains from individual skills. If they knew, they would already be working on it. A simplistic focus can produce a quick choice between; a session on prospecting to increase the opportunities or one on closing skills to improve results. But this ignores that most closing problems are created by failures earlier in the process. Adding more prospects or just squeezing harder at the end can actually aggravate the earlier poor performance.

A better solution is to apply a diagnostic tool to measure the team’s knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Last year I started using an online tool called The CheckUp for Sales Professionals, an element of RxSales: An Expert Performance System. It measures salespeople against the mythical perfect specimen in the critical areas identified for consultative sales skills. When relationships are important, the CheckUp highlights individual strengths or needs and also produces a team profile called the Group Diagnosis. Their critical needs stand out when you can see their sales competencies, some early warning signs, and their common myths all summarized in a team profile. But the CheckUp also introduced another major category to consider.

Framework for Sales

Sales results are not produced by what you know. They are produced by what you do. When sales people have a strong framework for sales they are more likely to take action. There is little point in working on their knowledge or skills if they are unlikely to use them.

Their framework consists of
1. Motivation to Sell
2. Commitment to Success
3. Positive Outlook
The most common motivation for top performers is money.

This is especially true in their early years when they are focused on prospecting to build a client base and their primary measure of success is money. Later in their careers their motivation can shift from making money to providing great service. Their focus on service produces a bigger client base from the resulting
referrals.

Your “Commitment to Success” is simply a reflection of what you are willing to do to achieve success. Stephen Covey made the observation in his “Seven Habits” that highly effective people will do whatever it takes to be successful. This characteristic is a strong predictor of success because it says they will keep going until their goal is achieved. People with a high commitment to success don’t just “try”. A positive outlook includes two specific components; high self esteem and being open to change. A sales person with low self esteem is more likely to be defensive about their current practices rather than admit they could perform at a better level. A healthy level of self esteem is what lets us pursue improvement without any loss of pride in our current results. An established producer can be just as keen to learn as the novice.

The Ego

A healthy ego, our conscious sense of identity, lets us see today’s rewards are a result of past efforts and that our future increases will come from our continuing drive to improve. When this strength of ego also includes our motivation to sell and a commitment to success, the result is great resilience when faced with problems or opposition.

When planning a workshop now I want to know about the team’s framework. Are they committed to improving their results and strong enough to identify the weaknesses that offer immediate opportunities to improve their abilities?

When you want to identify great potential, it is not the difference between the ordinary sales person and your champion. It is the new levels possible when the current champion, and the rest, focus their ego on growth. When you measure their framework, you are really looking at their potential.