CONSISTENT PERFORMANCE

By Hank Trisler

Terry Buchanan is the sales manager for B&H Australia, a purveyor of computer projection equipment in the state of Victoria, Australia. He runs a five-person sales team and wrote in an e-mail: "The biggest problem I have is keeping everyone focused on achieving consistent results. Too often a person has a great start to the month and, for some reason, seems to start spinning his wheels."

Well, Terry, don't feel like the Lone Ranger. Anyone who has managed a sales team for more than forty-five days has experienced exactly what you're going through. 

The selling profession, by its very nature, is a "fowl or feathers" existence. The only managers I have seen who have achieved truly consistent performance have screwed their teams up to the point that no one was selling anything, and you sure don't want that kind of consistency.

The process of long-term strategic planning and the setting of long-term goals are actually counterproductive to sales consistency. Our minds don't seem to comprehend "I will," but only really hook up with "I am." Learning to talk to and program the unconscious mind is, therefore, the key to getting the best out of our people.

Manage activity, not results. The manager counsels with his salesperson and says, "We need to have you sell two million dollars worth of product this year to help us meet our company goals. Two million is your bogie."

The salesperson looks blankly at the manager and nods. He is not thinking about the company goals. He's thinking about his bills, he's thinking about a new car, a suit of clothes and the fact that his wife's washing machine has been making that funny noise again. It is clearly impossible to comprehend precisely what he must do to sell two million dollars worth of product and, frankly, that goal is fairly low on his list of priorities.

Enlightened managers find out what the salesperson wants to accomplish and finds a way to tie that into the company goals. We need be able to convert results (which we cannot control) into activities (which we can influence, if not control). A Sales Activity Calculator appears on page 172 of NO BULL SALES MANAGEMENT and is a fine tool to help you convert results into actions.

If the salesperson clearly understands and believes that when his feet hit the floor in the morning, he needs to make X calls, which will result in Y presentations, which will result in Z sales, the activities necessary to achieve the results are clear, both at the conscious and unconscious levels.

If you don't have a copy of NO BULL SALES MANAGEMENT, you can get one through our website www.nobullselling.com or call, write or e-mail me and I'll send you a copy of the Sales Activity Calculator.

Keep Goals and Contests short. Long-term goals only become real to us during the final days of the period. If you set a contest wherein the person who sells the most product this year will receive an all-expense-paid vacation, most of the work will be done during the first couple of weeks, when the excitement is high, and during the last couple of weeks when the deadline is looming. Worse yet, someone may run off and hide early on and the rest of the team will quit trying as the deed has already been done.

We can learn a lot from General Motors accounting. Each month consists of three ten-day periods. All contests, reports, and incentives are based on these ten-day periods. If you have a good ten days, you get to start all over again to make the next ten even better. Rather like the Mess Sergeant's last meal. If you have a crappy ten days, it is in the past and you get to start all over, fresh and clean.

A variation of Murphy's Law states that, "Any task will expand to completely consume the time allocated for its completion." Keep the time frames short and you'll get the most consistency possible in this inherently inconsistent business.