3 Ideas on How to Plan for 'The Ides of March'

#1.  Figure out Where do you need to Apply your own time

• Do you work on the bottom 20% of your performers or just replace them?
• Do you spend your own time selling into the company's key accounts as the Player/Coach?
• Do you try to move the middle average achievers to the right?
• Do you focus your time on the right side of the sine wave, the top 20% and make them better?

My recommendation is always that you need to focus your very valuable and very limited time focusing on the right side of the sine wave!  You need to collaborate with your top 20%, the critical Sales Warriors, and provide them with the time and advanced training to move them and your results to performance that exceeds 100%.  The data on this math is very specific, and the example above, based on a $200 million quota, shows that by applying time and resources to the top 20%, results can improve by as much as 23%.

#2.  Replace the bottom 20% and don't look back

This is where you earn your pay as a manager since you need to make the tough decisions, and you need to make them now right at the end of this quarter when you still have time to make personnel changes that will pay off in Q3 and Q4.

• First, forget the axiom of "some revenue is better than no revenue".  That's a rookie manager mistake, and it's merely a question of the amount of time that it will take before that person in the bottom 20% falls further and further behind.   The world of sales management has proven time and time again that "nothing ever gets better by itself", so if you really believe that you can improve that person or that group of people who are the bottom 20%, you will need a very specific week-by-week improvement plan that not only invests training time and resources into those individuals, but will also capture a fair amount of your own time.  Nothing will get better by itself, so you need to be very specific and objective as to exactly what you're going to need to do with these individuals. 
• Second, admit that you probably just made a bad hire.  It is what it is, but in "The Derby Rules of 6's & 9's", we have piles of research that paint the scenario below:
  
  Question:  "When did you first realize after hiring that that salesperson's performance and abilities were less than you had expected?"
  Answer:  "Probably 6 or 9 weeks after they started!" 
  Question:  "When did you actually do something about it in terms of specific performance improvement plans or termination?"
  Answer:  "6 or 9 months after they were hired!"
  Question: "Why did you wait so long?"
  Answer:  "I hoped that she or he would get better, and, in the meantime, some revenue is better than no revenue"

#3.  NO LATER THAN THE IDES OF MARCH, FINISH AN UPDATE OF YOUR Q2 PLAN

My guess is that the current 2016 sales plan was most likely crafted back in November and "sold" to your various bosses at the December board meeting.  

It's time to dust this off, take a new look, revise a number of tactics and codify an entire list of updated best practices to be polished during the balance of the year.

• Put a date in the calendar right now to get the sales team together for a planning day during the first week of April.
• Our recommendation is always that the planning process is actually much more important than the plan that results. This is the perfect time to collaborate, engage and empower your salespeople in working together as a team.

 Head Coach