There are no excellent salespeople!

Well, there probably are…somewhere, but it would appear that they are excellent only for relatively short periods of time.  Or they're four check marks in their performance, but just not consistently five.  Probably a better comment on my part would actually be… “There are no consistently excellent sales people!”

The bestselling book, In Search of Excellence, was published in 1982, but within just two years, a number of the 43 companies held up as examples of their excellence had nosedived with businesses like Atari, Chesebrough Pond, Data General, Flour and Data General leading the fall.  In fact, two thirds of the companies had fallen far from grace within five years of the book’s publication. 

Somewhat the same results for Built to Last although Jim Collins, wanting to avoid the book selling problems of In Search of Excellence, wisely chose to expand the view of his 18 companies to cover the entire life span of their existence plus he only chose to study companies that were more than 40 years old.

Certainly, I’m not faulting either Peters or Collins.  They certainly have a much larger and more analytical view of the world than I do, plus the last I looked, I haven’t sold one book, let alone the best sellers that they  continue to produce.

The key word here is “consistently” excellent. 

My observation is that most salespeople don’t consistently take care of themselves, and very, very few consistently train themselves especially in new skills.

Compare “the better” (whatever that means to you) salespeople that you know to professional athletes.  There’s no comparison. 

Now compare those same salespeople to the committed weekend warriors that you know.  That may be you, but it certainly isn’t me.  I just get by with feeding my addiction to snowboarding and surfing.  On the other hand, my locker room buddy, Brian, a senior executive at a major financial service here in town, trains incessantly for two or three Mountain Challenges a year running against the clock up and down ski trails intermixed with rope courses, slogging through the mud and various swimming obstacles.  Running up and down stairs, driving himself on the treadmill, while working through vigorous drills, Brian is still just a sports weekend warrior, but not coincidentally, is one of the best performing managers at his firm.  Now I compare Brian to most of the “better” salespeople that I know, and very, very few spend the amount of time in one year training and drilling themselves in the skills of selling that he does in one month.

And the Brians of the world are far from unique.  I just think of all my close friends who have been training for the Pan Mass Challenge for the past year.  Bruce Stevens, the now retired CEO of Steinway, is out there today in what the Weather Channel is calling “excessive heat” working to build up his stamina in prep for the ride. My friend, Dede, is hobbling through pain right now with an ankle problem, but as captain for her team, there’s no question that she’ll be making the full ride.  And on and on for another 50 people that I know who will make the ride.

Compare that level of and commitment to training to the amount of time and drive that you put into your profession of sales, or, if you’re the head of sales, that you carve out of the year for your team.   Our data states that the average salesperson puts in 57 hours of work every week or around 3,000 hours a year.  Out of this, what’s the amount of time that you put directly into actual sales skills training per year?  200 hours? 100? 50? 

Think of this as an opportunity for the second half of the year.  We know from our H1 data through the first half that all of our customers, taken as a whole, attained around 94% of their business plan results for the last six months and approximately 82% of their planned sales quotas. 

We also know that H2 is going to be much more difficult.  The economy is a mess.  The job market is worse.  While the IPO market is relatively frothy, the layoffs at big corporations are clearly ramping up.  Right now, no decision maker is very confident about the economic outlook.  With this as background, think about your freshly scrubbed salesperson who then shows up for a sales call next week gushing excitedly over shiny new features and talks feverishly about such useless nothings as “better”, “cuter”, “faster” and “smaller”.  On the other end of the phone line or falling asleep on the other side of the desk is someone with a big Post It Note stuck on his or her forehead which says “SO WHAT?”

Going into the next five months, and really the next three in order to make this process the most impactful for this year, think about what it will take in terms of your time and expertise to skill, to teach, to drill and to test your salespeople turning them into much more highly trained sales professionals.  Actually it does not entail a lot of work, just dedicated time which you might want to start working into your August through October calendars right now.  As you think about this just continue to make the comparisons in the time committed to training not to professional athletes but also to the men and women who will be out there riding the Pan Mass Challenge .

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Good Selling !

Jack