I trust that everyone had a fun and relaxing 4th and was able for a day or two to leave behind the pressures of the office, quotas, politics and geo-turmoil and focus on celebrating this most important holiday with family and friends.  For me, I retreated to my tiny Vermont town of Winhall (pop. 769) where my major decisions came down to painting the second floor deck of the studio and whether it was worth the two mile drive to the general store for milk, or could it wait for another day?

The answers were that the painting could not wait, but the trip to the Winhall General Store was put off for multiple days.  It must be something in the Vermont air because the entire state of Vermont...along with Bernie Sanders... operates at its own pace and nothing a flatlander does or says is going to make any difference in terms of political or financial impact.  Even with 7 generations of Vermonters surrounding me, I always remember "my place" since I was born on the south side of Chicago and grew up in Boston's suburbs even through 5 generations before me were "true' Vermonters".  

After a week in Vermont, operating at a speed of no more than 25mph, this past Monday, I was suddenly dropped into the fast lane of the reality of returning to work in Boston quickly accelerating to 95mph with all of the normal thoughts of any sales manager that come with planning out a new quarter while at the same time already jumping ahead to figure out what it takes to get to 125% of quota by December.  What I brought with me from the quiet of the hills of Vermont is my resulting theme for these next six months of :

"Control What You Can Control"

In an time of ever-increasing domestic political and geo-political friction, divisiveness and, just abject violence, I'm doubling...probably tripling...down on absolute focusing on what I can personally control...and quite frankly that's a lot.  Although I'm not going to have any impact on reducing the vitriol and non-sensical suppositions coming out of Washington, I can have immediate impact with my own sales team and with the teams of our customers on one thing, and that's productivity.  What people have found in thousands of studies, and basically without exception, the more productive businesses are simply much more likely to survive and grow faster. If you want to be a successful business, you simply need to be a highly productive business, and there is nowhere in any company that has a more immediate impact than in Sales.  Productivity from Marketing takes months. The impact in productivity from Engineering takes years. Increasing productivity from Sales can make an impact next Friday!

Very simply, the measure of productivity is how much output, how much GDP, is generated for every hour of work. The easiest concept would be to imagine an old-school, pre-robot, manufacturing line of assemblers. If the speed of the assembly line could be increased by 10%, theoretically, output, therefore, productivity would increase by 10%.  Old school thinking which in the mid 1900's worked for a while. 

Let's take that concept, update it to the reality of actively engaging an incentivized team of bright, professional salespeople who want to achieve more productivity, and let's provide simple management practices and easy-to-use productivity tools that enable and increase the actual selling time betwen salespeople and prospects:

1. Completely take down the walls between Marketing & Sales
Anyone who gets in the way and wants to point fingers and assess blame to protect their own turf, you need to simply put them on warning with notice that any violation of not being a proactive and fully engaged member of the team, they get terminated immediately.  Zero tolerance!  Let the game of divisive politics play out in Washington, but not in your company.  Marketing's job is very simple:  provide salespeople with qualified leads.  The wonderful complexity in marketing comes through today's access to highly capable talent and extraordinary technology tools and platforms.  Zero tolerance! You have enough to do with your own time like working with new prospects and existing customers.

2. Count the hours
An "A" level salesperson works around 60 hours a week resulting in about 3,000 available hours a year, but subtracting holidays, vacations, sick time and standard unproductive "water-cooler" time, that result quickly degrades to a number of around 2,300 hours from which we now need to take away time for meetings, travel, and training before we get to actual "available selling time", which in our thousands of calculations of this formula, always comes out to be between 1,100-1,300 hours a year.  Go through the math yourself or give me a call, and we can do it together, but the reality will be 1100-1300 hours.  Knowing that number and what's behind it is critical since now you have is a baseline from which adding in productivity processes and tools will have both an immediate and significant impact.  What's significant?  Assuming adherence to a tightened up formal process and engaged technology, you should plan on a 20% improvement in sales productivity in six to nine months.  

3. Adopt a formal sales process with active tools and a completely embedded technology platform
If you want to to go faster in finding and closing on more new customers and selling more to existing customers, then that simply is not going to happen by having what I too often hear is "a kinda sales process". 

Just like any other profession (think auto mechanics, accountants, surgeons, pilots, and electricians), salespeople need to have the ease of one formal process structure embedded in an easy-to-use CRM populated with graded selling tools supplied by Marketing  (slide decks, videos, value proposition messaging and templates) that allow them to measure their own productivity and most importantly to transparently share best practices with one another. 

Enough for this morning! What started out as a simple thought or two I had about lessons from a week of downtime in Vermont, has now extended into taking too much time away from your own sales productivity this Friday AM.  Do think about these ideas for a bit of tomorrow during what's unfortunately going to be total washout.  Most importantly, plan on  focusing only on what you personally can control as we launch full force into the second half of this year.   

Have a great day selling today!  

Executing on your Sales Plan in 2024!

For a few ideas on your sales plan for the second half of the year and improving the productivity of your own team, you can click here for our new  "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024", for a few ideas on structure, sales models, process funnels and a number of productivity tools and how to recruit and hire the best.  Or, just give me a call, and we can kick around a few ideas

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.