Not only is Boston a great city to live and work in (if you don't count the traffic), clearly we are wicked sports-crazy coming off the huge Celtics championship. The Sox as of mid-July have had a pretty good season so far marked by both ups and downs. While they’re not leading the division, they’ve shown flashes of strong performance, particularly with their offense and some standout pitching moments. Actually, half way through the season, the team’s playoff hopes are still alive, but they’ll need to maintain consistency and capitalize on key games as the season progresses. In my own comparison summary, the status of the Sox sounds similar to what I'm hearing from many of our customers and business partners:
- A good start to the year but a watchful and conservative outlook.
- Everyone is "mostly" on quota plan, but a fair amount of monthly ups and downs.
- Good confidence in the economy, but major concerns about election distractions.
Similar to baseball, for B2B sales there's huge seasonality swings with a major emphasis right now on gaining traction during the Dog Days of the summa such that the September-October push will end up not only "on plan", but positioned for the world series of business by exceeding quota and making the cut for the winter's President's Club.
Exactly like baseball, analytics and stats at every level of detail dominate performance discussions in the game of Sales, but at the end of the day, everything comes down to wins and losses and what ends up on the scoreboard for the team overall and most importantly for the individual players. And it's here, halfway through the season, that all of us as managers of every sales team can make a major performance impact through what we do during July and August that gets us ready for critical months of the fall.
- Do we have the right players, or is it time to make changes and bring in someone from outside? If you're thinking about that, now is the time to make the change, not in September or October. Spend 30 minutes tomorrow on Saturday before you take the kids to the beach and just put a grade next to every salesperson including the minus and plusses. This game of Sales we play is the playing in the Bigs, and there's simply no room for B- and C players. Tough decisions, but do it now, and don't look back. C and C+ level performance is simply not going to get better by itself, and you probably don't have the time to move a C player to a B, which is a huge task anyhow. Better to use that time to bring in new talent.
- Do the playbooks that you carefully crafted back in April need to be updated for a different level of play now half way through the season? Hard to believe that what was planned for back in March and April still applies in mid-July. Easy to update over the next two weeks in tightening up your Value Propositions, enhancing short-reel videos and a list of 10 other tactics you can bring into play now.
- Run an intensive one day training camp the first week of August. Focus on specific hard skills improvement such as improving demos, crystallizing value props, detailing closing capabilities and negotiating techniques. All short term impact tactics that can be applied immediately. Spend the entire day, have a working lunch on Fenway Franks, and then take the team to a Red Sox game that night!
Just a few ideas to kick off another great day of selling!
Enjoy the weekend!
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.
