And you, are you "addicted" to your best sales people?
What are we talking about when we talk about the threat of "over-reliance on our best salespeople"?
We are not talking here about addiction (despite this rather provocative paragraph title!) but about the notion of dependence in the primary sense, defined as "a relationship of close connection between something and that which conditions it".
In other words:
You can (and should!) consider yourself dependent on your best sales people if a small number of your sales team members alone account for a vital part of your turnover.
The question to ask yourself is: are there any of my sales people whose departure or disability would directly and dangerously affect the profitability of my business?
If the answer is yes, you'd better change the situation (and read the rest of this article!) to stay in control of your business success!
The dangers of dependence on a few commercials
In practice, it is common to observe differences in results between members of a sales team.
When evaluating the performance of salespeople (solely) on the basis of turnover generated, the most common breakdown is as follows:
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- 5-10% of "over-performing" salespeople, whose results are well above the team average
- 80-90% of sales staff are "average" in terms of expected results and those achieved by their colleagues
- 5-10% of sales staff "underperform" compared to others (at a given moment or more permanently)
It starts to look worrying when the 'over-performers' category alone accounts for 30-40% of your turnover.
You are now entering a risk zone:
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- Economic risk, first of all: in the event of their failure, the survival of your company may be dangerously jeopardised.
- Secondly, there is theHR risk: the fear of losing one of these precious "pillars", the difficulty of finding someone "as good" if he or she leaves, and the feeling of inequality (competition, jealousy, etc.) within the team.
So how can you avoid getting into this type of situation, or get out of it if you are currently in it?
Discover the KESTIO webinars, where we discuss
all topics related to business performance with our experts:
Fabien Comtet, CEO
Dominique Seguin, DG
Nicolas Boissard, Marketing Director
Individual talent and collective effectiveness
1. DEFINE "POSITIONS" WITHIN THE SALES TEAM
You think that not all your sales people can be performers, and you have resigned yourself to this idea?
And what if it is ultimately just a question of perspective?
It's true that not all your sales people perform all the time, in all areas and in all contexts, but in reality they are ALL potential performers: in certain areas and under certain conditions... which must be discovered in order to allow their strengths to be expressed and developed.
Define a well-segmented sales process that does not rely on a few particularly talented individuals to master all the steps.
Instead, focus on mastering one or two well-defined steps for each of them.
You can then assign them as a priority - or even exclusively - to the phases of your sales process on which they excel: feeding the prospect file, generating leads, qualifying opportunities, building sales proposals, etc.
In short, and to use a football metaphor: to make the team win, it is better to distinguish the defenders from the strikers, and to avoid confining your centre-forward to the goal by asking him to stop the opposing goals (he may suffer from it... and the result of the match may be affected)!
2. PLAY TOGETHER
This clear and precise division of individual roles ultimately allows the greatest possible collective efficiency to be aimed at.
The division of tasks and the assignment of roles according to talents and affinities ensure a high level of efficiency at each stage and the best overall result at the end, where previously each salesperson had to master the entire chain and was heavily penalised by the stages in which he or she was less comfortable.
For this strategy to be successful, however, the whole thing must work smoothly and coherently, which means working on team spirit!
Disseminate a culture of collective success by promoting trust, sharing of good practices, mentoring between employees, solidarity in action, and internal communication.
Avoid over-valuing a team member for his or her individual results while forgetting about the others: not only could this harm the overall balance of the team (by fostering jealousies and tensions), but it could also generate other perverse effects, such as causing him or her to refocus on his or her individual interest, or making him or her more "vulnerable" to future difficulties.
The best of one day is not necessarily the best of the next, and it is better to value successes, positive initiatives and efforts (individual and collective) than people.
3. MAKE EVERYONE FEEL LIKE A CHAMPION
The value of such an organisation with clear individual roles within an effective collective game tactic, when it is 'working to the full', is that it allows everyone to feel like a champion.
This implies adopting a new point of view on the very notion of "performance" and changing the perspective on what it covers: if we consider that the turnover directly generated is not the only way of creating value for the company (feeding a file of qualified prospects is essential to the success of the following stages of the sales process, and this file as such represents a real capital for the company, for example), then the sales figure is no longer the only axis of performance to be evaluated. And those who produce other forms of value can also take their place on the "honour roll"!
This ultimately leads sales managers to replace the over-valuing of individual "Performers" with the search for so-called "A Players".
The latter are characterised by their ability to :
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- Seeing opportunities and seizing them
- Accepting to question oneself
- Be humble and aware of the ephemeral nature of success
- Find their own resources and self-motivation
- Passing on to others, sharing and "playing together
In short, where you used to focus on the numbers your salespeople achieved, now pay a lot of attention to their mindset.
Thus, the overall load will be more evenly distributed among all crew members, and the ship will be much less subject to individual hazards!
To find out more about the use of specialised and appropriate tools to adopt, discover this webinar on optimising the return on your commercial assets:
