Month: December 2016

The Real Reason Sales Reps Don’t Hit Their Numbers

img_1935

Does it look like you or your team will miss quota this year?  Do you want to know why?

Depending on which survey you read, somewhere between 40%-50% of sales reps miss their quota.  

Here are some of the reasons given:

-Not enough leads or bad leads
-Not enough prospecting
-Lack of training
-Ineffective management and coaching
-Unrealistic goals
-Bad hiring

I have been thinking it was “lack of good qualifying skills.”  Until two weeks ago.

Friends had my wife and I over for a little holiday gathering.  The booze was flowing, along with good conversation and a couple games of Euchre and Cards Against Humanity.

There were a handful of sales reps from various companies at the Euchre table.  “How’d everyone end up this year,” the dealer asked.  “I usually try to keep at about 101%-102% of goal, you know, so I don’t get screwed the next year,” he elaborated.  Everyone got a chuckle and everyone else shared similar sentiments.  

Except me.  I crushed quota.

I could point to any of the things above (except for maybe unrealistic goals and bad hiring) and say they have applied to me at some point in time in my career.  Heck, I still struggle with prospecting enough, I still screw up qualification and I definitely don’t get enough qualified leads.

But my goals are bigger than my company goals.

And that’s why I think reps don’t hit their numbers.  They take on the company goals as their own.  That quota becomes their “why.”  And they focus only on that.  They do not have goals that are personally meaningful to them.  They haven’t established their “why.”  When you do that, when you establish the reason or reasons that you get up every morning and they mean something to you, then all the things above become irrelevant.  If you fail to prospect, if you let yourself fail because you have a bad manager, then you are letting yourself down, not your company.

One could argue that coming up with meaningful goals comes with age and responsibility.  In my mid 20’s, my “why” was a new pair of Allen Edmonds or a well tailored suit.  But now, I think about finishing our basement, retiring to a beach somewhere, helping my wife get a masters, putting my kids through college so they don’t have to struggle and take out loans like I did.  I think about material stuff too, the Maserati Ghibli haunts my dreams these days.

I assign dollar amounts to these goals and timelines of when I want to achieve.  As my friend Anthony Iannarino will tell you, people forget how the Law of Attraction really works.  You need action.  You can’t just come up with great goals and then sit on the sidelines hoping for it all to happen.  But on the flip side, if you are just pounding the pavement, dialing for dollars, and blasting out emails and your only goal is to make quota, I think you are in just as much trouble.  Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but eventually.

It’s personally meaningful goals that will give you the gut check you desperately need when all hope is lost.

I work my way backwards to determine how much I need to make, when I need to make it by.  I use my average sale and close ratio as a barometer and reverse engineer the whole thing all the way to the number of prospecting calls and emails I should make.  I use a prioritization methodology called the Project 200, shown to me by Carole Mahoney and Rick Roberge.  But before you get started on individual goals and execution, I urge you to stop and think about your “why.”  So many people just end up in sales or get pushed into because they work in a technical field and are “good with people.”  They have never taken the time to think about the difference they want to make in other people’s lives or their own for that matter.    

Hitting plan in many companies will put you in the top 13% of earners in the United States.  Not bad.  Hitting plan in some of the top sales roles will put you closer to the top 4%-5%.  Would you believe me if I told there are sales reps out there, carrying a bag for someone else making $1M/yr or more? They exist.  Do you think they sandbag deals or try to keep to 101-102% of plan?

Need help starting?  Here is the same resource I use to create my personally meaningful goals and plan to get there.  The worksheets can be a little overwhelming at first, so you may want to have a conversation with the team at Unbound Growth first.  

 

Did Anthony Iannarino Ruin My Life?

I was sitting in a chair in his office, overlooking the Columbus skyline last Saturday.  I had probably pestered him long enough and he agreed to meet me just so I would leave him alone.  Maybe he didn’t think I would take him up on a Saturday morning meeting?

But for Anthony, his day was almost half over since he gets up at 5am every day.  A decision he made over 10 years when he was about my age.  He says this habit, to set the alarm clock at 5am was one of the single most important decisions he made to transition into who he is today.  That 5am wake up call started the clock for Anthony to work on himself.  That time, from 5am to when he went to the office of the staffing company he ran with his family, was when Anthony developed the habit of writing.  The habit that would build him a massive following, a successful coaching and speaking business and a 2 book deal, of which the first, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, sold 10,000 copies it’s first week.  “If you sell 9,000 books total, they will say it’s a good book, “ he tells me.

“How did you do that?”

“Never underestimate the power of taking massive action.”

This would be the first of several nuggets of wisdom I would glean from Iannarino during our 90 minutes.  Which by the way is 60 minutes more than I had on his calendar.  But that’s one of the best things I learned about Anthony, he loves to give.  He gives away probably 99% of everything he writes.  He encourages me to do the same.  “There really isn’t a lot that hasn’t already been written.  Keep in mind even though there are a lot of people that know more than you, there are a lot of people that know less than you.  That’s your audience.”

He’s right.  There is no magic formula or hack that will work forever.  Every sales book out there is just someone else’s spin on similar topics.  But it’s that perspective that people will pay for.

I’ve started writing over the past year doing as Anthony has mentioned.  I’m still waiting for the day that someone comes along and tells me I’m full of shit.  “If that doesn’t happen, you aren’t doing your job.”

We talked about a lot of personal stuff; childhood, politics, religion.

“What are your politics?” He asked me.  The question caught me off guard.  “I lean libertarian”, I said.  “What about religion?”  I chuckle.  “Non-practicing.”

“Ok, he says.  You didn’t just come up with those beliefs.  You were infected with them.  Your parents, family, friends, coworkers all combined helped you develop that belief system.”

“If you take one thing away from this conversation, I want it to be this…figure out the beliefs that are going to make you more successful and get infected by those.”

Mic drop.

We talked about my career progression to date.  How I started out selling books door to door, how I started making decent money in my late 20’s and then plateaued the past couple of years.  And how I sought out and hired sales coaches to fill gaps and grew my income this year.  “Not bad,” he said.  “But you still don’t know what you are capable of yet.  I can tell.”

At this point, I am convinced that he, Carole Mahoney and Rick Roberge all talked about me before this meeting.

This is why I think the way he writes his book is so important.  Mindset comes before Skill set.  It’s not an accident the way it’s arranged.  In a future post I will be writing about my observations on this.  I think its the real reason salespeople don’t hit the goals.  I’ve gotten better at developing a growth mindset over the past year.  Overcoming some key weaknesses in my Sales DNA has contributed greatly.  Getting back to the fundamentals.

He starts setting up his cameras and mics.  “I’m doing a podcast today.  I always tape it for B-roll.”

“So you aren’t going to like this”, he says.  “It’s probably going to ruin your life.”

“It sounds like you made good money this year.  But you made your bosses rich.  You need to stop making other people rich, make yourself rich instead.”

He continues, “You’ve figured out how to get to this point.  Most people never get that far.  It’s not a huge leap for you to get to the next level (this is a paraphrase, we actually talked dollar amounts).”  “You can make a lot more out there (motions to the skyline).”

Are you rolling your eyes yet?  Are you saying “Money isn’t everything” under your breath.  Ok, it’s not.  Until it is.  The more I have talked with people who either make a lot of money or just have it, you start to see that they don’t idealize the idea of money.  It’s more about the choices.  The freedom.  It’s a tool.

“It’s time to start thinking about what’s next.  You don’t need to know, you don’t need to have it figured out, but just start thinking about it.”

He told me a great story.  After writing for a while, he started getting people asking him if he would coach.  He said no until he finally said yes.  He had no idea what to charge, so he threw out a number that he thought was “audacious.”  “$100/hr, he smiled.  I went to Chicago and closed a $2M deal for them with a 20% profit margin.  I got $1600.”  Now to even get him to walk in the front door, you will need to pony up and order of magnitude greater.  The point is, he didn’t have it figured out at first.

I’ve recently talked to a few people that have read something I’ve written and told me it resonated with them.  Reps, my age, younger and older that have told me that something I put in the universe helped them.  So while I don’t have this grand plan for my blog, it’s doing all I want it to do now, help people.  It helps me too.  I learn better by teaching others.  I’ve created a reference library that I can go back to and remind myself how I handled a certain situation when it reappears.  And, I’m creating a way to engage with prospective buyers that maybe want to understand how I think before they decide am I worth talking to? (Which by the way, is what social selling really is.)

We’ve all heard that you become the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with.  But do we believe it?  I’d like to think I boosted my average slightly during this 90 minutes.  But did Anthony Iannarino ruin my life?  Was it really his intention?  Or did he just want to get me thinking?  Maybe he looked at me and saw his 37 year old self again?

So what beliefs are you infecting yourself with?  Are they making you better?  Are they developing your mindset to enable your success?  I asked Anthony for a couple books, to my surprise, neither were sales books.  “That’s boring”, he said.  Which at first I thought was odd for an author of bestselling sales book.  Then he elaborated, “If you really want to unlock your mind you need to understand how the mind works.”

So add The Lucifer Principle and Kosmic Consciousness to your list.  And while you are at it, add Passages.  It was recommended to me by Rick Roberge about a year before I hired him and Carole for sales coaching.