Personality tests are a "convenient way to categorize people, but they're not the absolute truth," says Natella, who puts test scores into context by comparing them with the average scores of his best reps. The bigger test comes when he puts potential salespeople on the phones for two half days to call potential clients. "We listen and give feedback to see how defensive the person is," Natella explains. Many candidates take themselves out of the running after a few hours. "The phone is the big differentiator. It's tough to fake it." As if the phone challenge wasn't enough, the final test is a face-to-face interview with Natella. "Part of being a great salesperson is being able to adapt your style."
Q: What motivates salespeople today?
Before September 11 and before it was clear the economy was in a recession, some salespeople yearned for perks like flextime and less travel. Be careful what you wish for. Now that travel hassles and hesitant customers have imposed more downtime on salespeople, the need for flextime has faded. Make quota and take Friday off? Forget about it. Today salespeople would be happy to just make quota.
The best way you can motivate salespeople now is to establish clear goals for the company and rational expectations for sales performance. In the current economy, for example, you may need to lower the bar on quotas. Or else kick in the incentive pay at, say, 60% of plan.
Training can also help keep salespeople on the straight and narrow and away from depressing thoughts. So fight the urge to delete all training from the budget. "Sales training has made the difference for us," says Verdie Williams, president of Facilitek Office Furniture Systems, a $20-million dealer of Haworth office furniture in Denver. "It has helped keep my eight salespeople focused. They're not distracted by headlines. Even though business is down, there are still projects out there. Training helps us listen better. We're thinking about ways to help customers rather than selling them." Must be working. After suffering several dark quarters last year, Facilitek saw daybreak: in the fourth quarter its number of new accounts was actually about 25% higher than the figure for the same quarter in 2000.
Williams uses a local trainer affiliated with the national Sandler Sales Institute. New recruits undergo Sandler training weekly while the whole sales team attends half-day sessions quarterly. In between, Williams holds weekly in-house meetings that reinforce the lessons and help keep them fresh. One Sandler theme is how to deal with rejection. "We talk about how to get back on track, how to focus again. Salespeople have to fight the urge to give the stuff away. Commissioned salespeople are under the most stress. We don't want our salespeople to feel like they have the world on their shoulders," Williams says.
Salonek, the guy who started out with his dog 10 years ago, finds that his salespeople need a daily pep talk. So he holds a "15-minute huddle" every morning. At 7:25 sharp, Salonek and his six sales reps use their cell phones to dial in from the road to the company's conference call center. They share their challenges and results from the previous day. "Someone will say, 'We got XYZ to commit yesterday, and that's another aerospace customer we can mention," says Salonek.
Another antidote for tough times: weekly and even daily rewards to keep the salespeople psyched. Activity-based pay is an old idea whose time has come again. Salonek, for instance, closely monitors contacts made on the phone and meetings arranged. A salesperson who has been at the company a year or less can net $20 a day for making the daily contact goal. The incentives keep changing; sometimes the reward is simply a free lunch for the winning team. "That makes it more playful. We're not just gutting it out," says Salonek. Some of his special perks -- like naming a salesperson in company promotional materials -- don't cost him anything. "They earn the right to have marketing done on their behalf," he says. "The ads are an expense we would have incurred anyway."
In the end nothing excites salespeople as much as unlimited earning potential. Translation: no cap on how much money they can make, even if it means your number one salesperson becomes your highest-paid person. If you can illustrate to sales reps how they stand to increase their take substantially as the economy picks up, you've got their attention. McElaney tells the salespeople he hopes to snag from bigger companies, "There's no cap on what you can make and no such thing as sales territories. It's open season." That message goes over particularly well right now. "Freedom is a powerful enticement," he says.
Q: I know I need help, but I've tried to hire salespeople in the past, and they never last. Where did I go wrong?
Lots of entrepreneurs expect salespeople to just do their thing with little help from the top. Or they wonder why all salespeople can't just sell, say, the "Microsoft way." Sales veteran Marty Sunde understands that perspective. He spent 18 years at IBM, including a stint as vice-president of Big Blue's North American field operations. To this day his business friends bug him for the "IBM solution" to sales management. Instead, Sunde takes his buddies through the basics.
First and foremost, are the sales goals realistic? That's what he asks when entrepreneurs complain that their salespeople are paid too much and work too little. "A big source of the problem is the company owners haven't forced themselves to sit down and say what their expectations are for the sales function," Sunde says. "It's not an indictment of these leaders. They're so stretched. They want at least one area to run itself."
Sunde has an exercise for you: "Mentally assign yourself the job of lead salesperson. Ask yourself, If you had 100% of your time to devote to sales, what would you do? Who would you talk to? Where? How long would it take you to convert an order, and how big would the order be? I force my company-owner friends to think this through, and I take notes for them. I get them to describe the selling process and assumptions they're making about how products will be received by potential buyers. If you did this many sales calls a day, would you get burned out? How much can one person handle? In other words, you need to ask how much your sales clone is worth to you. I have to force company leaders to quantify all this. Then they realize that it would be wonderful if they could get someone who could do 80% of what they could do personally."
