
Basic fact: if a business doesn't make sales it goes out of business. You'd think most entrepreneurs and executives would realize this but, surprisingly, many treat their salespeople like crap.
Here's a list of the idiotic ways that companies alienate their salespeople:
- Change the compensation plan after hiring the sales rep so that it drastically reduces the compensation that's actually paid.
- Change the demographic of prospects every two weeks thereby discarding any progress made towards closing an actual sale.
- Constantly refer to your salespeople as "friction" that needs to be removed from your business model.
- Create marketing materials that describe features and functions but fail to explain why or how anybody might use the product.
- Create product lines that aren't reasonably debugged or field worthy, thereby murdering the sales rep's reputation.
- Demand sales increases and then fail to compete on bids after the rep got your product specified.
- Discourage engineers from talking to salespeople because it would a "waste of good engineering time."
- Don't pay commissions until the salespeople have spent hours entering data into your clunky CRM system.
- Encourage your engineers to think of your salespeople as "sales weasels" rather than the only reason the engineers get a paycheck.
- Fail to provide competitive analysis leaving the rep to figure out how to fight off attacks from the other guys.
- Force salespeople to fill out expense forms at the $1 level when the customer is buying at the $1m level.
- Force your salespeople to use "corporate messages" that reflect your own firms internal politics rather than something meaningful to your customers.
- Have a sales rep build up business in a company then declare it a 'house account' that doesn't pay a commission.
- Hire a different sales training firm every year, even though each firm teaches techniques that contradict previously-learned techniques.
- Hire more sales reps for a region than revenue from that region can support so they'll all compete for the same business.
- Ignore a customer base that buys consistently in favor of higher-ticket prospects that are difficult or impossible to close.
- Insist that all contact info belongs to the company and demand all copies when the sales rep leaves the company.
- Keep dumping more and more responsibilities on the same size sales force, with no additional support.
- Know that a product is on back-order indefinitely but still encouraging your sales reps to sell it.
- Let a new rep bootstrap his or her income by cherry picking accounts belonging to another rep.
- Let fresh-out-of-college marketers (who've never sold anything in their lives) tell seasoned sales people how they "should" be selling.
- Limit the sales reps' access within your own firm to minor players so that they don't "get in the hair" of top management.
- Make the compensation plan incomprehensible and then make the rep fight for every red cent.
- Make the most popular products unavailable to the reps especially if demonstrating is key to closing a sale.
- Neglect to provide product training so that sales reps must "wing it" when asked technical questions.
- Offer a better price on the web site than the sales team can offer directly to the customers.
- Openly praise reps who set an impossibly high target while demeaning the ones who set practical ones.
- Openly wonder why salespeople make commissions because, after all, your products "sell themselves."
- Overload your sales staff with administrative reporting and trackers that take up time that could be spent selling.
- Permit discounts in order to close business but then force the rep to demand customers pay full price.
- Promise the reps commissions but hold off paying them until the end of the quarter or the end of the fiscal year.
- Promise to support a new product and then produce zero case histories, sales tools or training.
- Raise the quota every month at least 10% so that nobody ever achieves a commission check.
- Save all the best leads for the top rep and send the questionable ones to the other reps, just in case they might get lucky.
- Set a sales target but without any sensible sales strategy that would make it possible to achieve that target.
- Set ambitious targets intended to impress top management when you know that the reps cannot really achieve them.
- Spend big money on an ad campaign that has no tie-in to the products that the reps are actually expected to sell.
- Treat your salespeople as if they were brain-dead idiots because they don't have advanced degrees.
- Update the website without telling the sales team, so customers can tell the rep what's new in their own product set.
- Use phrases like "you've been overpaid" when making changes to the compensation plan.
- Wait until a rep is about to bring in a large account and then cap commissions so to reduce the compensation.
- Wishfully believe that none of this crap is happening in your firm even though you read through this entire list.
Jun 9, 2015