High base salaries breed sales complacency and do not provide incentives to develop hunting behaviour. If they are that good, they will love the open-ended commission structure you are offering. They know they will earn far more year to year
Your business is growing like wildfire. Lucky you! Build and manage your sales team appropriately and you can ride this wave to revenue-generation glory. Here is a primer on what to do to make hay while the sun shines.
Hire hunters
There is a misconception that all salespeople are natural born hunters.
Not so.
Even if your growth is fuelled by inbound customer requests, you want hunters. They will close and upsell more, and when inbound calls abate they will be ready and willing to go find business.
When interviewing, ask, “How do you feel about going out and hunting for new customers, and turning nos into yeses?”
Pay salary-light and commission-heavy
Pass on the salesperson who balks at an open-ended, high-commission, low-base-salary comp plan.
Their argument may be “I have lots of experience, thus I want a higher base.”
High base salaries breed sales complacency and do not provide incentives to develop hunting behaviour.
If they are that good, they will love the open-ended commission structure you are offering.
They know they will earn far more year to year.
Fiercely enable sales behaviour
Clear your salespeople’s plate of anything that smells like non-sales activities. In a high-growth environment, account management, customer service and project management duties should be put to others to handle.
Keeping customers you’ve already got will always trump finding new ones.
Relieve your sellers of such duties and watch them sell the lights out.
Measure to manage
Not measuring a team’s daily sales activities is a cardinal leadership sin.
You wouldn’t let your production staff run unguided and not measure what they are doing; why do that with your sales team?
Track how much of each activity that causes a sale to happen your team is doing every day.
Connect activity levels to sales results toward sharing sales best practices. Best-practice execution equals increased revenue.
Meet frequently
In growth mode you want to capture the maximum amount of revenue possible.
Meet with your team to share stories, learn what’s working, what’s not and how to fix it.
Remove any roadblock that may exist to securing and on-boarding new customers. While you’re at it, sprinkle in some motivational words to keep spirits buoyed.
Spread the love
High-growth environments demand a great deal of your people. You want everyone to know how much you appreciate their contribution so they come back Monday morning jazzed up.
Pizza lunches and post-work cocktail hours sometimes fall by the wayside as things heat up. Keep your eye on this ball and don’t let it hit the floor.
When your business is on a rocket ride and it’s all hands on deck, hire the best and stay present to their day-to-day sales activities.
Doing so will help you generate the maximum amount of revenue possible during this exciting time. •
Rob Malec ([email protected]), president of Businessworks Consulting, is a sales and revenue-generation expert.
