How to Win the Gold Medal for Sales Performance
Tom Luby, Business Consultant and Fence Industry Spokesperson
FINDING QUALIFIED AND MOTIVATED EMPLOYEES HAS ALWAYS BEEN A CHALLENGE IN THE FENCE INDUSTRY AND IT CAN BE PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT TO MANAGE IN THE SALES DEPARTMENT. A HIGH PERFORMING SALES STAFF MAY NOT BE AS EASY TO SPOT AND BENCHMARK AS, SAY A GOOD COMPANY ACCOUNTING, OR EVEN A CREW FOREMAN. AT FIRST LOOK, THE YARDSTICK FOR SUCCESS FOR THE SALES STAFF CAN BE SIMPLE AND QUITE EASY TO MEASURE HISTORICALLY; SIMPLY PUT, ARE THEY DELIVERING VOLUME AND DO THEY CLOSE PROFITABLE SALES? BUT, HOW DO WE KNOW WHETHER OR NOT THEY CAN ACHIEVE MORE? Sales is a skill set that can be difficult to spot and hard to quantify or qualify in new hires and to optimize in existing staff. Hiring and training the wrong person for a sales position can be expensive and time consuming for the company in both lost resources and wasted leads. You should ask yourself, “Can my existing sales staff be better trained to improve their capture ratio and sales profitability?” How can you qualitatively measure and improve sales skills or is sales only a quantitative equation? Sales can be qualitatively measured . Let me give you a few tips on how to build a high-performance sales department based on my book, “The Close”, a fence industry sales guide. These are ideas for organizing your sales team and how to make sure your company can be well trained and best prepared to win the gold medal for sales: Know the value of knowledgeable salespeople and the intangible costs of turnover. Considering base salary, commissions, training, travel expenses and benefits, a new hire can cost the company from $50,000 to $70,000 +, according to various studies published on the subject. Open territories can cost two to three times this amount. The 56
FEBRUARY 2022 | FENCE NEWS USA
intangible, but very real, cost of turnover is critical to control. Get organized. You need to organize “battle stations” and work environments. Your sales desks, field sales kits or samples, sales facilitator, appointment scheduler, territory management plan, and sales materials such as flyers, brochures, etc. Time management is also crucial. Get started quickly. Consider some real-world training. Have the new hire set up appointments with some of your satisfied, existing commercial and repeat customers. Set an objective to learn about various fiending products and why they are superior. Train your new hires on why your customers buy your products. With this real-world training, they will see and understand features, functions and benefits of your fence products more tangibly than through in-house feature and function training. Get them on a certification process. A certification process is an extensive training, evaluation and feedback process which is defined with agendas, benchmarks, tests, role-playing and the all-important final exam. An estimate from a CFP would certainly carry more weight than one from a novice in the industry, even if that is only a
perceptional difference. Train on a sales model. Successful salespeople establish objectives for each sales call. To be a top performer, the salesperson will formulate intelligent questions and track customer feedback. Training on the classic sales model includes: • Pre-sales call planning • Building internal and external rapport • Determination • Presentation • Handling objections or negative impacts to the sales • Closing the sale • Follow up and customer service • Collecting the money after the sale • Forecasting As a sales manager, you must know what potential prospects are in the pipeline and that must be your main focus. This will help your new sales personnel move those accounts into their sales cycle. Get involved early in finding a way to win. Sales managers must conduct consistently effective account strategy sessions for getting new business. By studying various pertinent
