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 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

information such as sales calls, proposals, quotes, and time in the field, a manager can provide feedback and support where it is needed the most. Oneon-one strategy sessions are real-world training. The attention given by your sales personnel in this setting is high intensity and can’t be replaced by a sales meeting with his peers.

The prospect list will be the account tracking system. The list will identify how many active accounts or prospects the fence representative has working. By measuring the daily or weekly call report, a manager can identify a sales personnel’s performance or lack thereof.

Nothing can replace working first-hand with your sales personnel and new hires for observation and coaching. Let your sales reps learn how to sell through observation. Never show them how to sell, everyone will have to put their own touch or spin on the process. Observe and offer praise or corrective criticism on each call.

Make expectations reachable and establish clear, precise benchmarks for results. Why assign or discuss quotes, plans or budgets? Wouldn’t it be an excellent idea to establish earnings based on 100% of their planned income? In other words, ask your sales team what is his or her desired income. The power and drive of their expectations could push them toward higher goals than they ever planned. Quality of results and not quantity of activity should be the benchmark. If you expect quantity over quality that is what you will get. Quality results with quality reviews and support will set the benchmark.

Give them feedback constantly. Never wait for a down month or quarter to conduct a review. Inspect your sales personnel’s work, if not daily, then weekly for sure. Provide constructive feedback immediately and praise when appropriate.

Motivate them. Celebrate their wins, encourage their progress and recognize their performance. Successful selling is very rewarding and a lot of fun.

Share the vision. Expose them to the future of opportunities in your fence company. Long-term goals and motivation will get them past the first year. A clear path is a must. Every goal or objective should be obtainable within a reasonable timeframe.

In order to develop your staff, as a manager you need to show them how, tell them why, and then let them try. Be sure to be a leader, a coach, a communicator and spend more time developing and less time selling for your new hires and veterans. The objective of all this is to be the leader that they expect, need and deserve.

Now that you have the tools to provide an overview of the entire team, let’s look at the individual sales staff and evaluate ways to improve their personal effectiveness.

Other than a neat and clean appearance, there is no visual clue to sales acuity, no favorite gender or age group; anyone can be an effective salesperson, or a sales flop. There is no minimum education level other than basic math skills, no minimum mechanical skill set necessary, no eye/hand coordination test.

So, how do you judge sales potential? It’s not an easy task. In fact, many people say that great sales people are born, not created. But, certainly the skill set, if it exists in them, can be honed and sharpened.

Please call or write to me if I can be of any help honing the efficiencies of your sales team and/or individual sales staff. I hope to see you in New Orleans at FenceTech 22, where one of my educational seminars will address work culture and developing the very best sales team in the fence industry.

Thomas Luby, and Profit Builders International PROFIT BUILDERS INTERNATIONAL 3421 10th Lane West Palmetto, Florida 34221 www.profitbuilder.org tluby@profitbuilder.org 941-981-3677

Makes it Real Easy.

Learn how at FenceTech 2022 February 16 - 18 in the Big Easy - New Orleans. VISIT US IN BOOTH #335