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Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith Become an Author

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To increase sales requires efforts be directed both externally and internally. With the current tightening of the financial industry to the future outcomes from today’s economy, firms now more than ever before need to look at their internal customers, strategies and processes with a unified goal to reduce waste and enforce accountability.

Productivity research suggests that 20% of your employees deliver 80% of your results. Customer service research also suggests that 20% of your clients deliver 80% of your sales or revenue results. So what is keeping you from getting rid of all of that dead weight? Maybe you are just to fat (lazy) and nice (not performance driven) and fear becoming lean (active) and mean (hold people accountable)?

With sales research revealing the following:

Almost 50% (48%) of leads are not followed up
10% of sales people make 3 contacts and stop
80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact

Why in your right mind do you still have under performing sales professionals? Because you:

Are nice?
Do not want to hurt them?
Cannot find any other sales people?

Sales Coaching Tip: One results driven sales person is worth the salaries of at least 2 to 3 non-performing or average performing sales professionals.

Possibly your sales managers are need to be held to greater accountability. The talents that made a great salesperson are not the same that make a great sales manager. Your sales managers need far more talent management skill or people skills than your sales professionals. Sales Coaching Tip: Sales professionals are promoted for technical sales skills excellence, but terminated because they lack human capital and managerial technical skills.

The recent meltdown in the global economy will eliminate the poor performing businesses or organizations and will strengthen the outstanding ones. These successful companies are already working on streamlining their processes, eliminating wasted steps, reconnecting with loyal customers, firing high cost, low volume external customers, developing human capital talent, improving sales skills and terminating under performing sales professionals.

Difficult times demand that you as a sales professional, a sales division manager or a sales producing organization take action by stop being fat and nice and becoming lean and mean. This is a time of survival of the fittest because they have taken the necessary lean and mean actions to outlast the economy as well as the competition.

There is a story that I share with most of my sales coaching and human capital talent development clients. The story is short and goes like this:

Every day in Africa, a gazelle awakens and knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every day in Africa, a lion wakes up and knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. So come morning, it does not matter if you are a lion or a gazelle. What only matters is that you better be running.

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