Feedback Form
Home Features Mastermind Videos About Advertise Blog Network Contact
   

Have A Suggestion?
Toronto Salsa Classes / Toronto Salsa Lessons Email us your ideas on how to make our website more valuable! Thank you Sharon from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for your suggestions to make the newsletter look like the website and profile younger entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez and Sean Combs!
Have A Suggestion?

Featured Ebook


ebook Famous Entrepreneurs - Modern Empire Builders


Featured Ebook

More Evan Carmichael
Have A Suggestion?

Sales Lessons From Starbucks And Dell

Incentives… and Other Impediments to Sales Success



Incentives… and Other Impediments to Sales Success
   



The greatest incentive for sales people should be their salaries, not commissions and other rewards. Salaries are paid to sales people for the consistent achievement of company and customer objectives. The only company objective most sales people know of is ‘budget’, and they know little or nothing about true customer objectives. Additionally, the majority of sales people achieve sales budgets only ‘now and then’, and therefore their incentive earnings are low or non-existent. I should point out that I am not against incentives. As a former sales and marketing director for a large multi-national, I used commissions and incentives to invite sales people to think and operate at rarefied levels. However, my priority was to ensure that our sales team knew how to behave in a professional and effective manner.

The challenge for organisations is to provide sales people with ‘behavioural budgets’ and not just $ sales budgets. This raises a question in two parts: what are the company’s and the customers’ behavioural needs of your sales people?

Most organisations do not set standards of behaviour for their sales people, and job descriptions do nothing to address this issue. And organisations do not discuss with customers what kind of sales behaviour they need to achieve mutual progress. Occasional focus groups will not throw sufficient light on this matter.

Asking sales people to compete for goods and services that customers know they want is not high-level sales behaviour. High-level sales behaviour – beyond competing successfully for what is ‘wanted’ - is helping customers to see key problems and opportunities they know little about, and then leading them to buy and implement the best possible solutions.

Obviously, everyone seems to know about this challenge, after all it is featured as a goal on most vision statements. Regrettably, while it might be ‘known’ it is not being put into practice. The reason for this is that management short-circuits the motivation and training issues with weak offerings like ‘incentives’. But incentives is only one of the many success substitutes used in business; here are some others:

• A change of title. Apparently, if a sales person is called a BDM or a CRM, this improves their behaviour and performance. The opposite happens: the title suggests improvement but if the service remains the same the disappointment for customers will be greater than ever! I asked a customer of a financial services company what he thought of the company’s BDM’S, and he said ‘Oh, you mean the brochure delivering managers?’

• Product knowledge training. Customers are only interested in their own products, not ours, and so their question is ‘How can your product help my product to succeed?’ Most sales people are not provided with this special knowledge.

• Sales aids created by marketing or the ad agency. These are usually materials that focus on products, which send negative signals to customers. Consultation tools are critical to sales people and in my experience agencies have little or no experience in this area.

• Annual sales training course. Most sales training is predicated on learning tedious, hackneyed ‘techniques’. The usual course involves drivel like ‘How to handle objections’, whereas the great need of sales people is ‘How to defend beliefs’. Naturally then, the sales people who are forced to handle the most objections are those with the least beliefs.

• A sales conference. This kind of event often becomes a pig-out with no residual value; it costs a fortune and is the equivalent of visiting a gym once each year.

Such is the lot of sales people, and it has been this way for years. I have yet to see seminars advertising ‘positive thinking for doctors’, or ‘goal setting for engineers’; only sales people have to tolerate this endless diet of nonsense. Doctors, engineers, architects and other professionals are driven by a continuous obligation to offer valuable knowledge to those they serve.

To ensure sales people operate as professionals, organisations need to address these issues:

• Ensure that your ‘service promise’ to the market at large is consistently updated, so that what your sales force sells is a distinctive, valuable and highly attractive offering • Consistently sell the team on the needs of the business and on the needs of the customers (not just the wants), and these needs should be compatible and complimentary to the needs of the sales team • Set high level behavioural standards, and offer ‘dietary’ training and professional consultation tools to enable the team to practise the standards set • Measure the effectiveness of sales people by their behaviour, as well as by their results, through organised customer feedback • Management must set an example of professional behaviour, inside and outside the company Incentives might make people ‘go’ but they do not make people grow. Only high quality motivation, knowledge, strategies and tools can achieve that goal. Finally, sales people must grow professionally at a greater rate than their budgets; otherwise service, profits and the sales team are at serious risk.



Incentives… and Other Impediments to Sales Success - To learn more about this author, visit John Lees's Website.

Like this article? Share it with your friends
[Get Copyright Permissions] E-Mail | Print | More  


Related Articles Related Articles
3 Key Tips on How to Make Sales Incentives Work for Your Business"
  Your company’s sales team is arguably the most exposed and hardworking group in your workforce, and that’s just one reason why they need to be given the RIGHT incentives REGULARLY. And so yes, not just any incenti...
What Are The Results of A Recent Poll?
  In a recent poll eighty-eight percent of the people surveyed reported that they would rather win a travel incentive then a cash incentive. One possible reason for this is that once money is spent (normally it is use...
How to use customer incentives to dramatically increase customer loyalty
  Maintaining customer loyalty through customer incentives is a very common practice of many businesses today. When customers make purchases they can pick whether they get air miles, cash or other customer incentives....
How to build customer loyalty
  Maintaining customer loyalty through customer incentives is a very common practice of many businesses today. When customers make purchases they can pick whether they get air miles, cash or other customer incentives....
Using direct sales incentives to reward and retain
  Direct sales incentives come in many forms, from cash bonuses for selling a given amount of a specific product, to selling to reach a specified sales quota. Some of these direct sales incentives do not always have a...

Related Forum Posts Related Forum Posts
Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional
Fear Of Cold Calling Fear Of Cold Calling
Take Some ACTION already! Take Some ACTION already!
Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional
Practical Sales Advice Practical Sales Advice
Re: Finding AND Keeping Good People Re: Finding AND Keeping Good People
Sales & Marketing Resources Sales & Marketing Resources
Sales advice from Jeffrey Gitomer Sales advice from Jeffrey Gitomer

 
About the Author


John Lees
(Visit John's Website)
Former director of marketing & sales for Schwarzkopf in Australia and NZ, achieving market leadership (against the giants 'L'Oreal and Wella) and best operations internationally for the organisation. Then worked as a consultant to the German company in the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa and leading Western European markets. These days operates as a speaker, trainer and consultant...specialising in sales & marketing. Author of 10 books on business development and a member of the Institiute of management consultants.
Have A Suggestion?

View Author's Blog
Become An Author

View Author's Video
Become An Author

Free Downloads


John Lees's

Complete
List Of
Sales
Articles

First Name
Last Name
Email
 
If you enjoyed this article, get John Lees's Complete List of Sales Articles For FREE!

More John Lees
Is Your Sales Team Expansive Or Just Expensive
DO YOU SELL FAR MORE THAN YOU CHARGE FOR
The Board Of Clients
If only customers and prospects went to buying school
Poor Sales Bad Marketing
How To Build A Winning Team
Why So Many Senior Managers Become Junior Leaders
To Win The Service BattleYou Must First Declare War
If You Need To Reduce Profits Do Some sales Training
Do You Want or Need Business Growth
Become An Author