Turbo Charge Your Sales Team: How to Get the Best Out of Your Sales People

Live from the Local Media Association/Blinder Group/Florida Press Association Revenue Summit

By Nancy Lane, President, Local Media Association

Steve Waterhouse

From the keynote address:
Turbo Charge Your Sales Team: How to Get the Best Out of Your Sales People
Presented by: Steve Waterhouse, President, Waterhouse Group & Predictive Results

Actions of winners:

• Winners do the right thing.
• Winners have a plan (ask your sales reps to show you their plan for the week – if they don’t, send them home to develop their plan and tell them to come back the next morning).
• Winners follow the plan; they don’t deviate from the plan. Think about the french fry maker at McDonalds. How many times do they get to burn the fries before they lose their job? Why is it different in our industry?
• Winning companies train the plan (Applebees example for wait staff – 2 weeks learning the menu/process and then a week to shadow another waiter. Why would our industry settle for less training?).

Onboarding process:

• Invest the time (people need to know when they are hired that they will be required to spend a long time learning before they go out on the road to sell. They hate it (as do the managers that have to train them) but that’s tough, “get over it.”
• Employ your team to help (may not be your top performers as process people are different than sales people).
• Build a rigid plan.
• Test knowledge (tell them there will be a test and you must pass it to work here).
• Test ability before you put them on the road (role play and videotape before you ever let them on the road).