Simplifying the salesman's life

While building a sales team for a client a year ago, I received a feedback during a push-back from my newly established team of sales consultants. They were challenged as to why they were not generating leads. This was not the first time we had this discussion, so they had plenty of time to evaluate how their time was being spent out in the field.

A sales consultant - we will call him Ken - led the charge by sharing his frustration regarding the production department. A great amount of his jobs were found to be incomplete upon inspection prior to collection of final payment. There seemed to be either technical or aesthetic issues. Also, jobs weren't being completed on a timely basis. All of this delayed the final invoice payment by clients, which in turn delayed payment of his commissions. Here are a few things sale professionals can keep in mind:

Lesson 1: Quality professionals must represent quality products: While developing a quality sales staff, we are fighting an uphill battle if our products don't meet the standards of our salespeople. Few quality people will continue to perform at their best if they don't believe in what they are selling. The ones who do will eventually be looking for a way out.

The products and services top performing sales professionals offer must meet or exceed the quality standards that they themselves would expect if they were the customers. The types of salespeople you want in your team are people with integrity. So the greater the quality of our sales consultants, the more quality expectations they will have for our company's products and services.

Luckily the products and services being represented were of great quality. We had to make some adjustments to how production crews handled each job and improve communications between sales and production. After that the quality issue was resolved.

There's more. Through our conversation, it became obvious that a large portion of their time was being spent doing other things than selling. Because no commissions were paid until they received final payment by the clients, our sales consultants felt it was their responsibility to make sure all of the problems caused by the production department were resolved. There's no problem with making sure all clients are happy with the final result. It is just that we had assigned too much of this responsibility to our sales staff.

Lesson 2: Let the salesmen sell: A simplistic sales cycle is made up of the following steps: Prospecting, presenting, following up, closing the sale and getting referrals. Any time spent outside of these activities will cost the company money. It will cost the sales consultants their commissions. Even more, it will cost the company their growth due to employee turnover and an unhappy sales force. Of course each step is also broken down into many different tasks, challenges and facets of their own. Depending on the industry, sales consultants may also be expected to deliver documents - or the final product - to clients and to provide some after-sale support. Yet, there are industries where it is unreasonable to expect that sales consultants spend much time solving technical issues they are not experienced in. These are some of the thoughts that began to grow in them as weeks went by:

• Lack of confidence in quality of products sold.
• Dreading a schedule booked solid with sales appointments, rather than rejoicing at it .
• They resented picking up phone calls for fear that it was another issue to resolve.
• They lacked the time to generate leads.

Thankfully we were able to make various adjustments. We transferred all client communications about the production and installation of materials directly to the production manager. We began paying 50 per cent of commissions once sales were made, rather than 100 per cent once products were installed. We gave the customer service department a protocol to follow to deal with clients' complaints that did not involve our sales staff. What was really important here was to have an environment where sales consultants felt like they were being heard and weren't afraid to speak.

The author is Renan DeBarros, a sales and entrepreneurship coach. Re-printed with permission. Link: https://www.linkedin.com/puls e/management -lesson s-top-pros-demand-quality-let-sell-renan-debarros?trk=prof-post