When companies are looking to hire new sales people for their organization, most concentrate on hiring the person with the most experience or with a solid history of sales success. As a sales recruiter, our job is to find the best business development, account manager or sales rep for companies. However, many companies are not prepared to make even the best sales person successful once they begin their new sales job.

Many company specific factors go into making sales people successful. Companies who have had a hard time retaining top sales talent usually have a few things in common:

1) A well designed Sales Compensation Plan

2) Ongoing Product and Sales Training

3) Coaching, Mentoring and ongoing support from their Sales Manager

Sales Compensation Plan

From our experience, most small and medium sized businesses do not have a well designed sales compensation plan. We find the plan either too generous for the sales person or too generous for the employer. Either way, if the compensation plan is not set up properly, either your business will suffer or you will not be able to retain good sales people. As a rule of thumb, you should not pay your salespeople more than 20% of gross profit. Any more than that and your business is paying too much.

Ongoing Product & Sales Training

Having worked for and with many large companies and it never ceases to amaze me how during training 90% of the time is allocated to the product. Sales training and the process of how to sell a particular product is usually a small component in corporate training sessions. While product knowledge is important, it is irrelevant if your people do not know how to sell its features and benefits. Invest in ongoing product and sales training to ensure your sales people have up to date knowledge on new products and services and so they have the sales skills to sell it!

Coaching & Mentoring

Hiring a salesperson is a big commitment of time, energy and money. Making a hiring mistake with a sales rep can be costly on all fronts, not to mention opportunity cost, damage to key accounts and missed opportunities. We talk to dozens of sales people on a daily basis and one of the main reasons sales people leave their job is lack of support, coaching and mentoring from their sales manager.

Ensure your sales managers are equipped with the skills to effectively coach and mentor your sales people. Most sales managers are promoted because they were the top sales rep and do not necessarily possess the skills needed to be a coach and mentor. Invest in sales management training for your sales managers to ensure their skills are up to the challenge.

The important thing to remember is that finding a great sales person is only half the battle. You need to invest in their selling skills, product knowledge and their sales managers to ensure you have sales people that are successful and stay with your organization for years to come.

I spent a number of years as a consulting nuclear chemist and radiation protection specialist at commercial nuclear power plants. Which means I love physics!

I've always been baffled by the concept of managing time, because from a physics perspective time can't be managed. The proof is obvious when we consider... it's impossible to manage our time so effectively that we get 25 hours in a day, nor is it possible to manage our time so poorly that we only get 23 hours in a day.

We can't find time or make time.

The only thing we have control over is what we do in the slices of time each day.

A great deal of people manage their day by using a to-do-list. Stop and think for a moment, traditionally, how do we create a to-do-list?

The phone rings, emails arrive, clients or prospects call, boss assigns a task, a coworker needs a favor, sales calls to make, follow-ups to perform, demos to give, proposals and contracts to write, not to mention; market research to conduct and articles and white papers to read. If new tasks pop up while we are engaged in any of these activities, just add them to the list.

Yes, we can rewrite our task list. Yes, we can assign numbers or letters to denote importance, but what does that have to do with being effective?

So many people confuse their to-do-list(s) with their priorities. They run around with their hair on fire, adding tasks to and checking tasks off the to-do-list.

The gravitational attraction of the mountain of information and activities competing for our attention is like a giant black hole gobbling up space in our head and time in our day. Finally, our busy day ends without completing the key sales activities that add prospects to the funnel, move deals closer to close and increase our capabilities as sales professionals.

So what should we do?

Instead of trying to better manage our time, we should focus on managing our effectiveness. Sales effectiveness is a function of our ability to identify and prioritize high impact sales activities that are in alignment with achieving of our objectives.

Stop focusing all your efforts on planning your day and start planning your week, month and quarter.

1. Develop objectives for your territory, sales and personal development
2. Set objectives for each of the key phases of your sales process
3. Define the success metrics and targets for each objective
4. Create a rolling 90-day action plan and organize tasks by objectives
5. Create a model work week - your weekly schedule
6. Move your tasks off the action plan and onto your calendar
7. Measure progress towards achievement of the objectives weekly
8. Say no to everything else

I highly recommend Sally McGhee's book Take Back Your Life using Microsoft Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized (she even covers work life balance).

So how do we identify the high impact sales activities?

Start by answering three questions:

1. What does a great day of selling look like?
2. What do you have to do to prepare to have that great day of selling?
3. What do you have to do to string more great days of selling back to back to back?

I'm very interested in what you think so drop by my blog and leave a comment.

Martice E Nicks Jr

Partner - Applied Concepts Institute, LLC

Professional Speaker, Master Sales Productivity Consultant, Coach and Trainer

Martice has 27 years as a successful consultant in government and private sectors. He focuses on optimizing and integrating systems that drive revenue and facilitate organizational performance. Martice has held multiple executive and management positions in companies including founding and self-directed teams. His approach brings a sense of urgency to drive positive behavioral change and most importantly-measurable business results. Clients realize between 15-30% increase in revenue in 90 days.