Unconditional Commitment. Are You In?

Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications, Inc.

Unconditional commitment.  Can you show up, day after day, for the difficult, often demotivating, and always humbling career called sales?

Commitment to selling success is one of the key competencies that we measure, and it always ends up being a very important indicator of a salesperson’s overall success.  Anyone who gets into sales because they think it means easy money, recognition, lots of business lunches, fancy cars, and a fat expense account is in for a big surprise.  Like any other career endeavor, it takes a lot of hard work and motivation to succeed.

So, what does it really take to succeed in sales?  There’s an endless list of tasks that need to be perfected, like customer research, cold calling and getting introductions, detailed deep dives into a customer’s needs, mapping solutions to those needs, coming up with financial and business value propositions, fitting the solutions into existing budgets, overcoming objections from stakeholders and buyers, enlisting the help of favorable references, improving your personal negotiation skills, improving your presentation skills, keeping track of competitor movement, understanding the impact of the economy of a customer’s business, understanding how your proposed outcome impacts your customer’s customer – and many more.  All are part of a successful sales process.

When the data in BCI’s sales assessments say, “lack of commitment to sales success,” it’s really talking about the person’s drive to do all the hard work that’s wrapped around the sales process, as well as paying attention to improving their own personal skills that will help them succeed.

If the person thinks that prospecting isn’t really all that important to their success, that ‘laziness’ will eventually show up in their results.  If a sales manager doesn’t think that he or she needs to constantly improve their own personal coaching skills – then that will almost assuredly show up in their team’s performance.

You must be motivated to do “whatever it takes” to be successful in sales – if it’s ethical.  Less than that results in missed goals and opportunities.

Working with someone who knows all the correct answers to the sales process questions, or who says the right things when you ask those questions, can turn into frustration when you find out that most of those answers weren’t factual.  Even worse is when those deals end up in your forecasted commit.

What can you do when you suspect that an incumbent is not committed to success in their sales endeavors?  For sure, you can track their progress with the account through your CRM.  But most good coaching sales managers will have created many routine interventions to see the progress of sales efforts and to react before they become problems.

This is where the importance of a sales management process can really help with uncovering a salesperson’s commitment to their deals and accounts.  We advocate 9 disciplines to follow that will help your team’s consistency. Following that process will also help you identify areas that require a coaching intervention or discover when someone has consciously or subconsciously “checked out.”  Key among those 9 disciplines are these four weekly or semi-monthly interactions with sellers:

• One-on-One Forecast Meeting
• One-on-One Pipeline Meeting
• The Ride Along/Call Along Meeting
• One-on-One Master Sales Meeting

As a sales manager and coach, you’re going to know the right questions to ask to verify that they’ve done the work on the account:

• Who will make the decision?
• Who are the influencers on the account?
• Have you talked to them recently?
• When did you communicate last with the account?
• What competitors are in there besides us?
• How does our solution stack up against their needs and our competitors’ solutions?
• And on and on.

These disciplines are both opportunities to coach as well as to check whether the sales rep seems unconditionally committed to a successful outcome.  Maybe something is interfering with their performance.  Whatever it is that’s causing them to waiver on their commitment to success needs to be fixed, or you’re both in trouble.

This is why we check for this competency in the hiring process as well as in an existing incumbent.   On the hiring side, the data is going to give you a red flag – even if you know this person and have worked closely with them in the past.  On the incumbent side of the equation, the data will show you that a coaching intervention is going to be necessary.  Depending on how that interaction and discussion goes, you’ll need to figure out the next steps.

You can’t train salespeople to be motivated, any more so than you can train a bank teller to be honest.  You can to some extent, however, help to motivate them.  Here are a few best practices:

• Tell the seller exactly what you want them to do. “I want you to work on this proposal this weekend and show me what you plan to propose to them on Tuesday.”
• Share in the effort and sacrifice. “Let me know if you need my help this weekend, and I’ll give you a hand working through some of the options.”
• Make an emotional appeal. “This one deal can turn around your entire year!”
• Inspire the person. However, before you can do that, you must be an outstanding example for them. If that’s you, then tell them a story that will engage their imagination and emotions.  Make an appeal to their own value system.
• Trust the person. You’ll never know when an average performer will dazzle you with way-above-average results.
• Challenge them to go above and beyond their normal performance. People tend to get personally excited when the exertion, sacrifice, and creativity are more than what they thought was personally possible.
• Don’t spend all your time with your problem employees. Your other team members are also going to need your help and coaching to make their numbers.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use this data to drive your hiring, training, and coaching decisions, we invite you to listen to the advice and outcomes of a sales executive who changed her entire hiring and training process over to the data-driven approach.  Watch the video here: https://www.bakercommunications.com/tailoredfit.html.