People Performance Management

Whenever I am visiting an office where the sales results are significantly below target, there is always one common theme that accounts for the largest part of this under-performance.

It isn’t that we aren’t creating enough new digital leads, or that these leads are too small or of low quality or that our latest salesforce implementation hasn’t been rolled out here yet or that our market pricing is too high or that the competitors software platform has more functionality than ours or that credit have been rejecting too many of the new customer applications or that our sales and product training hasn’t been good enough or or or. However, important these things are and all of the above do need relentless work if you are going to optimise your operation, by far the biggest issue that accounts for the under-performance is that the sales people are not working hard enough.

Recently, Lee our CEO came back from one of our international offices where the sales results are significantly below where they need to be and the first thing he said to me when he got back was that the average sales person call times (minutes per day on the phone) were about half of where they need to be. This phenomena which we constantly come across and have to address, tends to work in a downward spiral of ever decreasing results where new sales recruits also just end up as potentially nice new apples dropped into a rotten barrel where the local leadership is just too weak to face up to this difficult challenge and prefer to hide behind the endless list of excuses I described earlier.

Finding and developing good sales leaders that are capable of having those tough conversations alongside the positive encouraging ones to help their people develop is critical to the future of our business. This is why we like to give our new graduates exposure to the reality and pressures of frontline sales in one of their first rotations as well as then giving them small teams to manage as early as possible in their Radius careers. I believe that if they don’t start learning these critical people skills in their first 5 years then it will be very difficult for them to acquire them, later on in their journeys.

As I stand here outside the Tardis wondering if I should pop 20 years into the future to see if all our hard work on people development has paid off, let me give you a link to billholmes.me where you can find Lesson 8 in my new book on “Relentless performance management”.