Would like to share with you the #1 sacred duty of sales management, and the most common act of self-sabotage which dynamites your odds of prospecting success.
#1 sacred duty of sales management
Tightly control who your sales reps reach out to. You can’t delegate it. You can’t assume it is good enough. No amount of enforced activity will lead to success if you don’t.
I never let a client tell me whom to call
Before I started teaching this stuff I actually did it. Booked 2,000+ C-level appointments. I never let a client tell me whom to call. Why? Because I knew if I did my odds of success would plummet.
More than a few times, this turned things around
Carefully creating a list of potential accounts that look just like your best clients, then mandating that reps only work that list. No exceptions.
More than a few times this has quickly boosted results before we even get to improving scripts, outreach process and upskilling the reps.
Calling the right records has a disproportionate impact on results. You cannot delegate this to your reps and this requires constant diligence by management. Once a list is provided you must peek under the covers periodically to see how the list is being prioritized and whether reps are allocating time where it will do the most good.
Acts of self-sabotage
Let me relate one common self-sabotaging sales management mandate which is a predictor of results plummeting and sends talent fleeing to greener pastures. Mandate that your outside reps turn in 20 to 30 leads a week they think would be good to call from their travels.
Why did I never let a client tell me whom to call? Because I knew that sales management would cast the net far too wide and 50% to 95% of that list would be low/no chance prospects. Failure was guaranteed if I went along with it.
Why can mandating which records to call boost results quickly? Because reaching out to close clones of your best accounts has a disproportionate impact on results. Even if the scripts, outreach process and talent is average, that change can boost results. Then you work on improving the rest.
Why is mandating that outside reps turn in 20-30 leads every week an act of self-sabotage? Because most of them are garbage. The outside reps think it is stupid and just turn in random names to meet the requirement. The inside reps now required to call these randomly picked records know they are mostly shit, resent it and it is harder for them to meet quota or earn incentives.
If you are a sales manager, be the protector of the list. Only let carefully selected records get into the database. Stay on top of which records are being worked on an ongoing basis. DO NOT let a lot of randomly selected records dilute the quality of your prospecting pool.
