Put a Collar on Non-Sales Activity

What % of your salesperson’s time is spent selling today? (Are you sitting down?) The average salesperson is spending less than 20% of what I call “sellable time” actually doing sales activities and behaviors today. (I have seen in some companies less than 10% of the time is spent selling) That’s a problem, a big sales problem we need to fix to keep our sales leaders, owners, and shareholders happy. This post will discuss how to put a collar on non-sales behaviors.

Meet Duke, pictured above. He is our current Lab rescue. Our family fosters Labs and Lab mixes for the Lake Erie Lab Rescue. (an incredible non-profit organization of people who love animals) When the rescue found Duke, he was a hot mess: two ear infections, could not put weight on a hind leg, underweight by about 20 lbs., lime disease, and anemic.

For the last few months, we have developed a plan to bring him back to health so we could find him a forever home. Our goal had specific behaviors we executed, tracked, and even logged on medical forms. We gave him various medicines and special food. We slowly started walking him and exercising him, including water therapy. We put drops in his ears and loved him. He was not thrilled about all these new behaviors but is a gentle old soul and went along with it.

The last thing we always do before the adoption is spay or neuter. The surgery went great, and Duke came home. To ensure the incision healed, we had to make sure Duke did not bother it. We corrected him many times, but his nature was to lick the incision, and it started to get infected. So, we collared this behavior with a cone he wore for a few weeks.

So, what does a lab rescue with a cone collar have to do with growing your sales profitably?

I thought you would never ask!

If you want to increase your sales profitably and create sales velocity for years to come, you need to reinforce the sales behaviors you have seen that drive profitable sales and collar non-selling behaviors.

What sales skills, behaviors, beliefs, and motivations have you identified that deliver the sales results you want and expect?

If you have done your voice of the customer work, you understand what your buyers want and need in their buying journey. You know their buyer personas and the value drivers for their businesses.

I have worked with 1,000’s salespeople on manufacturer and distributor sales teams, and some of the common behaviors I have seen salespeople doing include:

Lead Generation
Building and leveraging relationships
Qualifying opportunities
Qualifying prospects
Qualifying leads
Follow up quotes
Making presentations
Servicing customer needs for information on deliveries
Account management
Networking
Trade shows/ Industry conferences
Territory management
Creating monthly email newsletter blasts
Training and education
Training accounts and distributors
Handling Quality issues
Helping AR collect past due funds
Searching for content
Driving and transportation
Creating new customer target lists
Lead nurturing campaigns
Writing content for industry articles and trade publications
Weekly reports
Call reports
CRM updates
Phone calls
Emails
Social Selling
LinkedIn research
Customer visits to your plant or corporate office
Applications advice
Helping customers sort parts that may have quality issues
Visiting end-users with distributors
Tracking order status/ dealing with supply chain challenges
Expediting ship dates
Finding out why orders did not ship on time
Dealing with product damages that occurred in shipping
Reviewing plant inventory
Personal social media
Personal emails
Webinar training updates
Team sales meetings
Product demonstrations
Working with field service to resolve customer problems
Entertaining customers
Booking hotel rooms
Booking airfare
Booking rental cars
Expense reports
Family time
Workout time
Plant tours with customers
Driving late orders to customers
Picking up material and driving to your plant to help make late order re-promises
Meeting with customer engineers and influencers
Meeting with other buyers at key accounts
Meeting with C-suite executives at key accounts
Product installation and repair
Monitoring and helping with product tests
Distributor training
Distributor sales goal management
Customer audits and assessments
Computer and IT issues
Booking advertisements
Managing point of purchase displays and updating them
Ordering content for customers and distributors
Company vehicle cleaning and maintenance
Ordering and stocking sales tools
Creating new sales tools
Customer events and outings

And you thought you had a lot to do…

Is it wonder when we ask salespeople why they are not prospecting for new business at current, and new accounts say it is because they are too busy?

Is it any surprise we find the below statistics for sales teams today?

The Average Salesperson spends less than 20% of their time selling today

30% + of time searching for sales tools (or building them, and that’s scary)

40%-50% administrative tasks

10%+ non-selling activities

Something else we need to discuss is we know multitasking decreases productivity by 20-40%.

Workers waste an average of 40% of their workday because they have never been taught organizational and time management skills and how to focus on behaviors that matter.

From my observations working with clients, salespeople often lack time management expectations by sales behavior.

I have yet to meet a salesperson that is not busy. We are all hard-working competitive people, and our customers see the top performers as strategic advisors. I encourage my teams and sales managers to embrace the idea that movement (activity) does not ensure sales goal achievement.

How do best-in-class salespeople spend their time according to Revenue Storm?

Targeting Demand 10%
Creating Demand 28%
Shaping Demand 19%
Capturing Demand 20%
Fulfilling Demand 8%
Personal Development Activities 6%
Internal Communication/ reports 9%

The question becomes: is your sales team busy doing the behaviors you know drive profitable sales based on the VOC research work and sales analysis data, or are they just busy

Are your salespeople spending their time like Best-in-Class salespeople? Top Sales Performers?

Here’s the deal…some salespeople believe if they are busy, they are safe. So, they get swamped. How do they determine what to do? There is a high probability they are doing what their sales manager did when they were in sales. They are often prisoners of an outdated sales process…Let that sink in a minute or two.

“You mean to tell me my salespeople are doing the behaviors my sales team did say 20 years ago? Twenty years ago, before we had a customer service department, the Internet, a CRM system, a formal sales process? Before we spent all that money with the consulting firm? Before investing in new IT systems. Before we invested in a marketing department? Before the pandemic?”

– CEO of one of my clients

Yep!

Like all of us, Salespeople will gravitate to their comfort zone of behaviors they like to do. If someone has been in sales for any time, they likely spend a great deal of time in service and relationship activities. If not managed, the key activities your research found drive sales results never happen because “ I just did not have the time…”

One last consideration is fear. Salespeople have been managed (not led, true leaders inspire and motivate. They do not use fear) by fear for years. If you are fear-filled, your brain’s creative and strategic part shuts off. So, they do not see what behaviors drive the best results, so they do what they are told and stay “busy” to feel safe. They are in fight or flight mode.

The shame is busy salespeople lack focus, and they often experience problems and do not hit their sales numbers like 70%+ of the salespeople, and then what do you do? We put them on a PIP…performance improvement plan and share what happens if they don’t improve. Then we see behaviors that hurt the bottom lines like unnecessary discounting, extended payment terms, and promises our products and services could never meet. This results in more fear, even more busy behaviors, more stress, and altercations with other departments, and so it goes.

How do we put a collar on non-sales behaviors?

Do your voice of the customer work find activities that produce value for customers
Create buyer personas
Map buying journey and what buyers need today to make a buying decision
Mirror your sales process to the buying process
Determine the behavior your data shows drives sales velocity today
Determine the top 5 behaviors that drive the sales you want
Train your sales leaders
Train your salespeople
Train support departments on the new sales processes and how they help
Establish/reinforce service expectations for support departments
Track support indicators weekly
Create leading indicator behaviors sales must execute
Measure those behaviors
Have sales report on those behaviors weekly and in each coaching discussion
Coach those behaviors on four-legged sales calls with your team
Coach sales to eliminate, put a collar on non-selling behaviors
Inspect what you expect
Reinforce / Coach behaviors you want

When we implemented the above in several companies, we experienced:

Sales growth exceeding 20%-40% year over year
Gross profit increases of 6%-10% in 18 months
Customer satisfaction increase
New business increases at current accounts
New customers (one company realized over 200 new large accounts in 12 months)
Sales close rate increases of 20%-50%
Improved morale inside the sales team
Improved sales efficiency and effectiveness
Reduced cost of customer acquisition/ cost of sale
Improved relationships with other departments
Reduced marketing expense
Improved engagement
Reduced turnover
Reduced recruiting expenses

If you want profitable sales increases, you must focus your sales team’s behaviors on those activities that drive the maximum return. When your sales team is aligned with what buyers have shared they need, and you deliver it when they need it in their buying process, your team will also experience the healthy sales results above.

When we assess your team’s current state of sales effectiveness and then prescribe training and coaching to close any skills gaps, we discover our key deliverables are met.

As for Duke, he is meeting with his new forever family today. He is happy, healthy, and not only walking on his hind leg but running! He did not want to do everything we had to do to get him strong and healthy, but we coached, trained, and reinforced the behaviors that would lead to this day where he will be placed with a loving family and put a collar on those behaviors that did not support our long-term goals.

If you feel your salespeople are “busy” but not hitting the key sales deliverables your shareholders want and need, let’s schedule a call. I would be honored to help get you back on track to a profitable year.