How to Get Your Downline to Produce More

How can you get your salespeople to be more productive? Recent research* says that having confidence in the product or service being sold has the greatest influence on salespeople’s productivity, followed, in order by, the individual’s competitive nature (hiring the right person), on-going training and coaching, and, last, financial opportunity and incentives. There are three important lessons here.

#1: The majority of people have integrity, are basically honest, and try to do the right thing. To sell well, they must feel good about what they are selling, the value to the buyer, the integrity of the company. It’s important that managers motivate salespeople with true stories of customer satisfaction and happiness, testimonials; and teach salespeople about the virtues of the products; and support salespeople with good customer service, fair customer dispute resolution.

#2: It’s hard to beat genuine “want to”. I own racehorses, and some of the best bred, most physically perfect horses just don’t care enough about winning to win. Some of the poorly bred, conformation handicapped, injury prone horses overcome all their disadvantages and win – because they want to. There’s just no point in keeping salespeople around who don’t care a lot about winning.

#3: Training is not a one time event. Huge, common mistake. The manager as teacher, as supervisor, as enforcer, as coach…the processes of role-playing and rehearsal, review of presentations, review of skills must occur daily. Further, salespeople need to be “plugged into” good coaching programs, attend seminars, get audio programs and read books.

Another way to think about this: confidence matters. Confidence in the products being sold, the company represented. Confidence in the selling skills learned and the selling tools relied on – confidence follows competence. Increase your salespeople’s confidence in you, your business, your products and themselves. Their sales performance will increase automatically.

(*Source: MOHR Access, reported in Research Alert)

— Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy is an author, consultant and business coach. Additional information at www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com