[00:00:00]
Bram Lagrou: Welcome back to another episode of the Commercial Leader Podcast. My name is Bram Lagrou. Today we're unpacking the topic of assessing sales teams.
Why would you assess your current sales team?
The first reason why you would assess your sales team is because you want to know as a sales leader or a business owner, where your team is either winning business and where it's actually losing business. Here's the thing: it's predictable who your salespeople are going to sell to, and it's also predictable where they are going to leave money on the table.
It is just something that we have seen in the work that we've done with sales teams in 25 countries in the last 20 plus years. It's predictable. We all have been brainwashed to believe that we should [00:01:00] treat people the way that we would personally wanna be treated. Now the problem with that is, is that if a sales team applies that same golden rule is that they're going to naturally fall back on a style of selling that they would appreciate.
Example, if I'm an extroverted person, which many salespeople are, and I like talking to people and I'm building and investing in my relationships, I'm doing basically relationship selling or I wanna really make sure that we are, we're having a good time and people really like dealing with us.
This is by default what we call a high I mode of selling, and that's all fine and well for customers that are like them. If you're an extroverted, socially gregarious person and you like meeting new people and develop new relationship and be creative and do things differently and be innovative, these people will respond well to that sort of style.
But any of the other styles, [00:02:00] especially the direct opposite of I being the c will be repulsed by that style. So if you put a typical, flamboyant, extroverted, highly energetic salesperson in front of an accountant or an engineer, those people will initially be really put off, by the energy.
They will be put off by the fact that the salespeople don't really get their processes right or that they're really too big picture, not enough detail. They don't substantiate with enough facts and figures, and instead try to sell through hype or relationships, which is not the way a C type client will buy.
And so again, why would you assess your sales team? Because it's predictable who they will sell to and who they won't sell to. Therefore, if you know exactly who they will sell to, you have different strengths that you can deploy. One is you pair the salespeople [00:03:00] up with their ideal clients.
So if you have a high I salesperson, you pair 'em up with other high I clients. That would be one way of doing that. But you're not really looking to make your team more flexible, more versatile, more agile. You're basically just pairing people up because of the way they communicate.
And again, there's value in that approach. Longer term though, you might say, we wanna train our people. We wanna make sure that they are the best of the best and that they are ready for any type of buyer, any type of client, no matter what style they have on the DISC.
And so what you then do is you're not just rolling out one sales process. Now you are actually building capability. You're building a machine, you're building flexibility in your team because you're not only rolling out one style in terms of selling, you're actually rolling out either a red, a [00:04:00] yellow, a green, or a blue carpet because that's what the client is requiring to make a decision.
Once again, if I have a highly analytical type person, like a GP or a researcher, or an an engineer or an accountant, you know that these people like quality of information. They don't like to be pushed or rushed. They want to gather the facts and do their research and their due diligence. And one of their concerns, key concerns, is to eliminate risk from the equation.
Well, then the sales process is smart and wise. If it caters for those needs, if it meets those needs Upfront. So what we do in our business is we help our clients switch gears and roll out the right carpet depending on the buyer. So we're not gonna treat people the way that we wanna be treated unless it makes [00:05:00] sense. And therefore, again, it's important that you start off with assessing your sales team because then you know where the strengths lie, where those people will do well in selling, and where targeted training and coaching and development is required to build more muscle in an area where right now they're deficient. And you can imagine if you have a salesperson that is a highly extroverted person, like a high I, and we know it at about 36% of the Australian population.
By the way, very similar numbers you could expect in other countries, but let's just say from Australia, that means then that the strike rate with the general population that is of a high I salesperson is going to be maximally 36%. And if you go back to conversion ratios in any industry under the sun, their strike rate typically are like one or two styles on the disc.
The largest being [00:06:00] s. S is the 36% of Australians are high S. 34% high i's. 12% C and about 18% D. If you notice, you can basically look at your sales team, assess them properly, and make sure that you know what their strengths are and leverage those. But also build critical mass in those areas where right now
They have no right pacing, they have not the right priority, and they rolling out a process that might do a disservice to the customer. Because example, if I am a customer who likes building relationships over time. I dread being rushed or pushed into buying. Then you can imagine that the sales process is going to be of a slower burn.
It's like one that really eases into it and invests a lot of time into the relationship [00:07:00] between two people. And it's also very wary of rushing people into a decision. So if I, for example, were to then make a comment about a special we have on or we need to make our quota and we are rushing into it with an offer where we can do a discount on a concession that, from an S perspective, might feel rushed. It might feel pushy, and that might make the relationship cool.
Another example, let's just say the client is a straight shooter. They don't like losing time or wasting time in their view, and they're very results focused, and they have the mindset of time is money. That is a D style buyer. You can imagine if a very extrovert, very talkative, and very easily distracted, salesperson walks in and cannot explain within the first sentence why [00:08:00] they should consider doing business with 'em or why it's worth their while... now, this could be over phone call, it could be through an email, it could be through a DM on LinkedIn. If any of those first point of contact doesn't straight away give the right reason to the client why it's worth their while to at least consider talking to the salesperson, they straight away shut the door.
Example, this is a real story that happened to me. One day, I wanted to speak with the managing director of a large commercial real estate business. Now, this is a global business, and in Australia, the managing director for the state was a certain person, never met this person before. Didn't know anyone inside of his business, so I basically cold called him.
This is many years ago. Before I made the cold call, like I suggest you to do with your sales team, I also assessed and profiled this prospect before I met [00:09:00] them. So what we do in our business is we teach people how to read people and assess their profile before they do outreach, before they pick up the call, before they send out an email, before they leave a voice message, or before they send a dm.
So before we do that, we first assess because we never wanna go in with an approach that is either blind, right, shooting in the dark, or where we just treat people the way that we wanna be treated. That is not a foolproof system. It's more wrong then it is right. Instead, what we do is we profile people upfront and then make sure that the entire approach, the whole sales process, from outreach through to converting and upselling that everything from start to finish is catering for their unique needs and wants; for their communication style. Once we do that again, [00:10:00] back to the story now, as I ring rang up this person and I spoke to the receptionist initially, that person then hand me over to the personal assistant of this managing director.
And then finally the third person I spoke to was the md. Here's how this call rolled out verbatim. Hello? And I said, this person's name, my name is Bram and he cuts me off there. He said, you've got 10 seconds to sell yourself. I said, okay, fair enough. I found ways to increase sales by at least 25% within three months, and I stopped.
He said, literally Wednesday next week, 10:00 AM be in my office, and he hung up on me. Notice now: if I would not have been ready for a D style person on the other side of the telephone. Do you think I would've held myself as eloquently as I did and secured a meeting [00:11:00] because that was the whole point of me making three phone calls.
I've done the work, the preparation that allowed me to succeed and get my meeting. Now, most salespeople wing it. They just go and sometimes it works, and more often it doesn't. They're intuitive. They try to make it work while they're on the fly.
To me, for all the money and time and energy it costs to generate openings, that winging approach is not good enough.
Would you agree?
So the point of it is by assessing your sales team. You know where the strengths lie and the weaknesses so that you can do something about the ladder. You wanna leverage and build on the strength. That's why they might be really good at their job already, but guess what? If the current conversion ratios, which never lie, they always tell you [00:12:00] whether you're on track or off track, and whether people have arrived already or if there's still a lot of room for improvement.
If the conversion ratio is 20, 25, 30, 40, 45, 50, maybe even 65%, you still have a lot of room for improvement. You still have an opportunity for targeted training and development, which comes after the assessing to address the weaknesses and turn those weaknesses into muscle. Now we all know that like the gym, you gotta exercise muscles in order for them to become strong.
And if they've never been exercised before, you gotta start off and build critical mass one step after the other. And that takes time and practice, rehearse, and drill. So the best thing you can do with your sales team is to first of all, assess their strengths and weaknesses.
Once you know what the weaknesses are, you can put a plan in place that is targeted to each individual [00:13:00] to strengthen them and give them the words, the scripts, the tools, the know-how, the process, and so on and so forth that allows them to be successful with anyone, not just a few.
The challenge is if you don't do this, because you might think, ah, it costs too much to put, money into training and development, you're going to miss out on a lot more money by not investing in the training and the development and the assessment. Because, let's just say that your average client is worth a hundred thousand dollars to make it easy.
And some of you guys might even have customs that are worth millions. Let's just make it easy and say a hundred thousand dollars is the average value of a good customer and upwards. Then how many do you need to pick up a year? Especially if their business is recurring because they don't just transact with you once, but they keep [00:14:00] dealing with your business on and on and on for as long as you do a good job.
How many of them do you need to pick up to justify maybe $10,000 per person? Once off, or, you know, even $5,000 per person 'cause good sales training, especially in today's age where you have online resources you can leverage, you have online group coaching, you can leverage, you have, public programs where multiple organizations come in together and learn all together and therefore shared the fee of a top-notch trainer with multiple businesses rather than just the one.
If you start thinking this way, five to $10,000 is very little money invested for the return you're getting. So assessments, they show you the weak link and they show you predictably where you're losing money right now.
Case in point, an organization that I've assessed the whole team [00:15:00] on, all of them were high s.
All of them were very friendly, relatable, relaxed, easygoing, But also shied away from conflict and shied away from coming across as pushy. So what they would do is they would share information, they would build relationships, they would have coffee chats. They would ask about people, they would listen but they wouldn't ask for their business straight up.
So you can imagine. If you're not asking for the business, especially with buyers who have indicated that they're ready to buy because they showed the signs, the buying signs, asking questions about how soon could you get started. So if we were to go ahead, you know, what exactly would be the steps to get started, who exactly would be working on this project for us? If they ask anything like this, or they start leaning more forward at the time when you presented them your solution, any of [00:16:00] these buying signs indicate that they're liking what they're seeing and hearing, and they would like you to ask them, especially if there are more direct communicators. So the point of it is, as you ask for the business, you can do it not in one way, you can ask it in four different ways: the red carpet, the yellow carpet, the green carpet, or the blue carpet.
And so the idea is that for every step of the process that your sales team is strained to know how to treat the customer in the way that the customer wants to be treated, how they feel that things are done right by them, rather than selling them like you would sell anyone.
I personally believe that that is so old school that it's not funny. It's actually a disservice to people to just roll out one sales technique and then expect it to stick for everyone. Or just think that then it's a numbers game. 'cause this is what you hear. Oh, it's a numbers [00:17:00] game. Yeah, strike rate is about 40%, 45% and we're very happy with that 'cause that's industry leading. That's above average.
You know what? You might think that. I know from all of the industries I've worked with, that 45% is still 55% short of what you could have, which means you could easily still double if you have the right systems and processes in place, and your people know how to deal with every situation.
We've seen it time and time again that some of our clients are reaching that 95% closing ratio, even with tenders. So if they can do it and many others are already doing it as a result of the programs that we help them with, surely your team can do so too.
So assessments, they're great.
Great to help your team to build their muscle. And again, part of emotional intelligent salespeople is that they become more [00:18:00] self-aware, that they understand themselves and understand other people better, and that those two aspects are very critical. Too often I see salespeople that have no idea who they are until they start working with us, because then we can show 'em the psychology behind it all, what their needs are.
We might actually pick up, without them even having spoken to us, what tasks in terms of selling they're procrastinating on because it's predictable which tasks they will drop and find the excuses for why not to do it. Example, if I'm a people person, I'll very easily prioritize people activities like networking, having coffee meetings, one-on-one, let's say BNI related things, making calls and the likes, so I'll easily engage in people related activities as a people person. If, however, I need to maintain my CRM, make sure that the information is up to date, I need to have some process in place to follow [00:19:00] up and actually do what I said I would, so I have to be more disciplined and so on.
Well, guess what? We know that that's more task related matters, that, for example, high I's will have difficulty with. The same also with D's, D's like to feel that they're in control. If they feel that you're trying to be controlling of them, that will really backfire. And so again, as a sales director, the head of sales or business development, the business owner or the CEO, you cannot just point a finger at people and saying that they're not doing a good enough job if you have failed to set them up for success in advance.
It's your job not theirs, to know exactly who your ideal clients are, how those clients want to be treated, and then ensure that the process and systems and the training is actually in place, to set your team up [00:20:00] for success because it's predictable whether they will sell or not sell, just by looking at the engineering of the situation. Pair up a very analytical person with a very flamboyant, big picture person, that in itself is a recipe for disaster in advance. If you're putting a very task focused, very results focused client in front of a relationship, easygoing type of manager, guess what? Once again, they will have a complete disconnect, right? And the salesperson won't even know why the other person didn't like him. But it's predictable because they didn't treat the client or the prospect in the right way. And the only right way is the client's way.
Long story short: there is value in doing assessments. Simple assessments, like the ones that we use, an individual assessment is like $270 per person, and if you buy 'em in bulk, they are only [00:21:00] $190 plus GST per person. So it's not going to ruin your budget at all by investing a little bit in assessments.
The second thing then is the assessments, like I said, I've come into boardrooms, presented to whole teams, all senior executives, even for CFO type positions where I can look at the data of assessments, like for example, Executive Insights for those roles, or sales DISC versions or Sales IQ assessments, which is more skills-based and all sorts of things like that.
If I look at the data, I don't even have to have a conversation with the people because I'm a psychologist by training, and for the last 25 years I've worked with sales teams in 25 countries, and so I've seen enough to be able to read between the lines and filter out information that most people kind of scan over [00:22:00] 'cause they don't know what to look out for.
Those assessments are worth a treat. So assessing great idea. Use the assessments then also as the next layer to identify your top performers, your unicorns, and use their templates against future recruits and candidates for the same type of role, because then you already know what's worked before in the role.
So you can easily hold it against another person. Basically clone your unicorn in the next hire. Another thing where you can use your assessments, as we said, of course, in multiple ways now, is for training and development to make sure that you train, rehearse, and drill and practice, and set people up for success in advance.
If anytime you're stuck with this, you'd like to pick our brain, you can just jump on a call, schedule a meeting with us, and we'd be delighted to show you how you can actually set your people up for success in advance and get the [00:23:00] strike rate from wherever it is now, closer to a hundred percent by targeted training and development.
I appreciate you guys joining. Any thoughts or questions, please drop them below. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Commercial Leader. My name is Bram. Thank you very much.
