Scaling Closing
I have found that most really good closers while highly applauded also frequently scare the you know what out of sales management. They are not dependent thus essentially uncontrollable, mess with them and they go on to greener pastures.
There is an old tome that goes ‘feed the winners, starve the losers (the idea behind commission sales). If you can figure out a way to scale the salesman’s volume then there is no problem then you get the best of all worlds. But typically scaling sales requires time and time is a fixed resource. 60 to 80 hours a week means that the salesman has no life left, eventually this will cause them to move on and you will have a giant hole to try to fill.
Raise the reward for what you get to get more (efficiency)? The fact is that there is only so much margin in a product. Add to this the problem is that management’s ego can only handle so much difference in pay, when the managed guy makes a lot more than the manager a whole new set of problems occur.
So how to you as a manager scale sales people?
Offer enough reward and they will put up with you?
Do that silly team training and motivation thing? Makes you as a manager feel good, but wastes their time, after all salesmen are hunters of other men’s souls in a way, they do it alone, you bring them together for your benefit, not theirs.
So how do you scale?
Brutal answer is you fire people to do it, you filter, get rid of the losers, try and try again to find winners. I call it voluntary turnover, you volunteer to turn over the poor ones to get good ones. What is makes it all harder is rarely can you tell what a salesman can do from his past record. He may have been good at the last place he worked but that says little about your place, it only suggests, it doesn’t guarantee. You have to be ready to turn them as fast as you get them until you hit gold. Hard but real.
Tags: entr, entrepeneur, making the numbers, sales, salesmen closing, success, turn over