What’s the difference between qualifying and disqualifying and how’s it accomplished? I’m assuming we’re talking about someone who might be interested in what you have to offer.

It’s all in the mindset. Qualifying implies that the salesperson is looking to “qualify” the prospect as someone they might try to sell to. In this case the sales person is the one doing the selling. Disqualifying is just the opposite. The sales person is looking for every reason to stop the selling process. This makes the prospect the one that has to sell the salesperson on continuing the sales process.

The way it is accomplished is called going for the “NO”. This is accomplished by following a systematic process, which the salesperson controls, and which the prospect must be willing to submit. If the prospect fails to follow the process, or fights the salesperson for control of the process or refuses to answer the salespersons questions then the salesperson disqualifies them. The smart sales person know that at any given time only about 5 – 10 percent of the people they talk to will end up becoming a client. They don’t fight this. They just learn to “cull” people quickly and move on.

A sales manager can motivate and inspire salespeople in three ways. Proper compensation plans, conducting effective sales and training meetings, and helping salespeople set higher goals and objectives.

Salespeople are motivated by ambition, the need for recognition and of course compensation. To prompt salespeople to higher levels of performance it is necessary to design an effective compensation plan. An effective compensation plan is one that is going to help both the salesperson and the company achieve their goals.

Companies must incentivize the behavior and results they want. The comp plan should emphasize the desired company outcome. Be it new clients, retention of clients, new product sales or gross profits. Whatever the compensation plan is it needs to be easily understood by the salesperson. It should be so easily understood that the salesperson could figure it out in their head.

Sales meetings provide an excellent opportunity for motivating, training and inspiring salespeople. Unfortunately, most sales meetings fall short on this. Many times the sales meeting becomes a forum for the manager to rant and rave about lagging sales, lack of activity or administrative policies and details. Because of the social nature of most salespeople, sales meetings should be fun, educational and inspirational. It is also a place to publicly praise the sales team for anything positive. Salespeople get beat up constantly so use this time to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. The salespeople should leave the sales meeting high as a kite not as low as a snake’s belly. Most managers fail miserably in this role.

Training prepares the salesperson to maximize every customer encounter. A methodical selling process incorporates specific selling techniques that are custom-tailored for each buyer they interact with.

Through proper training, salespeople better understand their customer’s wants and needs. They’re also better equipped to cope with potential difficulties with the company’s products and services.

Well-trained salespeople recognize genuine selling opportunities more readily than their untrained counterparts.

An effective training program brings new staff up to speed more quickly than when sales reps are forced to learn on their own. As a result, frustrations are minimized and people are less inclined to go elsewhere.

The third part of motivation is goal setting. The manager’s role is to help salespeople become more focused on specific, achievable personal goals that are aligned with the company’s goals. This requires spending time one-on-one with the salespeople to help them enlarge the mental picture they have of themselves and what they can achieve. Some examples of goals might include: sales and gross profits for the year, obtaining more business from existing clients, acquiring new clients, retention of existing clients, etc.

High performance starts with clear unambiguous goals. They must define what success means to the individual and to the company.

The manager whose first priority is developing his people knows that frequent coaching delivers consistent financial results. Regular scheduling of coaching and review must be an agenda item that’s written in ink, not penciled in.

Coaching is a system that “grows” people by enabling them to learn through guided discovery, not by showing or telling people what to do. Telling is not coaching! Coaching assumes that team members learn by doing. Effective coaches have three major responsibilities: (1) guiding people to discover the tools they need to get the job done; (2) building confidence; and (3) motivating team members to be the best they can be.

An effective sales manager juggles many balls in fulfilling his responsibility to the company, but none is more important than getting out in the field with their sales team. Too many sales managers are too busy shuffling papers, filling out reports and sitting behind their desks. They should be out making sales calls with their salespeople, helping to train them in more productive sales techniques.

There are three parts to coaching. They are field coaching, pre and post call debriefing and coaching for improved performance.

Field coaching has three parts: joint sales calls with the manager, training calls in which the salesperson observes the manager sell and coaching calls in which the manager observes.

1. Joint Sales Calls - working as a team the salesperson and the manager participate in the call equally. These double up calls not only increase sales but also are great learning experiences for the salesperson.
2. Training Call - the sales manager runs the call while the salesperson silently observes. It is important that the manager models the proper selling skills for the salesperson.
3. Coaching Call - the salesperson runs the call and the sales manager silently observes. At the end of the call the sales manager debriefs the salesperson and discusses lessons learned.

Coaching The Poor Performer

To help a poor performer the coaching process would include these five steps:

1. Define the Situation Clearly - gather facts and identify performance results.
2. Counsel - meet with the rep and make it clear that your goal is to help them improve their performance. Avoid blaming, reprimanding or delivering ultimatums. Let the rep know that you believe that with coaching the performance issues can be improved.
3. Ask the Salesperson - what do they think the solution to the problem is. Solicit input from them on what they think they need to change. Avoid giving advice or telling the salesperson what they need to do.
4. Design a Mutually Agreed-on Plan - this plan should be a comprehensive, clearly defined, results-oriented plan. The plan should include activity goals and results or production goals that both parties can agree to.
5. Set a Follow-Up - following agreement on the plan, the rep must understand that the sales manager will closely scrutinize sales activity and results. The follow-up plan includes weekly meeting with the manager to go over results and progress.

When salespeople don’t hit the targets, the manager needs to hold their feet to the fire. In some cases it may be necessary to renegotiate the expectations. But if the expectations were fair to begin with it is better for the manager to send the salesperson on to another career opportunity.

Unfortunately, we live in a modern culture that does not emphasize personal responsibility. The result is an epidemic of excuse making. It is not my fault is the prevailing attitude of the masses. The sales manager is charged with the responsibility of setting proper expectations, developing systems to track and record sales activities and results and eliminating any excuse making when results are not achieved. Some of the sales activities that should be tracked and monitored weekly include:

• Dials - How many calls is the sales person required to make daily?
• Conversations - How many dials does it take to reach a key decision maker?
• Appointments Scheduled - How many conversations does it take to schedule an appointment with a decision maker?
• Appointments Kept - How many scheduled appointments are kept?
• Proposals - How many first time appointments result in a proposal?
• Sales - How many proposals result in a sale? What is the revenue per sale?

The goal for the salespeople is to reach a point where they know what each call, conversation, appointment, proposal and sale is worth. When a salesperson knows this they can accurately forecast their current situation and set realistic future goals.

Knowing this information the manager can explain to the potential new hires exactly what is required and expected of them. This can be addressed during the pre-hire period and the sales candidate will know in advance what is required to succeed.

A salesperson cannot perform without knowing what is expected of them. Expectations spell out what is required to succeed, and it’s best to explain this to the new hire during the training process.

For the more seasoned salespeople, other expectations might include:

• Number of new customers
• Dollars of revenue per period
• Gross profit margins
• Retention rate of existing customers