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Leadership

Selling in a tough economy will separate those salespeople that ‘can’ and those that ‘can't’.

As a sales manager you need to know what to do when the economy starts to hit the brakes.

  • How do you ensure your sales team achieves their sales targets when the market is flat?
  • How do you as the sales leader plan to achieve your sales budget when there is so much indecision and fear in the market?
  • Think about it, do you really know how each of your salespeople are going perform in these troubled times?

 

The trouble is that we start discussing things in January, finalise plans sometime around April, it then takes a couple of months to get people and budgets in place by which time we’re into the summer holidays. So it’s hardly surprising then that we really get going on our annual plan sometime around September, we haven’t a hope of delivering the income that our January discussions envisaged.

If you have ever watched or participated in dog training you may have realised that most of the training is actually focused on training the owner to behave in the right way, that then enables the dog to respond appropriately.

We hire salespeople who claim good past results and appear professional and competent at interview and then they fail to hit agreed targets. Why is that?

In the theatre, the “fourth wall” is the wall between the actors and the audience. Behind this wall, the world of the actors is exactly as the audience imagines it. The good guys and the bad guys all fit within the story being told. If the fourth wall is “broken” the audience is directly acknowledged theThe Fourth Wall of Business management spell is broken. Once broken, the fourth wall is hard to reconstruct and the audience may not be happy. Think of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables during first act, turning to the audience and speaking in a normal, loud Brooklyn accent, “Yo, could you get off the cell phone? I’m trying to work here!”