SF Market Trends - New Chart

Great Expectations

The key and also the down fall the most of the managers that I've spoken to recently have involved setting clear and succinct expectations. From what I gathered to most effective managers us some of the following to maintain high job satisfaction, high retention and increased morale.

Here are key components to setting clear expectations:

1. Be clear yourself – understand where you are driving to and what it will take to get there
2. Keep it simple – the best expectations are ones that you can translate easily
3. Write them down and repeat often – avoid thinking that people “should” know and make it clear, visible and say it often.
4. Provide Support – if you’re expectation is to do 10 sales calls a day or fulfill 15 customer service requests a week (both tangible and easy to measure) then make sure you’re creating the time and space for you’re employees to do those things
5. Be sure that you’re expectations are about what people can DO – managing by result is something we so often default to because results drive our business, but getting people focused on what they can DO and how often you expect them to DO it is critical for morale and for turning your business around

Why do clear expectations matter?

• People thrive with clear expectations: most of the sales people I talk to are given clear results objectives, but nothing about the thing that they can control, which is the activities required to get the results.
• You provide yourself or your employees a framework in which they are able to define success and link those things to their own activity
• There’s a saying that people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers, well clear expectations can lead to higher job satisfaction and lower turn over

Six Things You Must Stop Doing to Reach the Top in Sales

I found this article in an old archive and thought it pertinent to today's market... enjoy.

Six Things You Must Stop Doing to Reach the Top in Sales
By Dave Anderson

In sales as in life, there are things you have to give up so you can go up. Making tradeoffs is part of paying the price to reach your next performance level. Following are five strategies for building a higher degree of excellence and consistency in your career.

Stop waiting for something to happen and get busy to make it happen. Stop living passively and take action. You can't sit or wait your way to the next level. You'll have to climb there and that mean's you need to make something happen….today…..right now!
To develop an action-bias: Strike early each day and stay in motion all day. Resolve to go from order-taker to order-maker.

Stop just putting in more time and begin putting more into your time. It's not important that you get everything done each day; what is vital is that you get the right things done each day!
Work within the disciplines of priorities or you work yourself to death : Identify your highest-return activities and schedule them. Identify your highest leverage customers and make time for them.

Stop making excuses and start making results. You can go from failure to success but you can't go from excuses to success because excuses stop you from acknowledging what the real problem is: you.
What is the number one excuse you use to explain away your lack of greater success? Decide to give this excuse up now!

Stop treating training like it is punishment. If you don't realize the value of training you are either arrogant, ignorant or both. If you don't think you need training, let me set the record straight for you: you're not that good! Professionals in any field never get so good they don't need to practice so don't think for a minute you're the exception.
The level of your practice will determine the level of your play: Which skills are you working on this week? Which product or services are you committed to learning more about this week? If you can't be specific, you need to get serious about the selling profession. You can't get more than you have until you become more than you are.

Stop planting the seeds to your next rut during the good times.
When you find yourself in a rut it's not the result of something you did last night. It's a series of bad decisions and failed disciplines you've sown over time just now manifesting themselves.
The good times can put you to sleep. They make you believe that since you've “arrived” basic disciplines like prospecting, practicing and planning no longer apply to you. The results of this foolishness don't show up overnight but they will show up over time. It's inevitable. You don't have to do anything extraordinary to make a great living in sales but you must consistently do the ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Stop hanging around with losers.
Don't hang around with an easy crowd because you won't grow.
Spending time with the fellowship of the miserable: whiners, complainers and gossips will cut your paycheck in half: at the least. Those you associate with on the job influence your values, attitude and discipline. Choose your associations carefully because eventually you become like them. Associate with people who elevate not devastate you.

The Problem of Service

The Problem of Service

No discussion of marketing challenges in sales would be complete without mentioning the problem of service. In many industries, service levels tend to decrease as volume rises. When the market is slower, everyone competes for the business at a feverish pace, motivated to action by fear and increased competition. As the market starts to gain momentum, service levels become strained. Order volumes swell and customers begin searching for other options, hoping that changing companies will resolve their need to have phone calls returned promptly and to have a less apathetic service level. Then as the market takes a breather, sales people and sales managers point to the constant outflow of customers that occurred which causes market share to remain stagnant, existing customers to leaving for greener pastures as they are being replaced by new customers. At the end of all of this, the company is left in a similar market share position where it was in the beginning, only with different customers.

Creating consistent service levels is a group effort. Operations and Sales must be service driven and embody a customer-oriented work habit. Sales people must communicate with operations and customers, facilitating service level improvements. Sales managers need to be cognizant of service level fluctuations and help the sales force to communicate these fluctuations to the marketplace, while informing escrow and county managers about potential service weaknesses. When all these things work in systematic unison, service levels tighten and customer attrition slows.

The successful sales manager is one who defines themselves and their company as different, builds a knowledgeable sales force, creates and implements accountability systems, and actively participates in the evolution of service levels. This is an extremely difficult set of tasks in many industries with little to no existing resources for sales managers.

The Problem of Accountability

The Problem of Accountability

Any comprehensive list of the consistent frustrations of many sales managers would have to include the problem of accountability. In many ways, the lack of the ability of sales managers to track and grade performance could be considered the largest inefficiency in the marketing arena of the title business. Too often, sales people focus on entire offices rather than specific target customers, or fill out general call sheets rather than activity-driven tracking reports. It is physically impossible to gauge a sales person’s actual performance without activity-specific business plans and individual target lists. These tools provide insight into a sales person’s strengths and weaknesses and provide aid to sales managers in both market share forecasting and profit projections. When sales people are held accountable to the right activities, their efforts yield more focused results.

Accountability is a difficult discipline in an industry where business originates from so many possible areas. It is sometimes difficult to determine whether a business development officer, a sales person, or some other activity brought in a deal. More importantly, it is difficult to determine who controls a customer over long periods of time as the customer becomes attached to many people and services within an operation. Long-term efforts to secure customer loyalty are hard to track and difficult to quantify, causing many managers to live in fear of a seasoned sales person’s departure. Accountability systems solve this challenge by giving sales managers the ability to measure results, both short and long-term.

The Problem of Knowledge

The Problem of Knowledge

The most elusive of all marketing challenges in many industries; the problem of knowledge, can be broken down into two major areas: a lack of knowledge about the customer and a lack of knowledgeable sales people. The lack of knowledge that most sales people have about the customer begins with assumptions that have trapped the their industry into buying business rather than justifying worth in other ways. For Example in many in the Real Estate Services Companies (Title, Escrow, 1031 exchange etc...), sales people make the assumption that customers do business with companies because of long-term operations-driven relationships. The truth is that some customers do business with their present company of choice because of a internal relationship, but most customers would change companies if a competitor could show them how to increase their business or efficiency. In a recent survey of 300 customers, RightNow Business Development Systems found that over 77% of would change services companies if another could show them how to operate more effectively. The overwhelming message that these customers are sending is that these companies should be providing success resources and “intellectual capital,” rather than trying to sell basic feature and benefit services. Orders are the compensation received for providing these resources. The trick is to help sales people to get past assumptions by asking the right questions of prospective customers, even when they think they know the answer. The best armor against assumptions is questions, questions lead to answers that the customer feels are important, building customer specific knowledge in the process.

The lack of knowledge that sales people have about the customer’s business creates a significant barrier to developing new business relationships. Real estate agents have shared with me that “all service companies are alike” and that the best thing they can do is provide the basic service. In most cases, customers feel that sales representatives don’t know enough about their business to be helpful and consider the reps to be nice, but unworthy of respect. The most successful sales people in any industry are considered to be experts by their customers whose business savvy advice and opinions are necessary and important. While knowledge that sales people possess about business is often perceived to be important by sales managers, knowledge about helping customers to run a more profitable business outranks product or services knowledge ten to one in the minds of top customers. Because of this, one of the goals of an effective sales management program should be to find, train, recruit, and evolve this knowledge.

The Problem of Differentiation

From a previous post in October I thought some elaboration was called for with regards to the 4 problem areas that Sales Managers must deal with to be successful. Here's the first...

The Problem of Differentiation

A sales manager must separate his or her sales force from the competition to be successful in building and retaining profitable market share. Many times, it is difficult to tell one company from another in any given geography. Every company has good escrow officers and bad escrow officers, similar title products, and roughly equivalent price schedules. To be different, a sales manager must identify a potential opportunity (or opportunities) in the marketplace that the competition has not uncovered and define their company’s “brand” within that opportunity. This can include things such as developing a computer training program for real estate agents, teaching agents to market their services on the internet, or any number of other unique ideas. The basic rule of thumb should be that nothing the competition does well is worth doing the same way. Great sales managers look for ways to define their sales force’s uniqueness in the marketplace rather than giving in to the urge to look like every other company. Differentiation from competitors is critical for marketing success.