Did your salespeople fail or did you?

The best salespeople are race cars. On a track they perform incredibly.

The failure is that you have not had the patience or pain tolerance to engineer the car and put it on a precisely mapped track. You expect the salespeople to pick up your cues, suck up some brochures and go out and sell something that is fuzzy around the edges.

Salespeople are your internal clients 

They are the first to hear the pitch, ask hard questions and hear the answers. First to understand the pricing, the differentiators in the market, the implementation and servicing. Salespeople are the first to buy your product. The first to become raving fans.

They then transfer all this and find prospects. 

Compensation

Commissions are a form of profit-sharing.

The best salespeople need to make hundreds of thousands a year or else they will leave. Their first stop will be at your competition.

If the best aren’t making enough and the best leave, you will wind up with low morale and a sales pool of adverse selection, the c players who can’t leave.

Sales Metrics

Many startups construct metrics with magical algebra.

All staffers, including salespeople need reality based metrics, not the optimistic numbers on a VC pitchdeck.

How can you establish achievable metrics? Good question, glad I asked.

A product has to be exactly articulated before it goes into the wild, salespeople should not be sent on a reconnaissance mission “the prospect says they’ll pay this much.”

Salespeople have to become stakeholders and personally invested in achieving the company numbers, it has to become a large part of their identity.

Salespeople benchmark themselves against the lowest performer

To compensate for this the top performers have to be acknowledged like a Roman triumph. The return on giving top performers a 3 day vacation or a larger expense account is exponential. The company is recalibrating by making the top performers not just a financial goal but also as a vanity: ‘I am a successful person and other people recognize this about me’ 

The End?