Sales Training Motivational Speaker | Gavin Ingham» sales management

Sales Survey 2009, The State Of Sales In The UK

Gavin Ingham — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:46:40 +0000

I recently partnered Aaron Wallis sales recruitment in producing The State of Sales in the UK, a sales survey, the largest of it’s kind in the UK. Over a period of 6 weeks nearly 800 sales professionals competed the survey and the answers made interesting reading. I am going to be talking about some of the finding and what they mean for you in future blog posts but for now here are the headline findings…

An impressive 31% of sales professionals are currently over target (28% of respondents were non-targeted) and despite what the media states only 4 in 10 sales professionals are either ‘on target’ or ‘below target’.
Getting clients to make decisions, cold calling and sales admin/paperwork were cited as the 3 most difficult aspects of selling in 2009. (This would explain why my most popular training programmes this year are my cold calling, face to face selling and sales mindset programmes.)
The two biggest motivators to keep sales staff (or what they’d look for in a new job) were i) opportunities for progression/career development, and ii) Their employer’s products, reputation and competitive edge.
‘Aggressive and Dictatorial’ were the most popular words to describe their line manager’s style though this was thankfully followed by ‘Supportive and Empowering’.
58% felt they did not receive enough training in their role and 36% had not received a single day of training in the last 12 months.
The majority, 64%, would prefer the opportunity to earn £10,000 in commission than receive a straightforward £5,000 basic salary increase.
Half would not accept a 50% pay rise if it would severely impact on their ‘work-life’ balance.
‘Better management and direction’ was cited as the biggest way to make a salesperson more successful (2nd was ‘Increased Marketing’, 3rd ‘Better Work/Life Balance’ and 4th ‘Training’).
96% of the respondents enjoy working in sales. Of the remaining 4% only 1 in 10 had planned to embark on a career in sales.
A whopping 72% judged their career to date to be ‘7 out of 10’ or more.
The way that the respondents personally measured success was i) ‘being respected by friends, boss and peers’ followed by ii) ‘loving relationships’ and iii) ‘peace of mind’. Status and material wealth was deemed as the major success measure by just 13% of the sales professionals surveyed.
70% of those that were unemployed had been recently made redundant.
Only 11% of those in employment felt that their employer was dealing well with the financial crisis.
Over 4 in 10 of the female respondents were Sales Managers, Sales Directors and Managing Directors, almost a two fold increase on 2007’s results. However all respondents that earned over £100K in the last 12 months were male.
53% had been 100% honest in every interview they have attended throughout their career.
44% were educated to HND or higher.
Despite the economic situation 52% were given an increase on their 2009 targets.
56% of respondents felt that sales was the most influential department/division of their business.
65% felt that they could perform their line manager’s role more effectively than them (84% of these were male!) even though more than 8 out of 10 described their relationship with their boss as average or better!
Surprisingly three quarters of respondents did not feel that an increase in green initiatives by their employer would have any positive increase on sales.
More than 8 out of 10 of respondents considered themselves to regularly work under stress levels of medium or higher.
79% of respondents typically worked in excess of 40 hours per week with a third of the total working in excess of 50 hours.

Want to read more? Check out the full Sales Survey 2009.

The Sales Apprentice 2009: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Part V

Gavin Ingham — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:21:47 +0000

This week on the Sales Apprentice the task was for our two intrepid teams to come up with a brand identity for a new product – Sir Alan’s new breakfast cereal concoction. He wanted them to name it, create a brand, think up an identity and produce an advertisement to pitch it to an agency. The team with the best campaign would be the winner.

Leading Ignite this week was marketing consultant Kimberly and leading Empire was licensing development manager Kate.

From the start of the task the two teams could not have been more different – Empire seemed to run smoothly and harmoniously whilst on Ignite Kimberly, Lorraine and Philip picked up where they left off last week with bickering and arguing appearing more important than the task in hand.

Kate’s team came up with the idea of calling their cereal Treasure Flakes and used a quirky little cartoon, parrot pirate called Captain Squawk. Ben, clearly taking on all the “action” tasks this series, dressed up as the parrot and did his bit for the advert.

Kimberly’s team meanwhile were struggling to have an idea of any credence and eventually settled for an off-the wall campaign using a cartoon character called Pants Man. This was possibly the maddest idea that any apprentice has ever come up with and was the brain child of Philip who steam rolled it through by sheer force of will. Check out this incomprehensible nonsense from Mona who clearly had no more idea what the messages was than I did, “…when you eat our serial you won’t dress up like Pants Man because you’re not pants man and only Pants Man can wear his pants over his clothes”. What?

To top it all, the box of cereal they had designed was puke green and was only illustrated on the front facia, the others being left blank because they “ran out of time”. Kimberly was uninspiring, uninvolved and unworthy of the role of project manager.

She wasn’t supportive either. When Mona was practising her pitch Kimberly was full of criticism and when asked why she didn’t make the pitch herself (as she was so experienced) she said that she did not have the time to prepare that late in the day. Later on, when challenged by Sir Alan on this point, she admitted that she was not “completely comfortable in front of an audience”. On the evidence we saw, I am not sure quite what she would be comfortable doing.

She did however score one of the best lines of the show when she was “apologizing” to Mona for her lack of support which she managed to do without taking any responsibility for her apology and blaming Mona again at the same time, “I’m sorry you’ve misinterpreted my body language.” Fabulous – she has to go.

After the presentations and in the board room Kimberly’s team were relatively supportive of her with the exception of Lorraine who seemed determined to rub Sir Alan up the wrong way by distancing herself from the team and the project and coming across as genuinely awkward. Even Sir Alan, clearly bored with her, had to hold up his hand and say, “Shhh! I’m getting vibes from you.”

Kate’s Empire team had obviously enjoyed working for her and if there was anything to be learnt from tonight’s show it would be about the importance of having the right personality and attitude to be a leader. Kate is beginning to look like a possible contender. Even Captain Squawk acknowledged she was good a project manager and the team really did seem to have worked well as a team.

Not surprisingly, Kate and Empire were safe leaving Kimberly and Ignite to face the music…

“This is total garbage… how you think you can possibly believe you can have an advertising campaign based around pants… this is total rubbish”, yelled Sir Alan.

Kimberly elected to bring back Lorraine and Philip.

In her defence Kimberly claimed, “I am not a creative, I manage creatives.” Hmmm, a definite case of delusions of grandeur. At no stage did she appear to manage anything, she couldn’t even manage a side or back illustration onto the packet, she didn’t manage Philip and she didn’t manage to win.

That said, I’d have cut my losses and let both girls go. Sir Alan had this to say, “Lorraine I’ve listened to you and I’m trying to weigh up in my mind whether you are responsible because you are disruptive… Kimberly you have a marketing background, you should really have walked this thing… Philip, you know, very cock sure people that bulldoze ideas through is not what I am looking for… I have to weigh up who I am going to forgive… Kimberly you remind me of the final scene from the Wizard of Oz you look very impressive but in my mind behind the curtains there is nothing there.”

And Kimberly was gone.

So not many sales training tips tonight but some examples of leadership – from Kimberly how not to do it and from Kate on how to do it. Here are just a few…

Be approachable and personable so that your team will communicate with you, confide in and support you.
Despite their competitive, cut-throat, egotistical personalities, Kate’s personality and approach really did seem to ignite Empire.

Encourage involvement and participation.
Kate encouraged discussion and equality from the off. She delegated well and got the best out of her team.

Create team spirit.
By involving all and creating one common direction, Kate crafted a team which pulled together, took responsibility and got results.

Take responsibility and make decisions.
Kate got her team moving forwards whilst Kimberly flannelled around and failed to make decisions leaving her floundering team with too much time on their hands to fight petty arguments.

So that’s it for another week. What did you think of tonight’s show? Who do you think is looking good? Who has to go soon?

Why You Must Run Sales Competitions

Gavin Ingham — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:42:49 +0000

A well run sales competition can stimulate and motivate both you and your peers like nothing else. Some of you will be lucky enough to work for companies that run great sales competitions. Some of you won’t. But you know what? It doesn’t matter.

Some of the best and most successful sales competitions that I have seen have been set up by the team, for the team. There’s nothing stopping you and your buddies getting together and running your own competitions today!

The best competitions have several key elements present and these include action, excitement, involvement, rewards and fun.

Competitions need to be inclusive, with everyone having an equal shot of winning. If salespeople feel that they have no chance then the competition may well end up demotivating them rather than motivating them!

Elements of your competitions should also be activity based rather than purely performance based. Why? Because you already have a commission structure to reward you for results; your competitions should be linked to the sales behaviours that you need for success.

5 Strategies For Building A High Performance Sales Team

Gavin Ingham — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:37:03 +0000

Tips for sales managers, sales directors & business owners.

Creating high performance sales teams is essential for any business wanting to achieve sales growth. Proactive, positive, consistent new business winning teams and salespeople are the holy grail of any sales organisation.

All of my clients have their own unique ways of motivating, managing and leading their sales teams yet they all have problems from time to time in keeping those teams on target, focused and “up for it!”

I’ve recently finished a tour with my Motivate People sales training seminar for sales managers, sales directors and business owners and I thought now would be a good time to review some top tips for building a proactive, results oriented, high performance sales team that achieves top sales results.

In this article I am going to outline 5 of the most effective motivational strategies and techniques that I have used to help many of my clients to overachieve on their personal, their team and their business goals.

1) Focus on the individual

You need to concentrate on helping your salespeople to understand and motivate themselves better. Help them to understand why they are in a sales role and what they want to get out of it. Ask them what’s important to them about their work.

What do they want to achieve? Why do they want to achieve this? What will happen if they achieve it? What will happen if they don’t? What importance does winning new business play in the achievement of those goals?

Begin to identify areas where they can gain quick wins. Helping your team members to secure small successes paves the way to larger successes, increased motivation and more activity. Make sure that they fully understand the links between increased activity, increased results and increased rewards.

Working mostly on their own and with your support you are looking to open their minds to a new way of thinking. Why not create a questionnaire or an audit of where they are at right now? What about creating a coaching form or process? This need only take a few minutes per team member per day but can produce phenomenal sales results.

2) Train on key sales attitudes, skills and techniques

Decide what the key attitudes and skills are that your team need to be successful in winning new business consistently. Create a simple, repeatable training programme and bring your team up to speed in these techniques and skills as fast as possible.

It always amazes me how so many sales teams have no formal process for new business generation with different team members working substantially different strategies to try and generate new business.

Putting together a programme of proven skills, techniques and activities will become associated with professionalism in the minds of your salespeople and when you are looking to change beliefs, attitudes and skills this is paramount.

Start your training right now. You don’t need to be a great trainer or an expert to do this. You can always call an expert in sales training (like me or one of my team) later on! For the moment, what you’re trying to do is help your sales team to feel valued, focus on what’s important to them, and improve fundamental areas of the sales process.

Training Tip 1: Before you even start training you need to get your staff to view sales skills training in the most productive light. There will be some on your sales team who think that they don’t need sales training at all, or who think that they’re above it or that it’s a waste of their important time! If you don’t change this limiting mindset before you start then the results you get will be unpredictable at best.

Try telling a story about peak performers and how training is important to their success. Get your staff to do a brainstorming exercise on why it’s essential for them to really take on board this sales training. Make sure that you ask them what their outcomes are prior to every training session.

Training Tip 2: When doing sales training you will find that there may be many conflicting sources of information with one sales trainer saying one thing and another saying another. Try to stick to simple repeatable sales structures and processes and one or two sales methodologies that work together.

3) Teach personal responsibility

It is impossible to force individuals to change and even if you could, doing so would only create resistance. That said, once you have the "buy-in" of your sales team you need to empower them to take control of their sales development programme for themselves.

Creating a personal action plan for each salesperson helps to consolidate their thoughts, hones their personal sales skills and enforces the key attitudes and behaviours necessary for sales success.

Your company may well have suitable action plans already that you can use and I’m sure that they will be well thought out and structured. It’s worth noting however that in my experience it’s usually more effective for the sales coach to develop their own sales coaching and action plans because they will be totally focused on your sales teams and your style of sales coaching.

4) Reinforce key behaviours

One of the questions that gets asked by business owners and sales training buyers for companies is, “What return on investment will I get from this sales training programme?” I’ve seen many convoluted answers from training and development companies however the most honest answer is probably, “It depends what you do when I leave!”

Even as an sales speaker and sales training expert I aim to engage your sales staff, create mindset change and inspire them to take massive action. Unless I am paid to stay around however I cannot guarantee success! Success is down to action and many members of your sales team will need support from you to ensure that these new behaviours and skills become part of their habitual behaviours.

You need to create ongoing, measurable and simple support tools to ensure that the new behaviours happen. I follow the management-coaching-autonomy model. Initially I manage people in their actions, then I step back into a more reflective coaching model and finally I release them to take autonomy for their own actions. When I work with teams I take time to help managers to ensure that they know how to reinforce key behaviours.

I went to one company where the HR Department was briefing the sales teams by asking them to “assess the training and see what they thought of it!” This was a team who weren’t making hardly any proactive calls at all! What were they likely to take from this training? With a focus like that, not a lot! How easy would it have been for them to walk out saying, “Not for me that!” or “I don’t think it’s that relevant!”

The focus should have been, “We’re getting an expert in to help us. After this training we want you to come up with your own action plan on how you are going to use this to increase your daily activity and sales!” That way they know they are expected to act differently and that their ability to change and adopt the key sales training messages will be measured and managed.

It always amazes me when staff that are seriously under-performing are sent on training and come back and say they know it all. If they do then why aren’t they top performers?

Don’t let the wool be pulled over your eyes in your business or your sales team! Make sure that you create simple, repeatable tools that ensure new behaviours and that help to create a fun and energised environment, which is supportive of the new sales behaviours that you want in your business.

5) Celebrate success

It’s important that any achievement is recognised and that as your team put the work in you create ways to recognise their success. In my experience many directors are internally orientated when it comes to motivation that is they know when they’ve done a good job and don’t necessarily need telling.

Many of your sales staff, on the other hand, will need that recognition from you because they are externally motivated. When I’m consulting with businesses the number of staff who say things like, “I don’t feel appreciated” or “I just wish that someone would say well done” is phenomenal. Directors and managers often “forget” to tell them because they don’t need it themselves or tell them but not in a way that is explicit enough for their salespeople to hear it…

I worked with one director who thought that he always gave praise saying, “Well done” to his staff yet they thought that he never said anything to them an did not appreciate the work that they did on a daily basis.

What the director usually said was actually, “So what’s next then?” In his head that meant, “Job well done. Now we can feel good and move on!” Unfortunately, what his staff heard was, “I’m never happy with anything you do, I always want more out of you!” As you might imagine this was an easy problem to solve once I heard it happening.

Exercise: Get a sheet of paper and write down as many ways of celebrating success that you can. Try a simple “thank you”, competitions, games, wall-charts and email reminders for starters.

Most of all remember that taking action in developing a proactive, new-business sales team is not only essential it’s fun!

Counter Culture, Motivation Strategies From Solutions The Magazine For Sagecover Members

Gavin Ingham — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:07:57 +0000

The negative attitude of an individual can quickly permeate through an entire company’s culture if not kept in check. We ask the experts what we should do with the whingers.

Troubleshooting. To eliminate negativity in the workplace, you must first identify those who are responsible. "Negative people are very good at weeding out those who can be "turned" and after a few moaning, whining, coffee breaks, things can rapidly take a turn for the worse," warns Gavin Ingham, leading motivational speaker and trainer.

Lead by example. "To change the behaviour of others, a leader must first change their own behaviour," says Robert Heller, founding editor of Management Today. "The employees know they should do better. They may indeed want to do better. But you cannot simply ask them to do better."

It’s time to get hands-on. "By managing results and not behaviour, you are not so aware of what your team are doing on a day-to-day basis and how the team perform," Ingham explains. "Action is as important as results when you seek to motivate teams and individuals." Secondly, you must take time to outline and explain what you believe positive and constructive behaviour is… and practise what you preach.

"By staying close to your team and ensuring that they are working together, feel valued and take responsibility. spottig unsuitable behaviour will be relatively easy."

Mr Motivator. "Most misguided staff are off course because they lack direction, not because they are disruptive," Ingham continues, "Most disruptive behaviour finds its root in misunderstanding."

Not surprising, really. What motivates one individual is not necessarily what motivates the next. And although you might be driven by bonuses and promotion, your disruptive employee may not. Ingham explains, "Many managers assume that money and promotion motivate individuals. Unfortunately, it may be that these particular factors may not motivate a specific individual at all; they may want security, or fun, or a friendly environment to work in. None of these motivators are right or wrong but we need to know how to harness them ot maintain motivation of individuals."

Open up the lines of comunication and get to know your team better – that way you can gain an insight into what drives them.

Listen Up. So, is it possible to change negative culture once it has embedded itself? Absolutely, says Ingham, "We need to get to the root causes of the dissatisfaction. Listen to the teams and the individuals; find and nurture common goals; set boundaries and rules; and get the team working together and realising that a positive environment is far more fulfilling." Most important of all: you need to genuinely want to change yourself. If you don’t feel passionately about the company’s wellbeing, how can you expect the rest of your team to follow suit?

Whinger to winner in five easy steps

Loosen up. The more hands-on and approachable you are, the more you’ll understand the individual needs of your employees. Be open to feedback and change.

Lead by example. Your own behaviour must be consistent with the demands you ask of the rest of your workforce.

Let go. Let those lower down in the company contribute to their full potential.

Common goals and values. Everybody should be clear about where the company is going and what they’re aiming for.

Care and share. Understand and care for individuals. Learn what drives and motivates them. Look for the positive intent behind their actions.

Interested in finding out more about how I can help you and your managers motivate your teams? Check out my Motivate People open training seminar or contact me about consultancy work.

Article courtesy of Sagecover magazine October 2007.