Did you know that 69% of leads get no follow-up at all? It's all very well generating those ever-important leads but but once you've got them, you want your sales team to convert them into orders - never easy under the best of circumstances and twice as hard now.
Within your sales team you have your stars - those individuals you wish you had an army of. An excellent way to increase your sales conversion rates is to find out what qualities make your stars so successful (you'd be surprised to find that it's not just about skills and experience) and develop those rare qualities in the rest.
In every sales job (in every job actually), there are people who consistently out-produce the majority of their peers, even where skills and experience are the same. We could call these people “Top Tier” and some 16% of your sales people will be in this category.
At the other end of the spectrum, there will be some of your sales people who consistently produce much less than the majority of their peers, though they have the necessary skills and experience. Let’s call these “Bottom Tier”. Again, about 16% of people in any job fall into this category.
That vast majority of people (about 68%) produce at a level somewhere in between these two extremes - neither not so bad nor not so good as to attract any specific attention. Let’s call these people “Middle Tier.”
So what does this mean to you in terms of sales?
Top Tier sales people consistently produce:
Middle Tier sales people consistently produce:
By managing up just one of your sales people from bottom to middle you could generate a 32% increase in that person’s sales. And managing up one of your sales team from middle to top will generate another 32% increase in that person’s sales. That’s a 64% increase in sales for the two sales people that goes directly to the bottom line.
What if you could do that with two from the bottom and two from the middle? That would be a 128% increase in sales for those people. Again, that’s adding thousands to the bottom line.
And what if you do that with all of your bottom and middle tier people?
Suppose you have a sales team of ten people, each having a target of £600K. Your numbers will be different of course but work with me for now. Suppose the sales figures looked like this:
In this example the average sales for each tier is likely to be:
Middle Tier Average: 667K
Bottom Tier Average: 400K
Difference: 267K
So, every time you recruit a bottom tier sales person (or don’t do something about the ones you’ve already got) instead of a middle tier it costs you 267K in lost sales and if you’d been hoping for a top-tier sales person you missed by 600K (in our example the top tier average is 1M).
And in our example what’s the difference between a top-tier sales person and middle-tier sales person?
Top Tier Average: 1M
Middle Tier Average: 667K
Difference 333K
Every time you hire a middle tier salesperson (or don’t do something about the ones you’ve already got) instead of a top tier one it costs you £333K.
So, in our example, what’s your total of lost sales from Bottom Tier sales people? Remember, you had five on the bottom tier: Amy, Sherry, John, Charles, Brian:
Bottom tier sales people represent lost sales of £1.3M (267k x 5).
What’s the increase if you:
Raise one bottom tier sales person to the middle tier?
Raise two bottom tier sales people to the middle tier?
Raise all bottom tier sales people to the middle tier?
And these are sustainable ANNUAL increases not one-offs.
What would the increase be if all your sales people were at the top tier? In our example total sales would increase by £4M from £6M to £10M (+67%) - annually!
How else could you get these kinds of sales increases?
What are your tiers doing? How much are they losing you?
So how do you:
• Recruit Top Tier sales people first time, every time?
• Raise Bottom Tier sales people to the Middle Tier?
• Raise Middle Tier sales people to the Top Tier?
• Make sure you lose no Middle or Top Tier sales people?
Losing just one top-tier sales person and replacing them with:
1 middle tier sales person costs you £333K (per annum)
1 bottom tier sales person costs you £600K (per annum)Losing just one middle-tier sales person and replacing them with:
1 bottom tier sales person costs you £267k (per annum)Show you exactly how you can do this
(Source: The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings” Psychological Bulletin, Sept 1998, Vol. 124, No. 2, pp 262-274)
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