All right, good morning, and welcome to Advanced Sales Management, How to Engage Your Salespeople for Maximum Performance. I'm Troy Harrison, the sales navigator, and I'm here to walk through what I think is one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of sales management. When we talk about sales management, we talk about hiring, we talk about retaining people, developing people, we tend to think in terms of skills, or traits, or in this industry, industry experience, all these different things. But what we very seldom talk about is how people actually feel about their job. And this is important in any job, but it's actually more important in sales management, because sales is an activity that is so mentally and emotionally driven. So I like to think in terms of building what I call a high-performance sales force. And a high-performance sales force, to me, has a few traits. First of all, a high-performance sales team is a sales team that consistently sells without constant management intervention. Let me repeat that. Consistently sells without constant management intervention. What that means is that if you have to keep pushing and prodding your sales team to sell, you don't have a high-performance sales force. The sales teams that are high-performance sales teams are the ones where you walk into the building in the morning, and you know that they're working. You know that they're selling. You don't have to wonder. You don't have to chase people down. You don't have to call everybody. You know, hey, they're out doing their job. The second piece of that is low turnover. Let me define low turnover for you. I look at 20% as being a pretty optimum turnover number, or less, or less. If you get over 20%, that means you're turning one out of every five people annually. That's what 20% is, one out of every five people annually. You get much over that. You've probably got a problem either in selection processes, your hiring, or your management, or your people aren't engaged. We're going to take a deeper dive into engagement here momentarily. And the third piece, and this kind of goes with the first piece, championing the company's cause throughout the territory. In other words, a high-performance sales team is one that does their jobs because they like doing their jobs. They like who they're doing it for, and they like what they're selling. So how do we build that high-performance sales team? Well, the thing that you need to understand, and if you're like me, you've probably seen sales teams that had very, very skilled people, the right products, good management processes. All of these various pieces that we think of as making up a great sales team, and yet they're not getting the results. Why not? Well, in many cases, they don't have engaged salespeople. Let's talk about engagement a little bit. Engagement is that characteristic where people walk in the door wanting to do their job because they enjoy doing their job, and especially in sales. Oh, by the way, Surgeon General's warning on this, 95% of what you're going to hear this morning applies throughout your dealerships, because engagement is important in any venue. But I'm a sales guy, so I'm going to stay in my lane, and I'm going to talk about salespeople. So to have a high-performance sales team, you have to have engaged salespeople. And here's my definition of engaged. Engaged salespeople are actively interested and motivated to help the company succeed. I'll say it again. Engaged salespeople are actively interested and motivated to help the company succeed. That means that they're not just driven by their individual goals, their individual needs, and their individual achievement. They're driven also by a need to achieve your goals, your metrics, your wants, your needs from them. So now, that's the good news. Here's the bad news. Nationwide, only 30% of employees are engaged. This, by the way, comes from two different surveys. One was done by the Wall Street Journal five years ago, and one was done by the Society of Human Resources Management three years ago. And the numbers literally were within a percent of each other on each one of these indexes. So I'm going to call that valid. This also dovetails with a survey that Selling Power magazine did in the sales department six years ago. Again, the numbers were only a couple of percentages off. The only difference is they didn't use the engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged terminology. They used synonyms. So here are the numbers. And you can think of it in terms of your entire employee base. You can think of it in terms of your sales team. 30%, 3 out of every 10, are engaged. That means that only 3 out of 10 salespeople are actively interested and motivated to help the company succeed. Give that some thought for a minute, will you? Because again, sales is a mental activity. We are trying to persuade people to adopt our solutions. So if you are not engaged, how effective do you think you're going to be at getting people to adopt those solutions, to buy your equipment, to buy your service, to buy your parts, to rent your equipment? 50% of employees, and again, sales team dovetails right with this, 50%, half, are disengaged. Here's what a disengaged employee is. A disengaged employee is somebody who is just going through the motions. You know what the really bad news? 20% are actively disengaged. I'm going to talk about actively disengaged in a moment. I want to put a pin in that a little bit. But when you look at your top salespeople, the majority of time your top salespeople are engaged. They come to work excited. They come to work interested. You don't have to walk into Charlie's office and say, hey Charlie, would you go sell something today? Because Charlie is already thinking about selling something. Or out in the shop, Charlie is already wondering what equipment he can work on in the rental department. They are looking to rent equipment. Whatever their mission is, they are looking to fulfill that from the time they walk into the door. Engaged people by the way, also tend to be the ones that come in early, that stay late. That doesn't mean they do it all the time. That doesn't mean they have to do it. But it does mean that when there is extra work to be done, they are willing to take it on. If at 5 o'clock you go to their office every day, and all you can smell is burning shoe leather from them getting out of the office, they are probably not an engaged employee. So we want engaged employees. Let's talk about the other 2 categories a little deeper first. Disengaged salespeople, now that's what a disengaged salesperson looks like a lot of the time. Disengaged salespeople, they aren't angry. They aren't necessarily bad people. They aren't even necessarily bad salespeople. Matter of fact, there's a heck of a lot of disengaged salespeople out there that are making their numbers and making their quota. But they are doing it without putting their all into the job. If you want to think of disengaged by another dis-word, think of it as disinterested. A disengaged salesperson, they are going through the motions to get a paycheck, but they are not necessarily motivated to accomplish your goals. When you go to them and say, hey, we need to sell 2 more bulldozers this month, they are just going to look at you and go, so? I don't have that in my funnel. I'm going to make my numbers. Leave me alone. They are not going to go the extra mile. They are not going to make those extra sales calls. They are going to come in, put in their hours, do just enough to keep their jobs. I like to say that disengaged salespeople know exactly where that line is between fired and not fired, and they have one foot on either side of it. And I bet you are thinking of somebody who works for you right now. Those people aren't great, but they are a heck of a lot better than the next category of people. The next category of people are actively disengaged. Look at what she is doing. She is walking out with some money. Actively disengaged salespeople are salespeople that are angry, they are upset, they wish you ill, and they are more than willing to do this to hurt you while they are still receiving a paycheck from you. That means that if an actively disengaged salesperson had an opportunity to slide your customer list to somebody else, they would. If they had an opportunity to do a little work for cash on the side, they would. Actively disengaged salespeople work against you. They can also work against you internally by the way. If you've ever had an employee or a salesperson who seemed to spend most of their days going around and fomenting dissent and discord with the other people in your company, you had an actively disengaged employee, whether that was a salesperson or not. And I hope you are not thinking of somebody that works for you right now, but you might be. And if you are, we will talk about how to deal with them momentarily. But that's what an actively disengaged salesperson. So think of it this way. Engaged salespeople, they are your employee from top to bottom. They are excited about the work. Disengaged salespeople aren't necessarily excited about their work. They are going to do their job, and they are going to do enough to keep their job. Actively disengaged salespeople work to hurt you. So what is required for engagement? Well, engagement requires three things. One, they have to love what they sell. Two, they have to love the act of selling. By the way, you would be surprised at how many salespeople don't love the work and the activities that go into selling. One of my favorite questions in the interview process is always, what's your favorite part of selling? What's your favorite part of the selling process? And if somebody says closing the sale and getting the check, I drill down a little bit because selling is a hard job. There is a lot that goes into it. And quite frankly, there is a lot of work that goes in that doesn't result in sales. If salespeople don't love those activities, if they don't love making the calls, asking the questions, talking to the customers, making the presentations, if they don't love all those things, there is a good chance that they are not going to be engaged salespeople. So they've got to love what they sell. They've got to love the act of selling. And third, they've got to love who they do it for. That means you and or your company. They've got to believe in you. They've got to believe that you have their back, and they've got to believe that you want good things for your customers. And if you have all those traits, if you have a salesperson who likes what they sell, loves what they sell, if you have somebody who loves the act of selling, and if you have somebody that loves the company that they sell for, there you've got an engaged salesperson. And if you don't have one of those three, you've probably got a disengaged salesperson. And if you are missing all of those three, and especially – and by the way, not liking and not loving does not mean disliking. Disengaged salespeople, they may not love what they do, but they don't actively dislike it. They don't hate it. Actively disengaged people are the people who come in and they hate their job. They hate you. They hate what they are selling. So how do we engage salespeople? Well, it starts on the first day. I want you to think about a job that you might have started. Think about what that first day was like. Probably it was pretty mediocre, because quite honestly, most first days are. I had several different jobs in my career before I started my business 15 years ago. And I have to tell you, I don't know that I ever had a first day really worth remembering. But I want to encourage you to create a first – when you hire a salesperson, I want you to create a first day that they can remember, and that they are going to talk about. And what does engagement do on the first day? How do you engage salespeople on the first day? Well, there are essentially five keys to it. One is internal networking. The hardest part about starting a new job is feeling like you are on an island. I can tell you that from experience, and I can tell you that from talking to a number of people. The most difficult thing about starting any new job is that feeling of being plunged into an unfamiliar environment, where you don't know anybody, or maybe one or two people. You know your hiring manager, but that's not your buddy. And it's kind of a sink or swim thing. If you ever change schools in the middle of a year, and I didn't, but I remember kids who did. Think about being the new kid in school in the middle of the year. Not at the first of the year when everybody comes in, but in the middle of the year. A new kid comes into school, and they are stood up in front. They are introduced to the class. Everybody kind of looks at them sideways. They go sit down, and they try not to be noticed. And then over a period of time, they try to figure out how to make friends. That's what it's like starting a new job, because you are going into a going concern. So number one is creating some internal networking opportunities. We talked about how to do that. Number two is what I call rolling out the welcome wagon. Number three is getting the paperwork done prior. By the way, the paperwork is absolutely the most mundane, time-consuming, mind-numbing part of the first day. Let's get that out of the way before they ever walk in. Number four is buddy up. Assign them a buddy. And number five is what I call planned spontaneity. Plan it out. Who does what and when? Now before we start diving into each one of these things, here's how I want you to think about this. Think about what you would do if your most valuable customer came into your dealership to spend a day, or your company if you are a manufacturer. Think about how you would treat your best customer, or the actions that you would take. Now think about this. The sales people that you hire are tasked with finding those great customers, so why would you treat them any less than what you would treat your best customer? So let's talk about internal networking. I guess I got so excited I skipped over to welcome wagon. There we go. Internal networking. Remember that kid on the first day. You are sitting down. You don't know anybody. You are uncertain. You are just trying to huddle up and not be noticed. Relationships are important. Internal relationships are one of the keys to employee engagement. Anytime I talk to an employee who is disengaged, or even actively disengaged, one of the key reasons is that they don't have good internal relationships. As a matter of fact, I can think back to a couple of jobs that I held, that in all honesty, I left probably a little earlier than I otherwise would have, simply because I didn't have the kind of relationships internally. It wasn't that I had bad relationships. I didn't have any relationships. There was no – I hate to use the word engagement, but there was no two-way dialogue with people. So let's think about those internal relationships. Who are the key relationships besides you, and by you I mean the hiring manager, who are the key relationships that that new salesperson needs to have? Who do they need to know in order to start functioning, and feeling, and being a part of your company? Make a list of who those people are, and then think about how can you start those relationships? What can you do to foster the relationship building? If they need to have a relationship with the service manager, how do you initiate that relationship? If they need to have a relationship with the rental manager, how do you kick that relationship off on a positive note? If they need to have a relationship with the owner of the dealership, how can you kick that off? Again, this requires a little bit of planning. It requires a little bit of being on your game, but it is so worth it because you will start your new employee off on a great note. The second piece, be prepared. Roll out the welcome wagon. Again, think about how you greet your best customer. A lot of times if there's a monitor up in front you'll have, welcome John Stevens from Stevens Construction, or you'll have a sign board that says welcome John Stevens, or however you would do that. How would you welcome that person? I would bet that whoever it is whose job it is to greet people when they first walk in the door, they are going to be prepared to know, hey, John Stevens, our very best customer is coming in this morning, and I want to make sure that we greet him positively, so crank it up for him. Well, do that for your salesperson. Hey, we've got a new salesperson coming in. His name is Bob Miller, and I want you guys to greet him and make him feel at home from the moment he walks in the door. Another great way is to have business cards printed and ready for him. Nowadays it doesn't take very long to get business cards printed, and it's pretty cheap to do. Why not have their business cards already there and waiting on them on their desk when they walk in? In the jobs that I had in my professional career, only once did this actually happen, and I was so impressed by it, because it was a concrete expression by them that they had already brought me onto their team and brought me into their fold before I had even walked in the door. You're going to laugh. I was suggesting this to a client that I had a couple of years ago. They were getting ready to hire two new people, and the start date was a week out. And I said, okay, get the business cards ordered. And they said, wait, what? I said, get the business cards ordered. They'll be here when these people get here. They said, well, what if they don't show up for the first day? Then I'm out the cost of that. I said, so you're worried – and their business cards cost I think $48,000. I said, so you're worried about saving $48 rather than making the kind of impression on your brand-new salesperson that you need to make? They said, when you say it that way, it sounds silly. That's because it is silly. Don't do false economies. Get their business cards printed. Maybe even have a shirt done for them waiting in their office. Whatever you need to do to make them feel a part of the organization. But coordinate that welcome. Everybody who touches – well, not touches, but everybody who deals with that person needs to understand how they need to be greeted, and what kind of an impression you want them to have. Buddy up. Here's what we know. Our salespeople will seek out buddies whether we assign them or not. There may be people on your sales team that you would want them to buddy up and learn from, and there may be people on your sales team that you would not want them to buddy up and learn from. If you don't assign a buddy, I will guarantee you, just because this is how the sales gods work, that the person they will buddy up and learn from is the person they are going to learn the bad habits from. So you should assign a buddy. It doesn't have to be your top salesperson. It should be somebody who shows some leadership. As a matter of fact, this is a good way to start evaluating salespeople as bench strength for sales managers in the future. And just let them know, look, I want this person to feel comfortable. I want them to feel welcome. I want them to feel excited. And because of that, I'd like you to help mentor them, show them the ropes, and make them feel at home. Plan it out and coordinate with the appropriate people. And you'll notice it says on the second line there, make it feel spontaneous. This is what I call planned spontaneity. You want everybody to be very welcoming and open to them. Here's how the first day plant tour works. And I've been through a bunch of these with clients and even as myself. And here's how that first day company tour works. You take your new salesperson into the service manager and introduce them. And the service manager sort of half rises, shakes their hand, waves, says, hey, glad to meet you, and does so in such a way that it makes it obvious that they are far too busy to actually sit and chat with that salesperson. Then you take them to the rental manager, same deal. And everybody throughout the department, they're meeting the people but they're not engaging with them. Everybody is putting out the impression that, hey, I'm a very, very busy guy, glad you're here but got to move on. Again, contrast that with what happens when you bring in your best customer. I will guarantee you when you bring in your best customer, that service manager's got time for them, that rental manager's got time for them. So this is where it's incumbent upon you to get with those people and say, hey, I'm bringing my new salesperson, Bob Miller, in and I want you to sit and chat with him, get to know him a little bit and explain to him what it is that you do. Make sure they have time. And again, make it feel natural, planned, spontaneity. They need to feel welcomed and excited. Matter of fact, what we want is that at the end of that first day, we want our new salesperson going home and telling their spouse, their best friend, their partner, their buddies, whatever, hey, I just signed on to the best job in the world, the best job I've ever had. I am excited. I cannot wait to get to work for these people. Engagement starts on that first day. More importantly, and I may be saying this wrong, it just occurs to me, I may be phrasing this wrong, disengagement starts on the first day. Disengagement is just another form of buyer's remorse. That early on, where they are sitting there going, okay, maybe I didn't make such a great decision. So make sure that on that first day that you give them an impression that they have started the greatest job ever. And you know what, if all that only takes a half a day, fine, cut them loose for that half day. Say, hey, go have a nice afternoon. We are going to work your butt off tomorrow. But don't do anything that could be negative or disengaging on that first day. Make sure that they go home excited, because what that does is that launches you into building a productive relationship with your salesperson. You know, it's funny, we talk all the time in sales about building relationships with our customers, and making our customers loyal, making them excited, helping them know why they want to do business with us. But we don't spend much time building relationships with the people whose job it is to build relationships with our customers. And again, I'm almost talking about a selling process here where you are selling your current salespeople on you, what you are all about, and why they should be absolutely dying to work for you. So how do we build relationships with our salesperson beyond the first day? We've initiated on the first day. How do we build relationships with them now? Well, first of all, you do for them before they do for you. In too many sales environments what we see is that the sales manager will hire somebody, and then kind of sit back and wait to see what the salesperson will do before they really engage. And that's absolutely wrong. The sales manager should be engaging, and moving that relationship process forward from the get-go. You should fight internal battles for them, and I'm going to say, as long as they are in the right. Sales is a job that is going to create a lot of internal battles. And it's not because we are bad people. It's not because we are not likable people. It's not because we try to create problems. But reality is, the nature of sales is that if we are doing our job right, we are constantly doing more, growing more, and asking other people to do and grow more right along with us. Now some people are going to push back on that. And when that happens, it is the job of sales management to fight those internal battles, and you get in the way of it so they can continue to go out and sell. I'll never forget, it was about five years ago. I was sitting in the office of a promotional products company, a fairly large one. And I was meeting with the Vice President of Sales, the CEO slash owner, and we were talking about the duties of their sales team. And in the middle of it, one of the sales people knocked and came in and looked at the VP of Sales. And he said, hey Jim, I'm having a problem with production on this big order. The production manager is kind of pushing back even though he gave me this deadline that we could use. Now I'm trying to get that deadline to happen, and he's pushing back on it, and that's going to upset the customer. And the VP of Sales looks at him and says, look, go deal with it yourself. Can't you see that I'm busy? And as soon as the salesperson walked out, I looked at the VP of Sales and I said, okay, so explain to me what it is precisely that you do for a living. And his jaw kind of dropped. And I said, look, that's your battle. I said, any time you send your salesperson to fight a battle, salesperson to manager, the salesperson is going to lose. This battle needs to be engaged at a manager to manager level. And then I looked at the CEO and I said, ultimately you are the Supreme Court on this. But this is a moment where you've got to get involved. And I ended up getting the client and the VP of Sales is no longer there, and I'm perfectly okay with that. But the point is that a sales manager needs to be the person to deal with other departments at that level. If you don't, if you dump it all back on the salesperson, then you are going to have disengaged salespeople. You also need to help them achieve their individual goals. And that means tailoring your management style. If you have six salespeople, and they all six perceive you as the same person, same manager, same management style, you are doing it wrong. Individualizing your management style is essential for getting the success out of your sales team that you need. Every one of your salespeople should believe passionately that you are focused on them, and their needs, and their goals, and what you can help them do. And finally, think through your rules and restrictions. There are so many rules and restrictions in the world of selling that don't need to be there. I live in Kansas, and I don't know if you've ever driven through Kansas, but let me say this. One of the things that drives me nuts about driving through Kansas is driving down the interstate, and then it's cut down to one lane, and I'm driving past miles upon miles upon miles of orange cones in one lane, and there is nothing happening on the other side of those cones. I will tell you this, if there is ever a competition in the Olympics for orange cone putter uppers, bet on Kansas, because I guarantee you we will win that. The reason that drives me nuts is that it's a restriction without a reason. There are all those cones there, but there is really no reason because there is no work going on. A lot of the rules that we put on our salespeople function the same way. They are restrictions without reasons. I'll give you a guideline. When you are trying to decide on rules for salespeople, if you cannot justify rule first based on its benefit to the company, the customer, or the salesperson, it probably shouldn't be there. And you would be amazed at how many rules, even that might be legacy rules that have just been there for years upon years upon years that don't need to be there. So look at your sales manual sometime, and see what all rules are there. So how do we re-engage the disengaged? This is a challenge, because I told you I was going to tell you how to deal with disengaged and actively disengaged salespeople. Let's start by talking about the actively disengaged salespeople. When you have a salesperson who is so over the line that they are actively trying to hurt you, they are beyond redemption. There is nothing you can do with them except to let them go. As a matter of fact, here is the first part of your homework. If you have a salesperson that you are convinced is actively disengaged based on the decision, based on the definition and the information that we have talked about, I want you to fire them immediately if not sooner. Because once they cross to actively disengaged, number one, they are not coming back. And number two, every day that they are still on their payroll, and they still have access to your information, to your company, to your people, they could be causing you damage. I'm going to take a little side trip too, because this also pertains to rehires. This is a question I get asked a lot, so I'm going to take a little side trip into talking about rehires. Sometimes people work for you, and then they leave, and then they want to come back later. As a matter of fact, I had a client ask me about this just last week. And my general rule on that is it is seldom a good idea. Very seldom does it work out when you rehire somebody that left and wants to come back, because the reasons that they left your employee are still valid in their mind. And they can come back and say, well, this other company recruited me away. They made me a bunch of promises that weren't fulfilled, yada, yada, yada, fine. But something provoked them to entertain that conversation. Happy, engaged employees don't engage conversations with other employers, period, dot. The only time they ever do it is if they are trying to pump the other employer just for information. But happy, engaged employees do not entertain advances from other potential employers. So whatever it is that caused them to be disengaged is probably going to be valid. But if you are thinking about a rehire, one thing I want you to examine very, very carefully is what their conduct was on the way out the door. Because partings can be extremely cordial and friendly and professional, or partings can be very negative. And in this particular case that my client was asking about, they had a sales employee that had sold for them, had left for a different company, turned out the grass wasn't as green on the other side as they thought it might be. They wanted to come back. And we were walking through the conversation, and then the VP of sales dropped in that, oh yeah, he said some really negative things about me on the way out the door. And I said, then don't hire him, period, end of story. Because that is actively disengaged. He was actively trying to hurt the VP of sales' reputation on the way out the door. He doesn't get to come back. So, okay, we've talked about actively disengaged. Get rid of them. We've talked about how to handle rehires. Now let's go back to one of the most important pieces of this, which is reengaging the disengaged. That 50% disengaged doesn't have to be that way, and it doesn't have to be a static number. A disengaged salesperson who is still working for you is somebody who in most cases is open to persuasion. What I mean by that is think of them as a customer that we sold and that may not evangelize for us, but they're certainly open to buying the next machine from us as well. A disengaged salesperson is a salesperson that we can resell, not always, but sometimes. So what you need to do is approach them in the same way that you would approach a customer. When I talk about selling and when I teach selling, I focus on asking lots of questions to discover needs, and salespeople instinctively understand this. They understand that we need to ask lots and lots of questions so that we can understand what our customer needs, so that we can meet or exceed our customer needs, and persuade that customer to do business with us. And sales managers will be sitting there and they're just nodding right along. Oh yeah, that's absolutely what we need to do. You're absolutely right, which is great. I love questions. But those same sales managers do not use the same approach in selling and persuading their salespeople. And I'll tell you this, the most important sale you can make is to your salespeople to persuade them to do their job. So what you need to do, first of all, keeping your salespeople engaged involves also asking lots of questions about what their needs are, not only as it pertains to work. How does their job fit into their overall plan for their personal life? How does this job fit into their overall plan for their career? Where would they like to go? What would they like to achieve? How can you help them achieve it? All of these pieces are pieces of the puzzle of engagement. So if you sense that a salesperson is disengaged, then my recommendation to you is that you create an opportunity to meet with them. And what's very important is this meeting should not take place in your office with you sitting on one side of the desk and them sitting on the other. That creates a power dynamic that will cause a disengaged salesperson to shut down, to say whatever it is they think they need to say, to mollify you and get you on down the road and worrying about another salesperson. So do not do this in that environment. Instead, the ideal environment for this is take them out to lunch. I would say take them to happy hour, but nowadays that has some liability issues. But get them off site. Get them in a relaxed environment where you can sit and have a relaxed, reasonable conversation, make a little small talk, and then just segue in. Say, you know, Steve, I'll be honest. I look at you, I look at your skills, I look at your personality, and I wonder if we're getting everything we could get from you. I wonder if our relationship is producing everything it could and should produce on both sides. And make it clear. You're not trying to fire them. You're not even trying to correct anything. What you want to do is understand where they're at, where they want to be, and how you can help them get there. Ask a lot of questions that begin with why. You know, why do you sell? What do you like about selling? What don't you like? What would you like to improve about your job? What can I, as your manager, do to help you achieve this? And hopefully, if you have at least a little bit of a relationship with this person, you can get them talking. You're not going to reengage them over one conversation normally, but maybe they'll give you the key to reengaging them. And then once they give you that key, once they tell you what it is that needs to change, what they could do, ask yourself if that's possible. Can we change that? If we can, do it. Remove the barriers to their success and their engagement that you can remove. Obviously, there may be times that you can't. You know, they may say to you, well, John, I'll tell you what. To be honest with you, I'm really dissatisfied over the fact that I don't have a company car here. Well, if you don't provide company cars, there's not a heck of a lot you can do about that. So don't go in with the expectation that you can fix everything that's wrong, but go in with the expectation that you might be able to make at least some improvements. And sometimes you don't need to do everything that they want. Sometimes even making slight improvements will reengage them and get them excited about their jobs again. And I'll tell you what, if you can take somebody who is running right around the line of fired and not fired, remember that's what disengaged salespeople typically do. They got one fellow on each side of that line. If you take somebody who is straddling that line and reengage them, get them excited, get them passionate about their jobs again, well, then guess what? You're going to turn around their performance and all of a sudden they're going to have both feet on the not fired side and moving farther and farther away from that firing line. And then you've basically gotten yourself a new highly productive salesperson without having to go to the expense of turnover. Remember, that 20% turnover line, excessive turnover of that is costly, both in dollars and in human terms. And one great way to manage your turnover and keep it where it needs to be is to keep as many of your salespeople engaged as humanly possible. That 30, 50, 20, the 30% engaged, 50% disengaged, 20% actively disengaged, that doesn't have to be true. It doesn't. That is not, you know, it's just like one of the things that drives me nuts is when people talk about the 80-20 rule. 80% of your results come from 20% of your people. In many cases, that is an excuse for poor management, poor sales, poor methodologies. That's not a rule. Same way with the engagement percentages. They're not a rule. You can affect those. You can move them, but it involves building meaningful relationships with your salespeople. If you have a meaningful relationship with your salespeople, it's harder for them to be disengaged. And it's a heck of a lot harder for them to be actively disengaged. So what are the key takeaways here? Well, number one, engage salespeople to drive your business. Find people in the selection process who are happy people, who absolutely love the job of selling, and then when you bring them in, engage them, sell them from the first day, form relationships with them, and keep them engaged. Second piece, and I'm going to give you this as homework, figure out who on your sales force is disengaged, and then figure out how you can reengage them. Have those meetings that we talked about. Have the questions that we talked about. And then next, spot the actively disengaged people and just get rid of them. Again, when somebody has crossed the line to actively disengage, there's literally nothing you can do. But those are the key takeaways that I want to leave you with today, because what you'll find if you actively work this process with your sales team, you will have a much, much more effective sales team than you would otherwise. And quite frankly, you'll have a heck of a lot more fun managing it. It's a lot more fun to manage engaged salespeople than it is to try and disengage salespeople into doing well or even dealing with actively disengaged salespeople. So I strongly encourage you to implement this process in your own sales team. Now, I also want to make a little offer to everyone, and this is an offer that several AE dealers have already benefited from, and I'd certainly like to encourage you to do that as well. I have a service that I call a sales strategy review. And basically, it's a phone call or a Skype meeting, or if you're in Kansas City, I'd be happy to meet with you one-on-one. It takes about an hour. And what we do is we go over your sales strategy, your goals, your compensation, your staffing, your management plan, your targeted customers, and other issues that affect your sales team. And as part of this, I give you two to three actionable takeaways that you can implement even if you never spend a dime with me. And I'm offering that on a complimentary basis to any company represented here on this webinar. All you've got to do to take advantage of that is email me at Troy at TroyHarrison.com. Very, very simple. Or give me a call at 913-645-3603, and I would be more than happy to have a sales strategy review. And again, two to three actionable takeaways even if we never work together. Now, I will be honest, if there is an opportunity for us to work together and greatly benefit your company, I'll tell you about it. But you don't need to spend a dime with me to get the free advice. It's just another voice taking a look at your program and seeing what little things you could do to optimize it. So I want to thank you for attending the webinar today. I've had a good time presenting it. I hope you've had a good time listening and being a part of it. Doesn't look like we have any audience questions. So Liz, with that, I will throw it back to you. Again, thank you very much. I've enjoyed being here. If I can be of any benefit, like I say, email me, Troy at TroyHarrison.com. Call me, 913-645-3603, or visit my website at www.TroyHarrison.com. Have a great day.

engagement

sales management

high-performance sales force

turnover

employee engagement

salespeople

meeting

sales strategy review