All right, good morning and welcome to this AED webinar, Troubleshoot and Coach Sales Performance. This is kind of a follow-up to a program I did at the AED Summit on smart sales hiring. Some of you may have seen that program, it was very well received, I had a lot of fun giving it. But you know, once you have sales reps, then you've got to figure out what to do with them and that's what this program is all about. You know, we've all had those seminal moments in our career, those turning points where we realized what we were really put on this earth to do. And if you haven't had that, I hope you do at some point. I had mine about 13 years, oh, wow, I apologize, I had mine about 22 years ago, time flies when you're having fun. And I was the sales manager, I had a brand new sales manager for a company called Ameripride Services. Now Ameripride Services is a national billion dollar uniform rental provider and I was the sales manager of the Topeka branch. When I took over, we stood 42nd in sales in the nation, that wouldn't be so bad except there were 42 branches in the nation, so I was kind of climbing from uphill. And I'll be honest, I really hadn't had any schooling or education as far as what sales management should look like. And so the company took me to their sales management school and everything that they showed me I thought was really anti-sales person, it was almost like the sales manager and the sales people at opposite ends of the spectrum as enemies. And so I went back to the branch and I'll never forget it, my mentor and my manager said to me, what did you think of that? And I said, to be honest with you, I thought it was pretty awful. He goes, yeah, I kind of thought so too, but I'm not a sales manager. He said, well, I'll tell you what, he said, you have six months to do this however you want to do it. And if we're getting results, I will continue to run interference for you and if you're not getting results, you're going to have to do it the corporate way. So I said, okay, that sounds like a fair trade. And so over the next six months, I figured out the art and science of sales management. I figured out how to troubleshoot and coach sales performance because when you're last in sales, there's a lot of opportunity to troubleshoot and coach sales performance. I learned a lot of things about sales management and the fundamentals of how I turned that sales force around and made them. I took over in August of 1998 with this company and in 99, 2000, 2001, we were the national champions from 42nd to first in a year and a half. What you're going to see today is going to show you the fundamentals of how I did that. So I kind of took a look around and I put my finger on a concept that I really didn't understand until much later. But that concept is this. The concept is of the engaged salesperson. Now at the time, I was thinking, okay, first thing I want to know is, are my guys really into their job? Well, that's a good way to look at it but there's actually a term for this is called engaged. People rate employees in three different levels and this is in the HR world or even in the sales management world. An engaged salesperson is somebody who is actively interested and motivated to help the company succeed. When they get up in the morning, you don't have to motivate them to get out and do their jobs. They're already motivated to get out and do their jobs. They want to do their jobs. They want to succeed. All you've got to do is just kind of point them in the right direction, coach them every now and then, help them refine their skills. You don't have to get them excited. Now the second level is disengaged. A disengaged salesperson is somebody who, yeah, they're doing okay. I mean, they're just kind of running through the numbers though. They're having their calls. They're putting in their hours. These are the guys whose performance never really changes from month to month to month. I mean, at 5.01, all you can see is burning shoe leather from them getting out of the office. 4.30, if they're not in the office, they're out at happy hour. You get the idea. They're just going through the motions, collecting the paycheck. That's actually better than the bottom 20%. By the way, nationwide, only 30% of employees are engaged. I've conducted this survey over the last 13 years with numerous sales forces that I've been working with. They report the same thing. Normally about three out of 10 of their salespeople are actually engaged in their jobs. 50% are disengaged. 50% of that are that neutral, that mask that isn't really excited about their jobs. They're just collecting paychecks. That's still better, by the way, than the bottom 20%. The bottom 20% are actively disengaged. Those are the people that are trying to hurt you. Now we've really got a problem. When I took over that sales force, and again, I'm overlaying today's terminology onto what I was doing then, but it was a similar thing. I had two salespeople that really were engaged. They needed coaching. They needed development. They needed help. I had two more that were disengaged. They were just putting in the motions, collecting their paychecks. Then I had one that was actively disengaged. I could tell. Every day he came in, he had a chip on his shoulder. When I dealt with him, I realized real quickly that I had to make a change. The first thing I did, and by the way, if you have an actively disengaged salesperson, first thing you've got to do is get them out of there. You cannot return an actively disengaged salesperson. Then I sat down with the disengaged salespeople to find out what their deal was, find out why they weren't excited about the job. I learned a little bit about them. The difference between engaged and actively disengaged is disengaged aren't happy, they're not excited, but they're not trying to hurt you. How many disengaged salespeople do you think you have? Obviously, you don't have to write it down, but think about that for a minute. Here's the thing you need to understand. It is possible to rescue a disengaged salesperson. It is possible to reengage those people because at one point in time, when they started working for you, they were engaged, they were excited. Something happened between then and now to make them disengaged. When you're dealing with a disengaged salesperson, the first thing you've got to do is sit down and find out why they're disengaged, what it would take to get them excited about their job again. I was able to rescue one of the disengaged salespeople by doing this. By the way, I wasn't using great, highly refined and well-researched sales management techniques at the time. The only thing I was doing was selling to them because that was all I knew how to do. It was my first sales management job. I was just using my selling techniques. Why do salespeople become engaged and what are the effects of a disengaged salesperson? A disengaged salesperson is somebody who, again, goes through the motions. When you ask them about their calls, they don't give you very much detail. Their closing ratios tend to be low. Their ratios up and down the sales process tend to be low. They're just not all that effective. Again, an engaged salesperson is somebody who's happy, who's excited. They're showing up to work early. They're highly motivated. It's a funny thing. I started my business almost 14 years ago. I went out on my own almost 14 years ago. I went through phases of being engaged and disengaged in my job when I was working for other people. We all do. You go through those phases where some jobs you're less excited about than others. I have to tell you, ever since I started my own business, I've always been so engaged that I can't sleep in anymore. I am awake by 6.30 in the morning at the latest, ready to get up, get at it, and go out and do my job. That is the level of engagement that being self-employed generated for me. It doesn't have to be that, obviously. The engaged salespeople are those people that you never have to worry, are they doing their job today? You know they're doing their job. It doesn't mean, by the way, that they're necessarily top performers. I have seen disengaged salespeople that can still perform very well because their abilities were that good. It's just that they're not performing to the top of their abilities. Why do salespeople become engaged? Salespeople become engaged because they believe in their company, they believe in the people that they work for, they believe that they can help solve problems, and they believe in themselves. The first thing that you need to do when you're looking at coaching and developing your salespeople is categorize your salespeople. Are they engaged? Are they disengaged? Or are they actively disengaged? Actively disengaged, I mean, if you're sitting there right now watching this webinar and you're thinking that you have an actively disengaged salesperson, by 5 o'clock today they shouldn't be working for you anymore because actively disengaged salespeople are loose cannons. You never know what they're going to do, but you do have a pretty good idea that whatever they're going to do, they're going to do it to try and hurt you. I'm not a big person. I'm firing people, but I will tell you those kind of people, you've got to get them gone. Disengaged salespeople, you need to sit down with them, and I'll show you the techniques to do this for the rest of this webinar. You need to sit down and figure out how to get them back on the train, how to get them drinking the Kool-Aid again, how to get them excited again. By the time this webinar is over, you'll know how to do that. I want to go into what I call Troy's Truths of Sales Management. First of all, know why you're paid. Sales managers are paid because sales forces perform better with a good sales manager than without. It sounds simple, but a lot of sales managers don't really realize that. I see sales managers running around trying to create value for themselves in all sorts of different ways, when the number one way that you can create value for your company, for your employer, for yourself, is to help your salespeople perform better. In other words, you don't have to be the super salesperson swooping in at the close and generating the win and walking back to the office saying, hey, look at what I did. That's not a great sales manager. A great sales manager gets the salespeople to be the super closers. Then you stand in the background and everybody knows that you did it because you helped them. Second truth, your selling skills are more important now than when you were out in the field, believe it or not, because this entire method of sales management is based upon using not your dictatorial skills, your tell them what to do skills, but your selling skills. Our model of sales management is about selling behavior change to salespeople that need to change their behavior. Truth number three, turnover is expensive. The best salesforces are low turnover salesforces, and I classify low turnover as anything less than 20% a year. If you've got a five-person salesforce and you're turning two people a year, that's too much. Turnover is expensive in terms of dollars, in terms of customer relationships, it's hard to have credibility for customer relationships when you're sending in a new salesperson every six months. It's costly in human terms as well. High turnover takes a toll on everyone in the salesforce, including you. My exhortation to you is use coaching skills first and termination as a last resort. Which leads into my fourth point, it's not about hiring and firing. I see so many sales managers that think they're going to be able to hire and fire their way to success, and unless you're just getting dumb lucky, you can't. It's getting too hard to hire good salespeople today. That's what my program Smart Sales Hiring was all about. So you need to focus on turning around the people that you've got. And finally, the proper glory is reflected glory, and that goes back to that comment I made about too many sales managers who want to be the super salesperson. The biggest glory goes to the people who win the big accounts, and that's great. That means your salespeople. The reflected glory is the glory that you get from hiring, training, and coaching the right team. So always think of that. Don't think of yourself as being the person who needs to make the sale. Think of yourself as the person who needs to hire and train the people to make the sale. Here's the good news. Everybody watching this webinar can get higher performance by implementing what I call the unconventional truths of sales management. I call it unconventional because it's different than most of what I've seen. That sales management program I went to when I first started with Ameripride, basically they taught you three things. Hire people, dictate to them what to do, and then fire them if they wouldn't do it. Hire, dictate, fire, and that's the model of sales management that's been going on forever. It's still going on. There's a better way, and here it is. First of all, after you've got them hired, you start by building an emotional bank account with your salespeople. Some of you may have heard that term. We'll go into it in a little bit more detail. Then secondly, you do a good discovery with your salespeople. Now you're starting to think of those selling skills. That's one type of discovery we do with our customers. Third, you sell behavioral change, not dictate behavioral change. If you sell behavioral change, you keep your emotional bank account intact, and the emotional bank account is key to employee and salesperson engagement. Fourth, you make withdrawals from the EBA wisely. In other words, pick your battles, and I'll show you what I mean. First of all, building your emotional bank account. That's about engaging your salespeople from the very start. When does employee engagement begin? Well, it begins on the first day. How do we onboard our salespeople? Think about how you were onboarded for a sales job that you might have taken on. Most of the time, onboarding is, well, here's a bunch of HR paperwork, and let's get that all filled out. Okay, now I'm going to give you a very rushed plant tour, and I'm going to introduce you to a bunch of people who make it very obvious that they don't have time to talk to you, and maybe we're going to get to go out to lunch, and okay, there's this time to get started. It's kind of a whirlwind, doesn't make you feel really involved, doesn't make you feel really engaged. There's a better way. First of all, I want you to think of onboarding not as the first day or half day, like a lot of people do. Think of onboarding as the first 90 days. We're going to use that first 90 days to decide if our new salesperson is for us. They're going to use the first 30 days to decide if we're for them, so that first 30 to 90 day is absolutely critical for engagement. So let's look back at that first day that we talked about. How do we make it different? Well, first of all, think about internal networks. Everybody needs an internal network, people that they can call on, people that can help them out, people that can give them advice. Most of the time, this develops by happenstance. Just happens to be the person that they have their office near, or who they get to know by accident. Guess what? You can do better. Design it up front. Figure out who you want your new people tied to. Look, we've all got those salespeople that we'd rather didn't influence our new hires, or at least some of us do. If that's the case, make sure that those aren't the people who are influencing your new hire. Get your engaged salespeople involved with your new employees. Let them do a little bit of mentoring. Roll out the welcome wagon. Think about when you bring a customer into your dealership, I bet you got a sign up front that says, welcome Bob and Jim's construction company, or whoever. You have the receptionist already trained to give them the hero's welcome when they walk in the door. Why don't you do the same thing with your new salesperson? Have a sign up that says, welcome Bob Smith, we're glad you're here. Have your receptionist trained to give them a big welcome. Everybody give them the big handshake. Let them know that they have made the best decision that they could humanly make by going to work for you. All that mountain of HR paperwork, email it to them, get it out all the way before that first day. All they've got to do is hand you the signed forms, 30 seconds, that's over with. That's again one of those prime times when you feel like you're bogged down on your first day. Buddy up. Pick the people that you want to buddy up with your salesperson and communicate to them. If you want Sally to become friends with Bob, if you want Sally to be the shining example of what Bob should do, then get with Sally and make that happen. Show them models of success. Your top salespeople, your engaged salespeople are going to want to help out. So let them. And then plan it all out. Plan it all out like you would a customer tour. All those people, all those other managers who are too busy to talk to the new salesperson, sit down with them and say, look, I really need you to spend 15 good quality minutes with my people. So instead of the rushed, oh, hi, Bob, good to meet you, sorry, I can't hang around, got to run out to the shop, then it's, hi, Bob, sit down, let me explain to you what I do here and see how we can help each other. Guide that. Now, it takes more effort, no question. It takes more communication with everybody in the building, but believe me, the result you get is more than worth it. So besides you, who are the key relationships that they're going to need? Who are the key people that they're going to need to know and how can you initiate those relationships? Plan out the network that you would like them to have and then facilitate that on the first day. Have some of those people take your new salesperson out to lunch. Maybe have some of them take them out to a happy hour, whatever, but plan those things. Don't let those things happen by happenstance because unfortunately, if you leave those things a chance, they almost always end up getting networked with the inappropriate people and the worst people. Don't ask me why. That's just how it happens. So plan it out. Have a game plan for who their key relationships are going to be. The welcome wagon. Again, have the welcome sign up. One touch that I always thought was great is having their business cards ready on day one, sitting on their desk. And coordinate with everybody how you're going to welcome them. Again, the idea is to be prepared. And when you assign a buddy sales rep, okay, here is one of my own personal slants on sales management. May not agree with you or we may agree. But here is always my approach. I always felt that one of my jobs as a sales manager was to pick and groom a successor. And the reason for it was simple. I wanted to move up in the company and it's easier for me to move up in the company if I've got somebody set up behind me that can take over my position. So I would have somebody all set up behind me ready to go. And that person a lot of times would be somebody who not necessarily was my top sales rep but somebody who showed leadership, who showed that they liked helping other people. And that sales person a lot of times would be my buddy for my new sales person. They would be somebody who kind of helped mentor them, helped onboard them, helped get them into the swing of things. And again, this is not something that happens organically. You've got to talk to your buddy. You've got to coordinate the responsibilities. You've got to let them know what's expected of them and what the benefits are to them. But if you do it, again, you're going to get better hires. You're going to get better hiring retention. You know, nationally, two-thirds of sales hires are failures. Now, I am convinced that a big part of that is during the hiring process. Again, that's why we did smart sales hiring at the AED Summit. But I'm also convinced that a lot of it happens in the early management techniques, that onboarding period. Salespeople get off to a wrong start and then they can never recover. Don't let that happen to you. And one of the best ways is this buddying up technique. Now, sales depends on relationships. We've already talked about how your selling skills are vital towards building your business, towards building a strong sales team. Well, here's the thing. This model of sales management, the model that gets away from hire, dictate, fire. This model of management depends on building relationships with your salespeople, building individual relationships. And I want to kill a sacred cow right now. But, you know, I do that. After a lot of my presentations, there's a lot of blood on the floor from me killing sacred cows. But I want to kill one of them right now, and that is this. There is a philosophy of sales management that says that you should not get close to your salespeople. You should not get personally invested in them. And I understand why that exists. The reason that exists is that there's a fear that if you get too close to your salespeople that you're going to be unable or unwilling to make the hard decisions. You're going to be unwilling or unable to discipline or to terminate or, you know, even really to have tough coaching. And here's the thing. I am going to trust you that you have that ability, that you're still going to have that ability. But if you stay arm's length with your salespeople, if you keep a huge – now, don't get me wrong. There still needs to be a little bit of a barrier of professionalism. There are certain things that I never would do. I never went out drinking with my salespeople, for one thing. And that's a rule of I never even go drinking with my clients. That's just one of those little lines in the sand that I keep. You still have to have a certain line of the sand, but it's okay to get close and to become personally invested in the careers of your salespeople. As a matter of fact, real success in sales management always depends on it. So what I want you to do is think about how you can build real, marketable, and leverageable relationships with your salespeople. And there's a few ways to do that. First of all, you do for them before they do for you. And what I mean by that is look for problems that you can solve for your salespeople, even if they're not producing the kind of numbers you'd like them to make. The first thing for you to look at is what problems can you solve for them? What interference can you run? Can you fight internal battles for them? Unfortunately, it's a truth that sales and operations or sales and finance or sales and service sometimes don't get along. Our job as salespeople is to create tension for other departments. I mean, there's no other way to look at it. It's true. Our job is to sell more and more and more, and when we do, we create pressure on other departments. Now, it's that pressure that drives companies forward to excellence, so I'm not sad about that. But it does mean that there are going to be internal battles that need to get fought. You know, I was meeting with a potential client about a year ago, and I was sitting in the room with the VP of sales and the CEO, and we were going over my program, and their top salesperson knocked on the door and walked in, and he said, you know, he said, hey, John, to the VP of sales. He says, hey, John, he says, I'm having some trouble with production. They're backing out on that commitment they made to get that order out for me by Wednesday, and I really need it by Wednesday. Can you get involved? And John just looked at him and said, look, go handle it yourself. I'm busy right now. And the salesperson obviously got a little upset, and he walked out the door. And I looked at John and I said, I'm curious. What is it precisely that you do for a living here? He said, what do you mean? I said, if fighting that battle at management level for your top salesperson isn't part of your job description, you probably need to be working somewhere else. And I meant it because that is part of the sales manager's job description. Help them succeed by removing internal obstacles, by fighting internal battles. When those conflicts exist, you fight a manager to manager. Don't ask your salesperson to fight staff level to manager. Help them achieve their individual goals. Find out what their individual goals are and help them achieve them. I'll give you some examples of this shortly. And think through your rules and restrictions. Over time, companies build up a lot of rules, policies, and restrictions. Some of them become outdated. Some of them become unwieldy. Some of them just, there's no reason for them anymore. There's actually a law in the books in Kansas, which is my home state. I check every year to make sure it's still there and it hasn't been repealed. There's a law in Kansas that says, and it was written in 1912, that says when two cars meet at an intersection, neither one shall move until the other has passed. Think about that for a minute. That's a rule that's unnecessary and a little outdated. So when you're looking at your rules for your sales department, if you can't justify them either in terms of benefit to the company, to the customer, or to the salesperson, they probably shouldn't exist. So think through those rules and restrictions and keep them, you know, when in doubt, keep a minimum on those rules. All right, now, you need to do a good discovery with your salespeople. And by a good discovery, I'm talking about a questioning process where you really get to know their needs and their wants. Because high-performance sales management is an individualized process. You must individualize your management style for each sales rep in order to be successful. And so what we want to do is basically want to figure out what makes them tick. Think about when you're selling a new customer and you're asking them all kinds of questions to find out their needs, their wants, their situation, weaknesses that they have, strengths that they have. Try and figure out anything that you can do to find a way to be able to help them. Well, I want you to do that with your new salespeople, too. And the first response I get a lot of times is, but, Troy, think about all the questions I've asked them in the interview. Okay, yeah, there's some of that. But a couple of points. First of all, some of the questions that you can ask of an employee are different than the ones you ask during the interview. And second of all, once they're hired, their answers and their spine on their answers might change. So first of all, understand your salesperson's needs and wants. And I've got here on this slide, hint, it's not just about money. Let me take that a step farther. If it is just about money, there's a good chance you made the wrong hire. Because real success in sales means you've got to be in love with the entire sales process. You've got to be in love with all the aspects of the job, not just the results. So find out what it is that makes them tick. Second, understand what motivates them. What gets them up and going in the morning? What gets them going? What makes them want to sell? And it says on that slide, question like you question a customer. Find out where they are now, where they want to be in five years, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Take a deep dive. Now, you can do this in your office. I don't recommend that. You can do it all in one big session. I also don't recommend that. I always like taking my guys out to lunch and just making it a conversation. Do that over a period of three to four weeks, and you can usually get a pretty good beat on where they're at. And I won through discovery. Let's go back to that first sales management job I told you about at Ameripride Services. Now, I told you I had two very engaged salespeople. They loved what they do. They enjoyed what they do. They wanted to be there. One was named Steve. Now, Steve had been with the company for 28 years. The company color of Ameripride was green, and we always like to say about Steve that if you cut him, he'd bleed Ameripride green. And he had held every job in the building except for general manager. He'd held my job at one point. And what Steve wanted most was to be seen as the ideal example of the Ameripride employee. I mean, when he got right down to it, that's really what he wanted. He wanted to be the guy, a man of respect, if you will. He wanted to be the guy that when he walked in the front door, people would point at him and say, yeah, that's the right guy, and that's what you get from a career at Ameripride Services. He wanted to be the prototype. The problem was he was only running about 50% of quota. So we had to find a way to get him moved forward. And what I helped him realize over a period of time is that as much as everybody in the building loved him, and they did, he would never be seen as that guy that he wanted to be seen as if he didn't update his sales methods. Steve was working with some very dated sales methods at the time, and they just weren't succeeding anymore. And so by doing that, I was able to help him kind of open his ears and his mind to some of the newer things that I was teaching him. And once he started using those, he got a lot more successful. The first year that I was there, nobody made our President's Club. Our President's Club awarded the top 20 salespeople nationwide out of a sales force of about 260. The second year I was there, I had two people in the top five nationally, and Steve was number two. He was very, very successful. So that was a lot of fun. But I never would have been able to do it if I hadn't really dug in and gotten to know him. Now, the same way I worked with Ken, Ken was the other salesperson who was very engaged. I told you Steve was running 50% of quota. What I didn't tell you was he was my top salesperson. Think about that for a minute. Ken was running 30% of quota. Matter of fact, my regional manager ordered me to fire Ken, and I told him no. You may be getting an idea of why I'm self-employed nowadays. I didn't take orders well. But I knew that Ken could be successful. I just had to figure out how to get him there. What Ken wanted most of all was my job. He wanted to be a sales manager. And so I figured out that if I groomed him as a sales manager, in other words, if I let him be the buddy for new salespeople, if I shared little bits and pieces of my job with him, showed him how I was doing, what I was doing, what I realized is that he'd go to the ends of the earth for me. And so I used that as some leverage to help Ken be groomed, because a lot of things I taught Ken weren't real natural. In fact, I had him on probation for 90 days, and he suffered through that a little bit. But the end result was he was very successful. I'll actually share the rest of Ken's story with you a little bit later, because it's a great story. Now, from Ameripride, I went to another company. This company did freight recovery of high-end goods. They did liquidations for truck lines of damaged and unclaimed freight. And one of the salespeople that I had there, his name was also Steve. And he was in charge of the electronics department. And I did the discovery process with Steve. And this is a little bit different way of winning through discovery, by the way. Have you ever talked to somebody and just had the little hairs on the back of your neck raised up a little bit, where you couldn't put your finger on it, but you thought something wasn't right? Well, that's what happened with this guy. And so I kept a pretty good watch on him, and what I figured out was that he was stealing from the company. He was stealing high-end server routers and that kind of thing, and selling them off for cash on his own. And he had figured out a way to get the stuff out and all of that. And as near as I could figure, he was getting about $5,000 a month on the side. So it was not insignificant. Well, I couldn't do anything about what he had done before, because I bet he had probably gotten away with $100,000 over the previous two years. But I sure could fire him right then. Effectively disengaged. Again, didn't know that term at the time, but that's what he was. And he was stealing from the company and got rid of him. Never would have known that. Never would have gone down that route if I hadn't done a great discovery with him. So don't be afraid to do a good discovery with your people, because the next thing that a good discovery will help you do is seek profitable behavioral change. It's one of my phrases. When you ask salespeople, or really anybody, to change or improve what they do, what you're doing is you're asking for profitable behavioral change. You're asking to change what they're doing so that it generates higher returns for both you and your company and them. That's the core of what management is. Any time we're managing and correcting anything, we're trying to seek profitable behavioral change. But here's what I want you to do. In the past, what we would do is we would find something we would want to change, and we'd sit down and say, okay, Steve, instead of doing this, you need to do this. Boom, period, end of story. I want you to take a different look at it. I want you to begin with persuasion. Use your selling skills. Sell the benefits of it. You know, Steve, if you change what you're doing right here, your customers would react in a different way as in thus, and then that would generate more sales for you. Sell the benefits. We're all accustomed to selling the benefits to salespeople, and then when we get into management, we forget that skill. Bring it back. Sell the benefits of profitable behavioral change and coach to them. Don't dictate to them. There's a big difference between coaching and dictating. Only after you have done those things can you move towards dictating. There is a point in behavioral change where if it has to happen and they're not willing to be persuaded to do it, then you have to lock it down by force. That's when you have to say, because I'm the boss and I say so. The trouble is that most managers go straight to the because I'm the boss and I say so. I'm encouraging you to do some different work first because when you do different work first, you're not making withdrawals from their emotional bank account. That keeps salespeople engaged. Salespeople who are coached and sold on behavioral change are salespeople who stay engaged. A lot of times what you'll find out is when you talk to those disengaged salespeople, what you're going to find out is they've been dictated to too much. That is a constant thread across my career and across my work as a salesforce development coach. Whenever I talk to disengaged salespeople, at some point they're going to talk about how they've been dictated to in ways that wasn't friendly to them. So I want you to think about how to handle behavioral change. Make your withdrawals wisely, withdrawals from the emotional bank account. Again, because every time you make a withdrawal from your EBA, that creates a chance of disengaging your sales people. So what are we going to do? First of all, you need to have a positive balance in your emotional bank account. Typically what that means is that you've done things for your sales person before they've done things for you. Remember all the stuff we talked about on their first day and on their onboarding period about getting them excited about the job? That's all building a balance in the emotional bank account. Now, you cannot make a withdrawal from a bank account that has a zero balance. They call that bank robbery. A lot of people have gone to prison for it. So keep in mind that when you're making withdrawals, they need to have a balance in it, and you've got to figure out, is this a wise withdrawal? So how do we coach sales activity? Well, first of all, you cannot coach sales activity from your office. You can coach results. You can look at results. You can look at activity numbers, and you can say, you're substandard here, and we need to raise that up. That's not really coaching. That's dictating. You can dictate from your office. You cannot coach from your office. To coach requires getting out and sharing the field of battle with your salespeople. You've got to go out on sales calls. And when you go out on sales calls, you have to do the hardest thing for any sales manager to do. And believe me, guys, I give seminars on this all the time. I always see the cringes on sales managers' face, on business owners' face. But here's what you've got to do. You've got to be willing to let them fail if necessary. Do not save a dying sales call. Now, let me give you the exception to this, okay? Pick your opportunities for coaching. If it's a deal that's going to be a difference maker for your dealership, yeah, okay, that's probably a call that should be less of a coaching call and more of a selling call. Focus on those more minor sales calls where you're looking for sales behaviors that you can coach, because the behaviors are going to be the same on a little call or a big call. Define up front, am I here to help you sell, or am I here to coach? If you're there to coach, your job is to be a bump on a log and not get involved in the sales call. Do not change the trajectory, because here's the thing. If you save a sales call, you don't teach the lesson. Salespeople only learn critical behavioral change by failure and coaching through the failure. So share the field of battle. Do not sell, be an impartial observer, okay? The person you want to watch, the person you want to focus on is the customer, not the salesperson. Watch where the customer gives positive signals, watch where the customer gives negative signals. And note down what provokes that on both sides. Also, do not view the sales call through the prism of what you would do. We're all different, we all communicate differently, we all sell differently. Focus on skills and techniques, do not focus on your sales style. The easiest and quickest way to put one of your salespeople off is by saying, well, you know, what I would have done there. You'll turn them off immediately. Don't do that. So watch the customer. Is the salesperson getting an appropriate reaction from the customer, right? Write down areas, keep notes, write down areas where the customer reacts in a way that hinders the progression of the sale and watch for inappropriate words or body language. Note all those things down. Keep good notes, again, not the kind of notes that are there to try and make a sale, but the kind of notes that are there to generate a report on the activity itself afterwards. Now, afterwards, as soon as you walk out in the car, your salesperson is going to look at you and say, how did it go, boss? Okay, my encouragement to you is do not curbside coach for two reasons. Number one, you're looking for patterns. Observe salespeople over multiple sales calls because anybody can screw up a sales call one-off. God knows I did last week, and I knew I was doing it. That's the thing. I knew exactly where I was going wrong. Anybody can do that in a one-off situation, but what you want to watch for are those patterns of behavior where the salesperson is making the same mistake multiple times. That's when you have a coachable behavior. So take a little bit of time after all the sales calls to write up a little self report on the patterns that you saw, what you'd like to see changed, how you'd like to see it changed. And then set up a coaching meeting with your salesperson. It can be the same day. It can be the next day, however you want to do this. Don't have it in your office with you sitting on one side of the desk and them sitting on the other. That creates a power dynamic, and anything you do will be perceived as dictation whether it's intended that way or not. Do it in a conference room with both of you sitting on the same side of the table. He'll do it over lunch. Do it over happy hour drink. It doesn't matter. But do it outside of the power dynamic. The first thing you do is ask them to review. You tell me where you thought it went well, where you thought it went badly. I always like a salesperson who can self-diagnose. If they can't, it's not a real big deal. But if they can, it's always a help, and it moves you down the road towards a successful resolution. And then review instances where the call went wrong, and base that not on your perspective but from the customer's perspective. You know, Jason, you may not have noticed because you were focused on selling, but when you said this, the customer reacted this way, which really kind of threw up a barrier. Let's talk through that. Review those instances. And stay away from I would have said. Focus on here's how the customer reacted. If you do everything from the perspective of the customer, you don't threaten and you don't make it confrontational. So, again, focus on where things went wrong from the customer. And then, just like we propose in selling, propose a change in behavior. Okay, what you did here provoked this reaction. What if you instead did this? I think this would generate a different reaction from the customer. Sell it to them. Show them what the benefits are. Show them how. You know, propose it. Show the benefits. Show them how to implement. And then, just as we do in selling, ask for commitment. Ask for commitment that this change would create the result that you're looking for. And then role-play that change right there in that coaching meeting. Say, okay, let's go back to this point in this meeting. The customer has just said this. Now you go with the new behavior. Role-play it through until you're comfortable they have it. And then, follow up pretty quickly, within a week if possible. Get out on another sales call. Do another ride-along and see if they've changed the behavior that you need them to change. A couple more notes on this. I like rules of three. I would recommend it. Now, you may go out with a salesperson and you may have just a complete dumpster fire. You've got a list of a dozen things that they need to change. If you propose to them to change a dozen things, you're going to get zero because you get into activity paralysis. There's just too much to do. They're sitting there going, I can't do all the things all the time. Keep it to three. Even if they've got 15 things they need to change, find the three most critical and work on those first. Once they've mastered those, pick out the next three. Work on those. Incremental change is how you're going to best be able to coach and develop your salespeople and how you're best going to be able to keep them engaged. What if coaching doesn't work? First of all, you have to define whether the issue is a lack of skill or a lack of effort. You cannot coach a lack of effort. That goes back to that engage-disengage thing. By the way, as you do these discoveries, you will find out why salespeople are disengaged, if they are, and hopefully how to re-engage them. But if you have a salesperson who just doesn't want to do the work involved, there's not much you can do there. That's where it's time to part ways. Let's say that you do have a salesperson, though, who's putting out the effort. You've gone out, you've coached them, and then you go out with them again, and they're still not changing. Well, try multiple times. Try at least twice to change the behavior before you decide it's just not going to change. And then you've got to ask yourself something. Okay, am I coaching to fine-tune one of my better reps, or am I coaching to try and save somebody's career? Part of your coaching time should be spent with your top reps. That's going to be your biggest return on investment. Because the reason your top reps are your top reps is that they are so skilled that every profitable behavioral change for them has proportionally more effect than it does on your bottom people. So don't shy away from coaching your top people. But here's the bottom line. If you've tried multiple times to change a behavior, and that behavior is an obstacle to success, in other words, they're just not going to make it unless they change, and they refuse to change, well, that's when you've got to part ways. But you can do so with a clear conscience and a clear look in the mirror and say, I've done everything that I could possibly do. And because of that, that has always been the moment that I have felt okay about letting somebody go. And frankly, if you're doing all that, it's not a shock to them when you let somebody go. So what are the benefits? I've told you to sell the benefits to your salespeople. Well, now I'm going to sell the benefits of this type of management to you. First of all, turnover is bad. You get better customer relationships through longer salesperson longevity. So you're going to have better customer relationships, happier customers. You'll have lower turnover. Management becomes a lot more fun this way, guys. It really does. If management is a dictatorial activity and a war between you and your salespeople every day, management is no fun whatsoever. I've been in those environments. This is a lot more fun. Your salespeople will be happier to see you. I mean, we've all worked for that manager where when he comes into the office, everybody gets the hell out of here. You won't be that manager. So it's a lot more fun for you. You get higher achievement and a long-term growth curve. Your salespeople never stop growing as individuals or as salespeople. You get more skilled salespeople. Again, that's what we're trying to do is make them more skilled. And unlike the hire, dictate, fire model, anybody can be taught to hire, dictate, and fire. But if you're a good coach, you are not interchangeable, and you are not replaceable. So that's very important as well. So there's a lot of benefits to this model. Before I get into questions, and I've got to be honest, I'm running short on time, and what I may do is just if you have questions, email them to me afterwards. I'll give you my email address here in a moment. But I want to finish the story about Ken. Ken, his name was Ken Muspel. He had actually come as a route driver and had been in sales for a year. That's how I inherited him. And Ken and I struggled for quite a while on getting him going, and we finally found the keys to get Ken not just engaged. He was engaged, but we found the keys to get him very, very successful. And this is one of those moments when you kind of break the fourth wall between employee, employer, and friendship. Ken became one of my very best friends, and he's to this day the best salesperson who ever worked for me. In August of 1998, when I took over, he was 30% of quota, and I was ordered to fire him. In 1999, he made president's club for our company on the last week of the year. And in 2000, he was the national sales champion for our company, top rep in the country, and had a great career, and he ended up leaving shortly after I did. In 2002, and he became the top rep in Cox Communications Central Region for five years. Huge region, a lot of salespeople. He was their top guy. And on April 1, 2007, which was two weeks before my book, Sell Like You Mean It, went to the printer, Ken went out in the morning to work on a Mustang that he was restoring for his wife, Debbie. That's one of the ways he and I bonded. We were both car guys. And after he'd worked on it for a little while, he decided he was going to lay down and take a little nap before lunch, and he never woke up. Passed away of a heart attack right there on the couch. The doctor said it was so smooth he probably never even knew what was happening. He just went from sleep right on. Fifty-four years old. It was a huge shock to me, and in fact, I rewrote the dedication to my book, Sell Like You Mean It, and dedicated it to him because he was such a great salesman. He embodied everything, in my opinion, a salesperson should be and embodied everything a man should be and a friend should be. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy. And about three years ago, I had an opportunity to go out to Salina, Kansas, which is where he was from. And I was on an overnight out there, and I hadn't talked to Debbie's widow for a number of years. And so I emailed her and was able to contact her and set up a dinner with her, you know, just to catch up. And we sat down. We had a great dinner. And over dessert, she looks at me and she goes, you know, Troy, she goes, I never thanked you. For what? And she said, you didn't just change Ken's career. You changed his life. She said, Ken was a different man after he started succeeding. And she said, the last seven years that we had together, she said, we were married for 30 years. And she said, the last seven of those years were the best. She said, Ken was so full of life those years that it was amazing. And she said, it was due to his success. And she said, that's due to you. And I got to tell you guys something. I have received a great many awards and rewards in almost 30 years in sales as a salesman, as a manager, as a speaker, as a consultant. But I've never received one as great as that. I can't guarantee you that if you adopt this method of management that somebody will say that to you. What I can guarantee is that you will have that effect on people. Using this method of sales management, this individualized, relationship-based, sales-based model of sales management, the unconventional secrets of high-performance sales management, you will have that effect on people's lives, not just their careers. And they will remember you forever. And that, man, I'll tell you what, if that's not a great reward for sales and a management career, I don't know what is. All right. As I said, we're about out of time. So what I'd like to do is if anybody has any questions, please feel free to e-mail me. I'll give you my e-mail address here in a minute. But I also want to make an offer. And it is a free offer because I want to help as many AED dealers as possible. I've engaged with a number of them after the summit. And you all are just a bunch of great guys. And I want to help as many of you as I possibly can. So what I'm doing is I'm making a complimentary sales strategy review offer to anybody on this webinar. What a sales strategy review is, it's a call either by phone or by Skype, about 45 minutes to an hour, and we go over your sales strategy, your personnel, your compensation, your processes, any other issues affecting sales. And my promise to you is that I will give you at least two to three actionable recommendations that you can take and make money with the next day, even if you never work with me, even if you never spend a dime with me. Eleven people did that after the AED summit, and they all got actionable recommendations out of it. Now, the only reason you wouldn't get recommendations out of it is if you're already doing everything exactly right the way that I would do it. In that case, you get validation from a nationally recognized sales expert. That's not a bad way to spend an hour either. One of my clients, and admittedly, he's moved on to do business with me, but one of my clients, Mike Ebert of Perimeter Office Products in Atlanta, told me, he said, man, this is the best hour I've spent all year. Now, granted, that was last year, so he may have spent a better hour this year. Who knows? But in December last year, he said, this is the best hour I've spent the entire year. We got him growing at 25%. So if you have a question, or preferably, if you'd like to take me up on this sales strategy review offer, and I really, really hope each one of you does, because we can do some great things for you, again, even if you never spend a dime with me. Email me. Troy at TroyHarrison.com. Pretty simple. Troy at TroyHarrison.com. You can call my cell. It's 913-645-3603. The only reason I wouldn't answer it is if I'm helping a customer, and if I am, leave me a voicemail. I'll get right back to you. But, yeah, feel free to email me with questions. Feel free to email me, and let's get a sales strategy review set up. I want to help you guys, because, like I said, love working with the AED, enjoy working with all the dealers, and I just have a lot of fun working with you guys. So I thank you very much. And Liz, I believe, I don't know if you've got anything left here to finish up with them, but if not, guys, thank you very much. I've had a great time doing this webinar, and I hope it's been a great hour for you. Thank you, and everybody have a great day.

AED webinar

coaching

sales performance

engaged salesperson

emotional bank accounts

individual needs

motivations

behavioral change

customer's perspective