Want Better Sales Results? Don't Focus Only On The High Performers">
In any sales organisation, the superstars understandably command a lot of attention and focus—from executive management, sales management, support personnel, and even other salespeople on the team.
As such, it’s somewhat intuitive that management would focus a lot of their attentions and improvement efforts on the superstars.
You see, the superstars are the superstars precisely because they’re already doing a lot of the right things in the right ways. They’re the superstars precisely because they’re already operating at a much higher level of effectiveness than everyone else.
In other words, there’s not a lot of room for improvement with the superstars. Or rather, there’s not as much room for improvement with the superstars as there is with the “meaty middle”.
The meaty middle is heart of your sales team. The meaty middle is statistically the 70% of your team that lives between the top 15% (the superstars that put up stellar numbers like clockwork) and the bottom 15% (the people who are likely in the wrong profession).
There are three main reasons management should focus primarily on moving the meaty middle, and all of them have to do with leverage:
Improvements are easier to achieve. While it might seem counter-intuitive, it’s easier to get people from 60% effectiveness to 70% effectiveness, than it is to get people from 95% effectiveness to 96% effectiveness.
Improvement impacts are larger. Because your efforts are affecting a much larger group of people (and likely to a much greater degree), the combined impact on overall performance can be more significant.
Improvements are much stickier. Driving improvement across 70% of the sales team necessarily involves systemic solutions that are repeatable, scalable, and effective for the “typical” salespeople that also make up the vast majority of the future hiring pool.
Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the superstars entirely. Obviously, you want to keep them happy and productive. And, the superstars are a great research panel to understand and identify things that should be emulated.
The point is that when it comes to driving significant performance improvements, the superstars should not be your primary focus.
The opportunity and leverage just aren’t there. And the meaty middle is where Sales management can do the most good.
The GOAL of every high performance sales team should be to…… Proactively create the conditions where more deals, that are more profitable, with better customers, are the natural result. This is achieved by engineering the overall sales process such that it reliably generates the desired outcomes as a matter of course.
If you would like to know a little more "About Mark", please follow the link for a brief profile view.
https://www.predictablesuccess.com.au/lp/mark-lenthall
Predictable Success can examine your sales processes and deliver an accurate road-map after determining where you’re on track and where you need a course correction. Predictable Success can provide a cost/benefit analysis and expert recommendations to improve your sales performance on every level.
