Editor's Note: This is the first part of a two-part article. Look in the upcoming November 14 issue of Rainmaker Report to read about the third and fourth elements of successful professional services selling.

I began to recognize the need to objectively and rigorously benchmark salespeople's performance over twenty-five years ago. The motivation to do this was strong: as a sales director, I knew I was wasting thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, on sales training programs. Simply put, they were not providing me with a proper return on my considerable investment.

But I needed solid data and analysis to prove my theory. Without it, I would have to continue to trust the training providers to root out the waste, and most of them had only their own interests at heart.

By taking an analytical approach, I arrived at the following equation for ensuring a solid ROI on sales training programs:

• Attitude + Skills + Process + Knowledge = Success

My initial reasoning was this: Attitude is fundamental to any achievement. Individuals with the right attitude tend to embrace the essential sales skills, to recognize the importance of process, and to strive to continually expand their knowledge.

Skills are the "tools of the trade" and need ongoing development. You also must be specific about which skills you develop in others. You can waste considerable time over-burdening employees with inappropriate and irrelevant ones.

Process provides salespeople and management with organization, efficiency and control. Effective processes provide objective analysis and indicators the company can use to benchmark and measure against.

Knowledge requires salespeople know services, industries, market sectors, competitors, and the details of their own company. Last but not least, it requires salespeople know themselves!

Attitude

Most managers and companies use the "Carrot and Stick" or "Reward Theory" to exhort greater efforts from their staff. It stems from two-statements:

• What makes people happy and motivated at work, is what they do.
  
  
• What makes people unhappy and demotivated at work, is the situation in which they do it.

A newer approach has become increasingly important and managers must familiarize themselves with it. It is based on Professor Frederick Hertzberg's ideas and has three parts (or letters). They are:

• Q.W.L. - "The Quality Of Work Life"

Managers who want to motivate their staff must improve their Q.W.L.

This starts by defining people as they are, not as who you want them to be. Many people who we have assumed to have the characteristics which we wanted them to have are now saying: "We are not like that. Treat me the way I am, not the way you believe me to be."

Therefore, the big revolution managers will have to face is identifying the needs of their people – not projected needs.
 
The first set of needs defined by Hertzberg is called "Hygiene Factors" and deals with a person's relationship with the environment. They consist of how people are treated at work:

• Do you pay them well?
  
  
• Are the working conditions good?
  
  
• How about human relations, such as the nature and quality of their supervision?
  
  
• What is the nature of your company's policies and administration?

They are called Hygiene Factors, because if the factors are right, they prevent people from being dissatisfied in their working environment. That keeps people from being unhappy, but those factors do not motivate.

I worked very hard to determine which factors motivated each of my team members, with the aim of maintaining their performance at optimum levels.

Skills

One-off programs supply short-term motivational buzz and provided my team (of two-hundred) with a number of thought-provoking ideas. However, once my team returned to the day-to-day pressures of their jobs, the reactive mindset returned and the pro-active mindset, necessary for implementing all the new concepts, took a back seat.

Then, and probably now, about 80% of training organizations were making the assumption that every salesperson had the same level of experience, expertise, and general business knowledge (or "commercial bandwidth"). This was, of course, totally unrealistic.

While you can never equate age and experience with success, the reality is that although some professional salespeople do have ten years experience, most have one year's experience ten times!

The very best salespeople – the ones that consistently exceed expectation – have usually received ongoing skills development from the "emerging" stage all the way through "advanced" right up to "consultative" level if appropriate, but the keyword is "ongoing."

Finally, most sales directors, (including myself,) make a most significant and blatant error of judgment. They give every member of their team the same training. They dispatch everyone to the same course regardless of whether or not they already have those skills or if they need to have them in their current role.

The point here is that there is far too little planning, assessing and objective setting; as I said earlier, it is much easier to abdicate that responsibility to the training company. The downside to this approach is of course, so much money is wasted.

I quickly realized that a company's first step to changing their sales approach was to diagnose performance gaps and tailor the training to what the salespeople needed.

Use a diagnostic approach. A formal audit of your business developers' saves an organization money and time. You don’t want to teach people something they already know, do well, or do not need. It also may identify leaders who fail to know what skills business developers need; in other words, leaders who have no right leading.

When it comes to the efficacy of sales audits, the most common feedback I receive is, "I cannot believe how much money [this is] saving us."

Editor's Note: Look in the upcoming November 14 issue of Rainmaker Report to read part two of this two part article.

Jonathan Farrington is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author and consultant, who has guided hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals around the world towards optimum performance levels, in his capacity as Managing Partner of The jfa Group. You can reach Jonathan at JF@jonathanfarrington.com.