Now that we have completed the discussion of management of sales people, I’m sure many of you are anxious to move onto a much more pleasant topic.

This gives me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite money-making subjects which might be called, “How To Be Your Own Consultant.”

Many times when I consult with a company my recommendations are painfully obvious, after the fact but were somehow invisible before my intervention. It’s very tough to be objective and analytical about your own business, very easy to be that way with someone else’s and that’s the basis of consulting.

However, there are certain suggestions I can make that may enable you to spot some great opportunities in your own business without the aid and expense of an outside independent consultant.

Virtually every business has unexploited, growth opportunities and unreasonable burdens. Most consultants who get involved with troubled companies find that each company has a product, a division, a type of customer or a marketing method that is actually costing more than it’s worth and should be cut.

I find this to be true in most cases.

You’ll want to carefully analyze your own business and the costs associated with each different aspect of the business very carefully.
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In my last post, I covered the topic of the job of the small business owner to manage his sales force. I introduced the notion that management’s toughest and most important job is the collection of accurate information about what’s actually going on out there on the sales battlefield.

Now I want to talk about what I consider to be the best thing management can do to increase the performance of most sales people. It is to force their analysis and accountability of time use. Most sales people waste enormous amounts of time and are notoriously poor time managers. I like to see sales people log and account for the use of their time in fifteen minute increments. The result is an honest representation of how much of their time is actually being used to produce results. Often even a small improvement in a sales person’s productive time use can result in significant sales increases.

Getting sales people to effectively prospect for new business is often a big problem. Prospecting is hard work. It often involves a lot of refusal and rejection and can be very discouraging. If you can develop a company managed lead development program to provide sales people with pre-qualified prospective customer leads that’s the very best marketing strategy you could have.

Consider space advertising, direct mail, telemarketing, exhibiting or a combination of these methods to develop qualified leads for your sales force. But caution, if you do provide leads to sales people insist on reporting of results.
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In your my last post we began our discussion on sales and the management of sales people. I pointed out that in managing sales people you’ll actually be dealing with three distinctly different situations.

The first was the poor performers and all the problems that they bring to an organization. But now I would like to shift our attention to the group that is mostly ignored by management which are the high performers.

If you’re looking for a prompt increase in sales a good way to get it is to divert some attention from the mediocre group to the high performance group. It’s much easier to coach a successful person to even better performance than to get a mediocre performer to begin succeeding.

The bottom line is that the only real motivation is self-motivation. You cannot take control of someone else’s thinking. Motivate them and keep them motivated purely through your external influence. The motivation that helps the sales professional achieve peak performance comes mostly from within.

As a manager or a business owner, you should concentrate on providing an environment and an opportunity where a person can develop that self-motivation and a set of good business tools for the motivated performers use.
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Today, let’s turn our attention to a topic that quite possibly offend some of you, but without it…the entire world comes to a screeching halt. That topic is of course…SALES!

Sales…when speaking about sales, you must first address sales people. If you employ sales people or will in the future you’ve got sales management problems. Although I can’t even begin to provide a full analysis of the solutions to sales management problems in a single post there are several fundamental and important things we can discuss that will help you have more productive relationships with your sales people, your distributors, or your franchisees.

First, you should remember that sales people are people. There are any number of problems that they can have at various times that will negatively affect their performance and productivity. Fears and insecurities, laziness, depression, personal and family problems, financial problems, health problems, automobile problems, all these things become factors affecting your business when you market through sales people.

This is probably one of the reasons for the validity of the 80/20 principle in sales organizations. This principle of management says that 80% of the sales come from 20% of the reps and 80% of the problems come from 20% of the reps. As long as it’s not the same 20% you’re in good shape and it rarely is.
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