ISP Sales Team Management 101

A managed sales team is a more productive sales team. Setting high goals and standards is the beginning.

by Christopher Knight [September 27, 1999]

Out of every ten salespeople you hire, only one or two will be great; the others will be marginal at best. This leads to the typical situation where 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your people. To maximize sales—to get your sales team performing to the ultimate best of their ability—you need to get involved.

Some initial guidelines for ISP Sales Managers

• Don't accept anything less than 100 percent commitment and effort from each of your sales reps.
• It's not who you hire, but who you don't fire fast enough that can threaten your total sales. Always be recruiting.
• Encourage your people to emulate a top dog in your sales department—or yourself—when it comes to learning the ropes.
• You determine the pace of the pack. Set your goals high enough to keep everyone running—including yourself.
• To do their job properly, your team needs to have quick access to information and sales materials. This includes flyers, brochures, spec sheets, customer testimonials, biz cards, letterhead/envelopes, etc.

Prepare yourself and your reps for maximum output
Your sales reps have one goal: to sell. Your goal is to provide the leadership that helps them maximize their potential, and at the same time fully realize the potential of the services your ISP can provide.

Create a pre-selling plan of attack, so that each of your reps is familiar with common customer characteristics and the typical needs and wants of each customer type. For example, divide your business into product-line units, such as dialup Internet access, dedicated access, Website hosting, Website design, Perl or CGI programming, etc. For each product or service line, create information sheets for your reps that outline how to maximize sales from each group.

Time-management skills often make the difference between excellent and mediocre performance. You must not only set the example for what great time management looks like, you should be generous with tips and guidelines on time management for your staff. Perhaps more important, you need to set expectations for how they will discipline themselves to achieve maximum productivity.

There are selling hours and there are preparation hours. Help your team to know the difference and what you do during each of these periods. Typically, the preparation time is before 8 AM and after 5 or 6 PM. The time between 8 AM and 5 or 6 PM should be pure selling time.

Tip: Have each of your sales team members send you a "60 second report" email at the end of their day. It should briefly cover what their sales and collections were, what went great, what went wrong, how they rated their day, and any problems they had that they want your help with. This is an extremely powerful way to get your people to be accountable, while helping you manage the flow.

Some scary sales statistics

• 40 to 75 percent of sales leads passed to a rep never gets followed up.
• 70 percent of your sales staff lack strong closing skills or will fail to ask for the order

These numbers are derived from my personal experience of hiring over 300 salespeople over the last ten years. A successful sales manager is not only a teacher and mentor, but needs excellent followup skills in order not leave money on the table.

Another approach to this problem, however, is take the lead and give your reps whatever basic skill training is required to get them to close sales. Failure to close generally comes either from fear or from laziness. In cases where it's the former, you can build up their confidence. Where it's the latter, the solution is often to fire them. Nothing personal, but the owners of your ISP want results, not excuses.

Managing your ISP sales team by the numbers
What gets measured gets managed. Motivate your sales reps by posting publicly their sales totals for the past month, last week, and current week, breaking it down by service or product category type. Also provide figures for average ticket size (total sales divided by number of invoices) and average number of days between orders and full collections. In this way, your reps can see how they compare with each other and the average performance of your whole sales team.

Tips for coaching your sales team

• Praise in public, and be continuously looking to catch them when they do things right so you can reinforce great behaviors.
• Criticize in private, and always offer some suggestions for a better way to accomplish things, based on your experience.
• Providing the answers to every problem will make you the "answer person," which is bad from a time-management standpoint. Instead, ask questions that help your people to get the answers to their own questions and problems.
• Pressure your sales team to evaluate themselves continuously. They will always be harder on themselves than you could be.
• Build their self-confidence.
• Keep excellent records and stay on top of the numeric performance of your team, so that your evaluations are not based on objective thoughts, but rather pure performance facts.
• Always be training your replacement so that you can move up to the next level.

Lastly, make your sales people feel successful by inspiring them, listening, and providing helpful suggestions via questions that lead them to their own motivation. They can't charge into their sales day effectively if they're not feeling on top of the world. Salespeople who feel unstoppable not only perform better, but pick up the pace of the rest of your sales team.

To Your ISP Success!
Christopher Knight
Founder & Managing Editor of the ISP-Lists Discussion Community

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Read other Chris Knight articles on ISP sales and marketing.