The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [128]
This single sales performance document is not just a measuring tool but a management tool. You’ll note that this particular salesperson didn’t do all the follow-up he should have for the effort he made at the top of the document. So when I received this call sheet, I was able to train and improve the rep’s skills based upon the data reported. In many companies, you have sales management software that can make assembling these reports easy. But for small companies without such software, this single sheet can track a week’s worth of activity with no trouble at all. Five minutes per day is all reps need to record their activity.
Here’s what the entire sheet looks like:
Sales Performance Worksheet
Contests
Another way to mea sure and increase effectiveness in sales or any other areas of your business is to use contests. My client who has a picture framing business noticed that his best framer was doing two or three times what the other framers were doing. So we took the number that the top framer was doing and added one and then challenged the rest of the framers to beat his performance. We told them that anybody who hits that number in a day with no damage to any of the products gets a bonus for that day. It immediately increased the performance of all of the framers.
This could be applied to anything. Take your top performers and analyze what they are doing. Then procedurize it as much as you can and put a contest in place to give every one the incentive they need to step up their performance.
Henry Ford used a similar tactic, but he didn’t even need to create a reward for the increase in productivity. As Napoleon Hill mentioned in Think and Grow Rich, Ford went onto the factory floor with a can of paint and put a large number 6 in the middle of the floor. When the night workers asked what it meant, he told them that it was the number of cars the day crew built. The next morning he came in and learned the night crew had built seven cars. He then painted a 7 over the 6 that had been there. When the day crew asked about it, he told them that that was how many cars the night crew had built. Just by playing the day crew off the night crew, he was able to substantially increase productivity for his factory.
I am using this same method with a sales team I am working with on cold calling. Every two hours we post in the sales room the number of calls each person has made. Every two hours every one looks up and sees where they stand in terms of productivity and who is ahead or behind them. This creates a natural competitiveness that is also fun. In one week this simple act of posting the numbers has tripled the amount of cold calls this team is making. This company even has a software program that gives them this data at the push of a few keystrokes.
If you’re not measuring effectiveness, your organization’s productivity is lower than it could be and your goals are further away than they need to be. So create performance worksheets, institute contests, and put the numbers up. Then see what happens in your company or department.
Firing on All Eight Cylinders
As you have learned, the key to success is not about doing 4,000 things but mastering just 12. This book has taken you through the 12 core skill areas that will put you at the top of the market as long as you continue to perfect and systematize those skills with pigheaded focus. With these steps and your determination, there isn’t any problem that you cannot overcome. To illustrate this point, here’s an example of an impossible situation that was turned around just by doing the 12 things you have learned in this book. I’ve told small parts of this story already, but it is the ultimate example of every thing you have learned about working together to create amazing results.
Billionaire Charlie Munger first hired me to sell advertising for a magazine called California Lawyer. At the time, it was the highest-circulating publication for lawyers in that state. But it had only 2 percent of national advertising market share out of