Get them in their own skin

There are so many systems and gimmicks out there. Some are good, most are unproven, and all are bad if they can be executed naturally.

The best sales people are constantly educating and refining their sales processes with these inputs. The worse sales people bounce from one to another trying to use them like recipes.

Notice the best chefs rarely have a recipe book open. They know how ingredients, spices, temperatures, and presentation all work together to create the best dishes.

Here’s the important part—they all read and review recipes, they just never cook with them.

Get them personally excited about what they sell

Good sales people are genuinely excited about what they sell. Customers can tell this in 5 seconds and that makes all the difference.

You have to get your worst sales people to believe. That is a big part of the problem, always.

• The best mortgage brokers know they are improving their customers’ lives with a new home or a refinanced mortgage.
• The best pharmaceutical sales reps know they are improving their customers’ treatments and patients’ lives.
• The best enterprise software field sales reps get crazy “geeked” when they improve the security or performance of a clients’ network, and save them a bit of money.

Show them why they should be excited about what they do.

Find what motivates them

Start by celebrating the little wins and find out what really motivates them.

The most important word in sales people to being a good sales manager is people. These guys and gals are all different. You have to figure out what trips their trigger to dig down when it’s hard—then use it.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is let them go

It’s true. Sometimes the best thing to do for the worst sales people and your best sales teams is to let the bad ones go.

Have a process though.

Do your training and vetting in a methodical way that sets the expectation, gives them the best management, gives them the best chance for success, and then identify and cut early and often. It gets your worst sales people on their way to something they can be successful at (it might even be selling something else) and keeps the performance expectations high for the rest of your team.