June 2008
BUSINESS OF WEARABLES
The Big Questions
We’ve got six ways to lower your sales staff turnover – and help ensure your staff grows
with your business.
Building a strong sales staff is one of the most important investments you’ll ever make. Many distributors instinctively relax once they’ve hired top performers and get ready to sit back and watch them excel. What they don’t realize is that hiring, while important, is only the beginning of a long team-building process. Here are six ways to minimize sales staff turnover – and ensure that your staff grows with your business.
1. Train them well. Employees who are well trained feel more confident in selling situations, and the confidence and competence they exude makes customers more confident in buying from your distributorship. A well-trained salesperson who understands his customer’s needs, the industry and the product lines you offer also make him an innate cross-seller. The bottom line is that training your employees well is the cornerstone of building a top team.
Just as you’re looking to grow your business, your sales professionals are looking to grow their careers.
At Proforma, for example, our members are given an initial in-depth training at our Cleveland-based Worldwide Support Center that’s designed to help them hit the ground running with competitive sales skills and product knowledge. Once they’ve completed training, members are able to access live and recorded Web casts on a variety of sales, vendor and marketing topics. Another educational opportunity is provided by the Proforma Convention and Family Reunion, held nationally to allow all of our members to meet, network and attend seminars and sessions given by top speakers and members of our support center staff. Consider integrating these kinds of events and educational opportunities into your business. In my experience, training your employees well is the first and most important investment you make in your sales staff.
2. Adequately equip and support them. Even the best salesperson doesn’t flourish if she’s using dated marketing materials, has a limited product offering or doesn’t have adequate support to handle the business she brings to your company. The first thing to consider when it comes to equipping a sales staff is ensuring they have a wide breadth and depth of products to offer. Unless you’re serving a very specific niche, most customers will appreciate being able to purchase all their materials from one source. At Proforma, we provide our members with access to four product lines: promotional products, print services, business documents and e-commerce solutions. They also have access to a preferred supplier network to get them the best pricing and highest quality products. Building supplier relationships is a crucial part of supporting your sales staff and should be high on your priority list as a distributor.
Once your sales staff has access to the highest quality products and services to sell, you need to evaluate the support system you provide to them. Is there someone to help them manage orders on large national accounts? Are you providing them with cutting-edge marketing materials? At the core of these questions is one essential question: Are you giving your sales professionals enough quality sales time to achieve? If they’re sitting in the office sourcing products, filling out forms or designing marketing campaigns, they aren’t out selling and establishing meaningful relationships with their customers.
Another way to equip your sales professionals well is to provide them with success coaching. We assign each member to an in-house professional success coach who delivers motivation and assistance on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. In a small organization, the sales manager could function as the success coach. In a larger organization, a coaching staff could be hired or a professional coach could be brought in to coach your sales professionals. Regardless of how you approach success coaching, it’s a valuable resource that will help your staff excel and improve their job satisfaction, an important factor when trying to minimize turnover.
3. Pay them well. One of the simplest and most important ways to retain a member of your sales staff is to make sure compensation is fair and competitive. Proforma pays its members approximately 80% of their gross profits. When determining compensation in your own business, consider what other professionals in similar positions are earning. It’s also important to consider what role commissions will play in your compensation package. It can be motivating to an employee to have a majority of his salary come from commission, but it also means that if the company has a slow month or if the economy causes the industry to turn, your employee might not earn enough to support himself. My recommendation for distributorship owners is to consider a base salary plus commission to give your sales professionals the motivation of commission sales and the stability and comfort of a base salary.
4. Recognize and reward them well. As we all know, motivation is crucial when it comes to building a sales team. Motivated staff members are more likely to meet sales goals and succeed. Success is intrinsically motivating and leads to even more success, which means that a motivated sales staff will earn more commissions, have higher job satisfaction and help you grow your business to new heights. How can you motivate your staff? At Proforma, we add motivation to our earnings structure by striving to provide as many opportunities for recognition and rewards as possible.
We reward our members for their growth, sales and achievements throughout the year with an awards gala at the annual Proforma Convention and Family Reunion. We also recognize our million and multi-million dollar members by inducting them into the Million Dollar Club, a club where they receive the opportunity to network with other top business owner members and experience the Million Dollar Club Trip, an all-expenses-paid vacation, held in a tropical location. Proforma members’ successes are featured in our weekly e-newsletter and our monthly newsletter.
To implement your own rewards program, first consider the size of your staff and the size of your budget. Setting a budget is important to keep the program consistent throughout the year. For instance, it does no good to offer incentives at the beginning of the year and not follow through with them because they didn’t “fit into the budget.” Once you’ve established a budget, ask your employees what kind of incentives would motivate them. Would they rather have small gifts for incremental levels of achievement, or do they want to work toward earning one large incentive at the end of the year? Once you know the details, you are ready to implement your rewards program. Make sure that you also integrate recognition into the program that includes a public acknowledgement of their achievement whether through the company newsletter, the local paper or an internal awards ceremony.
5. Have fun together. There are some great ways to promote fun in your organization that will leave your staff with a positive feeling about work and a sense of camaraderie that transfers into the team’s efforts. Proforma provides fun through our annual national and regional events and through our Million Dollar Club. This August, owners throughout North America will visit Walt Disney World for our 2008 Proforma Convention and Family Reunion.
What kind of fun activities can you integrate into your business plan? If you are a large distributorship or supplier, consider adding a fun social activity to your next national or international meeting. If you’re a smaller distributor, consider a company golf tournament, softball team or annual cookout.
6. Provide opportunities for advancement. Just as you’re looking to grow your business, your sales professionals are looking to grow their careers. If you can find a way to accommodate them as their careers advance by providing opportunities within your organization, it’ll improve your team and keep your sales professionals motivated. Our owners independently own their businesses and decide exactly how big they want to grow their distributorships. More than 100 owners bill in excess of $1 million a year, with about 25 billing more than $2 million up to $14 million.
How can you provide that kind of growth opportunity for your sales professionals? Allow them to move into management positions. Instead of hiring a new sales professional and giving some of the accounts to him, allow your current professional to hire an assistant to service the accounts she’s working on, making her the sales manager. Then provide salary advancement equal to the increased responsibilities.
