Episode 95: The Top 3 Christmas Wishes on Sales Leaders Minds

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And engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Merry Christmas everyone. This episode should be going live on Christmas Day and whilst I cannot imagine we have too many sales leaders or salespeople who are tuning into this podcast today, I'm hopeful that you'll pick this up over the next week and find some real value around today's topic. And that topic is three Christmas Wishes. Or should I say the top three Christmas wishes that I'm seeing on sales leaders minds for the coming 12 months. Yes, wishes for our sales teams or for our customers or for our businesses aren't always at the top of our list when it comes to Christmas as we're spending more and more time with our families and so they shouldn't be. But once we get to that point in time where we can have a moment to reflect on the year gone and perhaps the coming year, then today's insights might be something that gets your brain thinking around what's next for you, your business or your team. So what we're going to explore today are how these three Christmas wishes that I've seen somewhat consistently appear from sales leaders over the past three months in particular can be impactful for you over the coming 12 months. Two of those are very much about your professional results and how your team go about doing what they're going to do. And the third one actually has a personal lens which I think sometimes we can forget far too easily to roll into our journey of learning and development and how we strive to be the best versions of ourselves that we possibly can be. So let's get straight into it and have a look at the three wishes that I'm seeing. What? Well, in fact, let's start with wish number one that I'm seeing from sales leaders over recent months, without doubt, we had a huge focus on getting the best out of people in 2023. And then 2024 started to move towards lead generation. So that's how can we get the right number of leads into our business at the right time. I'm still seeing many out there trying to build lead generation activities that will deliver a mature pipeline for them and the long term health of their business. But I'm certainly seeing plenty are now saying we're getting the best out of our people. The movement from job to job of key resources has slowed down lead generation activities. They're not perfect, but they're improving. But what we're missing here is some robustness and some predictability in that pipeline, which more broadly speaking, I call the quality of pipeline. I'm working with a number of businesses now who have big pipeline numbers, millions of dollars, tens of million dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in a number of cases. But leaders are struggling to understand how real those pipelines are, how much of those pipelines are made up of short term decisions, how much of those pipelines are made up of long term decisions. So they're projects that are going to typically take more than 12 months to close and how much of those pipelines are actually made up of prospects or opportunities that will never close. Where customers are simply looking to explore ideas, but it's unlikely that they'll move to the committal stage. This can be super, super difficult for sales leaders who are looking to forecast for their broader business, whether it be product, whether it be financial, whether it simply be resource allocation. It can be also really difficult to evaluate the performance of salespeople within our team because we're simply unsure as to how or when their pipelines are going to be closing. And above everything else, it can be really difficult for us to then understand if we're allocating the right leads or the right training materials to the right people. If we're having salespeople within our team who are getting leads or who are getting lots of training, but they simply can't nurture their prospects or opportunities through to a closing stage. So for me, that is absolutely a key wish of sales leaders as we come into Christmas, a better understanding of their quality of pipeline. Fear not, I have a potential solution that is, whilst not perfect, works really, really well in most circumstances. So let's take a business that's dealing with a pipeline, let's look at one that's dealing with a pipeline of tens of millions of dollars, a 30 to $50 million pipeline. So quite robust and generally these are going to be businesses that are in the tens of millions of dollars here in terms of revenue. And that has a number of deals in there. Certainly too many deals that you can look at as a leader individually and go through all the details, but not so many that we wouldn't expect our individual salespeople to be on top of those deals. An exercise that I have seen work amazingly well, both personally, that I've used with teams a number of times along my journey, but also that I've seen work through teams that I've coached and worked with, is to use a technique for each open prospect that looks at when, who and what. So how it works is if we have a prospect for buying a huge kit of surfboards from our business, let's, let's use a fun example. It's Christmas day. They're looking to buy 500 red surfboards to roll out for their training program across the beaches in Australia. Fantastic and great initiative, by the way. If anyone's got red surfboards out there, I'd love to know. I'll come and give them a go. But they're looking to buy 500 surfboards for their training facilities across the country. The questions that our salespeople need to be able to ask to validate the quality of that pipeline is when is a decision going to be made, who is making that decision and what are the key criteria that they're assessing us against? When is a decision going to be made, who's making the decision and what are the key criteria? If salespeople can answer those questions, I generally look at the pipeline as being one that is valid. That is, it deserves to be in our nurturing pipeline, it deserves to have due dates around closing and it deserves to get some attention across our team. When is it going to close? Who are the key decision makers and what other decision making criteria? Now, if we're a business that has hundreds of deals in our pipeline, maybe thousands of deals in our pipeline, this can be a little bit difficult to manage at a sales leader level. However, en masse through our salespeople, it becomes simpler when we compare it into our CRM. Most CRMs that I've seen, particularly HubSpot, particularly Salesforce, particularly Zoho, particularly Pipedrive, particularly Netsuite, and there are more and more and more that I've missed. Even go high level, you can work through this on, allow you to have some custom fields where you can put this information in. So what I'm suggesting here is that in our CRMs we look to Put in a when, a who and a what as key stages within each deal, compulsory fields that our salespeople need to fill out. We can then run a data dump, export all of those hundreds or thousands of deals into Excel, run some filters across them, use sales support within our teams, have a look at ourselves, filter them, sort through blanks, sort from ascending to descending, look at time frames from newest through to oldest, and run some really strong analysis around those deals. We can then have that discussion with our salespeople in their one to ones. So as we're sitting down talking to them in the race to Christmas, we can actually have a look at the 50 deals that they have in there and start to handle by exception, start to spot check some of these numbers and really drill in around how much our salespeople know about our prospects. Because if they can't answer the when, the who and the what, for me, it's not a valid prospect and doesn't deserve to be in our pipeline. So there we go. Wish number one, I really like that as a way to validate our pipeline. If you have any questions around it, please get in touch because there's a little bit of work in it, but once you set it up once, like many great initiatives and systems, it really can tend to deliver for you over and over again. Right. Second Christmas wish that we're seeing and for those that are listening on Christmas Day, let's say it's mid morning as you're going into lunch and we're starting to get a little bit hungry. It's hunger that I want to talk about with our salespeople. Hunger to turn up to work, hunger to get into the office, hunger to get out and see their customers, hunger to close deals. And that real sense of accountability that if it's to be, it's up to me. There is no doubt globally in customers I'm working with, I am seeing accountability levels become a real challenge for leaders. It is consistently coming up that leaders are struggling to hold their teams accountable. Not because their teams aren't turning up to work, but because they're not willing to go that extra mile. And it may be at a period in time we've come out of a really difficult Covid era that is still impacting others. We have cost of living that's rising really high. And I think we're still in that phase of a number of people wanting to balance out their lifestyles with their professional lives. And please don't take that from this angle that I have anything other than support for that. However, I certainly do think that when you're at work, you are at work. And we deserve as employers to have your full focus for the majority of the time, notwithstanding family coming first or personal matters that do tend to get in the way from time to time. But what we're talking about here is a hunger to turn up, to work, to be accountable, to really get strong results, and to present yourself and the business that you work for in the best possible manner. No doubt it's at the top of the Christmas wish list for leaders that I'm spending time with. So how do we do that? Because hunger isn't something that we can simply generate from our team by lighting a fire beneath their feet and hoping it gets hot and they run faster. It's absolutely a fire that long term works from building internal or intrinsic motivation into our salespeople. For me, there's some levers here that I've seen sales leaders really effectively manage who have quite consistently achieved great survey results from their team members around their engagement or long term tenure within their teams or teams that really come to work to perform. And some of those things are very much around setting the example. The best sales leaders in particular that I've seen that have hungry teams actually set the example themselves. They know when to work hard, they know when to enjoy themselves, they know when balance is required. But, but really importantly is they know how to drive great results for the business. They'll own customer deals themselves, they'll own customer relationships themselves, generally to a much, much smaller level than salespeople. But they're prepared to be at the coal face in front of customers, waving that flag and leading by example around what accountability and hard work looks like for businesses. So this Christmas wish has a little surprise in there for sales leaders because I'm certainly encouraging you as you move into next year to have a look at the example that you yourself are setting as a leader. Okay, the second piece here is all around how you are recognizing progress and celebrating your achievements as teams. I have rarely in my career met a leader who believed that they recognized progress or celebrated wins enough aspirationally. Almost every leader that I have worked with has expressed a desire to be better at celebrating the achievements around them. And that's been consistent over many, many years. So for teams that I'm seeing do this really well, they have a set metrics and celebrations program that allows them to understand when they're going to be celebrating progress. A team I've worked with over the last few weeks is using pineapples to celebrate. And I Won't name the team, but I love it. It's a fantastic initiative from them and without going into detail, it certainly can blend all things that Pineapples can represent into a terrific celebrations program. I've seen lollies used really consistently as great ways of celebrating across teams. I've seen teams use financial incentives paired with other incentives such as time offs, such as team celebrations, such as shout outs. Right. And if you're ever looking for inspiration around how to celebrate for your teams, please get in touch because we just have so many ways that I've seen teams do so and I'm happy to share macro ideas with you. But the point here is that great leaders when it comes to building hungry teams have mastered the art of formalizing celebrations. They know how to recognize progress, they know how to celebrate. They have initiatives in there around when they do it so that everyone in the team is buying in to types of celebrations, to how they celebrate internally as a team, to how they celebrate as a team, out to their business and as to how they celebrate externally from the business back into them. Right. Some really impactful ways around how you can celebrate as a leader. Now, if you're looking for inspiration on this one, have a look back to our episode around managing change. This was episode 61 and there's some number of pieces in here around change management, but you'll find some information in there around celebrations as well as well. Okay, so that's the second piece. Number one was setting the example. Number two was all about understanding how to recognize progress and celebrate achievements to really drive hunger in a team. And the third piece here is around how the team meets and they are engaging and impactful meetings that happen across your weeks that really drive not only a high performance culture, but engagement and enjoyment from your team members. So these are things such as sales meetings, having your sales meetings, being forward focused rather than backwards looking. These are training programs, having training programs in there that are all about upskilling your team through topics they want to know about and doing it consistently and regularly. These are through getting your teams together to workshop deals and really use the power of everyone's minds to drive that level of accountability and hunger. And these are making sure that the one to ones you have with your teams or your team members are actually driving performance and growth for them rather than simply being meetings where you comply with what's required to be done. So we have three areas there around growing hunger, which is the second Christmas wish list. Item number one is all about setting the example. Number two is recognizing Progress and celebrating achievements. And number three is all about making sure that the way we are meeting as teams is really impactful and engaging. Okay, so we've had two Christmas wishes so far. Number one, as a sales leader, all I want for Christmas is a better quality pipeline. And number two, that they want for Christmas or all they want for Christmas is to have a team that's hungrier. Number three, and this is where we start to look at some personal wishes for sales leaders is to have a little bit more balance in their lives. Now, I completely get that. This is from a sales leader who at a point in time was working 80 to 90 hours a week, had been doing so for about seven years, and was right on the edge. A newborn. Some really difficult periods during COVID some tough shareholder relationships, and in essence, the most difficult period in my life. I didn't have balance and I paid the price. So I certainly am one that recommends balance as being critical for sales leaders and anyone in the workforce. So as you move into next year and you want to have a think about how you can get balance into your life, I'd like to give you some things to consider that might just help you along that journey. The first piece here is around understanding what your urgent tasks are and allowing time for it in every day. And I'll be honest here, I am poor in my execution at allowing time each day for the urgent. And what I mean here is making sure that my calendar is not so full that I haven't allowed one to two hours a day to handle the requests that come into my business that are really important. And by not doing that, what happens is that I tend to do them after hours at the end of the day, which reduces my balance, which means I have less time with my family or less time to work on my health and fitness or hobbies. So really allowing time in each of your days for the urgent is such an important recommendation for anyone who has a busy professional career. Number two is also allowing time for your strategic priorities. Again, what can happen here is that we don't have enough time in our weeks to actually get the key strategic action items completed, so they also end up happening outside of working hours. Now, these aren't things that we'd allow half an hour to an hour for every single day. However, what we can be doing is allowing ourselves three to four hour blocks once a week, or once a fortnight, or even once a month to be working on these. They can often be Friday afternoons where we have it set aside, or even Friday mornings to work on our strategic items, we book them out over a 12 month period. And that allows us to combine not only urgent tasks, but also strategically important tasks to get things done without eating into our very precious personal time. Last but not least is learning. So in this third Christmas wish around finding balance for yourself, we can look at allowing time for urgent tasks each and every day. We can look at allowing strategic time blocks as is appropriate for your business. But the most important piece that I would be recommending is that we're making sure our teams are learning. Because when our teams are learning, we're not having to go through the same issues with them again and again and again. But we're getting to upskill their baseline level of competence, which means they are performing to higher levels when with less involvement from us as leaders. The most common piece of feedback I have here is, yes, we have a training program. But when I dive into it, it is very rarely structured, it is very rarely consistent, and it very rarely has high uptake from sales members. That is they're always finding reasons not to be there. My strongest recommendation here is to set a weekly training program. What invariably ends up happening is that 1 in 4 of those don't go ahead. Whether it be public holidays, whether it be key periods in the business, whether it be sickness or absences, we end up having training periods, three and even occasionally, two times a month only. But by planning to have them every week, we make sure we get that baseline of two to three sessions in every single month and we plan them out a quarter in advance. I have a training program format that is on my website, strongersalesteams.com calendar that's strongersalesteams.com Calendar. This will help you build out a training calendar in about three quarters of an hour. It's really basic, really well structured, and something that you can use quite concisely to have the baseline of your training program built out. If you want more than that, please get in touch with me. We certainly go into greater detail in the programs that I run with our customers. So three things to get balanced. Allowing time each and every day for the urgent, allowing time blocks as is appropriate for your business, for the strategically important. And last but not least, upskilling your team so you require less time with them. That brings to a close the three wishes that I'm seeing sales leaders have this year for Christmas. Number one, quality of pipeline. Number two, hunger in their team. And number three, a balance for themselves moving forward. If you liked anything you heard there, I'd really be grateful if you left a review for the podcast. We live and breathe and die by reviews and by word of mouth, so we're so grateful to do that. But before I move on today, a health and fitness tip. Something that's very relevant to Christmas Day and that I touched on a couple of weeks ago is diet and nutrition. And one thing in addition, when I spoke about over in episode 93 around pairing your food at the times of training, it also is understanding your calorie intake requirements. It's something I've been doing a little bit of work on and it's quite easy to determine what what your average calorie intake is at rest. You can certainly find online how to type in some of your base parameters and then also the amount of calories that your type of exercises burn. And this allows you to actually structure your diet without weighing food, without looking closely at labels each and every time you eat, but gives you a really nice baseline to understand what your body needs when it comes to food and nutrition. Has really worked for me. I'm finding again that I'm much more consistent in how I eat and certainly having less periods where I'm absolutely starving and I'm enjoying it. If it's something you have an appetite to go down, please go and have a look at calorie consumption and how it can impact you and what you're eating. That's it for today. Merry Christmas for everyone listening. I hope you have a fantastic time with your family and a great break ahead. But for now, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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