Jim Johnson moved from pushing sales targets to asking what his team actually wanted: a new truck, a house, college funds. When he aligned the $5 million goal around their personal wins instead of the number itself, turnover dropped and people stayed.
October 4, 2024
$5,000,000 (team target) with an average salesperson selling $500,000, implying a 10-person team.
So lots of us that are pretty good at what we do in the sales world start to get looked at for the companies that we're working for, for positions of growth, things like team leader, sales manager, maybe even general manager, who knows? It depends upon the company that you work for. And I'll never forget getting promoted into sales leadership. I had had experience with that before. I had worked in the health, done very well in that. But it was a very clear culture there thing in the health club world was about selling memberships and just hey, whatever it took to get a membership sold. They actually had this concept of be backs don't come back. And I kind of thought about that when I was there in the health club world. This almost self fulfilling prophecy that if I press somebody to get them to sign because I believe that they wouldn't come back if they didn't sign that day. I actually fulfilled that prophecy because I pushed them so hard that, that if they did leave, they certainly weren't coming back. And we said all kinds of awful things to people. But it taught me something there that I took into this world which was how do I treat the people that work for me and what do I expect from them? And whenever I got into this, I was still very achievement oriented. I looked at it like a big math equation. I need to get to a certain number in sales. Let's call it $5 million just for a random example, I need to get to $5 million. How much does the average salesperson sell? Let's call it $500,000 at that time, 15, 20 years ago. And so if I have to get to $5 million in sales, I'm going to need. What is that? That's 10 guys, right? I need 10 people that average, that amount to get to $5 million in sales. So I had a number of people, an average of sale to get me to this achievement number. And so each individual that worked for me was literally a number of like they had to get to this number or we weren't going to get to where we needed to go, which would reflect on me, which I could keep my job or lose my job. And I was very oriented that way. And so everybody that I hired, I was like, hey, this is the expectation, this is what we need to do. And pressed each and every week to say, hey, what would you get? How many numbers you gonna do? How many jobs you gonna turn in? All this stuff. And ran it very much like most sales organizations that you would usually see and all these expectations of knocking a certain amount of Doors and certain amount of inspections and a certain amount of agreements, certain amount of contracts and so on and so forth. And because of that, we actually hit the number. It wasn't a problem, we hit the number. But I would say that the people that work for me didn't really truly love working for me. It was a push all the time, it was a press all the time. And I noticed that we started to have turnover and more turnover than I wanted. One guy would go out, another guy would come in, I was training all the time. And it was because I was more focused on what they needed to do for me and thus to keep my job and thus the company than it was what they needed to do for them. And that was the epiphany is like that absolutely shifted the way my mind thought. And I went, hey, if I make this more about them and what they they're going to do, then the result is just a byproduct of that. So I started to actually ask questions of the people that work for me. Hey, what is it that you want to achieve? What are you trying to get out of life? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live? What does it look like for you to be successful? I would ask these questions and as I asked those questions, I would take notes and then that's what I would focus on. I would remind them that the effort and the activity and those things that they are putting in, we're getting them closer to the new truck, the new house, the kids college fund, the property they wanted to buy, whatever it was that they were truly focused on. And what I noticed at that point was because I made it more about them and that the vision was about them and them achieving what they were after. I held people more, there was more loyalty to me. And really and truly the thing that broke all this and made me understand it about truthfully, how awful of a person I was, was the number of people that were leaving and then telling me they were leaving because of me. They didn't like working for me, which I'm sitting there like, how can you say that you're making a lot of money. I'm taking you to the bank every single week to cash checks and you're making more money than you've ever made before. But they don't like me. They didn't want to follow me is what they were saying. When somebody doesn't have a shared vision with somebody else that is more about their benefit than your own, you're going to run into this situation of having a lot of turnover. So if you're dealing with turnover, drama, chaos, a team that's fractured and not all on the same page, and you feel like you're constantly training people, you're constantly hiring people, and that nobody's loyal, like, if you're saying those kinds of things to yourself, you really need to rethink what the purpose is of you leading a group of people. Is it so they can get you something, or is it so that you can help them get what they're after? Because if you help them get what they're after, the outcome is already determined. The journey is already going to be what it's going to be. You're going to help them get what they want, which is going to help you get what you want. Which goes completely back to what Zig Ziglar said from the very beginning. If I can help enough people achieve their dreams, I'll achieve mine. So rethink the way that you're looking at the people that work for you. They're not dollar signs. They're not just another wheel in the cog. They're each human beings that to achieve something as well, that's about them. They don't care how your business does or whether you hit your numbers as a sales manager or any of that stuff. They care about what they're going to do for them and their families and those that they love. If you help them achieve that, you'll blow it away. The outcomes already predetermined.
