Is Your Sales Team Underperforming? It Might Be These 4 Things

Hello and welcome to the show. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, I just confirmed this morning that we have over 900 episodes. So that means before the end of the year, we would have crossed the 1000 mark. So if you're brand new, there's a lot of stuff over here that you can binge listen to and there's going to be more coming down the Pike in the future. So rest assured that you have discovered the right place to learn about all things sales related, especially the discipline of personal selling,

which is where you are having a conversation with someone either face to face in the DMS, what else, WhatsApp e-mail. I mean, so long as you are having a conversation one-on-one, then this is the perfect place to be. So today, what we're going to be discussing on the podcast is not a listener question. So this is not a question I've been given before, but I think that this is a topic that we should be looking at here.

And for those of you who own your own businesses, I mean, you're in SME space. It's not just you. You're not just the one man show or one woman show. You have a bunch of people selling on your behalf, or maybe it's you and your husband and your kids selling on your behalf. I mean, whatever it is, this is one question that people in that kind of space have on their mind all the time. And that is how do we boost the sales team performance?

This is not a question that I have, or rather, no, that's the wrong way about it. Yeah, this is a question that I've answered on the podcast in the past. So I'm going to take a different angle for today's episode. So in the past, I've answered it in a very brief, succinct series, but now I'm going to stretch it on and take a different angle with that. So my typical answers that I've given on the podcast, and even when people ask me this question on stage, for instance, I

typically answer it in about four or five points. First off, I say you should hire the right people to begin with. After that, I say make sure that those people have been trained on your selling framework of choice. Then I usually say make sure you provide these people with sales enablement. I'll explain what sales enablement is later on. And then the last one is the question of incentives. Make sure that the incentives are worth it and these are incentives that they can count on.

So let me give a summary now to all these things that I've spoken about. Now, when I say about higher right, I remember that we're talking about things from a sales and business development perspective. It's not about the academic background or it's not about their accomplishments and things like that, but rather it's about a winningness and a flexibility towards learning because sales, getting good at sales, requires attitudinal change in how we face the world.

And if you have somebody who is set in their ways, who believes that they know the best and this is how the world works, trying to get that person to fit into your business and your system is not going to work. So you're better off just hiring the person who is already flexible enough and who has that growth mindset from the beginning. Because all this thing about growth mindset, attitudinal change, liking personal development, blah, blah, blah,

all this stuff is really, really, really hard to train. So to make your life easy, don't hire somebody who has the MBA and who has the whatever it is that you're looking for. But the person know, they hear what as in the person is as dumb. OK, no, not dumb. The person is as obstinate as an ox. Don't hire that person. You guys will be constantly quarrelling. Eventually you're going to sack the person or the person is going to leave you.

It's not going to end well. You're better off taking somebody who has the right attitude to begin with and then train the person up in product knowledge and all the other stuff then. OK, so the second thing I talk about is to make sure that you have trained these people on your own preferred selling framework because the principles behind how to sell are the same, while the application of those principles are different depending on the context,

depending on your customers, depending on the industry, depending on things like that. So if you are a wedding photographer, let me start from there because that was my that's my primary constituency. That's why I started off my business journey over 15 years ago. So if you're a wedding photographer for the way that you run your business, there's a certain way that you want your business to be handled and you want your customers spoken to.

So you need to make sure that you figured out all these things and then train those people on that. Because if someone is good at sales, but the person has a different philosophy and the person sees customer service, customer fulfilment sales in a different way than you do, it's going to create all kinds of problems. The person is going to sell things that you can't fulfil. The person is going to put off all kinds of brand associations that don't match, that don't match yours and you know,

different things like that. So it's best to make sure that you have figured out a bunch of stuff first, especially if you're on SME, small and medium scale enterprise, small business owner, self-employed, you're trying to get people to sell on your behalf. If you've been doing this for any number of years, you need to figure out a bunch of things. And then when this person comes in, train the person. So the things you need to train the person is who is your ideal customer.

Not everybody knows who your ideal customer is. You might get a sales girl and put her in the shop and what you sell is children's clothes. And because of that, she thinks everybody who has a child is your customer. But you who owns the shop, you know that you only buy stuff from Mamas and Papas in the UK and maybe some of all these and maybe like Gap, the baby Gap and things like that. So these are brands that are not what's the word, These are not run-of-the-mill brands.

So it's not just any parent who is your customer, but it's parents who have a certain income level, who have a certain kind of sophistication and who desire certain kinds of things. So when you get this sales girl, I put her in your store, you need to let her know that our ideal customer are people who look like this, who sound like this or who do this or who do that so that she doesn't waste her time running up to people like me and saying, Sir, will you come and check out the clothes in our shop?

And then I go there and then I see Baby Gap and I'm like what the hell, ME75K for a pair of trousers for my 10 year old son. No thank you. And then I walk right out. So you need to let your people know who your ideal customer is. So if the sales girl that you put in the shop knows who your ideal customer is, if she sees someone like me walking around, she'll say this one and she will let me go. Because I don't look like the kind of person who will spend 75,000 naira for a pair of trousers for a 10 year old kid.

I don't even spend 75 K for a pair of trousers for a 15 year old kid. I won't even spend 75 K for a pair of trousers on myself. Maybe times might change, but right now? 75 K for a pair of trousers? You must be kidding me. Now, that doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It just means that whoever it is that runs the shop or runs the Instagram handle or the whatever has not trained up the person on who the ideal customer is. So you can see how it tiles into ties into sales performance.

If your sales boy, your sales girl, your husband, your younger brother, your children, if they don't know who the ideal customer is, their sales effectiveness is going to be poor because they're going to spend time running after the wrong people. Then you also need to train them on where can these people be found? How do you start the conversation with them? How do you get them through the buying process? How do you handle money objections and negotiations?

So let's say somebody who is maybe two or three steps above me enters into the store. So yeah, the person can afford to buy 75K for a pair of trousers. Of course, Nigerians like to haggle, so the person sees IT75K but the person knows OK, this is authentic baby gap or this is authentic Mama and Papa. And so the person thinks at 75 K, let me see if I can get it for 60 K. And then the person says 75K for what? Your sales boy, your husband,

your sales girl, your children, they need to be able to figure out how do you handle these money objections, How do you start negotiating things like that. That's how you make people much more effective. Then you also need to free up your people on how to do customer service and excuse me and after service functions. You also need to train them on how to get repeat business because the real money is not going to be when.

So excuse me, Yeah, my SO thought is getting better. So the real money is not going to be made when I walk into the shop and then I buy 1 trousers for 75K and let's say on that 75 K, let's say your profit is maybe 35 grand. So the real profit is not when you get that 35K from me. The real profit is if I buy baby trousers today for 75 K and then I come back next month. And then I buy 2 shirts, one for a boy, one for a girl and maybe one for my niece.

And I buy each of them, you know, 7575 K And then, you know, between last month and this month, you've now made, what was that, 353570? So you've now made 140K on top of my own head, one customer. So that's the trick to get the people to come back again and again. And also to get me to now tell my friends who are paid up so that they can go to the store and also buy baby Straussers for 75K. But unfortunately, I'm not in that segment yet.

So if you do sell stuff like that, don't bother reaching out to me. I'm not your customer. And I'm not going to spend 75 K to buy trousers even for myself. I'll just talk about the kids. All right. So these are the sorts of things that you have to train other people on. Now, it should be obvious, but for some people it's not obvious. It means you must have figured out all these answers yourself and create an SOP, standard operating procedure, whether it is detailed or whether it's in bullet points.

That is what you will use to now train your sales team. Also, if it's in writing, it's something that they can refer to maybe when your phone is switched off because some days you wake up, you don't feel like it. You leave your phone off until 12. Your your people who sell for you, they need to be able to refer to something if they have a problem and try and sort it out before they can reach out to you later on. So these are the sorts of things that you have to be able to figure out.

If you don't know how to figure out all these things before you start trying to onboard people to sell on your behalf, no problem. That's what people like me are here for. Then the whole thing about sales enablement is this sales enablement is just a fancy word for sales training. Not just sales training, but other facilities that people need to get the job done because there's certain kinds of technologies that people need.

So if you have a job where, OK, let's go back to the sales, the shop where you sell Baby Gap and, and Mamas and Papas and stuff like that. So in your baby Gap store sales enablement will mean, let me see, OK, well, first of all, the lady in the shop, she needs a cell phone so she can store customers phone numbers in, so she can call people so that she can follow up things like that. So you need a correct phone that is there.

And it shouldn't be 3310, it shouldn't be Nokia 3310. It should be something that you can store numbers. Maybe she can even follow people on Instagram if you are dealing with a high network, people who have high net worth, maybe the should should be able to follow those people on LinkedIn or whatever. But I mean, you get the point. It should be a correct phone. Well, a decent phone, even if it's a not a correct phone, it should be decent.

So phone, phone call my phone. So that one is steady. Then there should also be a computer in the store and you know, with those fancy scanning things so that when you take it and you scan bleep, you know, it just shows on the invoice that it shows in the, you know, now those of you who do retail will show on the computer how many trolls that they buy and blah, blah, blah. And of course all of this thing will also be updating in ACRM as a customer relationship management tool.

So that by the time I come into the store and I leave and the sales girl is done with the interaction, she'll be able to see there on the computer that Odogo Tavishima bought 4 pairs of baby trousers AT75K each. And then I also bought what else, Maybe two pairs of earrings for my wife at 120 K each. And let's see what else. Any. You get the point. But it will all be there. Odogo Tava Shima 1st of June came in. This is what he bought.

Total order, blah, blah blah. If she's good at her job, she would have been doing some small talk with me so that she would now know that OK, the two trousers I bought her for my son and the two dresses I bought her for my nieces. And then the bangle that I got is for my wife and everything. So some of that in the CRM. But The thing is you need to have the all that computer tech and that CRM to begin with. And this is the whole thing behind sales enablement.

You don't only give the person the training, give them the facilities that they need to get the job done. For some people, like in the banking space, I don't know about now. Now things have gotten really expensive. But when one of my cousins got into banking a long time ago, she started off before me. So let's say, let's say me like 20 years ago, part of sales enablement then was making sure that the people had a car.

It's not like they gave everybody one car. You know, there's no bank in Nigeria that is not paid off, though we give a salesperson one car. So what they used to do was there will be, there were different pools of cars, a driver to each car and I think each car to five people or six people and then you hit the road. So all of this, all of that, that's what we call sales enablement. Then on the thing about incentives, an incentive is just whatever it is that you do to try and ginger somebody to do more so you can see how this effects performance.

So in this case, the incentives for sales people is going to be money basically, and other terms of service, but let's stick to money. So some people say fixed salaries. If you're my sales person, everybody earns 300K. No matter how you bring, everybody earns 300K. There's some people who say a base and then give Commission. So some people say, look, if you're one of my sales people, everybody gets 150K. That's the base.

But you're going to get a percentage on XYZ, whatever it is that you can sell. And in those kinds of organizations, it's possible for a salesperson to earn 150K today because that's the base. But then next month, if they sell very well, they might earn 500K because apart from the 150, they've sold X amount. And so the compensation goes up or down. So that is called variable compensation. So either fixed salaries or variable compensation.

I'm not going to get into the argument of which is better. Some people say fixed salaries is better, some people say that variable compensation is better. Although for people who say fixed salaries, especially people in the West, you know, people in America and in the UK, well, I think that's what works for your own clients. I don't think that would really work in Nigeria anyway. Let me not go into all that. But the most important thing is this.

Sales is hard. Whatever it is that you decided, don't mess with it. If you told everybody 150, so you've told everybody 300 K every month, no matter how much we sell, then give them that 300 K every month. The moment you start messing with it that and yes, initially I'd said, I'll give you 300 K every month, but you, you're not pulling our weight. You're not pulling our weights. Instead of 300 K, I'm giving you 160. I'm giving you 280.

I'm giving you aha, you started messing with their motivation. If you say it's 300 K, give everybody that 300 K every single month. If you're not happy with somebody's performance, you know, sack the person, get somebody else. Then for the variable compensation, if you told them it's 150K flat, that's the base and then you're getting 10% on every extra. Whatever you sell, just pay them what you said because there's some people who will say variable compensation, no problem.

Today the person didn't sell. I give them 150K next month the person sells small are giving them money 200K. But then if the person works really hard in March and then the person sells and when you calculate the Commission you see that Commission is supposed to be 600K. If that is what you told them, pay the person the 600 Ki know it's hard. You're better off paying the person the 600 K first. Then later on, you don't call everybody and say, look, guys,

in the beginning I told you that, you know, everybody's 150K flats. Then depending on how you sell, I'll be adding. But you guys have been crushing it. You're really going out of the park and I really appreciate that you're helping my business grow. Well, to be honest, man, like those margins are higher. Like is is is doing me, is doing me. Somehow I can't beat those margins. Again, have an honest conversation about it.

Now you're going to be able to get some buy in and you're going to be able to review the thing and keep everything above board and people won't feel like you're taking them for a ride. Because I told you guys on the podcast about a guy I know here in Abuja who used to see who used to sell for a Benz and dealership. And this was the sort of thing that happened to him. He was doing it, he was doing it, he was doing it. And then, you know, usual now you get married and then you have children and girls like Amor and he stepped my game up and he did.

He stepped his game up until one day or guy refused to pay him on the two M Commission so he said no problem. So once he collected his money for the month he left he said look I'm not doing this again and he left and he went someplace else. So if that's what you promise them, pay them. Don't mess with their don't mess with their motivation because selling is hard. Try and keep things constant. If you have to change do it in a very upfront above board manner.

Would have been a different conversation if the owner called him and said, hey guy, you know what, you've been selling very well and I appreciate that. But bro, let me not lie you yeah, your Commission is supposed to be two M but because of what we've been suffering here in the office and cash flow and everything, that two MI won't lie. I can't pay that 2M now. So like how far you know, can I give you 1.2 and we'll call it Square Or if I'm paying you that two M, maybe this two M

Commission will pay it over the next three months. You know that kind of conversation, things will be different. Most Nigerians are not unreasonable. And anyway, I'm sure you get the point. So, so you see how all these things now tie into how you can get people to perform well if you select the right person, you train them well, you incentivize them well, and you have a robust sales process that you've taught them. You've seen how these things can affect sales performance, but the different angle that I want to take now is this sales performance is contextual.

So it depends on the nature of the problems that people face, and it also depends on the industry. So because of that, in tomorrow's episode and in future episodes, of course, I can't promise you how many episodes that will because you know how we do this podcast now, I just wake up and then I look at the question and then I answer the question for today. So I can't tell you that we're going to do it in five or in 10,

but tomorrow has future episodes. We're going to tackle the problems on a case by case basis about what you can in what you can do to improve performance when you're faced with different kinds of difficulty. So the framework or the kinds of difficulties that we're going to be looking at are are people related issues, how do we deal with that, process related issues, how do we deal with that, market related issues, how do we deal with that?

Because Nigeria, we're currently going through that. You know, the cost of fuel went up after the election, cost of living quadrupled, the price of everything has gone up. So right now in Niger, there's some serious market related issues because the thing that you used to sell before for 2500, because of how things have changed, you now have to sell it for seven, five. And then the Nigerian consumer is being pressed on all sides.

Disposable income has reduced, you know, things like that. So there's market related issues and then there's also organizational issues. So those are the frameworks that we're going to look at it. How do we increase people's sales performance when they are faced with people related issues, process related issues, market or economic related issues and then organizational issues. So that's going to be the difference. We're going to try and identify the root cause of why sales starts to decline.

Then we'll now see what kind of solutions that we can implement that will bring the results up. So more on that in future episodes. So that's all for today folks. Remember to connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140. The country code is +234. For those of you who are not Nigerian, then connect with me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you guys. My name is Tavishima Ayede. You can confirm the correct spelling of my name and you also have my e-mail address from the link where you're currently listening to this episode.

Thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.