Sept. 15, 2020
Many businesses spend a ton of money recruiting salespeople, but then ignoring the ones they have. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast, today co-host Chris Templeton and I are here to talk about the terrible practice of spending lots of money to recruit new salespeople and then spending little to nothing to help the very people that they've recruited. Welcome Chris! Chris: Thank you, David. Well, what are you so worked up about on this one? David: What am I worked up about? I guess I'm worked up because I've been doing sales training and marketing training for much of my adult life. Nearly all of my adult life has been involved in sales and marketing in one capacity or another, and when I see this practice, it just sort of drives me crazy because it feels like people are saying they don't care about their salespeople or they certainly don't care enough, but what they're saying is, "Hey, glad to have you aboard, now I'm going to go find somebody else!" Right? It's about piling up and stacking up salespeople with the idea that it's sort of a revolving door and some people will spin out and some people spin in and the good ones might or might not stay. And I just think it's such a short-sighted practice. And as I mentioned in a previous podcast, I've done a lot of work in the promotional products industry where this practice is rampant. There are ads everywhere trying to recruit other people's salespeople. So the whole goal is that I want to try to get people at other companies to come work for me, right? And other people at those companies are trying to get my people to work for them. So there's this whole thing going on where it's this big sales person swap and they're so focused on creating this vortex of salespeople moving from organization to organization to organization that they forget that once they've recruited these people, if they were to simply help them a bit; simply train them on what's going to work well and what's not going to work as well, that they can be more successful. Their business could be more successful, their sales people can be more successful. It's more success all the way around and I just think this is ignored or avoided entirely too much. Chris: I one hundred percent agree with you. Talk about what you can do to help a manager to change from being, “Let's see what sticks on the wall” to really taking care and helping their salespeople to become better at what they're doing. What is required in a sales manager's mindset to make that transition David? David: Well, part of it is the salesperson or the sales manager rather, and part of it is the ownership. If the ownership is not willing to put any sort of funds behind it, then it's just not going to happen. But if a sales manager can just think in terms of, “What can I do to help and nurture this salesperson so that this person can get in front of the right people, be more likely to be saying the right things, be putting the best foot of the business forward?” That's the thing that drives me crazy, is the idea that a business would spend tons of money to recruit someone in and then just turn them loose and say "Go ahead, knock yourself out." In the promotions industry in particular, a lot of times these people are independent contractors and so management will very often use that as an excuse. They'll say, “Well they're independent contractors so we can't force them to do anything.” Which is true, but you can offer it - and the ones who are likely to take you up on the offer are the ones who are going to be the ones you want to keep. Cause the ones that don't want to do it anyway; they don't want to learn anything new, they don't want to grow. They're not going to be as valuable. So simply by offering salespeople the option of learning things that would help them to increase their sales and improve their profit margins,
