There’s nothing more energising than success and nothing more tiring when things aren’t going well.

Last week I was speaking to one of my favourite friends… John Donnelly.
Now for those that don’t know John he’s one of the sharpest tools in any business toolbox. He lives in Spain where high level business people fly in to ask his advice and fly out again after a few glasses of sangria. We speak on SKYPE, as do many of his clients, and his wicked sense of humour has me regularly injuring myself when falling helplessly off my office chair.

John was reviewing one of my latest video-blog films and made some great suggestions on improving the final result. Everything he said was correct but it meant doing the film again! No problem, the result will be better and I’m energised to re-film it and send him the final (Director’s) cut.

In six months time…
On the other hand I feel sorry for another friend that’s going through a difficult time. Her new team is having great success and is delivering a first class product. As a result, however, is continually being pressured by others to produce more and more. They do this by focussing on the small areas that could be done better and just offer criticism whilst ignoring the excellent work of the project as a whole.

The result is that my friend has decided to leave and within six months will probably be giving in her notice. Having come to this decision she is finding that her tiredness has disappeared, she has a more relaxed attitude to problems at work and is becoming increasingly disengaged. In the meantime her boss keeps telling her “I don’t know what we’d do without you!”

He’s about to find out and at a most inconvenient time, I should guess. 

I’m often asked how to restructure a sales team to make them more profitable faster and how to identify and avoid recruiting order takers that eat up valuable management time.
So here’s a video I’ve uploaded on the topic and hope you find it useful

Hiring salespeople, avoiding ordertakers

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking to a couple of businesses about restructuring their sales teams. The intention is to expand their profitability by increasing the productivity of the personnel.

Major problem
A major problem with sales team development is the acceptance of the 80/20 rule. This is where management believe that 80% of sales will always come from 20% of the team and are happy to accept that situation. The problem comes when part of the top 20% decide to leave for another job! At that stage panic usually set-in amongst the sales management.

Possible reason
The possible reason for the above is that in good times the recruitment process allowed ordertakers to gain sales jobs quite easily. Personnel are hired to fill posts without investigating if the individual’s past sales results were due to personal drive, capability and whether the skills are able to be easily replicated in another company, product and territory. However, in these economic times a business can’t afford to be hiring order-takers when they really need capable salespeople.

New videos
To overcome the problem of hiring order-takers I’ve been asked to make a couple of short videos on this topic and these start filming towards the end of this week.
If you would like to be sent an email when they are uploaded onto YouTube then simply register as a subscriber on my YouTube channel @ stephenharvarddavis 
or send me an email at Stephen@assimilating-talent.com