person answering the phone on the best way to handle that opportunity , start there .
4Hiding Incomplete Work And Skipped Steps : Follow-Up Calls , Documentation , Sending Information , Making The Calls They Said They Would Make , Etc . This is where a good CRM / marketing automation platform and dialer comes in handy . If you ask a salesperson if they hit their prospecting quota ( and you have given them one , right ?), they will almost always give you an enthusiastic “ Yes !” Go check . Years ago , when I was working in sales at CGI Systems , the manager hired a sales assistant to help me and the other reps by entering inbound leads into our CRM , organizing , and cleaning them for us to follow up with ( back then , we received a lot of fax-back forms and direct mail response forms ). One day , she quit without notice to sell Herbalife , so I went through her desk to pick up the pieces . What I found was two big drawers of paper leads from prospects that were not processed and not entered into the CRM , but stuffed into a drawer to be forgotten about . Both drawers were so full I could barely open them . This may seem like an extreme example , but over and over again , I see salespeople skipping steps , not making calls , not following the script , not leaving notes , etc ., etc . I recently had to fire a rep because she simply refused to follow the steps and cost us two sales , and if it ’ s going on in my organization where we train , script , and manage tightly , I can absolutely guarantee this is going on in your organization too .
5Falsifying Sales Statistics This is similar to the above but worth noting . I often get told a campaign “ isn ’ t working ,” only to find out that the sales or marketing team is outright lying about the data for a number of reasons . One reason is to cover up the mishandling of leads ( see No . 4 ). Other times , they simply don ’ t like the ads and , therefore , take a passive-aggressive stance on trying to undermine the efforts of the CEO and me . If they are a marketing person , they sometimes want to sabotage the marketing because they didn ’ t create it . Salespeople will falsify stats to cover up a bad closing percentage , save face , or get out of doing the tracking because they ’ re busy and don ’ t like to do it , so they just make up the numbers .
I had a sponsor client leave the company they were working for and go to another company in the channel that also sold to MSPs . When he told the new company his plans for sponsoring our events , he was bluntly told they don ’ t sponsor our events because the leads are terrible and the event doesn ’ t deliver an ROI . Unconvinced based on his successful experience in sponsoring our events in the past , he pressed the matter and dug into the results from the last event that company had sponsored with us . Turns out that not only was it the highest-returning event they had ever sponsored in the
If you want to reach financial independence and true wealth as fast as you can , you ’ re a fool to not pay attention to how new prospective customers are greeted , handled , and followed up on .
company ’ s history , but it also was the only event where they actually closed sales in the booth . When he pressed the person who was sent to staff the booth on the numbers , she admitted that she falsified the results because she was busy the entire time , didn ’ t get breaks , and had to be in the booth for “ long hours ” talking to prospects and customers and didn ’ t want to repeat the experience .
There are more ways employees can muck up and mess with your money , and that ’ s what they ’ re doing . In some cases , you might be dealing with one or two of the above . Worse case , it ' s all five . It ’ s up to you to not only create the playbook of how things are done at your place of business but to also monitor , manage , and train to ensure they are actually being done that way . n
26 | WWW . TECH-ADV . COM