Sales Management

During the “fat and happy” 90s, the staffing industry developed some very bad habits that have become difficult to break. Business was relatively easy to get, and reaching solely for the low hanging fruit made a lot of outside sales people quite successful. That “low hanging fruit” is gone. Yet a lot of staffing professionals don’t want to recognize that fact. They keep doing—or not doing—the same things they did during the late 90s. Their results, as you might anticipate, have been less than acceptable.

It’s time to turn your poor-performing outside sales people into a team of lean, mean business-generating machines. For this, sales call planning is a must. We’ll supply the action plan and a way to get it implemented. You need only supply the discipline to insure its success.

In a difficult marketplace—one that frustrates sales and service people—what kinds of things do you do to prevent burnout and keep your staff motivated?

Here are the responses from more than 220 owners, managers, and sales professionals.

Familiarity breeds stagnation. Often the more we know about a subject, the less we are open to new ideas or innovative concepts. When you hire a new employee, that person generally starts with unique, creative ideas but after a few months their innovation gets lost within the culture of the organization. His naivete disappears. How do you get your employees back to that naïve point of view and why should you care about encouraging this kind of thinking?

During the “fat and happy” 90s, the staffing industry developed some very bad habits that have become difficult to break. Business was relatively easy to get, and reaching solely for the low hanging fruit made a lot of outside sales people quite successful. That “low hanging fruit” is gone. Yet a lot of staffing professionals don’t want to recognize that fact. They keep doing—or not doing—the same things they did during the late 90s. Their results, as you might anticipate, have been less than acceptable.

It’s time to turn your poor-performing outside sales people into a team of lean, mean business-generating machines. For this, sales call planning is a must. We’ll supply the action plan and a way to get it implemented. You need only supply the discipline to insure its success.

You want high performance from your staff. You push them to give you exceptional results. In doing so you often raise stress levels—theirs and yours! This can create a potentially explosive situation. If you want to diffuse that possibility and keep your staffing personnel smiling, try introducing Planned Spontaneous Recognition.

In a difficult marketplace—one that frustrates sales and service people—what kinds of things do you do to prevent burnout and keep your staff motivated?

Here are the responses from more than 220 owners, managers, and sales professionals.