Ralph Burns is a consistently top-performing sales manager with over 20 years of sales and sales management experience. He now runs the critically acclaimed Sales Management Mastery Academy, a step-by-step sales management training program and online community designed to help business owners and corporate training departments increase their company’s sales by training their sales managers how to motivate, lead and coach their salespeople to peak performance. To learn more about sales training, visit Ralph’s blog at http://www.salesmanagementmastery.com.

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Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ – SMM 1 | The #1 Factor To Achieving Sales Management Success

Hello and welcome to Sales Management Mastery on line at salesmanagementmastery.com. We are here to help you and your sales managers build a team of highly motivated, elite sales people, using easy to use, real world leadership, motivational, and coaching tactics that will unleash a flood of new sales for your sales organization.

On this episode of sales management mastery we are going to get into a little bit about what we what to accomplish on this show. As well as, introduce one of our core foundational concepts that is absolutely essential to becoming a top sales manager.

I’d like to remind you that if you would like to get a jumpstart on starting your own team of supercharged sales people, using our proven system , you can claim your free test drive of the Sales Management Academy by going to salestraininggift.com

On today’s episode we are going to talk about some things that we will be discussing on the show. And this is the difference between the unconventional and the conventional sales managers. Conventional sales managers are the ones who are typically the average sales managers. And if you’re a sales manager, you don’t want to be average. Chances are maybe you’ve been beaten by your competition or maybe sales are down and you are looking for other ways in which to supercharge your sales reps in order to get the sales results that you are looking for.

Or maybe you’re a business owner and you are looking for specifically how to supercharge your sales manager so that learn more concepts and your sales go in the right direction. And that’s what we are really going to be talking about here. So we are going to talk about easy to use, real world tactics. There’s a lot of management books and management theory books that are out there, and courses that you can take that talk about theory but this show is really all about easy to apply, real world, meaty concepts that you can listen in a very short period of time, and then take out and start using on a daily basis in order to move sales in the right direction by motivating, leading, coaching, managing and hiring brand new sales people, in a certain mold that will get you the results that you are looking for. So in the subject of conventional sales management, we will certainly be touching on that quite a bit in the show, but conventional sales management is something that we rail against quite a bit and that’s because the leadership results that get the best results from a sales standpoint are typically unconventional. And I think a lot of the sales trainers and sales experts that are out there talk about the more traditional ways in which to go about leading, motivating, coaching and hiring.

We take a slightly different tactic.-
Fortunately I’ve had a fair amount of experience, about 20 years of sales and sales management experience with a consistently very good track record of being able to bring out the best in sales people, and turn out high performing, low maintenance sales people. And the low maintenance part of it is probably the best part of it because when you have high performance and low maintenance you have sales nirvana because you as the sales manager can devote your time to strategies and tactics to make the sales people even better, thinking about even better ways to beat the competition and drive more sales revenues for the company. That’s really what we are going to talk about in the sales management mastery show.

So our first foundational concept is what we call the “trust account”. And the trust account is an underlying current or theme which we’ll refer back to many times throughout all of these episodes. It’s a very important foundation concept. I am not sure where it came from, I first heard about it when I was a sales rep and then a sales manager and I got some pretty good training when I was first a sales manager. And that first sales manager that I had was my mentor talked about getting deposit or placing deposits in the “trust” account.

The trust account is a fictitious account that you have with your sales people. And each one of your sales people has a different balance at any given point in time. And your job as a sales manager, if you really want to lead and motivate them, and get them to really tune you in and having you tuning into the right frequency so that you message resonates with them, you have to establish trust first. And if you haven’t established trust, then we are going to teach you a lot of ways to reestablish trust, and get that trust going so that a lot of the other things that we’ll be talking about in the show will resonate with you and stick a lot better.

So the thing is that you really need to make daily attempts to get your sales people to trust you. And sales managers need to start doing this as soon as possible. And the analogy that we say is that it is a bank account that you taking withdrawals and making deposits to it; because you are going to be taking withdrawals out if it at a later time. But in the early stages of your relationship that you have with your sales people, you want to make sure that you are making hefty deposits at all times. So at every turn, at every possible moment, you need to be looking for ways to strengthen your sales managers trust in you. Once the sales manager gets that trust, then they can start optimally leading and motivating them, but really not a second earlier. Without that foundation of trust, you are both probably going to end up being in the cellar. And you are probably going to end of in the bottom of the sales rankings, and this is something that you don’t want. Don’t think like this, because if all managers led their troops it would be far more difficult for you to surpass them as your competition.

So when it comes to becoming a sales manager, sometimes it means doing things a little differently and doing things in an unconventional way, in a very unconventional manner. So doing things unconventionally means that you are doing things that 99.9% of all average sales managers don’t do.
But here’s the real news flash for you: Averages sales managers don’t bother with trust at all. And that’s great for you. They don’t worry about establishing that level of trust, then your sales people just tune you out.

To optimally lead your reps and to unleash those explosive sales that you are really looking for, a sales manager needs to be on the same page with their sales reps at all times. And they need to speak their own language and the only way that they’ll listen is if they implicitly trust you. So you can not put the cart before the horse and start leading, motivating and coaching if they don’t believe in what you’re saying-.

Right now I coach my son’s baseball as well as his lacrosse team and they really are not all that different than sales people in the fact that they don’t trust anybody unless they see that you know what you are talking about and that you are going to lead them in the right direction and help them.

So that’s what you are really trying to do here. Not that a bunch of 7, 8, or 9 year old are the same as sales people, but a lot of times it is the same thing. Because what we are talking about is using the basic principals in human psychology in order to get the best out of your sales people. And when you use those basic principals, it doesn’t matter whether they are 40 years old or they are 4 years old, they are all the same. You motivate and lead and coach people almost the exact same way that you would in any type of situation. In this way you’re motivating, leading, and coaching sort of a difficult type of employee, which is the sales rep. They are typically a different bread, which you may have guessed and if you are listening to this show, maybe you have become a sales manager or maybe you are a general manager and you have a bunch of sales managers that report to you. And you notice that sales people, by and large, don’t really like to follow the rules typically, they are kind of mavericks . And they like to think that they are rugged individualists. And they are highly suspect of people telling them what to do.
So because of that, it’s important for a sales manager, and for managers in general, to first establish trust with their employees. So make those regular deposits in the trust account.

Here’s our example here.

In your bank account you have an ATM card, and only you have a PIN # to it, unless you’ve given it to your spouse or whoever, to access that account funds. So every week you make these regular deposits into that account. The base salary deposits go in regularly through automatic deposit, your bonuses, your commissions checks go in as well.

Sometimes you make cash withdrawals, you make debit card purchases, you write checks, and you make other kind of payments. And unless you really enjoy bouncing checks and incurring overdraft fees you are probably pretty careful to monitor those balances so that you don’t bounce checks and rack up those nasty overdraft fees because if you do, you are probably going to end up paying the16.75% interest so be careful to make more deposits than you do withdrawals.

So think about the trust
The amount of trust that they have in you is like your beginning balance. And maybe you are trying to re-establish or build trust because you are brand new

But before you can do anything else, you need to establish a level of trust. We are going to give you techniques to do that. So but here’s the thing, both of you keep a running tally of the balance at all times and this fluctuates over time. So similar to how you might manager your bank accounts, each of your sales people has a trust account that only you have the PIN for. So at the same time you make these daily or weekly deposits in your regular bank account and you make daily and weekly trust accounts too. So it goes both ways. And what you ultimately want is to make more deposits in, especially in the early stages, because you are going to be making withdrawals later and those will be the subjects of future shows; which is really the heart and sole of leading, motivating and coaching and getting superior sales results.

So to keep your sales reps highly motivated and really productive your goal is to make as many deposits in the trust accounts as you can. Avoid making any withdrawals, at least in the early stages, because the more you can build up that bank account, they better off you both are going to be. Another thing is that you’ve got to do this consistently and consistently. Like I said, for the average sales manager establishing trust with their sales people is not really something that they think about. We have members of our Sales Management Academy that have emailed me and that I’ve spoken with on consulting that say, “you know I never really even thought of this I just always thought that when I became a sales manager I would start dictating, and they would do what I say”. And they found out that most sales people would just tune them out. So although this is something that you have to do on a consistent basis, it’s like brushing your teeth everyday. You don’t just brush your teeth once and say “oh my teeth are clean for the rest of my life”. You have to make these deposits every single day as best as you can. And we’ll teach you to do that.

So we are just getting to the point now that you understand that this is very, very important to become a top performing sales manager.

So the truth is that trust is the most important element to any relationship, whether the relationship is personal or business. And by establishing trust, you can really distinguish yourself from all of the other sales managers that out there, all these average sales managers. What we are trying to avoid is having your sales managers be “average”, we don’t want average results. The average sales managers are probably not listening to this show. And the average companies and CEO’s probably aren’t listening to this show either because they don’t care about being average. They are probably getting whooped by the competition, and they know that their sales managers are in this crucible of their sales organization. They are the ones who influence the sales team the absolute most. To make maximum impact on your sales, your sales managers are the ones who are the most cost effective and highly leveraged individuals within your organization to train to get best results and drive new sales growth, and establishing trust is the first step to it.

The beauty of all this is that by making daily deposits in the trust account, it works in any industry. It doesn’t matter if you are selling cardboard boxes or you are selling biologicals, these are all the same concepts.

It is a simple formula here. Think about it this way, when your sales manager/sales people trust their sales manager they produce for that sales manager, they go above and beyond the call of duty, they do the things that typically sales people don’t do, they don’t just put in the bare minimum because the level of trust turns into this other law called the law of reciprocity which we’ll get into in another show which is extremely important to be sure that you are giving before you actually receive, so eventually you will take, you will receive back. I don’t think that it’s better to give than receive necessarily, I think that you have to do it in both parts. But as the first step to top sales management, your sales managers have to establish a level of trust and credibility with their sales people upfront.

Once you start making small deposits in the trust account and your sales managers will start to see their leadership affecting this increase significantly. A funny thing will start to happen; you’ll notice that your sales management performance starts to increase with it. It seem a little bit corny, I’m not going to kid you on this one, it seems like a corny concept, but getting people to trust you in the tough world of business and sales seems like a silly thing to do when all you want to do is make more money, and drive more revenue for the organization, and maybe for a sales manager its to get promoted, and work less than 60 or 70 hours a week. The whole concept behind Sales Management Mastery is high performing, low maintenance sales people so that you aren’t working 90 hours a week, you’re doing what you need to do in order to get those top sales results, but you want your sales people to be really leading themselves. And we will talk about that more in future shows. In the current economic times that we have, there is very little talk on these “soft” skills. There is a lot of talk about the “what have you done for me lately” sort of thing. The recession is probably killing you, and maybe you’re coming out of it as we record this show, but if you start doing this every single day, then it will start to bare fruit just after a few weeks. You’ll see a tremendous turn around in your sales

Establishing trust is a critical building block to enabling you as a sales leader to unleash the hidden potential of your sales force. And in order for them to produce big time results, to achieve goals that you have as an ambitious sales organization don’t fall for that crap. Because when it comes to sales management, conventional thinking and doing things they way you’ve always done them leads to conventional results. And in sales conventional results is just “quota hitting results”. That’s really sort of average results, that’s basically just doing your job and you want to drive new sales revenues that catapult your sales organization to the next level of performance.

So when you start making these deposits in the trust account, you have taken the first steps towards unconventional sales management. And you are going to start taking the very first steps to “unconventional”, exploding results.

Okay so when do you start making these trust deposits anyway? We talk about this core concept, and its easy thing to answer, if you haven’t done it already, you’ve probably waited to long. Now that you’re listening, start thinking of ways that you can establish trust and start building trust for your sales people. We are going to give you a couple of tips in the next show. But if you haven’t started already, you should start now.

What we are really doing here is introducing this concept, and making sure that you understand that this is a core concept that you must establish right from the get go in order to lay that foundation for superior sales performance.

What you really need to do is start early and implement often. If you are re-establishing trust or establishing for the first time, then start making deposits in the trust account as soon as you can. In fact you can start a precedence of trust, right from the get go, even before they start working for you which is even better. And we’ll talk about some of those tips and techniques in our next show.

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