1) High Performance Teams (200 Words Minimum) Article for this part is in attachment
In the 21st century, more organizations are moving to
the team concept to maximize overall organizational performance through the
combined efforts of people. The old adage, “Two heads are better than one” has
proven to be a valid statement, as organizations strive to face the many
challenges in the internal and external environments.
In this discussion question, please find an article in
the course Library relating to high performance teams. If possible, try to find
an article on high performance teams in the type of business you selected for
your business plan (Service Business).
Answer the following questions relating to the article and your own experience
with business teams:
Please
describe the background for the article you researched and explain why
this particular best practice scenario appealed to you. What did you learn
from the article that you could apply in your business?What
are some characteristics of high performance teams? What are the strengths
and weaknesses of business teams? Please share your experiences as a team
member in either a business or non-business environment.
2) Career Planning (200 Words Minimum)
When you start a business you need to be able to sell
yourself as well as your business ideas and plan. In order to get yourself on
the right path to success, complete and answer the following:
Review career skills in the field of business and
management and then create a 1-year action plan as to what specific actions you
will take that will guide you towards realizing your ideal job.
Please include the following in your 1-year bulleted
action plan: (In addition add your 1 year action plan to your Career Portfolio)
Specify
the ideal job you want. Determine
what skills you need to get that job. What
steps you will take to obtain the additional skills you might need? What
networking avenues will you use to understand your field of interest,
obtain advice, and help you increase professional development? How
would you use a mentor or coach to assist you in personal branding?
3) Create a code of conduct policy for your business (two pages). I will tell you my business
once tutor is selected.conversation. Call only when you have a predetermined
purpose in mind or have defined a worthy goal directly
relating to the sales process. Examples of reasons to call are
to provide more information, update the prospect on new
developments, share about new products or services, or offer
a special promotion.
This way, your calls will be of value and your communication
will have a better chance to be welcomed. And then you will
be more likely to make a sale and less apt to read about your
failure to do so!
High Performing Sales Teams
by Chris Lytle
E
©Peter L DeHaan is publisher of Connections Magazine (for
Teleservice call centers) and AnswerStat magazine (for
hospital and medical related call centers). Check out Peter
DeHaan’s writers blog Byline, sign up for Peter DeHaan’s
newsletter to receive monthly updates about his writing, or
visit the website for author Peter DeHaan.
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veryone wants a sales team full of high-performance,
hard-driving, revenue-producing professionals.
However, few companies know how to achieve this. Take an
honest look at your own sales department. Perhaps there
are one or two high performers, a sizeable group of mediocre
salespeople and a scattering of space wasters. To you this
seems about average. What you’d really like to do is move
the “mediocres” up to the next level and do away with the
poor performers.
Poor sales performers do tremendous damage to your
sales team. When you allow them to hang around without
producing, you lose the respect of your entire team. The good
people leave — generally when one person goes, two others
follow — and with them go assets like institutional memory
and sometimes, clients. What’s left is a sizeable group of
disillusioned employees who come to view your company as
a place to work, not a place to grow.
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Your problem lies not so much in the people you have
working for you as in your culture. What you actually need
to do is to create a high performance culture, one where
success breeds success and where poor performers simply
can’t hide. You can meet this goal with the following tips:
• Have standards, not wishes. Of course you would
like all of your salespeople to come to work every day all fired
up, fill their calendar with productive meetings and close at
least one big sales every day. Who wouldn’t? But telling
them the outcome you’d “like” isn’t going to feed the bulldog.
You need measurable standards by which you can separate
the wheat from the chaff. There are four possible standards
of measurement:
Quantity standards: Anything that can be counted:
number of sales calls, number of client lunches, number of
phone calls. These are the easiest standards to set but, as
you will see, they’re not often the best ones.
Quality standards: These are standards that include
subjective criteria. For instance, a sales call that yielded
data that can be used to write a proposal is clearly superior
to one that yielded no new information.
Timeliness standards: Anything that can be measured
by stopwatch, clock or calendar. For instance, the time
between needs analysis and proposal, or the time between
checking and returning e-mail, voice mail and return call.
Cost standards: These involve being a good steward of
the company’s resources. Such standards can mean refusing
to give away too much to get the order; getting a certain
price; not taking smaller, less productive clients on golf
outings.
9
The standards you choose to measure are up to you and
your situation.
• Make sure your standards lead to the results you
really want. When you measure the wrong things, you end
up shooting yourself in the foot. Take this anecdote about a
Texas radio station sales manager. “This new sales manager
told his staff, ‘You must be out of the office by 9:00 each
morning and you can’t come back until 4:00 p.m.’”
“So what did the salespeople do? They rented an efficiency
apartment and put in three phone lines! So the sales
manager was measuring a standard that led to a behavior he
didn’t want! He should have said, ‘You need to be in front of
customers from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m.’ The standard he set had
no basis in reality.”
• Define “hustle.” You need to clearly define what you
want your sales team to do. Spell it out in no uncertain
terms. I once did a seminar for a group of fast-food franchise
managers, during which a woman asked, “How can I get a
16-year-old minimum-wage employee to hustle more?” I
explained to her “hustle” means different things to different
people. It’s subjective. If you can’t put a problem in
behavior in terms then you don’t have a problem, you’re just
complaining. The manager said the employee walked too
slowly when she went to clean up empty tables. She added
she wished the girl would at least create a small breeze when
she walked by customers! So I told her, “Okay, go back and
get her to practice walking by a table fast enough to make a
napkin move, or rustle someone’s hair. Now your employee
will know what hustle looks like! It will have a meaningful
definition, instead of you just accusing her of being lazy.”
• Enforce standards early (or, shovel the piles when
they’re small). My favorite business line is ‘You’ve got to
shovel the piles when they’re small.” This speaks to the
10
importance of setting limits and following through with
consequences right away. Suppose I set a standard that by
Friday every employee must have at least seven sales
meetings booked for the next week. Well, if I come in on the
first Friday and Joe only has five meetings booked, then I
can have a meeting with him and say, “Look Joe, we have a
gap of two meetings here. You need to fix that right away.”
This is a small pile to shovel. But what happens if I let it go
for months and Joe has fallen into the habit of having only,
say, two meetings booked for the next week? That’s a much
bigger pile to shovel. If I don’t deal with it right away, when
will I deal with it?”
• Create monitoring systems that encourage teams to
reinforce themselves. If you adopted a seven-sales-meeting
standard like the one mentioned above, you must create a
systemic way to make sure it is enforced. You might, for
example, hold a progress meeting every Friday afternoon to
make sure every salesperson has his or her meetings lined
up. If you’re too busy to do so, how long do you think it will
take before people start slacking off? But if you do this every
Friday, it won’t be long before your old pros are telling new
hires they must have seven meetings booked by the end of
the week — because “that’s the way we do it here.” The team
begins to enforce the standard because it’s become part of
your high-performance culture.
• Think of discipline as teaching/coaching, not
confrontation. Most people dislike confrontation, which is
one reason so many salespeople get away with poor
performance. The manager simply avoids confronting the
issue until it’s way beyond critical mass. But when you have
strictly enforced standards as part of your company policy,
it’s easier to discipline as a teacher or coach, rather than a
tyrant. The standards allow you to approach the employee
as “you and me looking at the problem” rather than “me vs.
11
you.” Instead of saying, “Joe, you lazy bum, you’ve got to
start working harder!” you’re able to say, “Joe, you’ve only
got five meetings set up for next week and our company
standard is seven. You’ve got two weeks to catch up. What’s
your plan today? What are your next five calls going to be? Who
in your Rolodex can you call?” See the difference? You’re in
teaching mode, not confrontation mode.
• Create “success cycle” systems. When you set high
standards from day one, it ensures that even moderate
salespeople will have early success experiences. These
successes lead to increased confidence — and the selfimposed pressure to do it again — which in turn lead to more
successes. And other people in the department see these
successes and believe it can also happen to them. This is the
success cycle, and it is a salesperson’s best friend.
• Developing a strong bench lets you get rid of poor
performers. Sometimes you will decide a salesperson is
just not salvageable. When this happens, you must get rid
of him or her as quickly as possible. So interview regularly.
If you’re interviewing two salespeople a month, you will
always have a slate of potential employees to choose from if
you have to let someone go. And just knowing that you’re
interviewing keeps your team on its toes.
• Try this no-fail interview question. When I interview
salespeople I always ask them to tell me about their ten
biggest wins. Really successful people are driven to achieve
again and again. They constantly “raise the bar” on
themselves. So by asking this question, you quickly discern
if someone is a winner or not.
Your salespeople are your most valuable asset. But most
managers don’t know how to motivate them. Managers
must teach their salespeople how to win — and to do that you
12
must teach them the game within the game. I like to cite the
example of University of Wisconsin basketball coach Bo
Ryan. The standard he sets is “points per possession” rather
than trying to reach a particular score. You can’t manage
a score; you can only manage performance. Bo knows if his
team scores 1.1 points per possession, they’re virtually a
lock to win. Points per possession add up to victory, just like
meetings lead to analyses lead to proposals lead to money.
Understanding and coaching the game within the game —
that’s what creating a high performance culture is all about.
Four Ways to Redefine Sales
by Daniel Burrus
A
©An acknowledged leader in sales training, Chris Lytle is
also in demand as a speaker and consultant in advertising,
marketing, sales and sales management. For more
information, call 800-255-9853.
13
s a salesperson, you’re trained to ask customers what
they want in terms of your product offerings. That’s
wise advice. However, if you only ask customers what they
want and then give it to them, you’re missing the biggest
opportunity that has ever come in front of you.
Realize that clients will always under-ask because they
don’t know what is possible. Think about it…No customer
ever asked for a fax machine. They didn’t know it was
possible to send printed communication via a phone line. No
customer ever asked for an iPod. They didn’t know it was
possible to listen to music without some sort of CD or
spinning device. People don’t ask for things that they don’t
know exist.
Technology allows us to do things that were once thought
impossible. So for salespeople, while it is important to ask
customers what they want and then to give it to them,
realize that by doing so you’re merely competing with your
competitors. Chances are your competitors are asking
customers the same questions, they’re getting the same
answers, and they’re providing the same solutions. When
that happens, you end up competing on price and not
differentiating yourself.
14
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