Sean WillChene is the CEO and Founder of Shared Solar Advisors USA. He is based out of Minneapolis, MN.
As anyone who works in sales management knows, we are struggling with employees and contractors quitting before they see the benefits of the position. Like running on a treadmill, it can feel like a lot of work for your company to simply stay in place. I’ve mentored more than 200 people for my company and have seen all the different departure points for employees—that moment when they decide once and for all that “sales is not for them.”
Here are three pieces of advice on how to keep your commission-based employees from reaching that point of no return:
1. Admit it: Sales is not normal.
Working in sales is unusual because it asks that an employee constantly improve themselves. Career longevity in our industry requires patience, self-discipline and self-affirmation.
I’ve found that the idea of developing virtues for the sake of work makes employees feel nervous, as though this is an infringement on their freedom as individuals. My solution: Acknowledge it and get ahead of it.
Come up with the core values that are essential to succeeding in your company, and have one-on-ones with new hires where you review those values and acknowledge that “This is not a normal job. We’re going to ask you to push yourself, even when times feel tough. Are you OK with this?” Framed in the positive, deliberate light of self-improvement, you’ll find that most new employees are excited to make changes in order to grow.
2. Don’t tell them what’s possible—show them.
I recently met with a new sales hire to train him on how to succeed at door-to-door sales. I told him he would spend the first part of the day shadowing me while I knocked on doors. When I gestured for him to follow me, he paused and said he had to wait for the CEO to arrive first, as he was supposed to meet with him. When I told him I was the CEO, he was so surprised that we both started laughing.
Of the 50 salespeople in my company, across five different states, I have personally gone door-knocking with almost all of them. Why? Because if you just tell people what their sales quota should be, you leave room for doubt. Doubt works against a sales representative’s task of cultivating strong core values and growing as a worker. But if you go out and hit those sales goals with them—better yet, if you personally blow the daily sales quota out of the water—there’s less room for doubt to get in a new sales agent’s way.
3. Check in daily, but don’t baby anyone.
How are you checking in with your employees? Weekly? Monthly? Once they fall below a certain quota?
Let me offer this instead: Check in every single day. When you check in, speak from your core values, not from your anxiety (if your struggling employee who is dealing with their own anxiety picks up on your anxiety about their production, they’re as good as gone).
Checking in from the perspective of your core values will also keep you from “babying” anyone and help in establishing healthy boundaries about what is and is not acceptable. I often find myself writing things like, “I know things are not going well personally for you this week, but I need to be able to rely on your communication,” especially to younger folks who are new to the workforce.
Sales is hard. Making a career in sales can be even harder. Our job as sales managers is not to keep our representatives from having their “dark nights of the soul” but to make sure there’s enough positive infrastructure in place so they can move on and say, “There’s always tomorrow morning.”
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