Part 2

A New Year and A New Account List

Closing out the fourth quarter revealed the extent to which sales management will drive their salespeople to take action. One of the guys called the key senior executive at his customer during the evening of a Christmas party she was hosting at her house. That was a brief, expletive-filled and highly unproductive call. It was without a doubt the wrong thing to do. But the sales guy got ripped apart on that day’s forecast call where he was directed (or more like threatened) to make contact with the prospective client and report back to the regional Vice President.

That deal didn’t close, ugh…

Fortunately, I’d done enough to save my job and get out of the line of fire. December closed with a thud for the district, leaving January wide open and me anticipating significant changes to my account assignments.

A quick scan revealed that the three sales guys who were on a plan during the last three months of the prior year were no longer in the office.  A plan is what a salesperson is put on when they’re not performing. Putting salespeople on a plan is kind of silly and a real waste of everyone’s time. Somehow, a salesperson who has proven they can’t get the job done is somehow supposed to pull a rabbit out of the sales hat in 90 days to save their job.  

I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen any of these actually work.

Another guy in the office moved on to greener pastures in December, leaving just four salespeople in the office along with four open positions. Suddenly I was the second most tenured person in the office. I was giddy with anticipation of getting some existing client accounts with tremendous sales upside. The tech product I sold at this job was particularly useful to highly regulated industries like finance, insurance, and healthcare, but outside of these industries, the solutions for their particular problems were a challenge to find. The salespeople in the company who were making all the money were all working with clients in these sweet spot industries.

Take the Lemons and Shut Up

Sales kickoff is an event I looked forward to for several reasons, but I also dreaded it more than anything in my professional career. It afforded me the chance to meet new colleagues across the country and learn about their success and their unique approaches that added to said success so I could incorporate the same into my efforts.

After all, it’s a chance to see all the top salespeople receive awards and be recognized by the company’s leadership. The first time I made my goal, I got to walk across the stage to receive my award and be recognized as one of the best salespeople in the company. This cemented my desire to be there every year. Attending the awards banquet when I didn’t make my goal became an experience I loathed. The empty feeling of losing definitely provided inspiration to not let it happen again.

The motivational speaker at this year’s sales kickoff wasn’t the type that made you feel like leaping from your chair to climb tall mountains or run marathons. His simple message was about making a plan and following it because a bad plan is better than no plan at all.

It wasn’t until late January that we finally got our account assignments for the year.  The wait had been excruciating, but at least it was over and we could get on with the business at hand.  

Or so I thought.

Oh, I got a new account list.

In fact, I got a completely new account list. The two small clients I’d closed the year before were reassigned to another account executive, and I got a collection of accounts scattered across industries best known for not buying what we were selling. My mind was swirling with the stress of my financial situation, another child on the way and, as always, questioning my position at this firm.

I’ve never been one to shy away from fighting for what I think is right and speaking my mind. Even though I felt I got a raw deal, I didn’t push back. I didn’t feel that I’d done anything at the company to argue for a better patch. Sales kickoff inspired me, and I’d already daydreamed many times of receiving my award at next year’s event.

What I did do was what made all the difference.

Secretly, I wrote down a giant goal. I planned to be the number one salesperson at this company. During my weekly review of my goals and planning for the next week, I’d glance at this grandiose goal to be the number one salesperson then admonish myself for even considering it possible.

Make a Sales Plan

In my brief stint at this company, one of my colleagues taught me to rank prospective clients based on a few key attributes and avoid the outliers. My ranking resulted in six real targets.

If you’re not in sales, let me attempt to provide a roadmap of what lay before me. It’s the fourth week in January and I’m looking at zero opportunities in my new account list, yet I have a quota of $2 million to close by the end of the year or I’m out of a job. It was also very clear that to even get within spitting distance of quota, one deal had to be well over $1 million.

Besides the one existing client in my new portfolio of accounts, I didn’t even have contacts to call or email at my other prospective companies. I found myself spending almost all my time in the most unpleasant of sales activities: lead generation. Just mentioning cold calling stiffens my neck muscles and brings on a bit of nausea.

Take the Time It Takes to Find Prospects

I noticed my unofficial mentor and sales colleague in the office doing all his phone work at the end of the day. Most of you likely have read that you have a better chance of your target contact picking up the phone after their normal work hours. This was news to me at the time, but one thing’s for sure, it worked.

My colleague was always willing to answer my rookie questions and share his knowledge and experience. Interestingly, he also broke my uninformed stereotype of what an account executive is supposed to be. This guy was introverted, quite nerdy and very accomplished.

This observation led to another issue that was very perplexing to me. The other salespeople in the office didn’t do much if any prospecting, not even the new hires who were all senior folks with 15 or more years of experience. It seemed that they were waiting for customers to contact them. There’s much more to this topic of prospecting or the lack of prospecting by most salespeople. I’ll cover this in future articles.

Conrad Hilton has a great quote that characterized my efforts during the selling year. He said, “success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” Even though I absolutely despised prospecting, every day that I did it, something positive would come from it. By the end of the year, I made my numbers and set myself on a course for success that I’d never thought possible.