Show me a struggling sales team and I can tell you exactly what fixes they’ll attempt to remedy the situation with, all of which are woefully inadequate and will come up short again and again. The good news is, there is a solution and while it’s not well-known, it is highly effective. In fact, it’s so effective that the Mental Toughness University team often stays inside a single organization for years—sometimes seven or more—expanding from one regional sales group to multiple divisions.
So, historically when a company has a struggling sales team, they try a few things. They may bring in a motivational speaker to try to get everyone fired up to sell. Another approach is to bring in someone to do emotional intelligence training or something similar, and the problem with both of these approaches is that the most of what was learned, along with most of the energy created by the training, is gone by the time the speaker leaves the premises. A third approach companies use is to bring in a sales trainer or another outside organization, to do some sales training. This can have a temporary impact however, it fails to address key psychological aspects and doesn’t actually teach salespeople what to do to truly acquire the mindset of a champion, and this is a requirement if an organization is going to achieve long-term success.
The training done at Mental Toughness University is the opposite of these approaches, it’s completely non-linear. We get into the weeds of exactly what’s going on within the organization. The research we do is far beyond and far more extensive than anything than anyone else is doing. Our process allows us to determine exactly where the disfunction is that’s causing the sales team to underperform.
While giving us the ‘okay’ to interview people and do other forms of research, management usually says something like, “Our people are pretty tight-lipped; don’t expect much.” Yet, with our unique approach, we come away with detailed information that makes it appear as if we’ve worked at the company for 20 years. In some cases, we’ve even had Legal approach us saying they need to investigate exactly how we found out what we found out. It’s simple, we’re not breaking into headquarters in the middle of the night, we simply know what questions to ask and how to ask them to do the deepest dive possible and get ALL relevant information to determine all the issues and problems.
We begin by questioning for dissatisfaction but ultimately we will get to exactly where the disfunction is; and that’s the key. Disfunction is what causes all the problems that lead to low sales, bleeding cash, etc. While dissatisfaction may sound like the sales team being unhappy that management is pushing them too hard, disfunction is the fact that the salespeople are only making five sales calls a day when they’re supposed to be making eight. Take 100 to 200 salespeople in a region and add up those missed calls; that’s a lot. Whether that’s due to logistical issues, a lack of, or ineffective pre-call planning, post-call analysis, or other items, we find the issues through our research.
Next, we calculate how much that’s costing the company. For example, it might sound something like, “Based on our calculation which is based on our research, which we’re happy to show you guys how we arrived at this number… We think you’re bleeding $2.25M per year because of letdowns of three specific KPIs.”
We let them know this is not an opinion; we arrived at this number through deep research. There might be some subjectivity in the analysis… and we tell them that up front so there’s no bs, and no hype, and no exaggeration. “We think it’s costing you, maybe $2.25M maybe it’s $1.9M but at the end of the day, this is where the bleeding, the hemorrhaging, has occurred.
Once we’ve done the research and identified all the issues, we reveal exactly what’s going on in the organization. We let the salespeople and management know what the results are, where they’re failing. Frankly, we beat them up a little bit with the numbers and the disfunction. No one likes it, it’s not fun. They’ll complain about what we’ve found. They kick and scream and make excuses. That’s why they’re underperforming, world-class teams don’t kick and scream and make excuses, they say, “We’ll get it done. We’ll figure it out, don’t worry about it.”
But we back up the problems we’ve found and the solutions with research. We’re not bullies, we give them objective reality and once they’ve seen the proof they acquiesce: “Okay, I got it, I’m bleeding, I can do it differently and better, tell me how to fix it.”
To fix it, we work on the KPIs that are letting down. We get them up to quota and see what happens. And in 12 to 18 months, we probably will have made up the $2.25M, or whatever number they were short of quota.
To get the salespeople from believing it’s only possible to make five calls a day, versus eight, or deal with whatever mental blocks they’re facing, we’re going to change the way they think. We’re going to give them mental toughness and give them the specific tools so they’re able to say, “How can we do it?” As opposed to, “It can’t be done.”
Now there are a lot of ways we approach that and those are specific things that we’re going to do to get them to arrive at that level of thinking which we call world-class thinking but that’s effectively what it is, and once those KPIs are back where they should be, and as a result, the numbers are back to where they should be and management and everyone else is a lot happier.
And that’s how we were able to take a team at a major pharmaceutical company that never ranked higher than number 12 over a 20-year period, to number one in the company in two years. We were then able to duplicate that the following year, breaking a company record that’s never been achieved in their 100-year history.
It’s also how we were able to increase sales by about $100M for another region of a pharmaceutical company over a 12-month period effectively saving every job on the team.
We also had a giant success where we trained 200 salespeople to promote a urinary drug which was in stage-3 clinical trials. So, for the first year and a half they didn’t even have a product to sell. We had to train them to sell a product that they didn’t even have. When the drug finally did get cleared it became the biggest urinary drug of all time to this day over 20 years ago. We took them from “this can’t be done” to “it can, and we can do it.” That’s mental toughness.
What sets us apart is our research which uncovers all the problems and issues and our ability to apply effective solutions to those problems.
Bottom line, we have a highly-effective process that works to produce incredible results in one area: increasing sales; that’s all we do. We don’t do team building, we don’t do motivation, we don’t do culture, we don’t do time management, we do increased sales and we succeed or we don’t but that’s what we live for. Nothing else matters, we are mercenaries coming in to increase sales.
If you have questions on how Steve Siebold and I do this at Mental Toughness University, or to see if we may be able to help your sales team, go to: www.completeselling.com or email me: johnchapin@completeselling.com.
John Chapin is a motivational sales speaker, coach, and trainer with over 38 years of sales and sales management experience. You can reprint provided you keep John’s website and other contact information in place.