Growing a New Sign Salesperson

ARE YOU AN OWNER who has often had a revolving door of salespeople at your sign company? Have you tried a wide variety of compensation packages? Overpaid and underpaid? Have you kept someone around too long, or alternately, you snapped and sent someone away too soon out of frustration? Or maybe you’ve kept that “just good enough” salesperson around because you are just too tired to start over again?

I can relate. I’ve made all those mistakes and many more. Managing salespeople is one of the most important things you should be doing as an owner, if you are looking to grow your business. For many, the dream is to have salespeople you can count on and customers love so that you can be an owner only, and do what you really should be doing every day in your business.

I’m going to share one method I have used to help do a better job as a sales manager and developing my team.

Simple example of a scorecard tracking daily sales goals for weekly review.

• FOCUS IS POWERFUL — Giving your salesperson your time and focus can be frustrating and hard to do in the chaos of every day, but it truly is the path to building the team you want. For new salespeople, conversation every morning as well as every afternoon is critical. It may only be needed for a couple weeks or maybe a couple months, depending on how quickly you gain confidence in them. Eventually you may only need to meet with them once a week for an hour, but don’t rush the process.
• SCORECARDS MATTER — Build specific goals and a scorecard with your salesperson. Focus on the actual behaviors that make sales happen. Create daily and weekly goal spreadsheets to include things like “# of Est Completed,” “Follow Up Calls on Estimates,” “New Leads Contacted” or even “Cold Calls/In Person.” Each day these kinds of activities make actual sales happen. If you measure their activity every day and have a weekly total of activities, you’ll see a trend and you will help them build the right habits.
  Very experienced salespeople may object entirely to this kind of reporting, so you might adjust to simply meeting and chatting daily, with a weekly scorecard.
• ENCOURAGEMENT IS FUEL — For most successful salespeople, exterior praise and recognition are often what drive them; they are natural people pleasers. As a manager, I use a lot of praise and recognition for everyone, but most of all for my sales team. Recognition is free! If your salesperson had a good week based on meeting scorecard goals, praise them in front of other team members. When they finish their first order, post a photo of them and the project on your social media and give them a shout out.
  I’ll also point out that small items like trophies, plaques or other handouts are a wonderful way to recognize top-selling salespeople at the end of the year or at each quarter.
• CORRECT IN PRIVATE — As important as praise is to a salesperson, when they need course correction, do this privately and do it as soon as you possibly can after the error. Don’t harbor your frustrations with them — turn them into coaching and training.
• KEEP PAY FLEXIBLE — We always build pay plans to be flexible based on their development. Lower goals early on, and then adjust as needed based on their development path. Don’t get locked into a plan that becomes too expensive, nor do you want to start with a daunting goal that discourages them early.

Creating goals, meeting regularly and giving praise will help your most promising hires thrive and help push out candidates that aren’t a good fit. Most of all, your time and focus on their performance will pay big dividends, build trust and keep you confident in the choices you make.