In his book, Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior, Richard Marcinko, founder and first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, the US Navy’s first counter-terrorist unit, wrote, “When you’re a warrior, death is always looking over your shoulder. And we all knew there was just one way to improve the odds of survival; train, train, train”.
The OOH sales arena isn’t the battlefield, and your salespeople don’t have “death” looking over their shoulders. However, the specter of “failure” is ever-present. And, while you are not a SEAL team leader, you are a sales team leader, and part of your responsibility is to help your team hone their skills, refine strategies, and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their performance. In other words…train, train, train.
How much time and effort do you devote to helping your team improve the odds of their success? How do you monitor their performance and assess their training needs? How do you measure their performance improvement? Without specific benchmarks of performance, you can’t do any of those things.
Which elements of performance should you monitor? Conventional wisdom suggests results – the numbers of completed prospecting calls, closed sales, revenue generated, as examples. Makes sense, right? Well maybe not. Those are called “lagging indicators”.
Lagging indicators are important, no one is disputing that. After all, the results are what we are all after. However, if you are only looking at the end results it is not likely to be a gauge for determining training needs to ensure your people are performing as effectively and efficiently as they can.
What are the “leading indicator” behaviors that your salespeople are actually in control of that are what deliver the lagging results? First and foremost you must have a proven, systematic sales process that you’re people follow. Once that is established let me suggest a few sales behaviors to track…
- Are we calling on the type of industry verticals that are proven successful OOH advertisers?
- How much of that activity are we doing on a daily/weekly basis?
- How many UNIQUE conversations are we having with decision makers daily/weekly
- How many prospecting activities convert to a fully qualified prospect discovery meeting?
- How many of my discovery meetings convert to a proposal?
- How many of my proposal meetings convert to a sale?
At the end of the day your salespeople are really only in control of two things that drive their own success or failure…they control what/how much “behavior” they do and they control their technique as they are conducting that behavior.
The Navy SEALS will tell you “Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That’s why we train so hard.” Do your people know exactly what is expected of them and how to do it effectively in order to ensure their success “on the battlefield” of OOH sales? Are your people training hard and consistently to be the best they can be?
Need help with sales skills or coaching to take your out of home company to the next level. Learn more about OOH Sales Mastery at oohmastery.com or Contact Dan Nausley at dan.nausley@sandler.com, 423.702.5579.
Lisa & Dan Nausley of Sandler Chattanooga have developed the OOH Sales Mastery Program after more than a decade of training/coaching scores of OOH Operators across the country in sales, leadership, and executive coaching.
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