CDN NEWS | 
US NEWS 
Written by Hamish Knox; President of Sandler in Calgary, Canada
Managers are rope makers. Their direct reports get to choose to climb that rope or hang themselves with it.
Managers make the rope they give their salespeople from onboarding, coaching, mentoring, role play and accountability.
I’ve talked to managers who gave their team a shoelace and were shocked that they couldn’t climb with it. I’ve also talked to managers who not only gave their time a thick anchor rope with hand holds built in they manager climbed the rope while their salespeople held on to their back!
For this article, ROPE stands for Return on Prospecting Effort. Like a physical rope you can directly influence the thickness of your sales team’s ROPE through four activities.
1) Define your ideal prospects including sales cycle and dollar value
Without ideal prospect profiles created anyone who one of your salespeople trips over or who falls in their lap is an “ideal” prospect. This concept causes anxiety in both the salespeople and managers, I work with because they might “miss out” on a prospect by creating specific profiles. First, winners make choices. Second, creating ideal prospect profiles shouldn’t create handcuffs on your salespeople. Instead ideal prospect profiles support your team in focusing their prospecting efforts on prospects who your company can serve best.
Each ideal prospect profile must contain a typical sales cycle (number of touches from “hello” to Purchase Order/Signed Agreement) and a dollar value range. Both of these a required to give your team more ROPE.
To create a common language around your ideal prospects, we teach our clients to name the specific categories of ideal prospects. The names we commonly use with our clients are “rabbits, deer, bear and elephant.” One of our clients with a nautically themed company name chose to use different types of boats. Stay away from “small, medium and large” because no matter how we’ll defined your descriptions everyone on your team will have a different vision of what small, medium and large prospects look like.
2) Hold your salespeople accountable to the sales cycle for each type of prospect
One of the managers, I work with had an “ah-hah” in a session a few weeks ago when we talked about defining a typical sales cycle. In their world a “rabbit” prospect is usually closed in one phone call and their “ah-hah” was one of their salespeople had applied an elephant-sized sales cycle to a rabbit prospect, which was severely reducing their time to prospect for additional opportunities.
As, David Sandler said, “never do anything unless you know why you’re going it.” Sometimes it may make sense to slightly extend the sales cycle for specific prospect profile, but in our experience this is a rare occurrence.
3) Hold your salespeople accountable to prospecting a mix of ideal prospects each month
Because of their self-limiting beliefs your salespeople will tend to stick with one, possibly two, types of ideal prospects.
Support each member of your team through coaching and role play to have a mix of ideal prospects in their pipeline and in their prospecting activities.
4) Hold your salespeople accountable to hunting where their ideal prospects are through a mix of activities
Similar to sticking to only one or two ideal prospect categories, your salespeople will have prospecting activities that they do because they are comfortable, but that don’t necessarily increase their opportunity for interacting with decision makers at the ideal prospect organizations. These are often networking events, conferences or trade shows that previously provided good ROPE.
Sandler recommends that each of your salespeople have a minimum of four, proactive prospecting activities that they do every month. The top two activities they will do the most and the bottom two may only happen once per week or a couple of times per month. No matter how often an activity happens it should happen where your salesperson has the greatest opportunity to have a conversation with a decision maker in one of your ideal prospect categories.
Your salespeople may not only need to increase their number of proactive prospecting activities, but also change the venues where they hunt. Support them in creating new beliefs for themselves through journaling, coaching and role play, and create small wins as they adjust their prospecting mix. For example, instead of a win being closing a contract with a company larger than your salesperson has previously the win is that your salesperson secured a meeting with that company. Eventually you’ll get to celebrate contracts as your salespeople grow more comfortable in prospecting and selling to type of prospect.
Give your team a strong ROPE and they will give you strong sales.
Until next time… go lead.
Share This:
Canada’s Advantage as the World’s Demand for Plastic Continues to Grow