It’s 91° here in the Twin Cities today so vacation is on the brain.  CareerBuilder.com offers up some interesting survey results in Using or Losing Your Time Off?

E-leashes and hectic schedules are cutting into vacation time as increasingly wired workers are finding it hard to leave the office at home. Although an improvement from 27 percent in 2006, 20 percent of workers say they plan to stay in touch with the office during their vacation this year, according to CareerBuilder.com’s annual vacation survey, conducted by Harris Interactive of more than 6,800 workers. Nearly 15 percent of workers say they gave up at least one of their vacation days in 2006 because they didn’t have time to use it. Ten percent gave up four or more days.

First off, “e-leash” is excellent.  I’ve never heard that term before but it is quite appropriate.

Second, we had a Chicago-based sales candidate take time away from her family vacation in Orlando to spend an hour on the phone with us.  The Rock Star had to work through getting her schedule to align with our client’s schedule (a President) which was no small feat.  The candidate did quite well on the phone interview and is moving through the process as I write.

Interestingly enough, the President thought the candidate should be available even though she was on vacation.  His comment was “that is the way of sales these days.”  I think he is right.

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We’ll keep our baseball theme going today by referencing a well-crafted post from Dave Kurlan – Baseball and Sales Management by the Numbers. He develops a good analogy between how a manager’s style affects his starting pitchers’ stats (ERA) and how different situational factors affect a salesperson’s revenue totals. Towards the end, you get the fastball right down the middle of the plate (my emphasis):

Turning to sales, there are a number of statistics that are equally difficult to equate with performance, the most obvious being revenue. Many salespeople, considered top producers by their companies, top the charts for revenue but don’t perform in such a manner as to justify the attention, rewards or commissions that they earn. They may have inherited their accounts, built them up over decades, or have the best territory but if you removed those accounts and directed them to go out and sell, many of them would fall flat on their faces.

Conversely, some salespeople who don’t appear at the top of their company’s charts because they are new, don’t have the best territories or are starting territories from scratch, may be great performers, doing all the right things on a daily basis, but don’t get the recognition they deserve.

We’ve seen this inversion in spades often when we first start working with a client. Many times a top performer (not necessarily the top performer) has achieved their status by owning the best territory, longest tenure or the largest, locked-in account.

The unstated implication in Kurlan’s post is that a revenue metric is not the most accurate for determining your most skilled/talented salesperson. That being the case, how can you benchmark top sales performers? If revenue is your metric for selecting the benchmark participants that establish the baseline, you may be sullying your results.

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Yogi Berra once said, “Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting.” Sales slumps are a fact of sales management life. I personally think most sales slumps occur because salespeople get complacent and out of the good behaviors that lead to closed deals. As a sales manager, it is important to stay engaged with your salespeople and hold them accountable for the activities that keep the pipeline fresh, not stagnant.

If a slump does befall one of your salespeople, ManageSmarter.com offers a worthwhile article on this topic – How to Get Out of a Selling Rut and Regain Your Selling Spark. The second point in the article is excellent (emphasis mine):

Sales Mindset 2: The Heart Is the Wellspring of Sales Confidence.
Salespeople who are in a rut don’t need a lobotomy€”they need a heart transplant! Why do I say this? Because the very issues that keep buyers from trusting us as salespeople are not logic-based, they are emotion-based. Whether you realize it or not, customers make purchasing decisions based first on their emotions, and then on other factors, such as price and quality.

Your ability to interact with your buyer in a confident manner answers the buyer’s basic, emotion-based doubts and questions about you: Can I trust you? Do you care about me and my business? Do you know what you’re doing?

The dilemma most salespeople share is giving too much power to the buyer. Two common reasons sellers allow this to happen are: 1. They haven’t earned the right to do business, and 2. They lack confidence. Both of these are closely linked to how you feel as a seller, and how the customer feels about you.

How true. Successful selling requires the proper balance of confidence and humility. Is there anything more annoying than a cocky, smug salesperson? Anyway, we have seen once successful salespeople spin themselves down into a rut due to lost confidence. As a manager, it is imperative that you know your salesperson’s style and motivation to properly guide them out of their slump.

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