56 sales roundtable ... continued from previous page


What makes a great sales person?


Rolfe said Ridgeway had its own internal process for sales training, but recruiting the right person was also important. Supported by the brand manufacturers, Ridgeway used outsourced recruitment profiling to source appropriate candidates.


Bloxham and Sikorski said psychometric testing and neo-profiling were often used nowadays. Predictive analytics and biodata methods were also popular.


Hicks: “The counter argument is that you end up recruiting to one candidate profile which does not necessarily cover the spectrum of your market. Is that the only profile that can work for you and your customers? My experience is ‘Don’t recruit people that are all similar, it rarely works.’”


Incentives and gongs . . .


Murray invited comments on staff incentivisation to promote and reward sales growth.


Basic salary plus percentage commission was the standard model, but as Perriman pointed out “Financial reward only turns on some sales people. Regularly achieved commission can simply become part of an individual’s perceived salary, so fails to be an incentive.” Personal recognition among peers and within the business or industry can be a bigger driver, he suggested.


Grant Thornton shared success stories, not limited to business development, to internally recognise excellent performance and "create heroes" within the organization said Lane. The GCS sales team sounds a gong revealed Bloxham and Richards team had used an airhorn. Tatham mentioned bells and whistles, but reminded the Roundtable that any incentive scheme had to have a ‘carrot and stick’ element to it.


Non-payment of an incentive bonus had to be an option if performance did not meet expectations. Equally, secondary bonuses should be possible for outstanding achievement. Westcoast also had a team sales structure, with 20% of commission dependent on team performance.


“We try to make the work fun, interesting and achievable,” Tatham added, but Westcoast operated in a highly competitive market, and results needed to be achieved.


Richard Perriman


Bloxham agreed that diversity within a sales team was important, since customers had different personalities. “I know there are consultants within my business that will get on better with certain clients.” While sales training was important, innate personality and communication abilities were too, with sales still essentially a people business.


Perriman felt the key was the ability to listen to, understand and empathise with the customer's issues, and through their own experiences, thereby enabling the right solution to be determined.


Lane: “You need to care, have an element of curiosity to ask the right questions, but more importantly to listen to the answers.”


Sikorski: “We are all salespeople. Every person in every organisation sells, whether it’s persuading a colleague about a new idea for improving a product or service or convincing a colleague to do something. But we can all improve in our selling, and selling skills can be taught.


“Demonstrating self-confidence is the number one skill because all the other skills are underpinned by persistence which is all about demonstrating self-confidence. And selling skills enable the sales process to succeed.”


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Equally, achievement of performance standards had to be set against that fact that many customers didn’t like a change of account manager.


The type of working environment could actually be an incentive to performance, Stamatis mentioned, while revealing that Fourfront had moved from individual sales commission to a team and also group-based commission structure. “We try to foster an attitude of a functional family that is interested in how everyone is doing.”


Grant Thornton was establishing the same culture through its shared enterprise model, revealed Lane. “This model encourages collaboration as a team, across all services lines and geographies, to provide the best solution for our client, rather than thinking solely about an individual relationship or piece of work.”


Ridgeway worked on a team commission basis too, said Rolfe with rewards for orders, sales and prospecting functions. One team, for example, would be going to the Christmas market in Prague as a reward this year.


Bloxham noted that social media and company emails could heighten the celebration of performance recognition. GCS also adopted a meritocratic approach to individual staff performance linked to career progression.


Research had shown that achieving a


successful business was very much about teamwork, mentioned Sikorski. Sharing helped team bonding, but equally sharing the experience and knowledge of successful performance, and even failure, was a way of improving the chance of successful future sales. Using successful team members as coaches or to present case-study seminars was also an option.


David Murray


Richards: “It does depend on the type of culture of reward or punishment within an organisation, of course.”


. . . incentives or inducements?


Murray mentioned days past when the entertaining of customers was lavish and widespread. “But now, with the anti-bribery legislation, what impact has there been on customer incentivisation?


Perriman exampled: “Building long-term relationships with customers remains as important today as ever. However, with time pressures it is increasingly difficult for people to create those opportunities.”


Rolfe agreed that invitees were even refusing driving experience days.


Wilson noted that finding available time in busy lives was also an issue for everyone, but the likely concern was anti-bribery legislation. There was a balance between creating opportunities to build relationships in an informal setting without it being seen as extravagant.


Lane said entertaining wasn’t actually intended to have an undue influence on a customer's buying decisions; it was simply another channel in which you could build a better-rounded relationship with them.


Hicks: “It is a really delicate area, because you do learn a lot about clients when you are not talking about business matters. But, rightly so, there is significant rigor about this nowadays and corporate entertainment/ hospitality has to be appropriate and recorded to meet ethical standards and legislative requirements.”


Bloxham suggested entertaining budgets were now being used for more work-related activities, such as business seminars.


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – NOVEMBER 2015


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