Steps for Sales Managers Who’ve Let Their Salesmen Get Fat

A client told me the other day that in an effort to cut turnover over the last 2 bad years, they have pared down the size of their team. As a result, they created greater stability in the sales team. The remaining members of the sales team are doing very well financially servicing their renewal business.

His team is fat, dumb and happy.

At a sales management seminar a number of years ago, Dr. Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, was discussing motivation strategies. Bandler said that how we see ourselves determines how we act.  This, he said, is why pep talks don’t work – either the ones given to us or the ones we give ourselves.

This explains why, by nature, we get into patterns of behavior and do everything we can to maintain the status quo.

If your sales team has become accustomed to making their nut by servicing existing business you can forget new business development from them. They will not do it and will do everything in their power to keep things the way they are.

Bandler described an experiment done among the housekeeping staff at a hotel. They set up hidden cameras to watch the staff making the beds and cleaning the rooms in the hotel rooms.

Questions to the staff members about their weight revealed that 83% of fat staff members said they wanted to get more exercise to lose weight. Yet, when they watched the videos, fat staff members moved slower and made less movements in cleaning the room and making the bed compared to the thin staff members.

Overweight people in the study said they wanted to lose weight, but acted to preserved their fat by moving more slowly.

Fat Salesmen Don’t Hunt

If you’ve allowed your team to live off renewal business during the past 2 tough years, don’t think you can change things with them. The only solution to getting new business is to hire new sales team members.

Fortunately, now is a great time to recruit new sales talent. Take a free profile to learn how we can easily predict whether your applicants have the heart and blood of a top performer. Sales Managers and CEO’s Only. Thanks