hi, I'm Dave Salter and you've landed on Connect and Convert

the podcast where we share insider secrets for small business sales success.

I'm joined today, as always by Dennis Collins.

And Dennis is our resident rockstar sales training expert.

He's been successfully training salespeople for about 153 years.

Dennis.

Good to see you.

How are you doing today

. Dennis Collins: Dave?

I'm doing well.

I hope you are.

I am as well.

Yeah.

What we got, Dennis, I have to tell you, I, I learned too many things the hard way.

Don't we all?

Gee whizz.

I could give you a long list of things.

I'm still learning the hard way.

So take for example the first car I bought when I got my

first job when I got outta college.

All right?

So I had this car for about a year or so, and I start hearing

this deep grinding noise.

I have no idea where it's coming from.

From my dad was an engineer, he was a car guy.

So of course, I'm like looking for fluid leaky fluids.

I've got the hood up on the thing, not having any idea what I'm looking for.

And I don't see anything askew under the hood.

I don't see anything leaking, so I keep driving the damn thing.

Long story short I find out the hard way thousands of dollars for a new brake job.

My rotors were shot, my rotors were grinding, but they were so far shot

they were grinding into the drum.

So anyway, like few thousand dollars worth of a brake job.

And I, I didn't know what I didn't know, obviously.

And we see small business owners are a lot like that when it

comes to sales, aren't they?

I am continuously surprised Dave, at how many owner

operated businesses are not seeing the early warning signs, okay.

I live in hurricane country, so I've been in hurricane country for

a long time, and we get, thankfully we get, early warning signs of a

hurricane because it is important to protect yourself against a hurricane.

But what are the early warning signs of a sales problem?

Sometimes what I've seen, it's already too late.

The catastrophic failure has happened.

The early warning signs weren't observed, and now it's a big problem.

Just like your car.

Yeah.

And only 30% of small business owners hit or over-deliver on their revenue target.

So today we're gonna talk about, you might have a sales problem if, and it's really

interesting to me Dennis, because as you said, a lot of times, it's too late when

the biz owner realizes he's got a problem.

So talk a little bit about why business owners maybe have that

difficulty seeing that problem.

And then and we'll go from there, but talk a little bit about maybe that inability

to have that vision on that sales problem.

There's a number of issues.

The first issue that I see is a lot of business owners, founders, are

trying to be the d-i-y sales manager.

Okay.

Hey, this is my business.

I understand the business.

I can be sales manager.

I can do this.

And what a great intention, shall we say, but usually it's the wrong intention.

How many red flags can a business owner respond to in any given day?

In sales, there's red flags in operations, there's red flags.

In accounting, there's red flags.

How many red flags can you get to in one day?

Okay, so if you're trying to do all these jobs as an owner, Uhuh, it fails.

I've seen it happen dozens of times.

When you start experiencing that steady, steady decline in sales, guess what?

It's too late.

The hurricane has hit your shores, okay.

You've got you, you've got a sort of a top 10 list, if you will.

And you, as you talked about I was gonna use that example as well.

You know, we look at the weather channel all the time to see when

the next storm is coming or the be next bad weather maker, if you will.

And what are some of the early warning signs that a sales

storm is about to strike?

You've got a top 10 and maybe you've got a couple in there that are really important.

Yeah, this reminds me of Jeff Foxworthy;

"You might be a redneck if."

No I've been down that road.

We're not gonna do that today, but I am gonna say high

turnover if you are experiencing extraordinarily high turnover.

You just may have a sales problem and you also may have to worry a lot

more about just replacing people.

There may be some other issues.

How about the slow season that never speeds up?

You know, I talk, I talked to business owners.

"Well, we're in our slow season right now", and six months later I talk.

Yeah, we're in our slow season right now.

Well, that's what you said six months ago.

A slow season.

That never speeds up.

How about your sales leadership and your accountability?

Is it a plus or a minus?

Is your sales leadership helping you or hurting you?

What's your account?

Accountability?

What are people responsible for?

Who holds them responsible?

What happens when they do perform well and they don't perform well?

How's your cash flow?

Hey, my kids used to ask me that, Hey, dad, how's your flow?

Well, how is your flow?

I mean, if you have a a problem with cash flow, you probably have a sales problem.

Where are your prices?

Your prices just right, too high or too low.

Too low.

You have a sales problem.

Too high.

You have a sales problem.

We've gotta get the pricing just right.

The wrong customers?

Are you chasing the wrong customers?

I have had salespeople in my past that thought Everyone is a prospect.

Everyone is a prospect.

Well, not true if everyone's a prospect, no one's a prospect.

So what do we do?

In in sales training?

We teach people how to qualify a prospect.

It depends on the industry, but we might have five or six

elements of qualification.

Maybe the intake person on the phone who's making the appointments, does it?

Maybe the salesperson does it.

Somebody's gotta do it.

Okay.

What I've done in the past with clients is built what, what's called

the I-C-P, the ideal customer profile.

Who is that person that is the most ideal prospect to become a customer?

Hopefully for your business, the ICP.

There's all kind of ways to do this, but if your business is not focusing

in on the most likely prospects to buy, you may have a sales problem.

I love that.

I love that that process you've set up.

You've got a couple more bullet points on your top 10.

Why don't you finish those off and

Yeah, how's your communication?

How's the communication in your business up and down the business?

Are ideas flowing from staff up and from leadership down?

And how's your communications with your customers?

Do customers get responses instant responses to their problems?

If you aren't.

If you don't have a good communications program, you do have a sales problem.

Lack of standards.

I am shocked, I am shocked, Dave, in this day and age of the number

of small businesses that don't have accountability for their salespeople.

"Oh, just go sell, make some sales."

No.

What are.

So they have no targeted goals.

No targeted goals.

Sad but true.

Last but not least, and this is the biggie.

You may have a sales problem if the right people are not on the bus.

Thank you to Jim Collins.

No relation for writing that book all those years ago.

Are the right people on the bus?

Do you have the right people?

That's a tough one, but I would say in at least 50% of the cases that

I've consulted, I would say 50% have the wrong people on the bus.

So Dennis, let's for instance, say you're a small business

owner and you sort of in your gut, you see a couple of these problems on the horizon.

Maybe the situation isn't catastrophic at this point you've got some problems.

So if you are that business owner and maybe you're catching it

before it's too late what would you recommend that business owner

do before the business tanks?

First thing, Dave, take a step back.

Take a step back, do an audit, spend some time in the sales department.

Okay?

See what's going on.

Acknowledge that you don't know what to look for.

I am not knowledgeable about sales.

What should I look for?

Mm-hmm.

Find out what to look for.

Review your accountability and rewards programs.

That which gets measured and rewarded or punished is what?

Is your culture.

That becomes your culture.

Can you explain that a little bit, Dennis?

What would, how, what's a rewards program?

How do you pay, how do you compensate your people?

Okay.

Okay.

You would be surprised, maybe not.

You would be surprised at how many small businesses don't have a comp

plan that's in line with their culture, with their top line goals.

They've gotta be lined up.

Okay?

What do you reward people for?

What do you not reward people for?

What consequences are there for not performing?

If there's no consequence, then there's no standard.

And likewise, if there's no reward for the performance that you want, so clearly

define what you want and reward it.

That's what keeps things happening.

Beautiful.

You've got a couple more ideas on this.

Ask another trusted business owner.

So maybe you have a friend, a colleague, and a same or other business.

Ask them to maybe become a secret shopper.

Maybe call in and pretend to be a customer and see how they're treated.

Talk to your customers.

How many of us ever talk to our customers after the sale?

After the sale.

Follow up.

Talk to the happy customers.

Talk to the unhappy customers.

Work with a coach or consultant.

It's very hard to see what's going on when you're inside the bottle.

Get somebody outside the bottle.

A coach a co can help you.

And of course, contact your Wizard of Ads Employee Optimization and Sales RX team.

That's what we do.

We have a product called Sales Scan which we can use in your business to

answer all these questions to help you identify those early warning signs.

What I heard from you today is that oftentimes small business

owners don't realize they have a sales problem until it's too late.

Yep.

You gave us some really good indicators of what some of those problems could be,

and then also some really good solutions.

So 25 years ago, my youngest daughter convinced me to coach

her five year old soccer team.

I had no clue.

I had no idea.

So what I did was a local high school had a program whereby their students

got credit for community service hours.

And I, through third party found this high school soccer

player at the local high school.

I brought her in to runes cuz I did not know anything about it.

Good move Dave.

So she came in and ran my drills.

She was standing next to me during games.

So I found that third party expert to come in.

She examined my problem and said, I'll take care of this for you.

And then, I provided the leadership.

But I, we all need that sort of neutral third party eye to come

in and take a look at what's going right and what's going wrong.

Yeah.

We're just not objective about our performance.

We tend to overrate our performance and not give a very

read on how we're actually doing.

So that outside party may be the most important of all the things we've

talked about, highly encourage it.

I think the sign of a great leader is admitting that

he or she doesn't know everything.

That's correct.

Dennis, thanks for your wisdom and insight today, folks up

another edition of Connect and Convert, the podcast that lets you behind

the curtain with inside strategies for small business sales success.

This is Dave Salter with Dennis Collins.

Thank you for joining us.