What would you expect to happen if your favourite sports team were not going to make the finals this year again (let alone take out the Premiership), and there was no good reason to believe that was going to change? Would it mean changing out some of the players and how secure should the coach feel? What if you decided to buy that team and it was going to become your club/side? What would you do about it underperforming? Would you be willing to make the tough decisions for the greater good?
Business as Sports
If you were purchasing any new asset, you would do your due diligence so you could be clear about what you were getting yourself involved with. You would want to understand the strengths and weaknesses that you are inheriting? You certainly wouldn’t be willing to just accept the previous owners’ perspective. You would want to base your information on the objective facts and not emotional opinions?
Do You Have Any Sales Ghosts In Your Team?
In the world of sales, ‘B Grade’ players are sometimes described as Sales Ghosts. This is because they look and sound like professional salespeople but they lack all the substance required to deliver the required results. The last thing you want and can afford on your organisations ‘vessel’ is even one Sales Ghost because if you are not
very careful, it will soon become a ghost ship that ends up at the bottom of the ocean? Click on the link to complete the Sales Ghost Calculator to discover the true cost to your organisation. Warning, don’t do this calculation late in the week when you are feeling tired because the results can be very scary!
Raising the Bar to ‘A Grade’ Only using the 20:60:20 Rule
The 20:60:20 rule states that 20% of the prospects will buy from you ALWAYS just because you made the effort to turn up, 60% will buy from you SOMETIMES and 20% will NEVER buy from you no matter what. The question then becomes how many of those 60% SOMETIMES prospects are your sales team converting to happy long-term clients? Wherever the bar currently sits, if 
you want to raise the bar to capture a higher percentage, it is essential that you raise the standard of new sales team members you recruit and make ‘A Grade’ players the new minimum standard!
One sub-standard player can have a massive negative impact on overall moral, energy and team culture. The examples are everywhere to be seen as supposedly talented players are removed for the greater good of the team (refer cricket or any of the football codes). They may have the skill-sets but if their mind-set is not right, the ramifications can be incredibly damaging (a prime example is the Australian Men’s Swim Team at the last Olympics).
Sales Talent Acquisition
Just like every professional sporting team out there, great ‘A Grade’ players in the sales game are highly sought after and there has to be a deliberate and substantially different process introduced to acquire their services. You simply cannot treat recruitment of revenue generating team members (promise makers) the same as recruiting those admin, service and operations teams that deliver on those promises. They need to be and should be a 
different breed so that requires a specific recruitment process called the Sales Talent Acquisition Routine (STAR) program.
Any hiring mistake can be damaging to a business but allowing ‘B Grade’ players to get on board can be catastrophic. Especially once the dust settles after they eventually leave (if your ship is still afloat). Worse still, they might just stay and infect the rest of the crew! Talk to us about raising the bar and making sure the next player you bring on board is ‘A Grade’. For a confidential, obligation-free initial meeting, please contact us.
