As most of you know there are 100's of different team performance "Sales" solutions out there in the market at present. Do any of them actually work and or can they make a quick difference in your team’s performance?

I was speaking with someone the other day about their business and they were telling me how they have "Coded" every single sales behaviour possible, and so they can now go into a business and sit within a specific sales environment and "Know" what’s missing or is needed within that team.

A great idea, I guess although whether you use this kind of process, or a more major global sales strategy and trust me I've seen most of them. It never ever seems to get as good a result as if you were to figure out exactly what your best ever internal people do, and consider how this matches to the biggest and best sales programs then build these attributes into your program!

You see over the past 10 years I have attended read or worked with clients who paid a fortune to get results from structured sales programs that have not made the difference they had hoped for, or thought they would have.

You may have experienced this yourself with programs like Solution Selling, SPIN selling, Cowan Brown, Exceed or one of many others. They all have incredible value, but ONLY if they can be tailored to fit and work in the specific context with which you find yourself. E.g. if you are in Financial Services and Retail banking you will need to use this process in quiet a different way to if you were in Life or General Insurance.

If you are in manufacturing and selling to wholesalers or in Telecommunications and you try to teach your teams to sell like people in another sector you may be in for a shock. So often clients have told me, we spent $XXX,XXX on this particular program and only achieved a 15-20% increase accross 5% of a population.

Damn I say feeling sorry for them, well rather than throwing the investment away, in some cases it may have actually worked extraordinarily well in the 5%, so lets code that and replicate it.

We have also rolled out many of our own solutions and seen exactly what works and does not work best. One of the biggest lessons we had in the early days was where you have a sales head, that refuses to change his or her own coaching and mentoring style.

One organisation we had where we knew exactly what was needed but could not get through to the person at the top of the sales team who never changed a thing and therefore results only occurred in segments where the other managers did not like him anyway. Hmmm - What was the lesson, make sure you have your most senior managers on board first! Understand who your talent is and how you need to manage them. Your ability to talent manage will in almost all cases significantly influence your results.

The other day for the first time in my life I could not breath while I was going to sleep, I had been to the swimming pool that day and the chlorine was incredibly strong in the children’s pool where I’d been. My symptoms were almost exactly like that of an Asthmatic shortness of breath and no matter how hard I tried no air was getting in?

At the time I though wow – that’s interesting, then what am I going to do, not wanting to wake my partner I got up and Google’d the symptoms. Amazingly I found at least 5 websites with some really serious detailed and well researched answers.

One of these explained a breathing technique which it said worked wonders, having nothing to loose I tried it and within minutes was back to sleep. A couple of days later I was speaking with a client about this and he said wow so did you go straight to the hospital and or a doctor?

I said no actually, I turned on the Web and did some research found some answers and alls well!

You might be asking so what, how does this relate to me and my team? Well have a think about it, you think the people in your team are either good or bad, average or superb.

But maybe they are just missing some of the crucial links they need in order to perform at their roles. Often we go running to the doctor or the hospital when sometimes the best possible thing to do might actually be to sit down with some of the smartest people in our own business or teams and ask them questions or log into the web and start google’ing for answers. How do you identify and manage talent in your organisation?

By then linking up the answers your team finds to expert knowledge based information systems often you can then deal with the same problems 100’s of times faster.

Ironically often we rush off to places for solutions when they lie right at our fingertips, whats your organisational change process and who do you have internally to role it out.

It reminded me of a client that had a person who was right at the bottom with regard to his results. He took the time to speak with some of the very best in the business and had a look at in detail what it was that the very best people had been doing with their clients to get specific business results.

Interestingly enough he also had three things over and above this which I believe should be present in order for any change to occur

1. He was motivated and wanted to get different results
2. If he did not get them his job may have been on the line
3. He did not hurry the process but worked methodically to change just a few small things

Often managers in organisations “Tell” their teams what’s expected but don’t give the “How” around how to make the change. Funnily enough this is often because they don’t believe its their job to “Know” much about the details.

I would argue that you need to be able as a leader and manager to know, what it is exactly that are the things that your best people are doing to make the difference. Often this is not known and we just dump the people who “Don’t work”. The person above went from being right at the bottom to being consistently in the top three performers.