Looking into the Sales Mirror

Sales mirror, sales mirror on the wall,

who’s the greatest salesperson of all?

Well, it’s the end of the year and the new year is almost upon us. How did you do?

In the next 30-60 days, that conversation will go on all over agribusiness as salespeople sit down with their managers to reflect on the last 12 months and plan the next 12.

That famous quote or question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall…” is from the film, Snow White. In that early scene, the wicked queen asks the know-it-all-mirror …..” who is the fairest of them all?” When the mirror replies that it’s “Snow White”, we all know that answer is too difficult for the queen to deal with. She sets out on a vindictive path of doing harm.

What about you? When you reflect on this past year, will you own your results? Will you accept the feedback or discussion you have in your annual review? Will you focus on how you can improve? Or will you point out other’s faults as an excuse to not change? Personally, having done all of the above, I found the power of questions during these conversations to be somewhat of a magic tool to help.

The annual review or reflection conversations can certainly be positive and upbeat, but too often they are negative due to a variety of reasons:

Lack of trust between the salesperson and manager
Lack of accountability
Inability to agree on viewpoints
Vague results measured, or no results measured
Unclear job role expectations
Lack of open communication

It’s this last area that I want to discuss around the lack of open communication. There might be valid reasons that there are not enough open conversations. However, we have a duty to ourselves, our family, and our company to continuously strive for open communication.

By open, I mean high quality, which is factual, unbiased as much as possible, and focused on improvement.

One of the greatest tools needed for high-quality discussions is the use of questions. This skill follows the selling skill used in the “Discovery” phase or the “Understand” phase of selling. When selling or having important conversations like an annual review, we need to first “Seek to Understand” as Stephen Covey told us in his “7 Habits” books.

Here are some conversation starters to get your sales mirror going:

First, there are three areas of development in a salesperson’s career.

Selling Skills. This is the 4, 5, or 6-step process that you might use when meeting with a customer.
Territory Management. These are all the activities of managing your sales territory, which includes admin paperwork, yearly planning, customer segmentation, and yes, using your CRM program
The Trusted Advisor Journey. This is all about you building your personal brand in your market. It’s you becoming the reason to do business with your company

2. What are you most proud of over the last year? With each of these questions, they don’t end with a one-word answer like, “Selling the Smith’s Ag account”. You want to know a few more things, like why are they so proud of it. This is the gold mine you need to extract with these questions. It’s the secondary discussion where you find out their motivations, their opinion of themselves, and get the conversation to open up more.

3. Of course, that means I have to ask, what are you least proud of?

4. If you could do this year all over, what would you do differently? In other words, what did you learn from it all? What would the impact be on you and the business if you were able to do those things over again? How and where will you apply what you learned?

5. From a purely statistical measure, can you walk me through the results of this year? And maybe look at this like an annual physical where your doctor does a lot of lab work or tests to get one view of your health. Statistics are just that, one view.

6. What do you think was your best decision this year? And, how was it your best?

7. Same question but change it to your worst decision. And what did you learn from it or how will you avoid that same poor decision in the future?

8. Between selling skills, territory management, and your personal brand, which area do you feel needs the most improvement? Which of those three holds you back the most from making sales?

9. If you were me, how would you help you and the rest of the sales team? In other words, what would you do if you were in charge?

10. Looking to next year, where do you need to grow and where do you want to shrink? If you ask people to grow and do more, it only makes sense to realize this focus will sacrifice other areas. So, the follow-up question on growth has to be about reduction or shrink in another area.

Products

Customers

GeographyTechnical skills or knowledge

Selling skills

Personal brand

Preparing, holding, and then completing annual reviews was always a struggle as a sales leader. They take a lot of time. You need to pull in a full year of data and observations. Not fun. However, they are important to your salespeople. Even if they don’t say it. Even if they say it’s not important. Don’t believe it.

Everyone wants to be understood.

Everyone wants their manager to understand them better.

And every salesperson wants to look into that sales mirror on the wall and conclude that they are (or on their way to becoming) the best salesperson of all!