Dear Tony, our sales department has just been given a new territory after an acquisition. It is an important territory so I’d like to give it to my best salesperson, but this may seem unfair to my other salespeople. How do I appease the rest of the staff whilst making sure that we maximise this opportunity with our best sellers?
If you’ve seen the great film Glengarry Glenn Ross, which is based on sales people selling real estate in America, you’ll know the whole premise of the film is centred around who should receive the glengarry leads? (Which are the best quality leads). Now I don’t wish to ruin the film, so I won’t tell you who does receive them, however I’d like you to ask yourself this question:
If you were a business owner, who would you give your best leads out to?
As a business owner myself, my answer to that question is very simple; I would reward 2 types of people – firstly the top performing sales person, as I would be confident that the lead is in capable hands and has a higher chance of converting it.
Secondly I’d look at the person who is grafting the hardest in the team and not necessarily getting the results yet. I would be looking to develop that person and identify what requires attention to help that person achieve the results they deserve. Once that person started to improve, I would reward them with the leads as well.
In my experience of training 3,000 sales consultants; the ones who moan about wanting the better quality leads are often the lazy sales people who want to be spoon fed and can’t be bothered to be proactive. To avoid rewarding this behaviour, it’s imperative that you are very selective when it comes to lead allocation.
One option for distributing leads is to set targets; one could be the person who has the highest call activity and achieves a minimum of X result, gets the leads. The person who sells the most in a week receives the leads.
Salespeople should only be rewarded for success, not for just doing their job; that’s what their basic salary is for! I view commission and the best leads the same; they are both rewards and should be treated as such.
