Hey, everyone, this is Steli Efti with Close.io.
And in today’s video, if you’re a sales manager, you’re gonna learn a very easy
mistake to avoid, a mistake that can cost you months and months of development time
and performance out of a salesperson on your team, and a mistake that doesn’t take that
long to correct.
But I still see so many sales managers make that mistake, so today, I felt like no mas,
no more.
I’m gonna record this video, share this knowledge, and hopefully, we can kill that
tiny little mistake that can have a massive impact in your career and in the performance
that you inspire out of your sales team.
What is the mistake?
It’s very, very simple.
It is not having full context when you evaluate a salesperson’s performance.
Usually, it’s not that you don’t have access to all the information you need to
make a decision what somebody’s performance is like, but it’s that we are all just a
little bit lazy, and we get half of the picture, and we just add the other half to it in our
own mind.
We just add information to create the full picture, and in that, we interpret based on
half the data, half the information.
More likely than not, we’re a bit too positive, a bit too willing to create scenarios in our
mind that benefit our own narrative.
And therefore, we think somebody’s doing much better than they actually do.
One very specific example of this is evaluating somebody’s performance on sales calls.
So, a lot of times what happens is – and we had this problem.
We made this mistake repeatedly, one of our sales managers did, where he would be managing
a new sales rep and listening to the calls because the sales rep would physically be
in the same room.
So, the sales manager could hear the new sales rep talk.
He could notice her energy, notice her tonality, listen to everything she said, how she reacted
to the things that the other person probably said.
And in his own mind, he would make up a story if that sales rep is doing well or not, if
that sales rep sounds good or not, and is probably doing a good job on the phone or
not.
So, what would happen is that the sales manager would go, “Oh, this new sales rep is doing
pretty well on the phone.
I think this sales rep is doing really well.”
And then we would find that the results were not as good as they should be, and my instant
inclination would be to go, “Well, can we share some phone calls, the ones that we made?”
This is a legal issue.
Some phone calls you can record, some phones you can’t record depending on where in the
world you’re calling, who, and why, right?
I’ll leave all the legality aside and say that when you have recordings of the entire
conversation on both sides, you need to listen to it.
And in many cases, we would go, “Well, why is the performance not as good as it should
be?
The sales rep sounded good.
They made the right amount of calls.
They hit certain numbers, but the conversion is not as good, or the quality of what’s
happening is not as good.”
And then when we dig into the actual phone call, and we listen to the entire call and
not just to one half on one ear in the room, but when we listen with both ears and our
full focus, and we hear the reaction and the answers and the tonality and the energy of
the other person on the line, it’s obvious what the problem is.
Some calls that, if you listen to them on one ear, on one side, and you just hear the
salesperson’s side, some calls sound phenomenal.
You’re like, “Oh, this person is crushing it.”
And then when you listen to the entire call and you hear the prospect, you go, “Oh,
my god!
I can’t believe this person said this.
I can’t believe he didn’t pick up on this problem or that problem,” or, “Why didn’t
he ask, or she ask, a follow-up question to this very crucial item?”
And the context of the conversation completely changes.
So, this is the mistake.
Don’t pay attention just with one ear while you’re doing other things, just listening
to one side of the interaction, and make up your mind if somebody is, “Good energy,
and sounded good, and I think is doing a well job on the phone.”
Listen to the entire phone call.
I just had an email in my inbox from another founder that shared a few calls from a new
rep and said, “OMG, I thought we were doing well.
I could not understand why the numbers were not looking as good as they were, and then
I listened to some sales calls in their entirety.
Oh, my god, I think we have a real problem.
Our guys need to be coached.
Steli, can you listen to these calls and confirm that I’m right?
And can you help us put together a coaching program to get these guys up to par and to
do a lot better job on the phone?”
It’s magical when you have full context.
It’s magical what happens when you don’t interpret, when you don’t make up the other
half of the information to get to a conclusion.
So, what I want to inspire in you is to not make that mistake.
When you evaluate people on their performance, you need full context.
You need everything you can have.
Now, in some cases, you might be calling people that you can’t record those calls.
That’s fine.
But don’t listen to them and go, “Oh, they’re doing a good job.”
Do mock calls with them.
Every day at the beginning, if they’re a new sales rep, sit them down and have a mock-call
conversation.
Challenge them.
Ask them questions.
Slip in little bits of information that might trip them over.
Just test their real skill set and see.
If they’re not doing good in mock calls and with other people on the team, even if
they sound good on the phone, they might not be doing a good job.
Just realize that you don’t have enough information to make that judgment call.
If they are negotiating with people – more senior reps, sometimes account managers, they’ll
be in negotiations – they’ll come back to you, and they’ll tell you their interpretation
of what has happened.
“Oh, this was a horrible call.
They wanted this, I told them that, and it didn’t work out because they were really
blah, blah, blah,” and they’ll tell you their justification.
They’ll tell you why the prospect was at fault, and why they did everything right and
the prospect did everything wrong.
Are you just gonna believe them?
That doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Are you never gonna believe anything they say?
It doesn’t sound like a good idea either.
How about getting the information?
How about with reps that are at the beginning of being put in that situation, you are part
of every fifth negotiation call or every second negotiation call at the beginning?
Maybe at the very beginning, every single negotiation call with a large client, you
just listen in.
You’re part of a conference call.
You just listen in to the interaction.
You don’t interfere.
You just pay attention so you have full context.
And if they do a good job, you might loosen this up and jump into every second call and
then every fifth, eventually every tenth.
If they perform and they’re crushing it, you don’t have to check in at all anymore.
But make sure you don’t make judgment calls just based on the information they give you,
or just on the limited or half of the information that you gather by paying attention, just
listening to them with one ear while they’re on the phone with somebody else.
You need to get the entire picture, all the information.
And what the prospect says in reaction can completely change your perception of what
happened on a call, versus just listening to the one side of it.
Don’t make that mistake.
Don’t let other people on your team make that mistake.
It’s gonna save you months and months of wasted time, wrong interpretations and evaluations
of people’s performance.
It’s gonna help them not think they’re doing well when they’re not really doing
well.
I mean, it’s just gonna make the world a better place.
I hope that this was useful.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the Comments, so just share what you think
about this topic, your experience, your tactics around how to evaluate accurately how somebody’s
performing.
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