Growth can take…We know it…

Growth can take…Creativity and time

It’s time to add that new sales position but you can’t establish a new territory with zero business. So you need a few seed accounts to create the new territory. The question is where to get them. The answer is as old as the business. And it’s also a key to increasing the earnings of your best performers.

While it might seem counterintuitive, to increase their productivity you transfer some of the smaller customers they’re currently handling to the new territory.

But how does that benefit those donors and their earnings? Well for starters those small accounts likely account for a small percentage of their earnings but consume an out of proportion share of their time. Eliminating that disproportionate earnings/time load will allow them the time necessary to open larger and better accounts.

It might take a leap of faith on their part. To accomplish the sensitive matter of getting those accounts from the understandably reluctant donors might require a subsidy for a few months. That, plus your confident assurance that they’ll be happy with the eventual result.

Of course you might have to spend some extra time in the trenches assisting them to do that but, in the end, everybody wins. And you now have that new territory up and running with a nice core of established business.

Next up: Account transfers without losses.

We know it…so can teach it

So you weren’t born with a golden tongue or even much confidence when it comes to speaking in front of a group. Here’s a news flash. Truth be known pretty much neither is anybody else! Sure for some it’s easier. But except for that gifted few who seem born to be in front of an audience, it’s neither fun nor natural for most of us.

But like most skills it’s learnable. And like all those other talents we’ve developed, the secret to mastery is preparation and repetition. That first install you did was probably a bit unnerving and even the second or third took concentration to avoid making an embarrassing mistake (like forgetting to turn off the water before tapping a line). But with practice and repetition it became second hand.

The good news is that when we have to stand in front of that group to conduct a training session, we know the tropic well enough to make the preparation part pretty easy. And once we have done one session the next one is pretty much a rerun of the same script. So maybe the only constraint is that we don’t do those sorts of sessions often enough to be near automatic.

Next up: Dealing with those nerves.