The Problem with Veteran Salespeople

Veteran salespeople are sometimes very difficult to manage, especially if it’s your opinion against theirs. Sometimes even though you convincingly win the argument their personalities will not let them let go; if there are not indisputable facts. John Adams said: “Facts are stubborn things, but those are the facts”.

As a manager and owner of an eight store chain for many years in Texas I can’t tell you how many times I ended discussions with a strong personality from my sales division and even though the buck stopped with me sometimes you both have to agree to disagree.

If you tell a store manager or veteran salesperson that their closing ratio is lower than they think it is, you better be able to support it with facts or don’t even start the conversation.

At Trax we understand this dilemma completely and equip you with exact verifiable extremely accurate information about how many true customers visit your company with time stamps and weekly summaries.

I had a sales manager once tell me that he had three of his top salespeople come up to him and inform him that corporate headquarters was clueless about how to advertise and that if they didn’t get it together and bring in more traffic we will all be forced to leave for greener pastures.

This sales manager then said: Let me show you all something about the last couple days that might surprise you. We have 12 salespeople on the sales floor on average every hour and if you look at these photos we have had over 150 customers per day and our overall closing ratios are less than 10%.

As you can see I have also removed all of the non customer counts like all salespeople the mail man and even the manufacturer reps that came in yesterday. Don’t you agree that we have plenty of potential customers that are coming in? They all agreed that if we could figure out how to improve our closing ratios and average sale that there is a great opportunity to improve! The sales manager said he felt very good about the discussion until one of the salespeople said: “I wonder if they could try to bring in better potential customers who had more disposable income”? Well that’s another story…

Here’s the primary difference between a standard infrared traffic counter (body heat detection) such as Shopper Trak, Prodco and all the others, the traffic counts they give you can’t be verified and some are manually adjusted before you see them so that they always look good. But how can you trust them?

Trax with patent pending Visual Proof technology gives you live feedback with up to the second Verifiable Proof of true customer activity. There is nothing more powerful than having the ability in a meeting to say Wow… We had 1000 real customers last week and only sold 90? Is this possible? If true how can we fix it? Owner talking to his sales management team… Do you realize that if we can figure out how to sell just 5 more customers per hundred that we will increase our total sales by over 50%. The first thing we must do is make sure the pictures are accurate and then make sure all sales are entered into the reports (5 second import) then we will know the truth.

With TRAX you simply select and grey out the salespeople and other non customer pictures and all reports are then extremely accurate. W. Edwards Deming once said: “Without facts you are just another person with an opinion”. And John F. Lawhon said: “If you can measure something, you can improve it”.

Give me a call and let us show you how to dramatically inspire your sales teams and help them improve their performance.

713-466-7177 or 888-534-1253