In Sales, You Are Always Where You Deserve To Be | Performance Improvement Plan

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Welcome to the “performance improvement plan”. This is a new series of short-form podcast episodes that I promise to put together and will continue to publish as we move into and hopefully out of the impending recession.

For anyone who is fortunate to have not come across the term performance improvement plan in their career, a performance improvement plan is what your sales manager leadership put you on when your performance isn't up to scratch.

I’ve been on two of them, but I came out of the other side a stronger, more effective salesperson. Sometimes they’re exactly what you need to get your head out of your ass and to start making real progress.

In my experience performance improvement plans are typically enacted when your management wants to start collecting evidence that you are not performing to the standards of the organisation so that they can then eventually let you go without any repercussions of firing you.

This performance improvement plan series that I’m going to publish each however is different. I'm here to give you the daily motivation and tactical advice you need to improve your performance to the point at which your success becomes undeniable within your organisation. The goal being that the amount of revenue that you're going to generate in both hard times and easy times will make you unsackable.

The first lesson that I have for you today is a tough one. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but if you an choke it down, your life will be better for it.

The lesson – “you are exactly where you deserve to be”

Let me say that again you are exactly where you deserve to be.

This is a harsh reality of not just B2B sales but of life as well.

• If you are behind on your quota right now, you have only yourself to blame. It's been widely publicised in the media that a recession is coming. You are bright enough to understand, that during recessions most organisations reduce their spending on products and services that are not essential, and they become a lot more picky as to the products and services that they do spend money on.
• And so, knowing this, if you haven't been working your ass off for the past six months to build a solid sales pipeline, you are exactly where you deserve to be.
• If you haven’t at least six months’ worth of living costs saved up in a liquid bank account, and you've been spending money on crap that you don't really need, again knowing that there is an impending recession that will affect everybody sales careers, you are exactly where you deserve to be.
• If during the good times of the past ten years of rapid economic growth, you’ve been spending your evenings watching Netflix, becoming overweight, and going out of your way to avoid learning how to improve your sales skills, knowing that at some point we’ll enter a rapidly changing selling environment, you are exactly where you deserve to be.

Now, this isn't all doom and gloom.

If you are one of the thousands of Selling Made Simple Academy students that have signed up in the past couple of years, you've improved your sales skills, you've built a strong pipeline and you've become known as a recognised expert in your industry, you are exactly where you deserve to be. You will now dominate the marketplace for the next 6 to 12 months. You will become a hero within your sales team because you will be one of the few individuals that has already done the hard work and so has resilience in your sales pipeline.

Now, the good news is that there is still time the change. You don't need to join Selling Made Simple Academy, I'm not here to shove our training and coaching program down your throat. But you do need to put in more hours, work smarter, and be more strategic right now, if the place that you believe you deserve to be six months from now, is a place of financial abundance, security, and admiration of your selling peers.

So ask yourself the questions as you’re working through your selling activities today –

• Is what I'm doing right now going to lead me to massive success six months from now?
• Can the task I'm doing right now be eliminated, delegated, or automated?
• If the percentage of my pipeline that usually closes got slashed, how many more prospects would I have put in the top of my pipeline so that I still smashed my sales quota 12 months from now?
• How can I convert the value proposition of my product into a must have during the recession rather than a nice to have?

So that's it for today's performance improvement plan. I hope you enjoy this new series.

My promise to you is that I will give you everything that you need from a motivation and strategy standpoint, over these daily podcast episodes, over the next few years as we ride through this recession to make serious money.

All you have to do is implement the strategies undo the work.