Latest / Sales Trajectory Podcast / The Hidden Cost if your most experienced salesperson left tomorrow, what knowledge, relationships and momentum would leave with them? With Violette Bouvier

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The Hidden Cost if your most experienced salesperson left tomorrow, what knowledge, relationships and momentum would leave with them? With Violette Bouvier · Sales Trajectory Podcast

• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Trajectory Podcast, where innovation meets execution in sales.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Jason Howes, your host, a 35-year sales veteran and lifelong student of the game.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is for leaders and sales professionals with a growth mindset.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: You'll hear real sales stories about new products, motivating teams to prospect, and boost productivity.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: We dive deep into sales process, cutting edge tech, and recruiting top sales performers.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get started.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Trajectory Podcast.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Today I'm joined again by Violette Bouvier.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is episode three, the hidden cost of key person dependency.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Great to see you again.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Great to see you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Still working on processes and systems, which has been quite interesting.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: We were building some materials for our clients in order to deliver them quality content for coaching, onboarding, training sessions.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: We've been visiting some of our clients as well down the coast.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So pretty much an interesting and exciting month so far.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, time is slipping away, that's for sure.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: It has been good to get out and uh visit some clients and some prospects as well.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: We were fortunate to have some really good site tours as well, which is great.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And really been enjoying training and coaching sessions we've been doing recently.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorites I'd like to just talk about a little bit is when we work with our clients, we have them to record a value proposition and elevator pitch.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then we combine that together to understand it's really about listening to how sales and marketing aligned, you know, how's their messaging being positioned?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we learned a lot out of that.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was some really great exercises.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: And again, as you know, if you are prospecting for new business or put in front of somebody, you really need to have a very consistent message on how you help your clients from an outcome-focused perspective, not just pitching products.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, what were what were some of your what were some of your key takeaways from that?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the things we were working on together was to create some tools to help our clients to do a sales assessment of where they're at, which has been very interesting because they're like we feel like with the team we are training at the moment, they're like more involved in their own processes and more like to engage to take ownership of their own data.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So those kind of things has been very like for me interesting to work on, and I cannot wait to have the next step with them.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's about how we can all become better at our craft by having that set time to invest in your team and to be able to talk about key areas that typically wouldn't be spoken about on a daily basis.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: This leads me into this episode here, the hidden cost of key person dependency.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh episode three of our five series.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll hand it over to you to juice, just do a little recap on episode one and two, and also lead into the opening for this one.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because in our first two episodes uh that I recommend for any people who listen to it about how to find the right people and how to create the right environment for them to succeed.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another question we haven't really explored yet.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's like what happens when those people leave the company?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because when someone has been managing the same customers for 10 or 15 years, they don't just build relationships, they accumulate an enormous amount of knowledge.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so the question is whether the knowledge belongs to the business or whether it only exists in that person's head.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So one really interesting question we could start is what if your most experienced salesperson left tomorrow?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: What knowledge, relationship would live with them actually?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, look, it's a it's a great question and it does happen.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes uh it's easy to get comfortable with the team you have.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Look, right now, there is a lot of moving around, whether that's people that have been moved out of a business due to underperformance, or maybe someone headhunts your top salesperson.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: We would like to help the leaders to recognize what is the risk if one of the person of their team is leaving the company.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: What about account history?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: What about contacts?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: What about commitments?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: What about pricing knowledge?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen business realize after one of the salesperson leaves the team how knowledge they've lost after their departure?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think it does depend on the business, whether there's a sales manager or managed by the business owner.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Smaller teams uh don't typically sometimes have a direct sales manager.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So really it can come to a head fairly quickly, particularly if they're replacing that person, because it you can go into panic mode a little bit when someone does resign.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh hang on a sec.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what's what's happening here?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: So typically what will happen there is say if they are replacing that person, they'll typically maybe run to advertise again.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what I like to do, what I used to like to do as a leader was to actually just stop and reset for a little bit and look at who were the customers for this salesperson because sometimes it looks like they were your best salesperson, but when you look into it deeper, potentially if they'd been there the long amount of time, they had the best customers and the longest established relationships.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So just because someone's um got the highest sales doesn't necessarily mean they're your actual best salesperson for growing and developing your business.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Revenue alone doesn't tell us how a salesperson is actually performing.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on their customer portfolio and a lot of different things.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you're totally right about that.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's where data becomes really important.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, for example, imagine there are like two salespersons, one in your team is generating like three million of dollars, and another one is maybe generating one million dollars.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So at the first sight, you would maybe think that the first one is performing a little bit more because it has more revenue.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing that you're addressing right now is not about just the revenue.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine like if the first one inherited from a portfolio with of a long established customers, while the second salesperson has been developing an entire new territory.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is two things absolutely not comparable.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: So without looking at the account history or new business generated opportunities, progression, and customers' development, we're not necessarily comparing performance.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we're comparing revenue at this stage.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: How should leaders distinguish new growth, account development, and uh inherited revenue?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you're recruiting, how do you assess whether someone's past success is genuine or it has been transferable from another business?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good question.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: For me personally, whether you're talking about recruitment or sales management, if the business has leading KPIs that separate uh existing growth, uh new product growth, or um new logos, so new new customers, I think that way you should really be able to quite quickly look at the scoreboard, I always call it.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: So in your uh in your CRM or your technology stack, at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, who are what are the sales, but also who's winning the business, uh, who's the person that is successfully achieving their KPIs as far as you had new product development or new uh new clients.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think it's unfortunately if you look back, what I've found over my experience and dealing with a lot of people is that if someone does leave the business, potentially they may have left some time ago.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: So they were still there, maybe they're in a comfortable zone, but potentially the trap now is that they've left and you're going back to try and look at the data, and you know, there's not a lot of input, uh, they're not they haven't been filling out their reporting, they haven't been logging their monthly planners, they haven't been winning a lot of business.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes I think you really just need to stop and reset.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we've had this multiple times where we've assessed sales teams and the person who was the apparent best sales professional uh scores very low compared to uh the millions of other salespeople that have been evaluated.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: So, and then all of a sudden it becomes a little bit uh tender topics, you know, the uh leaders saying, Hey, that's our best person.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well, hang on a sec, let's just have a bit a look a little bit deeper as well to see if they are the best salesperson.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: We still need to, as you said, to reset and to make sure that all those information is scattered, not just across emails or personal spreadsheet.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be recorded and accessible up to date to need to know about the customer relationship with the company.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a question of reporting to report.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's more like before you pick up the phone with the client to be able to know what was the last order, if he prefers to be contacting on a Friday rather than a Monday, and all this kind of information that just knew you as a salesperson can know about the client and the relationship you've built so far with him.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing uh worse than uh being a sales manager and somebody leaves or someone walks out the door and then you start to backtrack and then realize that, wow, okay, I was caught up in the moment, maybe I should have been a little bit closer to the relationship.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I yeah, maybe uh we're not operating in that sort of same zone anymore.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: That can that can tend to happen as well.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if you do put your reliance on your salesperson to manage the business and grow, well then it's a risky game because And if we're only measuring revenue, we might be measuring the value of the portfolio rather than the capability of a salesperson.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: We need to take into consideration all this aspect as well and not just the revenue.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where the ownership of the data and the history and all the activity becomes really important.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: I know that leads into some of the our next discussions.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, uh, it makes me think that the biggest risk is isn't simply like losing a salesperson, it's losing the ability to continue the customer relationship.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes me think about a personal story.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: My dad used to work in the industry field as a salesperson for all his entire life.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember that day when he retires after 40 years in the same company, he was retiring with another three salespersons at the same time.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so the sales manager was saying, okay, today we're losing 160 years of knowledge.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that hit me quite a lot because what's exactly what this sales manager was speaking about, what kind of knowledge?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because of course, in this company they were having a system, right, to record the orders and the relationship.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: So as we can see, with this discussion is not just the contact details or the purchase history, is knowing is knowing as well what this particular customer prefers and how to approach this kind of situation of this kind of how to sell this kind of product.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: We were working recently about sales messaging, but it's an interesting question to ask yourself what do you want your sales team to record in your system and how you can give access to the people and how to use those data?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a question of recording uh account history.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: When we reach the point of having someone leaving your team as a salesperson from a customer point of view, what would be the approach, according to you?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: What would be the thing that you need to think about?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because we don't want the customer to re-explain their story, preferences, pricing arrangement with the new salesperson.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So what would be your advice is or what could you say about your own experience?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's all the when all the hard work you've done leading up to that situation pays off.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: If the sales manager or the business owner is very in tune with what's happening, they're able to quickly divert back and look at the history, look at the pricing.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any unsolved issues?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: That then comes down to compliance on reporting.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've spoken about this before.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: As a manager or leader, you need to set a good practice to fill out information yourself because if you're expecting your team to do that, you need to uh lead from the front.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's nothing worse than being a customer and having to a new salesperson walks in, hi, I'm from, you know, and all of a sudden the customer goes, I'm busy.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do I really have to explain myself again?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: It can get to a point of where the customer will shoot from the hip and they'll be like, This, I don't want to deal with this company anymore.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, they're not providing them with the information, they're not on boarding them properly, and the manager's not working with the new salesperson.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, yeah, it's really important.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, sometimes you don't know the impact on your business if you are turning over salespeople.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And typically, if you are turning over salespeople, there's a problem much deeper than just blaming the person.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that most of the time the businesses underestimate this part?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, without a doubt.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's difficult.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: We are not just speaking about replacing someone else.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in charge of a customer for 10 years and then there is a new person coming, you need to build again the trust and the relationship.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: It would be nice for the company to identify and to preserve the knowledge that matters for the business and the company.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you might as well lose a bit the motivation to record every single thing about the customer.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: So systems and processes are very important, but maybe more important than that is to identify what you want to record for the relationship you're building with your clients.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, as we said, not just account history of purchasing, but as well pricing agreement and knowledge and also preferences of the customers.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because it's just to avoid creating frustration.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're always asking more and more things to the people with maybe sometimes as well less time.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just as well a bit cautious of the relationship you're maintaining with your own sales team as a manager.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: What you would need to make sure they record on the system before those people leave your team.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: We really want to encourage experienced salespeople to share their knowledge without making them feel that they have to give away their value.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very important thing.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you really need to identify what's the best information to collect about your customers and the relationship you're building with them.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, you must be consistent across customers' record.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Consistency is the keyword here.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have not collect everything again, but what's most important for your business needs to be record consistency in the system.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: You need to identify the next step with the client.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: In each client record on your system, whatever it is, if it's an Excel sheet or if it is a CIM database software, you need to be able in less than 10 seconds to identify the next step.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the main contact for these customers and what is the account plan?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: That should be, in my opinion, the most important things you need to check and to invite your team to consistently update.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: That does come back to having a plan on what is required to be captured.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: I can share some experiences over my time of starting with a sales team that tripled in size.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened was as the leader, you really want to keep up with what's happening each day when your salespeople are seeing them.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: But again, I'm not being rude here.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: I used to say to my guys, hey, look, I don't really need to know that they're they're having a good day, right?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's you need to know that.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: What I want to know is what's happening in the business.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Are we working on any opportunities with them?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Have they made a decision?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or was there a next step?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a new opportunity to partner with them in some way?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: What's the plan for the account?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because yeah, if you've got 10 or 20 salespeople and they're seeing 20 to 30 to 40 customers per week, that's a lot of data, right?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I think it needs to be really easy for the leader and the manager to read, and it also needs to be very clear for the salesperson to be able to follow up with on the next meeting or next call, because you can't expect everything to be in your memory bank.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that leads on to, yeah, a new salesperson starting.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing worse than them reading all this content or all this call information, which really means nothing.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's about your old mate's dog at its fifth birthday or whatever it is.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: I know what we work with is actually creating a call plan template, and that then prompts the salesperson to fill in the information that we feel is really important for the business and also for the customer.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that can remove a lot of guesswork.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want the business to wait until the last minute that someone resigned to realize how much uh knowledge and value is living with the person there that leaves the company.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: If someone's on holiday, another salesperson should be able to pick up and have access to their customers and know exactly what's going on.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's really important.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think like it's from the business perspective.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: The goal isn't to replace someone, it's to make sure that the value those people is bringing to the company is remaining in the business and is able to be handled by a new person who will maintain the relationship with the client.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think if you involve them in the process and you say you're like we're building out the system and these processes and a model here, and you've been successful in the role and your customers love you, yeah.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: How do you do it?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: How can we share the success you've had or the the secrets of what you do so that we can help the other team?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: You make them feel valued and appreciated.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think it becomes a different story instead of saying, Hey, we've got to get all the information out of you into a into a system.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: So look, it is really important.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: You can put yourself a long way back if you're not prepared for that.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: The closing message is the goal is to not make people disposable, it is to make their knowledge valuable beyond the individual tenure.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think again, that goes for the salesperson.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Once you work in a business that has really good systems and processes and good data collection, well then you you'll see the and and again if the market changes or if you if you lose your big account or contract, that's what's happened.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it's a learning experience and a coaching environment because yeah, if you do want to coach your team, well then from a leadership point of view, you definitely want to make sure that you've got the best people and they're using the technology you want them to, and you and you're able to to go back and see what's going on.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's really important.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: From today's episode, a quick shout out to uh HR Tactics.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: If anyone's listening to this episode and and their their teams are not aligned or your position descriptions are not really clearly identified, we do a lot of work with the team at HR Tactics, they're great to work with.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's really important to uh to have your information accurate in today's sales environment because yeah, things have changed, and if you're expecting your salespeople to do different tasks or use different technology, well then you need to be able to include that into your workflow.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: Do greatly appreciate your time today, Villa.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, great to see you.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: Got a product that's struggling or launching something new?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Reach out.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're inviting guests who want to make a real impact.