At the start of Q2, how is your team trending year-to-date?
After all, you spent a lot of time at the end of last year and beginning of this year building and submitting plans—are the plans strong enough to guide you to a strong year-end finish?
Unfortunately, most plans are not even worth their paper.
Assuming your numbers aren’t exactly where you want them to be, let’s take a deeper dive into some immediate techniques you can implement to strengthen those plans and further develop your team.
1. Make sure the plan is real
There's a couple of easy tips to take when you're looking at developing others and looking at their plan to make sure the plan is real. Does the plan end at the objectives or does it move down towards those objectives and benchmarks to the behavior? You have to remember when you're looking at a plan, here are the rules:
- All goals must be converted to behavior. Behavior is the only thing we can control.
- They have to have goals—in their standpoint are their goals given to them, or are they actually what motivates them?
- Do they have a plan? The plan is the outline, the sequential step, the benchmarks, the timeframes, on when pieces of the goal are going to be achieved.
- Action steps. Action steps have to deal with guts and vitality and discipline. Do they actually have the courage and the guts to do what the plan calls for on a daily basis? Along with guts is discipline. Discipline is more important than guts. Discipline is, “I'm going to do it consistently every day.” When you’re looking at your plan, is your team stopping your oversight once you get to the action steps? The action steps are the most important pieces. Action is behavior, not the result of a behavior. And make sure your plans speak to the behavior; you supervise behavior and you manage numbers.
2. Consistently take action
After working with tens of thousands of financial services sales professionals, I’m here to tell you that if you do not focus on micro, then macro is just a hope. Believe it or not, a big part of how I work with clients revolves around managing behaviors, not results. And, if you are in a management role, I strongly encourage you to adopt this philosophy. Traditionally, we are taught to train for skill. I’m asking that you train for mindset. Think of it this way, if you’re focused only on the outcome (the macro), then you’re lengthening the time it will take to successfully reach your goal. Read more on this topic here.
3. Use mentorship to develop your team
Using mentorship as a means to grow and develop newer or underperforming producers is a great way to strengthen skills and increase productivity. The contributions a mentor makes may include making introductions, acting as a sounding board, and offering inside perspectives into industry trends or nuances. Under the right circumstances, the insight and experience a mentor offers can be invaluable.
It shocks me when I go into agencies or companies and their appointed mentors are people who have been there for a long time but are mediocre in their own production, their systems are outdated, and they don’t follow a structured approach to selling. The cold hard truth is this: just because someone has industry experience doesn’t mean they have the skill set to be a mentor.
Why would you have a mediocre producer or manager mentoring some of your people?
I’m not sure either. More insight into mentoring here.
I hope you’ll take these techniques into consideration when developing your team. With the right leadership and accountability, your team will be certain to crush it in 2019.
Remember to do a little bit all of the time, not a lot some of the time.
I’d like to hear how you’re developing your team. Please reach out to me via LinkedIn and let me know how it’s going.
Glenn Mattson is a seasoned veteran of the selling profession, Glenn has personally built one of the leading offices for Sandler Training with his office ranking consistently in the top 1% of Sandler franchisees worldwide. He specializes in working with financial services producers and agency managers who want to shorten their selling cycles, grow their revenues, boost their productivity, and improve their operational efficiencies. Glenn's clients include many producers who seek to be MDRT qualifiers as well as Court of The Table and Top of The Table members who attribute a great deal of their success to the principles, practices, and, above all, the accountability Glenn brings to their practice. Glenn is based in Long Island, New York, but he's usually "in the field," working with clients all over the United States helping them to grow their business, revenues, and profits. Additionally, Glenn is a sought-after keynote speaker, available to speak to small or large groups on emerging business topics.
