2023: The Nightmare - Part 2
You may want your sales team to be selling...
Back in March, I started a series on the lessons I learned in 2023, which was an abysmal year. (Read part 1 here…)
Today I’m back with part 2 of 6. I'll be dripping these out over the next few months, so subscribe!
You May Want Your Sales Team to be Selling
The Challenge:
One of our best salespeople, well, stopped selling.
And we didn't realize it as soon as we should have.
We thought things were moving right along until suddenly, in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, we realized this person (half of our sales force) had gone nearly “salesless” for months.
The Lesson:
Your team is human. You are human. Humans are massively affected by their home and personal lives.
A person with instability in their personal life needs love, support, and kindness. But if they are not willing to share or change the things they can change, their work product will fall off a cliff.
Some people can separate “work” and “life”, minimizing the impact of domestic struggles on their work output. But this creates another burden for them, doesn’t it? The need to suppress their emotions?
Some people call this “professionalism.” And yes, we all need some level of this to simply function in the work world. But long-term stuffing of emotions and disguising what’s happening behind the scenes eventually comes to roost.
What I Do Differently Now:
Two things.
First, we go way deeper with our sales metrics and can now head off issues like this at the pass.
One of our favorite metrics is NSLI. This net sales by salesperson divided by the number of leads issued in a certain time frame.
John sells $250,000 in April. John was issued 25 leads in April. John’s NSLI is ($250,000 / 25) = $10,000.
The name of the game for a sales organization is maximizing the income generated from every lead. NSLI is a great way to compare salespeople with each other and compare salespeople or sales teams over a period of time.
Second, we've worked really hard to create a space where people can "struggle out loud."
More conversations. More check-ins. More follow-up and, yes, more accountability.
It's a fine line in 2025. "That's none of your business!" But it's critical for a healthy team.
Thanks for reading this post. I appreciate you. In return, please share this with those you know who may be interested.
Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately: You’ll notice I’m changing this section up a bit. There are too many enjoyable things in addition to books not to share! I may be late to the party on this (it debuted in 2019), but the “Your Own Backyard” podcast is riveting. I’m not much of a “true crime” guy, but listening along as this notorious disappearance case concludes is highly satisfying. And since the podcast itself was influential in the very trial it covers in season 2, it had a cool meta vibe. (Just like this documentary, one of the best I’ve ever seen…)