Stop Letting Your Sales Reps Do These 7 Things

"Why didn't you make your calls yesterday?" I asked, staring at a Zoom screen. It was directed to a remote sales rep that was hired a few months ago. She was struggling to hit the key number, which is a minimum of 60 calls per day. (Side note: If someone has a lot of proposals to follow up on, you can balance their day like this: 1 hour emails/meetings, 3 hours follow-ups and 4 hours calls (15 per hour x 4 = 60).) She looked at me, quizzically, and said "I was in the sales meeting." Ok, I thought, that's 90 minutes. "How long did that meeting take?" I asked. "It was around 2 and a half hours, maybe more," she said. I was SHOCKED. Why on Earth was the sales manager (who you can read about the firing in this article) taking up all of our salespeople's precious time to have this massive meeting? I learned a lot about structure and efficiency after that meeting, and reset the entire sales meeting structure. Think of it this way: 8 people in a sales meeting, for 1 extra hour, not making 15 calls = 120 calls not being made to grow the company. Let's get into what I've learned you don't want salespeople to do: Quick intro: I run a $10M+ service business that only takes me 2-3 hours a week to manage, thanks in part to a great team of remote sales reps. If you want to know how I did it, just DM me "SOP" and I'll send you my 20-page sales script used by my sales team to generate millions in sales. Tip 1: No Long Weekly Meetings The reason that sales meeting was so long was because the sales manager was not following our process and was looking at every single sale, proposal, etc. You don't need to be updated on everything in the entire sales world. A good dashboard tells you, in a split second, who is "on track" and who is "off track" with their goals. Now, I approach the weekly sales meeting with a focus on just what's important. I go into our CRM, Pipedrive (here's an article going over the benefits of a proper CRM) and organize the proposals by biggest to smallest. I look at the top 3-5 and ask for updates, checking to see the notes written down. If you do this every week, you'll know what's happening and where you might need to provide feedback. What's more important, a $250,000 deal or a $15,000 one? So keep your eye on the big ones. Another element is to cut it off at 1 hour. I did a 90-minute meeting for sales…and it was too long. 60 minutes is plenty. You review everything from the previous week, plus a handful of issues, and get everyone back to what they should be doing: making calls and closing deals. Tip 2: Not Making Calls (Even on "Off Days") I've had reps say "But the school is closed that day," or "It's a US holiday" on a Monday or Friday. Or it's spring break. My reps are calling schools…but I say you STILL need to make your calls aka "outbound contact." But instead of the "outbound contact" being a phone call AND an email, it's just an email. So when they come back into the office you are there, and have shown how good you are at follow-up. This is why there's never a reason to not "make your calls." EVER. Tip 3: Sales Reps Should Not "Build Their List" or "Make a Pipeline" Here's what I've seen in the past (and I'm guilty of this too). "Hi team, it's an off day so we can't make any calls today in the US, so I want you to clean your pipeline, do some research, or data scrape." No. No. No. The purpose of a remote sales rep is to hit the phone hard and make outbound contacts. You hired them because YOU, the owner, don't want to spend 5 hours a day making calls. But you're also the sales manager (if you don't have one). So your job is to organize their leads. I even recommend having a sales admin help out. Organizing leads is a time-consuming, mind-numbing but also important part of keeping your sales rep locked in. I've had my assistant do things like: Find 300 charter schools in California, data scrape using Google Maps their phone number and address, then add them one by one in a very specific way into our CRM and assign them to the correct rep. I can't "group import" this type of thing…because it has to be done very strategically or we have problems like things not being assigned correctly, or two reps calling the same organization twice. It's a mess. Do it right, even if it's done manually. I'm sure A.I. will fix this soon. Tip 4: Asking "How Are You" to Gatekeepers and Decision Makers They've Never Met It's a human instinct that when someone picks up the call, after you introduce yourself, you say "How are you?" On a sales call…it's a waste of everyone's time because: You don't know them! There's no rapport. They want to get off the phone. You're ruining the chance to grab their attention, which is key on a cold call. I find bad salespeople say "how are you?" when they are on a live call. My script even says to not ask this question. Because you can ask that to someone you know…someone you've had a First Time Appointment with. Or that you've spoken to a few times before. Instead, we launch straight into a one-sentence pitch of what we do and how we can help them. That's wayyyy more effective than hearing them say "Good, and you?" and you saying "I'm good, thanks for asking!" and then pitching. Skip the pleasantries, until you've EARNED them. Tip 5: Not Having a Clear Quarterly Goal In my last article I went into how 90-day sprints (or quarterly goals) are the keys to productivity in business and in life. Sales reps need a quarterly goal that is achievable, exciting and realistic. Not all quarters are the same, and often the results in one help the next one get results. Don't have annual goals. Have monthly or quarterly ones. My sales cycle is longer, so quarterly works better than monthly. But if it's smaller sales for $2k, $5k, etc., then go for monthly. My minimum contracts are $15k, and those take longer to close, especially in education. Tip 6: Not Staying on the Script I've spent hours and hours perfecting the sales script. (I've given it away if you DM me.) It's efficient and designed for maximum impact, in the least amount of time, without being too pushy. And it's not just my experience — I bring in the input of my top remote sales rep and they make it better. They share feedback and I listen and incorporate it. So during our daily sales roleplays, we make each person memorize the sales script. They have to know it very well. Also, scripts get tested and refined. Oftentimes, a sales manager writes a script on a Google Doc, but when you say it out loud it's too long and convoluted. Good sales reps follow good scripts. And the best sales reps can be reading the sales script AND make it sound super natural. Tip 7: Not Being Confident So many sales reps lack the confidence required to sound good on a LIVE call. We let these people go pretty quickly, and wonder why they got hired. Confidence is such an underrated skill. It's also tied, tangentially, to sounding "upbeat." You have to be genuinely excited to talk to each gatekeeper or decision maker. You have to believe that the service you sell will help them and resolve their problems. If you have that energy on the phone, it will carry over. That's why tonality is so important. And smiling. And sounding confident. And if you want the SOP my remote sales team used to grow my business to $10M+ per year, that only takes me 2 hours a week to manage, DM me "SOP."