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Hello and welcome to the show. Today we're going to be looking at organizational issues that lead to declining sales performance and of course what to do about it. If this is your first time of listening to the show, then you have a few episodes that you need to get caught up on. One of them was where we looked at people related issues that causes your sales performance to go down. So that's when your sales people are the problem or maybe when you are the problem as the owner of the business or as the sales manager.
Then we also looked at process related issues. You know, perhaps you guys don't have an efficient selling framework in place. You know, sometimes those are the problems, the reasons why teams are not performing. And then today we're going to look at organizational issues, problems with the organization itself that can lead to sales people performing poorly or to lead to overall sales not being all that great. So when we're looking at organizational issues, it can be a whole host of things.
And remember, that's the reason why I said in previous episodes that I am not a business management consultant. So there's a limit to how much, how much of how will I put it? There's a limit to the opinions that I can have when it comes to this topic because it's not my area of specialty. But of course I can have opinions on things that tie in particularly to sales. So let's go ahead and look at some of the organizational issues.
Now, sometimes one organizational issue that you have that is leading to poor sales performance for the business as a whole and for the sales team is because there's a misalignment between sales and marketing. Now we have roles in the business that are tied to sales. Well, the difference usually is that the sales role is the person who is interacting with the end user, with the final customer. So back to the example that I
made, the example that I'd used in the previous podcast, I think about a woman owning an E tree, for instance. So the person who is interacting with the customers who come into the E tree, that's a sales role. Or if she has someone who goes out to other organisations to see if she can get catering opportunities, that's a sales role. While the marketing role is concerned with broadcasting, advertising, publishing messages out to the whole world to let everyone know that this business is around and this is what this business is about and this is how this business can help you.
So that's the main difference. Marketing is focused on a whole. Marketing is very public. You're talking to everyone, you're broadcasting messages, you're advertising. So excuse me. And then for sales, sales is one-on-one, you're talking to a particular customer. So you find that because these functions are different, most businesses try and unknowingly split them apart. But The thing is, they should be working together and well, they should be working together.
So ultimately that's what we should be trying to do. We should try and see how our sales people and our marketing people are working under the same roof. So yes, in the office, they might have different sections of the office, but whether it's a daily or on a weekly basis, the sales and marketing people ought to be sitting together and having conversations. And the reason why is because if you let sales and marketing go off in different silos, they end up with different goals and they end up with different motivations.
So that's the main reason why they don't collaborate. That's if you leave everybody apart. And that's because marketing, if you understood, if you understand the difference that I just tried to sure. Now between sales and marketing, you can see that marketing is always concerned about reach. How many people did we reach? How many 100 people? How many thousands, How many millions? How many? This marketing people are always about reach, reach, reach.
They want to see how many people did the message get to. Now, since sales is a one-on-one thing, sales people are not focused on how many millions of people saw it. They're concerned with this particular person that I'm talking to. How close is this person to placing an order? So a marketing or a social media manager for an egg farm, for instance, will be happy if they do something and they get one million impressions on Instagram.
But for the sales team, one million impressions on Instagram doesn't mean Jack. If we got one million impressions on Instagram but then we didn't even get 100 orders from that, the sales team thinks, look, that's rubbish. So yes, one million impressions, but how much money did we get? So you can see that if you do not have a way of making sure that both teams are collaborating in your business, then you can see the difficulties that are going to arise because the marketing team is looking at impressions of the sale teams.
The sales team, they're focused on leads and orders. A lead is someone who put up his hand to say I might be interested in the product or the service. So that's all the sales person is concerned about. Who raised their hand and how much are these people going to pay? So the solution is to plan your marketing campaigns with sales people in the room, because the marketing people will come up with all these brilliant, wonderful ideas to see how we can make a million people see what it is that the business does.
But then the sales team is going to be looking about looking at these plans, and they're going to be focused on conversions. And the conversion is just what is the next clear step that is going to take people closer to the sale. So if the marketing people are there and you, the business owner are there and you're prepared to answer these questions, then you can see that you wouldn't just be about generating a campaign that is going to bring 1,000,000 people to the website because the sales people are going to say, OK,
fine, if 1,000,000 people come to the website, what next? It is then that you guys can sit down and say, oh, OK, if 1,000,000 people come to the website, then there should be a landing page. From the landing page, they're going to drop their e-mail addresses and their phone numbers. And if you take this extra step, it means they might be interested. So this is the point at which sales and marketing people should. Now this is the stage at which sales people should call up and try and see if you can do business together.
So the solution is just to make sure that sales people are in the room when we're planning all these fancy marketing campaigns because marketing people will always be concerned about reach. Did we see 1,000,000 people? Did we see 2 million people? Did we see 3 million people, 3,000,000, Four million impressions. It's success. And in fact, the bigger the impressions, the more successful the marketing team is going to feel.
But for sales people, if we did not get leads, somebody calling in, writing in or coming to the office to say how much are you guys available, do you do this, then that is not a success. And if not able to close business from that, then that is not a success. Now, of course, there's that whole thing of are the sales people properly trained and do they know how to handle these kinds of conversations? But these are things we already addressed on the first day when we were doing these series.
We started off with the people part of the equation. So do we have the right people? Are they properly trained? So the solution, make sure that sales and marketing people are in the same room when these things are, when you're coming up with these ideas. Now another management problem, I already addressed it I think in people. Was it people or process? I can't remember when we talked about compensation. So sometimes the organization has an inadequate compensation plan, compensation plan that is not enough, it's unfair, doesn't involve motivate people.
The page structure is wonky and since we've already addressed that in future sorry in previous episodes, there's no point in going that bringing that up again. But the summary of this is whatever it is, don't mess with their competition compensation sales people's conversation because sales is hard enough. So stick to the plan. If you said monthly you're giving everybody 200K, then you know, on the 21st, on the 29th, make sure you pay everybody that 200 K.
But if what you agreed with them was there's going to be a base and then plus a Commission and then the base is paid on the 29th, you know, 100K, then the Commission is paid. When you reconcile accounts, you know, two weeks later, then stick to the plan. On the 29th, give them their base. Two weeks later, give them the Commission at their end. So when you start mocking up with things, start trying to change things in the middle of 1/4 or something, then this problem.
So just stick to the plan, but then things change. When things change, give the sales team a head up. Okay guys, girls, this is what we agreed to. So yes, I'm going to pay you the 100K now in two weeks, I'm going to pay you the Commission. But this is what is happening. Things are getting tough in the economy or this is how things are doing me. Things are doing me like this. Things are tricking me like this. So please, in two weeks time we're going to review.
That's a different thing than someone thinking it's the 29th. I'm supposed to get 100K and then 80 K hits their account. And then two weeks later they think my Commission is supposed to be 150 K and then next thing you know, 132 K hits their account. So we need to make sure that, excuse me now, we don't miss with people's pay structure and their motivation. Now, of course, it's efficient sales support that's not having enough support for the sales people.
We've also spoken about this in the previous episode, so no need to go into this in much detail. But basically this is where there's not administrative support or technical assistance for the sales team that you have. This also creates a lack of motivation and can cause things to go sideways because sales is hard. So it's not a good thing when somebody goes out, does his best, brings in a customer hands about the customer and then customer service people are now behaving one kind towards the customer or the customer has a problem and then the technicians are not going out on time to resolve the issues.
You know, these sorts of things mess with people's motivation. Like why am I going out stressing myself getting all this business. I bring the customer in house and then in house. Now you guys, the ones that the guys are not messing up, you're messing up my reputation. So we need to make sure that there's administrative support, Technical Support, that's for those of you who are in the technical space. So of course, well, actually even for people beyond the technical space, because back to the restaurant example, you can go out and you can talk to maybe Ministry of Finance or something and you find out that the department is organising a dinner to celebrate the HO DS
birthday or something. And you bring the deal back to the restaurant. And then customer service is now messing up or restaurant staff is now messing up, you know, they're showing up late or maybe they didn't come dressed tidy or things like that. So yeah, these are problems that all businesses can face. So yeah, sales is hard. So provide admin support, provide Technical Support, provide customer service support, provide whatever support it is that the sales people need.
Also, recognition and support go a long way. When somebody's doing a good job, you know, call them, you say hi equally, I saw what you did, you're a correct guy, you know, keep it up. Christiana, I saw what you did. You're correct, babe, I appreciate you. Keep it up. Recognition and support also go a long way. Then we have already done prior episodes on sales enablement. So check the episodes that we've done so far. We have over 800 and sorry, 910
episodes so far. So just check. And there's a lot there about motivation, pay, sales enablement, things like that, and you get caught up to speed. So like I said, there's lots of stuff when it comes to management and organizational issues that can fall your hand as a business or as a business owner and negatively impact your sales performance. If you want a whole list of things that could go wrong, you should be talking to a management consultant if you have any concerns.
But after you do that, of course, you can call me up and let's see what we can do about sales. So that's all pretty much for today. Then next you should be doing either listener questions or the list of topics I think are important. I'll have to check my my handy notebook, see what question is next and then I will move on to that. But either way, we should be expecting some new questions, especially related to artificial intelligence.
And that's because I'm going to be talking at the SMEV con. That's a small and medium scale something I can't remember some conference anyway. And the topic this is about artificial intelligence and how you can use it to improve your business. So most likely I'm going to get a bunch of questions when I'm speaking at that forum, lots of AI related questions. And when I get those questions over there, I'll do my best to answer the questions over there.
But then I'll also be making podcast episodes over here so we can share in the goodness that we talked about over there. I'll speak to the organizers and see if I can get the audio and put it in the podcast feed over here. But if they don't give it to me, then expect a bunch of questions to follow that will be artificial intelligence related and how we can use that to grow our businesses. So that's all for today. Please connect with me on WhatsApp.
The phone number is 08064662140 and the country code is +234. Then connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Tavishima Ayede, I'm the host of the show. You can get the correct spelling of my name. So you can search for the right person on LinkedIn by using the link where you're currently listening to this episode. My e-mail address is there. Thank you guys for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.