Are Your Salespeople Carnivores or Cannibals?

 We're gonna be talking about "are your salespeople carnivores or cannibals?"

Or it could be, are your sales behaviors carnivorous or cannibalistic? So let's talk about this a little bit.  I meet a lot with business owners and talking about how they can grow and scale their business. One of their laments is we need more hunter DNA. We don't need more account managers.

We need people who can bring in new logos so that we can grow the business. And absolutely you do need new logos, particularly when the economy goes down. If you don't have an ability to go out and hunt and get new business in, then you are a cork bobbing on the wave of the markets which will rise and fall, and you don't want to fall when the market falls.

You want to be able to go out and get business, take more market share, and when that market comes back, you're going to be the dominant player. Now, there are other symptoms that would indicate a lack of growth capability. It could be. I hear, well, we've hired five salespeople over the last two years, Mick, and yet our revenues have remained flat.

Or they might say Our overhead costs have risen, but our operating profit has not. So what's going on here?

The brutal truth is that most of your business comes from existing customers and relationships and salespeople. Great salespeople are canny, right? They figure it out. They're, they're going to make money.

They figure out the quickest and easiest way to make sales commissions and cement their place in your organization. So when they come on board, they do their research and identify one or two accounts that exist in your current portfolio and go after them.

 I'm no different. I started my sales career 40 years ago. And I remember going into a, business and I'm looking at the business thinking, where can I make my money? One of the salespeople there, beautiful man, Charles Donald. He actually went to school with Prince Charles. He was very well connected.  lovely, lovely man. And he'd managed to sell a lot of work to food companies in the uk, food manufacturers.

And I thought, hey, I'm gonna go after food manufacturers, because why not? You've got case studies, you've got evidence, you've got relationships.  We butted heads for a little while until I found own little niche.

But you want to avoid that because what happens is that there are only so many relationships and if you spread those relationships Over more people you don't get any net new business. But your salesperson's costs have gone up, so you actually cannibalizing your existing accounts. So what you want are carnivores now, not cannibals. Now I like this distinction because it speaks more to sales DNA than the hunter farmer analogy.

I think farmers get a bit of a bad rap. They're salespeople and they might be called account managers. they are a vital asset and if they're growing their assets. What you want is for the farmer to increase their acreage, so it yields higher revenues and greater profitability year after year. They do have sales DNA. They are salespeople because they build new relationships within their existing accounts. They meet other decision makers, they talk to additional divisions, they sell them additional products and services and hopefully build a robust annuity revenue stream built on deep relationships.

So I celebrate the account managers. I celebrate those people that are selling and expanding your existing relationships.

But what I want to talk about today is avoiding the cannibals who glom onto those accounts that could be served by your very effective farmers.

You need carnivores, the meat eating T-Rex of sales because they're programmed to hunt and kill. Often, you knowthey've chased a sale, they lose interest after salivating over their prey and they move back out in the jungle of the market to go and find the next kill. And that kill can be handed off to one of the farmers who will turn that relationship into a longer one that yields more meat and profit for the business.

The carnivores,  they're interested in the thrill of the of the chase. They're emotional. They're  olfactory, you know, they smell and they're driven by impulse and emotion. And the account managers are a little bit more logical. They play the longer game. They farm those accounts.

They're a little bit more predictable.

But you need, you need the killer. You need the killer out there in the market. And I'm sure any business owner you want, you want killers, you want that T-rex, you want them stomping out there and bringing in that new business. And If you are a carnivore, right, you, you remember when you, when you first started, you were hungry.

You went and chased, you ripped the meat off the carcass of those prospects, and after a while you've developed some accounts. And you could farm those accounts and take it a little bit easy and you become a little bit more, you know, fat, right? You don't have to go out and hunt because you've got all of this other stuff that just comes your way because you brought those relationships in and you kind of own those relationships.

Well, if you, if you are in that situation, you're doing yourself  a disservice. You want to reactivate carnivorous, DNA, you know, you get the most thrill from hunting. Yeah, it's a little harder, but that's what you were designed to do. That's what great salespeople are down, are designed to do. You need to go and chase.

You're going go find that work and bring it in. Rip it to shreds and be the  carnivore that that's inside of you. 

There's a couple of things that you can do to either reactivate your carnivorous DNA or if you are an owner and you want more sales hunting going on in your business, right?

The number of things that you need to do as an owner or even as an individual. Right.

1. You gotta be clear on what you want them to hunt.

Or if you are an individual contributor, you're a sales carnivore, you need to be clear in your own mind. I asked salespeople, I asked the carnivores, what, who are you gonna chase?

What, what's your plan? They don't have a written plan. You gotta have a written plan. And if you're an owner, I see  the tail wagging the T-Rex, right? The, the sales carnivores. Go and hunt whatever they like and expect you, the owner to be grateful for the business that they bring in. And so your strategy, your business strategy, your growth strategy, your customer portfolio is a result of their carnivorous inclinations and not your design.

 You gotta be very, very careful with carnivores cuz they'll just go and they'll go and find an elephant. Right. They'll go and hunt that elephant and that elephant takes forever to catch. And then it, it takes forever to, cut it up and it bec and it becomes you know, the cash collection on those projects is, is, is long.

The sales hunting cycle is long. The project delivery cycle is long. When you want some gazelle's. Or, or cheetahs. You don't want lions and tigers or, or elephant, so you've gotta be clear. So  number one, you've gotta be clear in your own mind about what you want to hunt. Otherwise, anything looks good.

And as an owner, you need to direct these predators to the right places.

2. You've got to be able to flush out the right prey from their hiding places into the olfactory range of your carnivores. Y

You want them to smell, you want 'em to smell that prey, but it's hiding somewhere.

And if, if you don't bring it out, then they may not discover it.

there are two, two sales processes. There's:

• getting to hello.
• And hello to close.

Now, most organizations focus their efforts on the hello to close part. You remember that Jerry McGuire movie where he comes back to, see Rene Zellweger and he starts talking and  he's just  blabbering, and then the end, she just says, you had me at Hello.

 The hello to close is a little easier because you're in front of a warm body. You are already having a conversation, but the, the challenging sales process is getting to Hello. That's where the carnivores need to be.  But even carnivores need a little bit of help. What you should do as an owner is to have somebody who can create target lists.

You've gotta be able to identify the kind of work that you want, the kind of prospects that you want, and then build a list and then warm up that list. You could have somebody internally in your organization who's emailing those types of people. That's. Lead Generation Look, hiring, paying and retaining sales hunters is expensive right then, and there's no point going to all that expense if you're not prepared to invest in generating leads for them to chase.

It's akin to putting the scent of blood in front of the carnivore. Just spend some time on lead generation, getting your message out, posting on social media, sending emails out. Now, if you don't have a lead generation capability and you're not feeding leads to your carnivores, then you need to talk to me.

I can help you with that.

And I see it's, it's one of the weakest aspects. In most, , businesses. Their lead generation is not systematic and it's not effective, and you are not giving enough scent to these killers.

3. Carnivores need to be in the hunting grounds in the field, not the office.

So you need to take their desk away. If you're an owner failing that, take their chair away. They'll soon get fed up of standing and they'll go out there and hunt. They need to be out there on job walks. They need to be out there on site. They want to be having coffee with prospects, lunch with vendors, and soirees with associations.

They don't want to be in the office tied up with a lot of admin. This is another thing that I see is that salespeople , do a lot of administrative work. You, you should take a little bit of that administrative load off of the carnival, right, because you want them out there. Here's the thing, it is easier to double the number of sales conversations that your carnivores are having then doubling their conversion rate.

So track the number of meetings that your salespeople are having it, it won't be that many and it's very easy to up that significantly where it's very, very difficult to give salespeople the skills and the capabilities to actually move the dial even a few points on conversion rates.

 The critical element here is get The carrnivores out in the field, getting them in front of more targets, let them sniff more of that scent and they will close more work.

Hope you've enjoyed this episode. In summary, don't let your carnivores turn into cannibals. Even the best sales people will start to try and find an easy way, and they'll start harvesting their existing accounts. You want them out there. You want that Carnivorous, DNA to be fully, fully expressed. So you need to help them. You need to help yourself. You need to remind yourself what you're good at, and you need to go make more of those cold calls, but you need an organization that's got some leads.

Feed them. Feed them the leads, give them the scent, put that little handkerchief with the smell of the prey in front of them and they'll go. You need to do that for yourself.

So invest in lead generation. Have a lead generation system. I can help you with that. Take away some of the administrative load, get them to double their number of sales conversations and your business will grow exponentially. Hope you enjoyed this week's episode.