We work with company executives who believe it's insane to have 20 percent of their salespeople closing 80 percent of their sales, who are sick of revolving-door sales turnover, who are tired of the high cost of lost opportunity, who refuse to waste more money on pointless training and who want to eliminate every bit of this madness forever.

If you are such an executive, spend the next 60 seconds reading the following summary on our thinking, then call us if you want to hear more.

Why This Madness Exists

Two Sales Team Models Exist

• Me-Based Model: Salespeople function independently, win or fail alone, and get rewarded based on individual accomplishments.
  
• We-Based Model: Salespeople function as a unit, win or fail as a unit, and get rewarded as a unit -- just like everyone else at the company.
  

You Get What You Reward

• Me-Based Model: When you build a commission-based sales team, you reward individualistic thinking -- each salesperson thinking of his or her own commissions first -- and create a me-centric group merely pretending to be a team.
   
  This model attracts two types of salespeople: 1) leaders who thrive on competition, who love money and whose egos cannot tolerate being anything but the best; 2) followers who enjoy blending in, who are happy with average pay and who prefer to leave their job at the office.
   
  This model also rewards salesdrip behavior -- "If I fib just a bit, I might close the deal" -- which eventually results in an erosion of ethics across the entire group.
   
  When you reward individualistic behavior, you will always end up with a mix of 20 percent of the team closing 80 percent of the business, because for the first group to be truly happy the second group must exist. Unfortunately, this 80-20 pattern also adds to the erosion of ethics as the second- and third-tier salespeople struggle to keep up.
  
• We-Based Model: When you build a salary-based sales team (rewarding your salespeople the same way you reward all other employees at your company), you get an all-in-it-together model of selling that promotes openness, honesty, group-centric thinking and professionalism, and attracts collaborative people (leaders and followers) who thrive on teamwork and camaraderie.
   
  This creates a team result founded in the ethical standards set by top executives, and gives those executives total control over that result, because to change the results, you simply change the system the team uses, not the team itself.
  

Breaking Sales Barriers By Breaking The Commission Mindset

Your company's employees, you included, are rewarded as a group, win as a group and lose as a group, and we think it's sheer lunacy to build a sales team that is any different.

However, we don't call it "Honest Selling" for nothing, so we'll end with a bit of brutal reality. While the end-game -- having a sales team that produces predictable, controllable, repeatable success while maintaining high ethical standards -- is wonderful, the journey from a Me-Based team to a We-Based team is not for the faint of heart. It takes dedicated effort and comes with tons of transitional pain.

Of course, true innovation always does.