Category: Leverage

How to Break the Sales Plateau Glass Ceiling

Have you reached that point where your sales efforts bear no fruit? When you do everything by the book but still feel the results you get are not proportionate to the time and resources you put in?

Well, being the results oriented person you are, you have thought of downsizing and having a small sales force that do more with little expenses.

However, even downsizing isn’t the answer because it will leave your sales team fatigued and disengaged. Also, downsizing comes with a permanent fear of “you don’t know who is next”. People working in permanent fear of job loss shift their attention to their career advancement plans— not profits for the company.

Sales is important, it is what keeps the diesel engines running, workers coming, and landlords away. If you have hit a sales plateau, a quick fix isn’t what you are looking for— you need a sustainable jumpstarting strategy to keep the juice flowing.

Here are 3 tips to break the sales plateau glass ceiling

1. Pay attention to the process

One major reason that get most sales teams stuck is because the leadership is focusing on the results rather than the process. In the end, the only things that you remain with is a high expectation and a sense of entitlement to results.

You might say, “But I pay them to do the job, I should get the results”, but do you pay attention to the efforts they put in?

In his book of strategy, The Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches that the war isn’t won in the battlefield, but every war is won before it is fought. It is healthy routines that fuel the pursuit.

Ask yourself these questions; How will I keep my sales people motivated to keep the chase alive? Is there an accepted reward and punishment strategy in place? What are our daily/weekly/monthly/yearly sales targets?

Investing in the process, helps you forecast and keep your expectations in proportion with periodic milestones. It is by focusing on the process that you will know loose bolts to tighten and broken conduits to fix.

2. Keep Learning

The shifting business grounds requires that you keep learning. The market dynamics do not stay the same for years, in fact, with social media, email marketing and all the ‘new generation’ lead strategies, what worked last year might not work today!

You must therefore keep learning to be in favourable position when the complacent business owners are getting a sales snag.

Grant Cardone, a best-selling author of many marketing books says; “Even a veteran sales person needs to continue to read, educate and train in order to keep skills sharp,”

To retain your clients you need what works to satisfy them, and to gain new ones, you must know what works in getting their attention and how to meet their demands.

3. Make Prospecting a priority

How serious are you prospecting? Without prospecting you remain with the only customers you have had for years, and while it is important to prioritize customer retention, it is even more important to add new customers.

Prospecting helps you land customers who will be more profitable as you have created credibility serving your old clients.

Most importantly, prospecting keep your sales force in the ‘hunting spirits’, it kills complacency and is a motivating factor to your sales team.

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Why You Don’t Want a Salary

I know I have already done a post on passive income. I was sitting down one day and wrote out some more by hand. Sorry if some of this is a repeat.

Passive Income vs. Active Income

What is passive income and why do you want it? Basically passive income is making money while you sleep or vacation. How would you like to go on vacation and come back with as much or more money as when you left? (And not because you hit the lottery while you were on vacation.)

Active Income

This is basically your salary, your paycheck. The problem is that you are trading time for dollars. You only get paid for the hours that you work. If the work is something that a lot of people can do, it doesn’t pay well. For example, washing dishes or digging ditches. You can be really good at it and you still won’t make much money.

The more unique your skills, the more you can make per hour. Lawyers make $200-500 per hour and sometimes more. A doctor is similarly highly paid because of their specialized knowledge. But even among doctors, some with unique skills are paid much more than other doctors.

BUT. They still only get paid while they are working. If they take time off or go on vacation, they aren’t making any money. So their income is capped by the hours they can work unless they have another source of income.

Passive Income

Passive income is not dependent on how much time you put in, but on how smart you are in how you use your time, resources and money. Passive income can take various forms. Following are a number of examples of passive income.

One way many people do it is investing in stocks or bonds. The assumption is that you will receive income from dividends and also that the value of the stock will go up over time. The problem is that sometimes the value drops so you not only aren’t getting passive income, you are losing money.

Another way is to loan money and earn interest. A wise person once told me that smart people (and often also wealthy people) earn interest and that foolish people (and usually poor) pay interest.

Hard money lenders

One example of this are hard money lenders. These can be anybody. There is a doctor locally who is a well known hard money lender. They lend money to people rehabbing houses. Frequently they take a fee of 5% of what is loaned and the interest rate is often 12-15%. Why would someone borrow at such high rates and with such high fees? Hard money lenders are more flexible than banks. (But they aren’t stupid. If you don’t perform, they will end up owning your house, although for most, this isn’t their goal.) You don’t need all the paperwork associated with a bank loan. It can be done much faster. And what if you have a ding on your credit and can’t get a bank loan? The hard money lender only cares about if the deal makes sense and not your credit rating.

You would never use a hard money loan to buy a house and rent it out. You would lose your shirt. The loan makes sense when you buy a house, take 1-3 months to fix it up, then sell it. So you are only paying the high interest rates for a short while and if you did the rehab right, you have significantly increased the value of the house and you will make a nice profit despite the high interest rates.

But, for the hard money lender, rather than making 2% interest in a bank account, they are getting 5% of what they loan and then 12-15% interest. And, if the rehabber is fast, they can do this with their money 3-4 times a year. It only takes them a few years to double their money.

Book and Music Royalties

If you write a book or write a song or sing a song that is popular, you can earn a lot of money on the royalties. Of course, many people write books and songs that aren’t that popular and never make much money. But the idea is that you put in the time on a one time basis and then you can make money from it for years to come.

TV and Movie Royalties

Similar to book and music royalties. If an actor is in a TV show or a movie, they will get royalties whenever it is shown or a DVD is purchased. If it is popular in reruns, they can make money for years for the short period of time they did the acting. However, this isn’t true for all actors. Performing on stage is like having a salary. You only get paid for the performances you act in and the salary is limited by the size of the audience in the theater. But for TV and movies there are two effects that make for a much greater income. The first is that the audience can be in the millions and therefore the pay is greater. The second has already been mentioned in that you not only make money at the time, but each time it is show in the future which can’t happen with a play or musical.

Inventors, Patents and Royalties

Another way is to be an inventor. You can then patent the product or process and license it to a company who pays you a royalty for the use of the invention. Another way is to create a company around the invention that grows and if run well, allow you to step away while other people run the day to day business.

Starting a business

Some people start a business and they spend even more time working on  it than they did when they had a job working for another company. The key is to create systems so that other people can be trained to do the work and you don’t have to be putting in crazy hours all the time. There is a great book on this topic called the eMyth Revisted by Michael Gerber.

Software

Another way is to write a piece of software or an app or plugin which people then buy. Or you can set up a marketing / sales funnel on the internet which brings in leads or sales automatically for you.

These are just a few ideas for passive income.

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TV Shows & Game Shows Business Model

TV Shows Business Model

The other day, House of Cards was filming at a church right around the corner from where we live in Baltimore. Quite a site, with trailers all over the parking lot, food trucks, generators, limos, hundreds of people from the actors to all the support staff.

There were tens of thousands of dollars being spent on this and it was just one scene from one show. How do they afford this?

You, The Viewer / Consumer

It is all thanks to you. Between the cable channel fees you pay (no wonder they are high) and the advertisers who want to sell to you, that adds up to be able to pay for everything. It would never work if they were putting on a play with a small audience, or even a big audience for a play. That is nothing in comparison to the millions of people who watch the television shows.

Advertisers

How are companies going to sell their products? They can send you direct mail, put up billboards, or do newspaper, magazine, radio or television ads. And, more recently, online ads. The appeal of television are the large audiences. With television and a number of these others, you can also target your audience. For instance, you probably wouldn’t put an ad for tampons into a dirt bike magazine. You would put an ad for dirt bikes or related products.

Advertisers will pay a lot because of the size of the market and the ability to target the viewer based on surveys that allow the producer of the show and the advertisers to know the demographics of the viewers.

TV Game Shows

Shows like Wheel of Fortune must be an advertiser’s dream. Not only do you have the ads during the commercials, but the whole show is pretty much a commercial. Each night there is a car that the contestants can win that is plugged on the show. Then there is the trip to someplace that is also plugged. Don’t think the show pays for those. Those are paid for by the car company, or the cruise line or travel company. It can be more effective than an ad because people get up to go to the bathroom during ads or go to the kitchen to get a snack. With the in show placement, they know you are going to watch, and it comes off psychologically different than an ad. The trusted hosts are pushing the product.

Between the money from the car companies, the travel companies, the advertisers, there is more than enough money to pay the contestants. Plus you only have to pay the 1 or 2 hosts and the crew that films and a set that tends to stay the same on most shows. It is cheaper to make than a TV drama. I always did wonder though about Do You Want to be a Millionaire. It always seemed that they gave away more money than other shows I was familiar with.

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Are Sports Players Overpaid?

Do you think sports players are paid too much? Why are they paid as much as they are? Is it just because they are good at what they do? If so, why does a professional lacrosse player with tremendous talent have to work a job as well as play lacrosse, whereas a baseball or football player makes enough money to retire after a few years of playing if they want to?

And why are they paid so much more than people who have other jobs who work just as hard. It can’t be because of physical danger. Otherwise we would pay police and firemen and miners a lot more money. Many people don’t understand it and are angered by it, like this article in TeenInk.

It is because of the leverage they bring. People like watching the games. Lots of people! Companies need to sell their products and they are always looking at different ways to market and advertise their products. So the large audience that the athlete’s generate is very attractive to the advertisers.

It is like a cycle that reinforces and gets stronger as it goes along. The companies advertise on television and radio because they know they have a large audience and they can determine some general interests of the audience so they know which products to target. The radio and television companies then pay the teams for the right to broadcast the games. The larger the audience, the more they will pay.

So that is why football and baseball teams can afford to pay so much more than a lacrosse team for instance.

But once this is set up, you have a lot of people with a vested interest in having it continue and helping it to grow. If the audience grows, advertiser will pay more, the teams will receive more money and the athletes will be paid more. The local newspapers, even though they aren’t directly involved in the way radio and TV are paying fees to air the game, they write about the games and the athletes because it helps sell newspapers. The writers and the TV and radio announcers have an interest in promoting the sport and games as well because it gives them a job and the more popular the sport, the more they are likely to get paid. Just not as much as the athlete’s.

Before they formed unions, the athlete’s were actually underpaid. If their abilities get enough people watching that the advertisers, the TV and radio stations and the teams are making millions or billions of dollars, the athlete’s should be getting a cut of that.

It is similar to television stars. The more people who watch a show, the more the actors will be paid.

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