Page 88 - 914INC Q2 - 2016

914INC. Sales Roundtable
86 914INC. Q2 2016
Ryan: There’s no such thing as one- person selling. And I would go so far as to say it’s not only the team, but sales are also generated by the customer. The customer is actually selling while you are selling to them. Example: Whether it’s a husband or a wife or a family, discussions and input from those members helps drive a sale and drive the differences in the level of the sale, the size of
the sale.
Metzger: It’s 100 percent team ef- fort. We’ve embraced this “World Café” concept of knowledge sharing. You get a group of people together and sit around a table and share all of your ideas. But imagine there are 30 other tables in the room also—all trying to figure out how to become better at sales or lifting top-line rev- enue. By the end of this exercise, we have all these ideas that you never would have thought about on your own. Employing the team concept makes your end result, your ultimate product, that much stronger.
Kennedy: While I’m sitting here today, my team is running my busi- ness. Everybody knows every single client, and we all have a role. My role is to be face to face with clients, get- ting listings and selling properties. Then, I have staff who support the listings side and support staff on the buyer’s side and an assistant who does things like getting taxes and property cards and putting out signs. I would never be able to succeed without [my team].
Bagliebter: [We have a] single- point-of-contact approach in our bank. But that is still a team. If you’re working with a client, and one person is the lending expert, and that same
client needs deposit accounts, we have other people who will help the client with that. Your team has to be as responsive as you are, because un- less those people deliver what they are supposed to, your whole effort may fail. So, it’s making sure that you have a really confident group and that everyone follows them.
Bagliebter: We’re not commis- sion-based, but there are sales goals, and there are bonuses. So, the team has certain goals, and if the team makes its goal, the pot is divided [by percentages] based on the positions of people within the team. It works really well because everyone is pull- ing together; everyone gets monthly reports to see how they are doing against their goals, so we are all in the same effort together.
Ryan: At Heineken, we have a salary-plus-bonus commission structure. And it is by team, so people have to support each other in their respective sides of business.
“We recently became a purpose- driven organization, and I’ve
100 percent bought into that. Maybe I could sell houses or sell Heineken, but I don’t think I would be as good at it.”
—Jason Metzger, Vice President, Region Executive, PURE Insurance
Q
Schork: But assuming it’s still
a commission-based model, isn’t there some point at which tension arises from the inherent conflict between a team approach versus the
individual competition for sales?
Metzger: You are seeing less and less of commissions or commission- based sales for a variety of reasons. In financial services, it’s because of [the need for increased] transpar- ency. It’s also because of alignment with your clients—people don’t want to think that you are [getting one] over on them because you’re selling them a product and getting rich off of it. So, a lot of companies are going to fee-based models.
Kennedy: Real estate is typically 100 percent commission; that’s how it works. But I decided to build a different model. The way that I have my team structured
is that everyone is an employee. They get salary and, based on our performance, bonuses for the team, which
are given out quarterly.