Preaching Sales
Every agent on every one of our teams has KPIs and OKRs to shoot for. Hitting 12 out of 12 monthly targets within a calendar year represents huge success, and invokes a lot of respect. At times, this feeling alone is worth more than gold… And more than cash.
One of our all time top performers, nicknamed The Bishop, has been the 12 for 12 kind of consistent force, hitting 17 consecutive targets at the time this next story took place - in the midst of one of the Bishop’s less stellar months, which, in his case, means being a single book away from hitting his target, on the last day of the month.
After a brief struggle to catch a good lead, he stood up from his desk and made the announcement that would go down in legend among all future salesmen in our company:
“I’ll pay full commission to the next person who picks up a lead and transfers it over to me, whether I book it or not. I’ve got a target to hit.”.
So basically, the Bishop bought a chance at booking a client.
Yeah. This story ends as you might imagine - a teammate transferred a client over, The Bishop entered Wolf of Wall Street mode and booked the client on the same call, hitting his target and continuing his streak. Not for the cash, but for the title of 'King of the Hill'. A title coveted by all, but held only by the likes of Marko 'The Bishop’ Vesic and the bookers he trains and develops today, as sales manager.
All for One
It is the start of March, 2020. We’re breaking our own performance records across the board, hiring a record 18 people within a month, and we’re poised to make the year our own. As we’re sharpening our knives, word starts getting around involving some virus from somewhere far away. The media’s blowing it out of proportion, it’s way too far away, it’s nothing to be worried about, we thought.
Fast forward two weeks, and we’re at the start of what will be the most bizarre period of all of our lives - curfews, quarantines, full blown pandemics, stocked toilet papers - the works.
Before we’ve realized, the entire economy is in a downward spiral, and our plans for expansion are reduced to plans for survival, both figuratively and literally.
What do we do? We’ve hired 18 people while our clients are looking to conserve and downsize, as is the rest of the world. But how do you lay people off at this time? You’d doom them to a search for a new job at the most horrible time imaginable. We couldn’t do that.
Our only recourse here, if we were to stay true to our values, is to take this problem head on, as a unit. So, we held an all-staff meeting, and suggested we all take a temporary 30%-50% pay cut in order to keep our new teammates. Everyone was at liberty to say 'No’ and stay on with their current salary, by the way. But no one did. We shrunk our expenses, evaded any downsizing, and supported our clients (and each other) at full capacity while simultaneously reducing their expenses until we were out of the woods.
Though this time has been turbulent and unstable, we’ve come out of it stronger than ever as a unit. We were now in a position to look back at this ordeal and say to ourselves that we truly walk the walk when it comes to teamwork and the whole 'all for one’ approach.
