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>>Jacqueline Davies: Thank you for joining us, I’m Jacqueline Davies with
Zions Direct and I am here today with Rob Jeppsen, Senior Vice President
with Commercial Loan Sales at Zions Bank. Rob is a winner of the Stevie Award
for ‘banking sales team of the year’ by the American Business Awards, and is
a regular industry author and keynote speaker. This is the second of seven
videos about the Business Performance Series. Thank you so much for joining
us today, Rob.
>>Rob Jeppsen: Thanks for having me back.
>>Jacqueline Davies: I know you had mentioned earlier about the six parts of
the Performance Series. Give us a little bit more detail about the first part.
>>Rob Jeppsen: Day one it’s the building blocks of success, right, you got
to have the foundation. I like to tell our class, or our business owners, if
you’re building a house, you got to start digging holes and pouring concrete first
and it’s hard work, it doesn’t show up and it’s not pretty, but you can’t have
a good house without it - same thing when building your sales process. You can’t
start putting on the really cool, elegant parts of what you are doing unless you
have a really strong foundation. What we found is there are two things that are
the building blocks that you have to build this world-class sales organization
on. One is you have to have a really clear understanding of role and we have to
have a really clearly defined process.
>>Jacqueline Davies: What is most important thing when starting this process?
>>Rob Jeppsen: It is important to understand that there are four levers that will
help your sales organization grow. We like to ask our class members if they can
figure out which one will move the fastest.
The first lever is the aptitudes of the people you hire. What are the natural
gifts they have? Maybe you’ve heard some people are just wired for sales.
The second one is how motivated are they? I define motivation by the person’s
willingness to do whatever it takes to win without cheating.
Third, what skills do they have? Clearly, higher-skilled people can do better,
maybe, than lower-skilled people.
And the last one is what is your perception of your role? I usually will have people
guess which one will move things fastest. Rarely does anybody get that it’s role,
and the reason that this is the case is your most precious resource, your most finite
resource you have is the time of your people. And based on what you role is and your
understanding of your role, that’s how you will define is something high value or low
value, and sometimes it’s almost enough for a company to be successful to have a clear
understanding of what the high-value activities are and do more of them and less of the
low-value activities. That’s why we have to start there.
>>Jacqueline Davies: What are some people doing as far as finding what their role is?
How can they define their own role?
>>Rob Jeppsen: Really good question. We like to do a couple of things. We like to
have the salespeople, or the people inside the organization, say “This is what we think
our role is, and by the way, this is what we think it should be.” Then we like to
go work with management and other leaders in
the company and ask them “What do you think the salespeople’s role is, and by the way,
what do you think it should be?” We look for
gaps. The greater the variability and the greater the gap, the more likelihood there
is that just by tightening up the role, you can
have success. It’s almost that simple. Find out what people think it is versus what it
is, and then start dialogue around that so you
can really firm up what that role should be and then you can match activities to role.
>>Jacqueline Davies: One other thing that you had mentioned earlier was motivation.
How do you keep people motivated once they have established
what their role is?
>>Rob Jeppsen: What we have found is there are some false motivators. A lot of people
think that “I can get a motivational speaker.
I can get them so fired up they’ll go do whatever
it takes to win.” Other people think it’s changes in compensation, that by compensating
people they will fire themselves up and go and do
whatever takes to win. A third false motivator is
contests. You can have people have a contest or a campaign and that will give you a slight
lift, but as soon as campaign’s over that goes away, it doesn’t keep motivation going.
What we found is having clearly defined roles and
activities that will match that role, that leads
to success and success will do two things. You will have internal rewards, internal meaning
“I am good what I do, I like what I do, I am finding fulfillment at what I do.”
And the other is external rewards, you know, sometimes it
is compensation, sometimes it’s commendations that
you get. People say “Wow, you are really good at what you do.” That then drives ongoing
motivation and it fuels it that way. So we like to see motivation come best by having
role that’s tied to success that’s tied to
rewards that then fuels things around.
>>Jacqueline Davies: Thank you so much for joining us today, Rob. It’s been a pleasure
speaking with you.
>>Rob Jeppsen: Thanks for having me.
>>Jacqueline Davies: I am Jacqueline Davies and today we have been talking with Rob Jeppsen
and we hope to see you again next time.