It is no secret that I have long been a proponent of having enough “Feet on the Street,” the simple concept that a station or a cluster has to have the critical mass of sellers necessary to make enough calls to generate enough business to hit top line revenue budgets.

Recently, some of Radio’s most visible groups, large and small, have chosen to plant their flags firmly in a different place, settling on the idea of reducing the overall size (and cost) of their sales teams by using senior sellers exclusively, ridding themselves of newer, less senior, lower-performing sellers and/or not hiring inexperienced sellers in the first place. Most visible among these is Clear Channel, whose Bain and Company investor/advisors have made it clear that they think newer, lower performing sellers have a bad Return On Investment (ROI.) Another group going this way is a well respected, big grossing, small market Wisconsin/Michigan operator who says, flat out, that he doesn’t have the time necessary to train newbies, so he just doesn’t hire any. Hey, at least he’s honest about it!

While I have issues with both of these approaches, for the sake of this article, I'm going to accept their positions (however grudgingly) and instead offer both some “words of warning” and some management and training advice that might help both the managers and the sellers get the most out of the difficult situation that they face together.

Here’s a ditty I learned while working with Ken Greenwood, Norm Goldsmith and Chris Lytle years ago – The Four Stages of Learning a Skill:

1) You don’t know what you don’t know.

2) You know what you don’t know.

3) You know what you know.

4) You forget what you know.

It is true, new hires don’t know what they don’t know, so we have to train them. The breakthrough comes when new hires learn enough to reach Stage 2: Suddenly, they know what they don’t know!

The ones who reach this level, who come to this realization and have the desire and wherewithal to seek enlightenment, just might make it to Stage 3: You know what you know.

These are the sellers who have a chance to really become top performers, the best of the best. And it becomes a tremendously effective feedback loop, because these sellers who “know what they know” are even more keenly aware of “knowing what they don’t know” and, in fact, often seek it out, wanting to broaden their horizons and sharpen their skills. A seller with curiosity is on the launching pad to success.

As sellers succeed, they usually begin to follow a natural progression to some form of specialization, either by following the path where they are most successful and/or the path of least resistance. Either way, these now specialized senior sellers face fewer and fewer situations where they “don’t know” and more and more where, whether correct or not, they will utilize what they know rather than admitting to something they don’t. Specialization also leads these sellers to stop using many of the skills they learned in the training process. Suddenly, they begin to reach Stage 4: They forget what they know.

That’s all well and good, as long as nothing changes and these senior sellers continue to work and succeed in the specialized areas where they are comfortable. Those are, almost by definition, the type of accounts that don’t require these senior sellers to use what they have forgotten, what they no longer know.

There are lots of these sellers out there, many of whom were making very good livings and hitting their numbers month after month, and year after year. The operative word here is “were;” they were making very good livings, as long as everything stayed the same. But nothing is the same these days, is it? Nothing is as it was for most senior sellers, especially those who have been “mailing it in” for years. For a senior seller to find him or herself suddenly at Stage 4 can be very scary. And, it is an equally scary place for those managers and owners who have allowed experienced sellers to “mail it in,” accepting skills that had obviously become less than sharp. Because now the feedback loop takes Stage 4 sellers and their managers – those who have forgotten what they know – and takes them straight back to Stage one, where once again, they literally don’t know what they don’t know.

Let’s look at a real world scenario (all too real for some) where this is taking place. You may remember that in my last column, “Bringing Senior Sellers on to your Team” , I spoke of the unforeseen consequences of Clear Channel’s huge reduction in sellers that took place around the first quarter of this year. At that time, Clear Channel released many of their sellers (up to 40% in some markets), generally retaining only higher performing senior sellers. The active accounts of those released were divided up among these retained sellers. The immediate result was a huge reduction in New Business. The bottom just fell out. Admittedly, this was in the first and second quarter of 2009, about as brutal a selling environment as any of us have ever seen, but the situation was made even worse at the effected Clear Channel properties. Here’s why:

First off, the truth is that in Radio the majority of most sales team’s New Business Development and Prospecting efforts come from newer and more recently hired sellers. As they work to build their account lists (what in most industries is historically called the “book of business”), they use and practice and hone the prospecting skills and processes that they have learned in their early training. The best of these newer sellers know all about their stations and are wonderful at telling its story because the information is fresh in their minds from being drummed into their heads. Though these young sellers are very good at the lead up to a sale, they often need to be accompanied by sales management to help close a deal.

With senior sellers, the situation is usually just about the opposite. It has generally been years (and often decades) since these big shot AEs have been forced to do any real prospecting, any actual “New Business Development.” Concurrently, it has been years or decades since they've had any formal training on how to prospect. Their knowledge of station capabilities has long been restricted to the needs of their “book of business.” In other words, they don’t remember how to find clients, don’t understand what the clients need when they do stumble on one and even if they do figure out what the client needs, they don’t know the capabilities of their stations to fill those needs. Stage 4, meet Stage 1: “They've forgotten what they know” meets “they don’t know what they don’t know.” The feedback loop comes around to kick ‘em in the butt.

Fixing this problem takes formal, individualized instruction and time, lots of time. Getting senior sellers to admit that they need a refresher in the basics is way easier said than done. Unlike new hires, it’s usually not a good idea to treat all your senior sellers the same. With a new hire, you can almost always start with the assumption that you know what they don’t know, because they usually don’t know anything. With senior sellers, they generally still know some things but have forgotten many others. This calls for individualized instruction because, “There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.”

The only appropriate and effective way to figure out where your senior sellers need help is for the sales manager to make calls with them, lots of calls, week after week. I can hear the grumbling associated with this statement, especially from sales managers, who “don’t have the time” to make calls with senior sellers. That’s horse manure. Making calls with your sellers is the sales manager’s job, especially now that you know that they don’t know but you're not sure what it is that they don’t know. And don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that these senior sellers know, because they don’t; they've returned to Stage 1: They don’t know what they don’t know!

Here’s a four-step plan to help return your senior sellers to high-performance:

1) Sales performance improvement for senior sellers is not available in a single workshop or seminar; it requires relearning both the appropriate skills and when to use them, reinforced over a period of time.

2) Seller performance is best coached from the field. Game plans can be created from what is found in sales reports, but if you want effective change, do it in “live fire” conditions. Repetition is often vital.

3) Sales Managers are the critical link to rebuilding the skills and confidence of your senior sellers. Sales managers should spend at least 7% of their time x number of salespersons in the field; if you have 6 sellers in the field, 42% of your time should be spent with them. If you are a GM or an owner and you disagree with this, I'd suggest you go off alone for awhile and think about your career path.

4) Sales management compensation should be restructured to recognize and reward success in re-building the skills of you best sellers. Make sure that your bonus model for both sellers AND their managers reflects this idea.

Senior sellers are the foundation on which we have long built Radio’s sales success. But just like the foundation of a building, if you don’t do the required maintenance when trouble is spotted, very bad things can happen. If you want to get maximum performance from your sales team, you must develop individualized training programs, all while holding your Senior Sellers to a single set of very clear standards. That’s a tough balancing act, but after what we've been through over the past year, it is an act I think most of us will be willing to try.

When it comes to our Senior Sellers, Radio’s Sales Managers are at Stage 2: They know what they don’t know. It is high time to move to Stage 3, eh?