Distractions can prevent your staff from hitting their individual sales goals and the sales goals of the department. That’s why they need a plan to be productive and understand how to prioritize their activities. The plan should create more consistency with their sales and should make their day more effective, more productive and more enjoyable.

To accomplish this, you must assess the following:

• How well do your staff members serve their purpose? The membership sales staff’s departmental purpose is to sell and grow memberships. Their activities during the day should reflect that.
• How well does your staff organize and stick to their tasks?
• Can they tell the difference between what is urgent and what is important?
• Have they created and perfected a sales structure and process that is second nature and creates systematic consistency?
• Do they leverage their time to make money or are they distracted?

To be successful, your staff must understand what is important and what is urgent. In “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey says that “important” means a task |whose completion would significantly contribute to the key aims and objectives of the organization while “urgent” means a task that appears to require immediate attention.

When you complete an important task, you are being effective at achieving goals. When you complete a lot of urgent tasks, you are being efficient.

Important tasks include:

• Following up on leads
• Selling by walking around (SBWA), twice per day for 15 minutes at a time
• Calling to confirm appointments
• Attending sales meetings
• Producing sales reports

Urgent activities include:

• Taking an incoming call that should last no longer than 3 minutes
• Giving a tour to someone who has just walked in
• Meeting with prospects
• Responding to Internet leads
• Following up with new guests
• Handling any in-person member requests that fall outside the realm of an administrative person at the club

Each member of your sales staff should create a plan for their day, week and month. This will require collaboration with other members of the sales staff.

Daily sales activities may include:

• Three rounds of follow-up calls
• Current member calls
• Confirmation calls
• SBWA twice a day
• Lead-generating activities
• Five appointments each day
• Three sales each day
• Administrative tasks
• Sales performance tracking, analysis and repositioning



Your sales staff’s weekly activities might include:

• Professional development work
• A corporate/group activity day
• A group sales meeting
• A one-on-one sales meeting with a manager



Sales staff’s monthly goals should be:

• Making dollars from day one
• Handing out guest passes in classes
• Sending out an alumni mailer
• Attending a lead wrap-up event (for 10 to 15 attendees) during the third week of the month
• Staffing the promotional launch display during the first three days of the month
• Attending social functions held for members

The daily plan will have quite a bit of repetition, which will create consistency. Your staff needs to be flexible and able to adapt their schedules on certain days according to weekly and monthly activities. But try to stick to the overall plan. Your staff must have the integrity to follow through in order to hit their goals consistently. If they do not, they will struggle to hit sales goals, feel ineffective in their jobs and frustrated with their lack of accomplishment at the end of each day, week and month.

BIO

Karen Woodard-Chavez is president of Premium Performance Training in Boulder, CO, and Ixtapa, Guerrero, Mexico. She has owned and operated clubs since 1985 and now consults with and trains club staff throughout the world.

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