Month: March 2017

By Sherri Sklar

Recently I received the following email from a VP of Sales, asking for advice about his sales pipeline and sales forecast.

Dear Sherri,

I’m a Sales VP, it’s mid-March, and I’m sweating the end of quarter. Truth is, we don’t have enough good opportunities in our pipeline. I can only rely on 20 percent of what has been inputted into the CRM. Either reps are sandbagging or putting in fluff just to have something there. How can I get control of this situation so I’m not left to figure out where things stand so close to the end of the quarter?

Sincerely,

“Sweating the Numbers”

In my reply, I assured this VP there are a number of things sales leaders can do to turn a situation like this around. Even starting with just a few of the actions below can make a huge difference in a single quarter, while also setting you up for sustainable growth.

1. Face the truth. When I was training for a triathlon, my coach used to say, “Face the truth,” so we knew where I was in terms of strength, endurance, stamina, and speed. You need to use the same “face the truth” type of information to determine where each deal truly is in the pipeline. You need factual evidence of where the opportunity is in the buyer’s process. Look at your reps’ letters of understanding, emails, and social interaction with the client, and ask yourself if your rep truly set all the right elements in motion for this to be categorized as an opportunity ready to close by the end of the quarter.Key information you need to look at includes: what is the buyer’s critical business issue keeping him or her up at night? What’s causing that issue? Who else is impacted and how? And is your rep calling on the right person? Other telltale signs will also tell you where this opportunity stands, such as, are they still demoing the product? Are they still meeting with other members of the buying committee? If the answers are yes, you’re looking at an earlier stage opportunity, not late-stage ready for closing.By getting a good grip on answers to these questions, you’ll know where the opportunity actually stands and if it’s fluff or real. Don’t just rely on your CRM system. You need to roll up your sleeves and have these concrete conversations to truly get the real picture. You’ll get a much more realistic view of the pipeline and be able to produce a solid forecast.
2. Get the real deals across the finish line. Once you’ve figured out what’s fluff and what’s real, you want to clear the pathways and make it easy for every deal that’s real to close. There are many things your reps will need. For instance, you can help your reps foster an even stronger relationship between your company and the client by developing meaningful dialogue with C-level executives from both companies. You can create account-based cross-functional SWAT teams to triage issues and ensure the most creative solutions emerge that will gain rapid agreement with other key managers in your company who are stakeholders in this deal.Where you need to, you can run pass interference for your reps to speed up any problematic legal issues or T’s and C’s. All these things can make an enormous difference in being able to close a deal faster and solidify the relationship for long-term success.
3. Accelerate sales with process. Simply put, you’re going to need a good systematic approach to deliver reliable, predictable numbers so this does not happen every quarter. You may hate the word “process,” but – call it what you will – the fastest and most dependable way to deliver an outstanding performance is to give your team a common language and a set of consistent, repeatable actions that work. It has been proven over and over that implementing some kind of method and process not only helps every rep grow into a better rep; it helps them make quota – and organizations as a whole perform a whole lot better. Putting in a process helps you avoid people “winging it” and gets people doing the right things at the right time so there are no surprises in the pipeline or forecast. Reps won’t be sandbagging or creating fluff anymore, because your clearly defined and articulated process will expose it right away. You will accelerate sales and, as a result, the performance of the entire team will improve.

Reps can be like kids. They’ll tell you they hate structure, but secretly – or maybe subconsciously – they crave it. They need your leadership, your guidance, and your process to review their opportunities in a way that gives you the accurate information you need to accurately predict the numbers. Only then will you not be sweating the numbers.

Want more predictability in hitting your numbers? Download GrowthTera’s free checklist for Sales Leaders and get control of your numbers.  Or, contact Sherri at:  212/500-2161 x 700 or sherri@growthtera.com.

Sherri Sklar is CEO of GrowthTera, a consulting firm that helps organizations elevate their performance to accelerate growth. For more than 20 years, she has helped companies deliver triple-digit growth, orchestrate liquidity exits, and emerge as market leaders in their field. She has trained, coached, and helped companies expand deal size, shorten sales cycles, build a robust pipeline, and convert stalled opportunities into multimillion dollar closed deals. Sherri received a BA from Tulane University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

By Jim Cathcart

In a speech years ago to the executive team of Wal-Mart at their Bentonville, AR, headquarters – after meeting Sam Walton himself in the hallway – I explored the concept of where power comes from in an organization.

The traditional view has always been that power “comes from the top” and flows downward through the organization. We use organization charts with boxes to indicate the players, with lines to show reporting roles between them.

The boss or owner is always at the top and the hourly workers are at the bottom in a wide row. It’s a pyramid. The problem with this structure is that it isn’t true to life. That is not how good organizations get results.

In truth the only power that really matters is the power of customers. As a company, we are working to find what the customer will value – and design and deliver it in a way they’ll be eager to pay for. We want the customer’s allegiance and enthusiastic loyalty. They give that both through money (revenue) and through support (testimonials, referrals, and feedback).

When I received my orientation to Wal-Mart prior to my speech, I discovered that they operate quite differently from most organizations. No wonder they are one of the world’s most successful! They refer to their coworkers as “associates” instead of employees, superiors, subordinates, or bosses. The store managers don’t have traditional offices because they are expected to spend most of their time walking around and actively engaging with others. They see their stores as outlets designed for the convenience of their customers and they negotiate the lowest possible prices from their suppliers. They were the originators of “greeters” at the front door and many other friend-building innovations in retailing.

Pyramid-shaped org charts don’t describe Wal-Mart. And, in actuality, neither does that structure describe any customer-facing organization. The owner or CEO, in truth, is at the bottom of a pyramid – with all of the weight of the organization on his or her shoulders. The people who touch the customers most are at the top, like the ice cream in a cone. But there’s another element that doesn’t show in this symbol: the resource network – the suppliers and industry colleagues.

A much better symbol, as I told the execs that day, is a tree. Trees have two systems: one seen and one hidden from view. The seen system is made up of the trunk, branches, and leaves reaching toward the sky (opportunity). The unseen system is made up of the root system and taproot reaching down for the resources and nutrients in the soil.

The branches represent the growth system of your organization: sales, marketing, customer service, product development, etc. The roots represent your strength system: suppliers, distributors, research, finance, engineering, quality control, etc.

If the strength system is weak, you might outgrow your ability to deliver or sustain growth; and, if the growth system is weak, you could die from lack of sales. Seeing ourselves in this way within the company gives us a much better sense of our responsibility to each other and to our marketplace. The purpose of selling is to make life better for people at a profit so it also makes life better for us.

Years later I encountered then-president of Wal-Mart, David Glass, at a banking conference where we were both speaking. He told me, “We are still using many of your ideas from that day.” Cool.

Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE is the original author of Relationship Selling and one of the world’s leading professional speakers. Jim is a regular contributor to Selling Power and a certified Peak Performance Mindset Trainer. Contact Jim at Cathcart.com.

By Kevin F. Davis

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the difference between sales managers who fail their teams, those who do a competent job, and those who excel.

One of the factors that has the biggest impact on a manager’s success is how effective he or she is as a coach. Research has shown that effective coaching is part quantity and part quality. Doing more coaching means controlling your time and priorities – a topic I won’t go into for the purposes of this article. Better coaching is a matter of focusing on actions you can take that will do the most to help your reps improve in the long run, not just win one deal. Here are three tips to get you started down that path.

Tip #1: Don’t try to coach based on a scorecard. I’m an avid golfer and, like everyone, keep track of each game on a scorecard. Suppose you were a golf pro and I handed you the scorecard from my most recent round and asked you how I could get better. You couldn’t really help me because the scorecard tells you only the aftermath of what I did when I was golfing  – it doesn’t tell you where I made good and bad swings or what decisions I made. Any feedback you gave me would be based only on the results I got, and it couldn’t be specific enough to be helpful. All you could say is something like “try harder” or “don’t make a bogey on hole 5.”

If you really wanted to help me improve, you’d have to observe my game and come up with strategies to help me learn what I was doing wrong and what I could do better.

Reviewing your reps’ sales results once a month or every quarter works the same way. You can’t help your reps improve if all you do is examine their results  – their “scorecard” – after the fact. You have to start looking closely at what they’re doing upstream. Talk to your reps during the early stages of working a sales opportunity, and observe their call preparation and interactions with customers. When you ask questions that challenge them on what they know and don’t know about their customers’ needs, you provide more specific and helpful coaching that they’ll be very motivated to implement.

Tip #2: Focus more on identifying deficiencies of skill and will. Back in 2014 and 2015, the Sales Management Association did some research on how often sales managers discussed 13 specific topics when coaching their salespeople. The kicker is that they also studied the connection between how often each topic was discussed and revenue growth in the organization.

By a big margin, the topic that had the biggest positive influence on revenue growth was “identifying skill deficiencies.” Now, can you guess how often that topic was discussed in coaching conversations? It ranked 12th out of the 13 topics. That means talking with reps about their skill deficiencies happened far less often than discussions about things like “advancing a sales opportunity” and “crafting proposals” – and even the 11th-ranked item, “instruction on administrative processes.”

In my mind, if you are not having regular conversations with your reps around their skill deficiencies, then you’re not really coaching. At least you’re not providing the kind of coaching that will have the biggest impact on your team’s results and your company’s revenue. To help your reps be more successful, you have to make the time to identify each rep’s skill and will shortfalls. And you have to coach them on how to improve in those specific areas.

Tip #3: Take your sales coaching to your reps. There’s a well-known principle in the field of psychology called “the self-serving bias.” It’s the tendency for a person to take credit for their successes but blame external factors for failures. You see it when, for example, sales reps who have a great month attribute their success to their strong work ethic and top-notch skills. But, when that same rep has a bad month, they blame external factors such as lousy leads from marketing. Sound familiar? I fell into that trap at one point of my sales career, and think most salespeople do the same.

Here’s the thing: people with a self-serving bias think they’re doing better than they really are. They are blind to their own mistakes. So they will NOT come to you to ask for coaching. And that means they’re losing deals they should win – and they may not know why.

The best way to combat self-serving bias is to be a strategic sales coach! Take coaching to your salespeople. Don’t sit back and wait for them to ask you for coaching.

A sales manager may well be the most talented sales professional on the team, but what matters now is whether they can transfer that greatness into the hearts and minds of your team members. Great sales coaches focus their attention on the input side of the sales performance equation – the behaviors and activities – not just the results. Great sales coaches make “identifying skill deficiencies” in a sales rep a key objective during every coaching conversation. And great sales coaches are proactive – they don’t sit back and wait to be asked for coaching. They take coaching to their people. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be on your way to building a championship team.

Kevin F. Davis is the founder and president of TopLine Leadership, which has provided sales and sales management training to leading corporations around the globe. One client put more than 3,000 sales managers through Kevin’s two-day workshop. He’s the author of three books, including The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness (March 2017).