Posted on

New Survey Shows How to Develop Excellent Sales Managers

By Norman Behar

When speaking to clients, I often make the point that sales success is highly correlated to the effectiveness of their frontline sales managers – those who have day-to-day responsibility for managing the sales teams. These responsibilities typically include hiring, managing sales performance, coaching, and leading their teams. Obviously, these are not easy tasks.

In our book, The High-Impact Sales Manager, we describe the “Star Athlete Syndrome,” where high-performing sales professionals are promoted into sales management positions with the assumption that their individual sales success will translate into better sales team performance. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, since the skills they developed as sales professionals do not prepare them for the key responsibilities they will assume as sales managers.

To better understand the correlation between sales management skills and sales team performance, we (in partnership with Selling Power) recently conducted a survey that included sales leaders from more than 20 industries. A new report, “2017 Sales Management Research Report: Five Hallmarks of High-Impact Sales Organizations,” based on survey findings, was published this week (and can be downloaded here).

As part of our analysis, we compared high-impact (where over 75% of sales reps achieve quota), average (where 25% to 75% of reps achieve quota), and low-performing organizations (where less than 25% of reps achieve quota).

This list summarizes what we found were the five hallmarks of high-impact sales organizations:

  1. Sales managers spend more time coaching.
  2. They are better at managing sales performance.
  3. They are more proficient at recruiting and hiring.
  4. They earn their teams’ trust and respect.
  5. Their sales organizations invest more to develop sales managers.

It was interesting to note that, while most organizations recognize the leverage sales managers can have in increasing sales team performance, most sales managers are left on their own to learn how to coach their teams. In fact, 45% of the respondents reported that they do not have sufficient resources or budget for the development of their sales managers.

We also learned that the biggest impediment to implementing a sales management training program was (according to 65% of respondents) competing priorities. While I wasn’t totally surprised by this response, I seriously question what other sales initiatives would have a higher impact on sales performance than training frontline sales managers.

I continue to believe that training sales managers has a huge impact on sales team performance – and the responses from our survey seem to validate this point. To download the full report, please click here.

Norman Behar is CEO and managing director of Sales Readiness Group.

Posted on

Seven Things All Good Sales Leaders Must Do

By Jim Cathcart

People love to follow leaders who know where they are going and who care about their followers. Even those who consider themselves to be leaders are usually willing to follow others who seem focused and collaborative. What they don’t like is to be led by someone who is neither clear on their destination nor open to input from others.

If you’re a sales leader seeking increased sales, the strange truth is that it won’t be achieved by seeking more sales. At least not in the usual way. When people sell more it is rarely because they are urged to sell more – or threatened if they don’t.

Selling requires positive energy: optimism, hope, eagerness, and open-mindedness. People buy to make things better – either to remove a problem or attain a desired result. If the salesperson doesn’t represent some form of increased happiness then people don’t buy.

So what’s a sales leader to do? Here are seven things you must provide if you want more sales.

  1. Target
  2. Tools
  3. Training
  4. Time
  5. Truth
  6. Touch
  7. Trust

All people like new and exciting destinations. Some say that people resist change. That’s not true. People resist unpleasant change – but try announcing that we’re all going to Disneyland and suddenly everyone’s on board. It is your job as the leader to get people enthused about what you want from and for them. Paint pictures, tell stories, give examples…show them the outcome. Once a desirable Target is clear, action will follow. Remember: motivation is “motive” plus “action.” The Target is the motive – make it appealing.

If your target is the top of a sheer cliff, you’d better be looking for a ladder. Because, until people see it’s possible, they won’t take action. That is why Tools are necessary in your planning. The Tools might be information, updates, reports, or insider information, or they might be sales tools that make it easier for them to tell your story. The right Tools will make your salespeople more effective.

Imagine having the world’s best software for selling but you don’t know how to use it yet? Tools aren’t enough; there must be Training in how to use the tools with confidence.

That brings us to Time: if there’s not enough Time allowed for the Training to sink in and become a new skill, then the Tools won’t be able to serve you yet.

People thrive in an atmosphere of Truth. When they know what is true and what is not, decision making is easier. It’s the leader’s job to create an atmosphere where the Truth is always welcomed – even when it’s bad news. As Bill Gates said in his book Business at the Speed of Thought, “Bad news must travel fast.” The sooner we know what is so, the sooner we can take the appropriate action. The longer it is delayed, the fewer good options remain.

Touch means the human touch. If all that people get is bad news, they will start avoiding news updates. We need to provide the caring “touch” that shows we believe in their potential and we respect them as human beings. Without the personal assurance that your leader cares about you there is little motivation to exert initiative. As Zig Ziglar said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Which brings us to Trust. It’s foolish to trust untrained people to do highly skilled work, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t to be trusted at all. Trust follows ability and intent. Train your people in the skills that matter. Increase the Trust you give them at each new skill level; then train their thinking to assure that they are seeking to help people with every sale. When you build a team of helpers who are seeking to serve others at a profit, you are building a powerful sales force.

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 Mindset Trainer. Contact Jim at Cathcart.com.

Posted on

How to Raise the Performance of Your Sales Managers

By Kevin F. Davis

First, a disclaimer: I was a sales manager myself for many years, and think it is one of the most critical jobs in any company. It is also one of the most demanding. And having consulted with sales managers, VPs, and directors for the past two decades, I know the job pressures have only gotten worse.

So I can imagine the gasps from sales managers when I say that companies can get even more out of them. The idea is unimaginable to people who routinely get hundreds of emails, texts, and calls every day – to people who are already working long hours, who barely have a minute to themselves on many days.

And still I say it: Companies can get better results from their sales managers.

How? By imposing the same kind of discipline around managing and leading that they do around selling. This is the philosophy behind my new book, The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness.

Think of it this way: I don’t know of a single successful sales organization where sales reps are allowed to sell any way they want. Every good company has some kind of common, consistent sales process to grow sales.

But very few companies have embraced the concept that a consistent sales management methodology is equally important for business success. By that I mean having proven, documented approaches that sales managers are expected to follow for everything from managing priorities, coaching, and handling rep performance problems, to hiring, forecasting, and driving a customer focus. This includes strategic allocation of coaching time and doing monthly or quarterly reviews that contribute to ongoing rep development as well as better results. All of this accompanied by job aids and tools that help them ensure they are using best practices.

The benefits of embracing this approach are manyfold. Here are just three examples.

1) Better accountability: You can’t let employees do whatever they want – then try to hold them accountable after the fact.

When a company wants to hold employees accountable for something, it clearly defines what they are going to be accountable for; effectively communicates those expectations; provides the methods, training support, and tools employees need to stand a reasonable chance of meeting the expectations; and reviews performance against the standards.

Why not use this same mentality for sales managers as for everyone else?

2) Creating a self-correcting framework: A key principle in modern manufacturing is to alert workers to a mistake immediately so the error doesn’t get passed on to the next step in the process. Most sales management teams don’t have anything like that. The only indicators managers have that maybe they did something poorly or wrong is seeing bad sales figures months after the fact.

The same tactic you use to create better accountability also helps managers become self-correcting. If, for example, they understand the “hows” and the “how oftens” around coaching – and the link to better outcomes – they’ll be better able to recognize when they’ve gone off track. Then they can figure out what they need to start doing, stop doing, or do differently to get back on track.

Without a self-correcting framework, sales managers are reliant on their boss recognizing the problem and then being redirected. And, along the way, time, sales personnel, and deals all get lost.

3) Faster ramp-up of new sales managers: What happens to newly promoted sales managers who aren’t taught about the management part of their job and don’t have a sales management process to follow? They keep selling!

In the absence of process, they follow their instincts, which typically lead them to be the “super-salesperson” running around helping close the biggest deals. (While this is not exactly wasted time, the sales team would do better overall if the manager let the best salespeople work with minimal guidance and spent more time helping the up-and-coming reps turn into competition for the team’s star players).

Organizations that have a standard sales management methodology in place can avoid that situation. By having standard methods, they very quickly create sales managers who understand that their biggest contribution to the organization now lies in leading and developing their team – and who know how to perform those methods effectively.

I don’t mean to imply that sales management can or should achieve the same level of rigor that manufacturing processes do. But having standards that are communicated to first-line sales managers is key – no matter whether they are newly-minted managers or old hands.

Experienced sales reps know when and how to deviate from the standard sales process they were taught. But all reps have the same starting point; they know they must master the essential selling skills and processes that increase the odds of getting a good result.

The same should be true for sales managers.  

Kevin F. Davis is the author of The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness: 10 Essential Strategies for Leading Your Team to the Top, which describes methods for everything from leading, coaching, and managing priorities, to hiring, forecasting, and driving rep accountability. For more information visit TopLine Leadership, Inc.

Posted on

Four Reasons You Need Account Planning for Sales Success

By Mark Donnolo

Mike Barnes, executive vice president with Andrews Distributing – one of the largest beer distributors in the United States – knows the value of account planning.

In April 2013, the company began following a structured account planning process. They collected large amounts of data about their customers’ buying habits and, based on what they learned, changed their sales coverage model. “The minute that we did that, we had the first year of consecutive months of share growth,” says Barnes. “We’re now in our third year and, as we have improved in account planning, we’ve seen our market share grow. We’re in our 34th consecutive month of share growth – and that’s virtually unheard of in our industry.”

Account planning provides a structure to determine what’s important and what’s not when pursuing customers. Below are four reasons account planning can make a difference in your sales organization now.

Four Reasons You Need Account Planning

#1: Competition is out there. You have to know more about your customer, better understand their needs, have a differentiated value proposition, and have an actionable plan to beat the competition. Account plans provide data that pinpoint the market share, level of competition, and the strengths and weaknesses not only of your position but of your competitors – all of which contribute to the predictability of whether or not you can hit your goals.

#2: Account plans coordinate teams. Most individual sales reps are great at the tactical level. But accounts typically require larger coordination – either between accounts or within the same account – depending on its size. Account plans also reveal how well you work together as an organization within the account. How does the sales team work with the technical organization?

#3: Your account is one piece of a larger puzzle. Every company has financial goals, and financial leaders have to demonstrate they have a plan to achieve those goals. But the sales organization – and typically only the sales organization – knows what’s going on at eye level. Account plans help communicate that bottom-up view. The sales organization has an opportunity to discuss what their customers are doing, for better or worse, and offer valuable information about how sales will achieve its goals.

#4: Account plans create accountability. The sales team needs a way to measure its success beyond whether each individual achieves her quota or not. The team needs metrics, goals, and milestones to work toward. Account plans create a record of what an individual is supposed to do – both the actions and the goals – that can be used in performance metrics.

Account Planning Challenges

So how do companies end up starting and stopping account planning so often? We’ve seen the following major challenges to achieving a well-oiled account planning process:

The organization isn’t committed. When a process takes hold at a grassroots level and spreads throughout the organization, it creates a powerful result. Unfortunately, for most companies that see a grassroots account planning movement, it doesn’t gain commitment from everyone and, at some point, leaves a pattern of ad hoc practices that benefit a few teams but has little overall effect on results. Whether the account planning process starts at the top or the bottom, the organization has to have strong commitment from leadership. That commitment has to follow through to sales leadership, sales management, and to each salesperson who has a role in the account planning process.

There isn’t strong ownership of the account strategy. When I work with sales organizations on sales process and sales roles, one of the questions I ask is, “Who owns the account strategy and the account plan?” I expect to hear a decisive and consistent answer across the organization and the accounts it covers. Unclear ownership indicates a lack of accountability and a gap in leadership that can result in sales opportunities falling through the cracks. Designate ownership of the overall account planning process and the plans for each account.

Account planning becomes all about the document. Account planning isn’t about the document. It’s about the client needs, the innovative ideas to meet those needs, a committed plan to address those needs, and the discipline of ownership and execution from the team. Elevate the position of account planning beyond the document. The document merely contains all the hard work, and it will continue to evolve as the work and results progress.

Salespeople would rather sell than plan. Let’s face it: most salespeople love the pursuit. They don’t love planning. The irony is that the most successful sales teams I’ve worked with understand the criticality of account planning and they embrace it. If a salesperson isn’t a planner and thinks incrementally and transactionally, she is likely to get incremental and transactional results. If she thinks big and is intentional about operating according to a big plan, she will make different, longer-term decisions and get bigger results.

Contrary to instinct, the work of account planning will get you further along – and multiples more successful – than trying to pull it off yourself. Investing the time to do a good account plan increases the value exponentially.

Mark Donnolo is managing partner of SalesGlobe, which helps companies connect sales strategies to the bottom line. He is the author of What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation, The Innovative Sale, and Essential Account Planning: 5 Keys for Helping Your Sales Team Drive Revenue.

Posted on

How to Really Measure Your Sales Team’s Call Activity

By Eric Esfahanian

The Pareto Principle – or the 80/20 Rule – is the concept that 80 percent of your effects are obtained by 20 percent of your causes. Your sales force probably proves out the concept as well: about 80 percent of your company’s revenue is produced by 20 percent of your sales team.

Although the 80/20 Rule has come to be expected, you can turn the Pareto Principle on its head within your own organization and distribute performance more evenly and consistently. To do this we have to get back to basics.

Call Activity: Stats Don’t Lie

By enlisting the help of technology and analytics, sales leaders are now able to challenge that conventional sales wisdom and increase the average effectiveness of every rep to drive performance and revenue target rather than simply rely on the 20 percent year after year. But, in order to do this, you must be able to measure your team’s call activity…all of it! At first, it may seem simple, but ask yourself: “Are you able to accurately measure your team’s daily call activity?”

If you’re like 90 percent of sales teams today, the answer will be “not even close.” But technology has evolved and it’s now possible to easily capture sales rep telephone activity from any phone or carrier. Really!

Once you can take a transparent look inside your team’s activity, it might be a shock to discover what is actually happening compared to what you thought was happening or what you have been told was happening or what CRM reported was happening.

If you want to grow your top line systematically, relying on manually generated reports or overly hopeful input from your reps’ CRM entries to measure call activity is no longer adequate (and maybe never was). With automated, real-time, and 100 percent accurate data, you will have a baseline of minimum performance and the knowledge to set realistic expectations for your team and manage to that expectation.

For nearly two decades, Gryphon has captured phone-based sales activity from some of the largest sales organizations worldwide, and found several key performance indicators that are truly predictive of success. These include the total number of calls a rep makes, conversation conversion (contact-to-close), the call frequency (persistence) of the reps, and how many times they are reaching out to their leads before they are “exhausted.”

If you focus on (first) understanding and (then) improving these metrics, you will be amazed at how quickly it impacts your sales team’s effectiveness and your revenue – and how sustainable it will be if you keep it up over time

Turning the Pareto Principle on Its Head

Once you have an accurate standard against which to measure your team’s performance – and set benchmarks to follow – what’s next? Identify the behaviors of your top and bottom performers and get an understanding for how they are succeeding or how they are struggling. Use their behaviors as teaching opportunities for your team.

Train your bottom performers with the techniques your top performers utilize to win over prospects. Not only are you able to coach to proven standards, but you will decrease on-boarding times for new employees.

Listen to Lead

Speech analytics can help you with this as well by providing a completely transparent view into conversations. Once the exclusive domain of call centers or spy rings, advances in secure cloud recording and analytics are now within reach for any rep calling from any device. With this powerful capability, you can ensure your reps are adhering to their scripts without veering too far off message and pick up on notable keywords, confidence indicators, and even the emotions of your rep and their customers during conversations.

With this kind of data and insight into what works and what doesn’t, there is no reason to fail. You are taking control of your team, managing their performance, and are able to forecast with confidence.

For more than 20 years, Eric Esfahanian has been helping clients increase sales and marketing effectiveness with innovative business intelligence technology and processes. As Chief Revenue Officer of Gryphon Networks, Eric is charged with driving growth of Gryphon’s Fortune 500 client base with cloud-based sales performance management solutions that increase revenue and client retention while reducing training/onboarding times for large, distributed sales organizations. Previously, Eric held sales leadership roles with MicroStrategy, Hewlett-Packard and EMC Corp. He received his MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College and Bachelor’s Degree from Boston College.

Posted on

Should Sales Leaders Swoop in to Save the Deal?

By Sherri Sklar

Recently I received the following email from a VP of sales, asking for advice about how to bring out the best in his people:

Dear Sherri:

We have a relatively new team and I am noticing that the first-line sales managers are spending a lot of time swooping in to “save” the deal. If they don’t step in, they say we’d lose the deal to either competition or no decision. I know we need to be developing these reps, but they are concerned that, if we take time out to coach and train, we’d lose the momentum we’ve got going with these deals. But, even with the managers stepping in to drive the deals, I’m still not getting the results we need. Reps are getting frustrated that they aren’t more empowered and many are starting to leave. Help! Is there a better way?

Sincerely,

SWOOPING IN SALES VP

Yes, there is a better way. Take note of these simple points that could make all the difference in bringing out the best in your people and their performance:

  1. Embrace a new mindshift about your reps. You, yourself, as the head of sales, have to start seeing your reps as the secret weapon. As soon as you have that vision, you’ll realize you need to do everything in your power to develop and coach your reps into being amazing, trusted advisors for your customers. That’s when the magic begins. Your customers will start to see your sales being able to make an impact on them and their business – and truly look at them as partners and valuable assets to their business. When that happens, you win deals and your reps will make quota.  

  2. Stop the swooping; start the coaching. Along with the new mindset, you need to stop the swooping. By swooping in, the credibility of your reps is being undermined and you are setting a bad precedent for an imbalanced buyer-seller relationship. When your rep has been undermined, your buyer will no longer perceive them as a “trusted advisor” on equal footing with them. Without being a trusted advisor, your company is seen as just a mere vendor, not a company that can make a difference – and, ultimately, not the company they will choose to do business with. Instead, use your and your first-line sales managers’ expertise to coach and guide these reps. You’ll find reps starting to feel empowered – and happy again that you entrust them with the job they were hired to do. They will most likely go through walls for you just because you are showing them you believe in them, you are investing in them, and you care about them. 

  3. Build a first-rate sales management team. One of the most important roles in the entire sales organization is the first-line sales manager – simply by the fact that they have so much influence over the people who report to them. Are you sure you have the right people as first-line sales managers? If the reason these managers are swooping in is because they relish being the hero who saves the deal instead of enabling their reps to be heroes, then it’s time to assess whether you can coach them to be great managers or whether you should return them to the field as reps where they are at their best. Assess your management team, recruit great managers who are outstanding at leading and growing others’ skills, and weed out the ones who aren’t.

  4. Invest in your people. Coaching your reps and sales managers on an ongoing basis is one very important step. Make sure you are also investing in helping them grow their skills in all aspects of what they do by giving them great sales training and sales management training. The last thing you need is people second-guessing how to generate business; winging it will lead to 50 different approaches and 50 different outcomes. Give your organization the tools they need to succeed. By having an ongoing learning environment, your sales managers will be empowering their reps, building their reps’ skills, and equipping and empowering them to perform.

  5. Make it fun. Make it fun to be a part of your organization and to come to work every day. Create an environment where you are not only helping people grow, but also giving them the tools and support they need, along with team mentoring and manager mentoring. One way to do that is by conducting regular team meetings, sharing stories, recognizing great performance, and creating opportunities for friendly coopetition with fun games, contests and incentives.

Changing your approach by creating an environment that empowers your reps – giving them the support they need to succeed – will ultimately prove the better strategy in the long run, enabling you to amplify your results significantly by bringing out the best in your people and the organization as a whole.

Want more insight from Sherri? Contact her at sherri@growthtera.com and join her at the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas on September 18-19, where she will present Sales Planning: Strategies that Leave Your Competition in the Dust.

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.

Posted on

Improve Your Sales Performance with These Team-Building Activities

By Luke Talbot-Male

Common practices and sales pitches nowadays are becoming ineffective because consumers have been overexposed to them over the years.

To help the company achieve their sales goals, revising sales strategies sounds like a great plan – but doing so will be more effective if you have a strong sales team behind it. The team-building buzz is now targeting businesses and companies that aim to improve sales performance and hit their revenue targets.

Why Strengthen the Sales Team?

Functional teams achieve their goals because they are able to communicate well and make collective decisions. Evaluating your sales team in terms of its skills in communication, listening, creativity, decision making, and teamwork will help you find the areas you need to work on. And implementing these “new” sales strategies – and how high your sales can reach using them – depends on your team’s skills. So it will be best if they are geared up for the battle ahead.

Trust and Interdependence

Every team needs to establish trust and task interdependence to improve the quality of its output. Accomplishing sales goals is also dependent on your sales team’s cohesiveness. When the team is working closely together, the variable of having to completely trust each other always comes into the picture. A simple team-building activity that will help you enhance your team’s interdependence and trust is the game called the “mine field.”

You will need to do this activity in a wide indoor or outdoor space with materials like chairs, boxes, or cones as obstacle. Build a maze where a blindfolded person can pass through from start to finish – but strategically create “mines” using the obstacles you have gathered. Divide the team into pairs; one person will be blindfolded and will pass through the minefield while following his teammate’s verbal instructions.

The Good Old Role Plays

There’s nothing old with “experiencing” how to do the different scenarios when pitching sales to your customers. This team-building activity will help you raise sales performance by improving your sales team’s customer relations skills and creative thinking.

Divide your team into groups that will act as customers and salespeople. The salespeople team should be able to brainstorm the best sales pitch they can come up with for the product while the customers team will need to make the act as realistic as possible by asking questions most customers ask. Role playing this act will help you identify the reasons potential customers do not buy your products – and how your sales team can overcome those reasons.

Know Your Team Better

There might be instances where some of your sales team are assigned through various regions and cities and might not have even interacted with each other in person. One of the best “get to know you” games we use for team activities is based on the American television game show To Tell the Truth. We ask all members of the team to state two truths and make up one lie about themselves – and the other members have to guess which one is the lie. Unlike the old-fashioned way of introducing yourself to the team, this game will help you build rapport with your colleagues in a more fun and creative way. Knowing the people you’re working with will help establish great working relationships.

Problem Solving

Your sales team will face a lot of problems that will require them to devise new ideas that are outside of the box. Organizing team events that will require problem-solving skills will help your team enhance their cognitive abilities. Team activities like the ones described above are just some of the team events your team can try to develop their problem-solving skills.

If you want your sales team to experience these super team building events and other team building Melbourne activities, visit our Website today!

Today’s post is by Luke Talbot-Male, founder and managing director of Beyond the Boardroom Australia. Luke has a 20 years’ worth of experience working in Australia’s adventure tourism industry. As the owner of Beyond the Boardroom, he understands the importance of a functional team and his leadership style follows the same principles that are used in every Beyond the Boardroom activity.

Posted on

Sales Leadership in The Age of Anxiety

By Adrian Davis

Sales leaders are conducting business in a unique environment of rapid change and immense risk. We face complex national and international challenges.

Predictability provides peace of mind, whereas uncertainty creates anxiety – and ours is an uncertain age. The Information Age is behind us. We are now in The Age of Anxiety.

We are the most educated and well-informed people in the history of mankind. Yet, in some ways, it feels as if sales leadership is being asked to solve insurmountable problems based on events over which they have little control.

What are the top challenges facing sales leadership today? Here are three to consider.

1. Employee Engagement

As our world continues to change, your customers will face more complex problems. You need engaged employees to bring their best thinking to client problems. Otherwise, the spark of creativity will seep out of your business, you won’t be able to inspire your clients, and your business will decline.

Your salespeople are dealing with more stress in their lives than previous generations. This mounting stress is leading to unprecedented levels of depression.

Everyone is trying to find ways to cope. Use of antidepressant medication and alcohol is increasing, and many are turning to extreme forms of entertainment.

Employees struggle to balance their work and personal priorities. People shut down when they feel overwhelmed, and depression is one of the ways that happens. Employers must now also take part in their struggle. That’s why one of our clients specializes in helping large corporations spot depression in employees. Sales leaders must now take an interest in this balancing act.

Another of our clients has an incredible, high-performance work culture. What is different about their high-performance culture is how much they care for each other. They have built a culture that is productive and supportive – and that support extends beyond the work environment. They have developed personal friendships. People feel needed and appreciated. They derive great satisfaction from their work.

Employee engagement will continue to be a key challenge in our changing world. How are you doing connecting your employees to the core purpose of your business?

2. Customer Loyalty

Getting attention is hard enough. Once you’ve gotten it, keeping it is even harder. As your clients’ world changes, their priorities change. As their world and priorities change, they face increasing anxiety – and doing business with you may no longer be one of their top priorities. Commoditizing your services may give them a sense of control and security. Finding a cheaper alternative may give them a false sense of accomplishment. This is especially true if your employees have not been as engaged as they once were.

You must earn your customers’ loyalty. That means your loyalty to your customers has to come before their loyalty to you. Win-win means you win after your customers win – not before. The more successful you can make your customers, the better customers they will be. Take the risk with your right-fit customers. Invest in them. Help them address their current priorities. Grow your business by helping them grow their business.

Remaining relevant to your customers will be one of the greatest challenges your business will face in a rapidly changing world.

3. Effective Leadership

In the simple world of the Industrial Age, leadership was about command and control. We broke work down into discrete units and we employed arms and legs to perform the work.

As the world has grown in complexity, we have realized we need people’s heads and hearts as well. We needed to put the discrete work units back together. We now ask our employees to own their work and we gave them the autonomy to make appropriate decisions. As the pace of change accelerates, we need employees who care about their work. We are now asking employees to bring their heart to work – and not just their arms, legs, and mind. We need arms, legs, head, and heart – we need entire human beings to show up.

We humans are complex creatures, aren’t we? Managing complex people in a complex, fast-changing world requires a different leadership style. The command-and-control style of the Industrial Age no longer works. People check out when they feel exploited or undervalued. Command and control ignores the internal lives of employees. It used to be about getting the job done. Period. Today, it’s about outcomes and results. You need people who commit to outcomes. People who commit to outcomes need a leader they can respect. You need to be humble but decisive. You need to be calm, cool, and collected as you navigate your company in a sea of anxiety. Your people need to see your heart. You need to be transparent and humble but not soft or weak.

Your leadership needs to extend out to your clients and suppliers. Personal development must be a key priority for you. As the pace of change and increasing complexity heats up, character flaws will show up. When character flaws show up in leaders, followers can be unforgiving. You must commit to personal growth in The Age of Anxiety. As those who depend on you see you grow, they will also grow.

Three Key Sales Leadership Challenges

Our key challenges are:

  1. Keeping our employees engaged
  2. Keeping our clients loyal
  3. Providing leadership

If you’d like to explore a program to address these challenges with your team, reach out to me for a complimentary consultation.

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and DuPont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).

Posted on

Teaching Sales Warriors New Tips: How to Train Seasoned Salespeople

By Shari Levitin

Many salespeople speak about sales through the language of warfare. To them, the idea of a warrior suggests power and conquest. They skirmish with customers, fight for leads, and talk about losing the battle but winning the war. They forget that what makes a warrior isn’t a weapon or a uniform, but sacrifice and doggedness. Great salespeople – like great soldiers – learn how to deliberate, practice, drill, and rehearse.

But let’s face it, most salespeople don’t wake up in the morning eager to train any more than your prospects line up to purchase your product. So how do you energize sales reps to fight for the skills they need to win more deals?

According to new research in the Harvard Business Review, titled “The Internet Makes You Think You’re Smarter than You Are,” Yale doctoral candidate Matthew Fisher and his colleagues concluded people are more confident that they’ve learned information by simply having access to that information.

This got me thinking. Do salespeople assume they know how to build trust – or move a customer through the pipeline – simply because they bought the book or signed up for the online course? Fisher’s research indicates an answer in the affirmative. Even more compelling is this: Just because you can find the information and understand it doesn’t mean you can apply it.

So how can you encourage your sales and marketing teams to open the books and courses at their disposal and apply the material inside? Employ these five methods.

  1. Reward a Growth Mindset. Too many sales contests reward the top 20 percent, leaving the remaining reps discouraged. The solution? Offer incentives for learning and sales activities rather than simply sales outcomes. Create rewards and recognition for books read, leads generated, and courses taken.

  2. Create Team-Based Contests. This will bolster bonds and increase creativity. Focus either on sales performance or mastery of learning objectives. At one of our Train the Trainer events, 10 teams of five demonstrated their understanding of the buying process by creating skits and clay models – and even performing rap songs! Of course, everyone won.

  3. Present Learning in Small Chunks, Not in Large Assignments. The average attention span of people today has plummeted from 12 seconds to eight seconds. They say goldfish have a longer attention span than people! If you don’t believe me, go to the nearest pet store and have a staring contest with a goldfish. If you’re like most people, my money’s on the fish. Short, poppy pieces of wisdom will inspire and entertain. They’ll offer instant solutions to common problems – resulting in a series of small wins.

  4. Make Training Interactive. A few years ago, I sat with a group of senior leaders who weren’t meeting their quotas. They were struggling to get salespeople to prospect correctly and to isolate objections. “The salespeople just don’t listen,” they complained. “We tell them over and over again what to do and it goes in one ear and out the other.” Their complaint revealed the underlying problem: them!

    According to Adult Learning Theory, people retain:

    * 10 percent of what they only hear.
    * 50 percent of what they see and hear.
    * 90 percent of what they see and do.

    Your reps learn by seeing and doing. Simply telling your reps what to do – rather than engaging them in role-plays, exercises, and interactive games – will cause frustration and result in low performance.

    People don’t want to listen to the conversation; they want to be part of the conversation.

  5. Become a Master at Giving Feedback. No one likes being told what they did wrong. Before ever giving negative feedback, though, tell your reps what they did right. By hearing the good stuff first, their brains will be more receptive to the areas where they need to improve. In fact, a Harvard Business Review study confirms that individuals who receive at least a 6-to-1 ratio of positive-to-negative advice significantly outperform those who are more often criticized.

Apply these simple tips and you’ll not only lead your war horses to water, but you’ll also help them to think.

Shari Levitin is the author of Heart and Sell: 10 Universal Truths Every Salesperson Needs to Know. She is the founder of The Levitin Group, a global company operating in more than 40 countries to passionately inspire transformative change.

Posted on

Advice for a Sales Leader: How to Gain Control of Your Sales Pipeline and Forecast

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.