Sales Leadership

Reform for Sales Success

Written by Tony Cole

We don’t typically use political jargon when referring to sales. Yet, aren’t politicians always selling? They are either selling us, as voters, or they are selling other politicians on their ideas and programs.

As I read Decision Points - The Presidential Memoir of George W. Bush, I couldn’t help but recognize some parallels. For instance, in the chapter titled Leading, the President discusses his decision that leads to the “No Child Left Behind” legislation and says the following: “You cannot solve a problem until you diagnose it.”

While this isn’t a huge “ah-ha” for any of us, he then makes a quantum leap to “Accountability would serve as a catalyst for reform”. Again, this isn’t big news. Everyone knows that, to exact change, one must implement a system to ensure that necessary behaviors are being performed. Right?

As I think about the dozens of sales organizations we have worked with over the years, in nearly every instance, the chief executive’s objective is to achieve some variation of reform. While their companies are not broken, they are working imperfectly, producing less than desirable results. These executives need a different set of outcomes and they realize that change is necessary.

In his book, the former president goes on to discuss the fact that, as a nation, the USA finished 3rd from the bottom, above only Cyprus and South Africa in the subject of mathematics. Sad placement for our country, known as a super power and the most influential country in the world.

But how could this happen? Surely our educational programs include quality math curriculums. It turns out the curriculums are not the problem. Apparently a lack of accountability- no checks and balances- is to blame.

Apparently there were no accountability measures set up to track progress. This tracking would have helped schools and reformers determine how to best duplicate occurring success or failure. As it was, there was no record and therefore no statistics to which one might refer. Given a lack of measurable data, accountability was impossible and success, or lack thereof, became a judgment call.

Translating this analogy to the business of selling, this means that if there is anything in your sales results that you can no longer accept, you must reach beyond treatment of the symptom to find the root cause of a problem. Then set standards. Then track the data. Then compare the data to the previously set standards.

Achieving success is not a one-step process, done when goals have been identified. Achieving success is a continuous and on-going job requiring discipline and process.

In other words, if your sales are falling short, where are the choke-points? Do your salespeople fail in closing? Or do they not prospect consistently? Do they sell on price and neglect the value your product brings to the prospect? Does your sales team even know that you, as chief executive, are looking for volume? Or margin? Or to expand distribution into other vertical channels?

In other words, your company’s choke points could span executive, management and sales teams. Minus a deep-dive to uncover all the problems, you might easily address the wrong ones.

However the following issues typically come to light when we perform our diagnostics to help companies discover their choke-points-- the first step to reforming for sales success.

• Crucial Elements of Success are specific strengths or weaknesses that impact an individual’s ability to grow and to be coached. These crucial elements include desire, commitment, responsibility and outlook, traits that largely impact an individual’s performance in life and in sales.

• Major Performance Factor are deficits that impact execution of ANY sales system. These factors include need-for-approval, money issues, poor record-collection, and non-supportive buy-cycle.

• Strategies and priorities for the business are not aligned between senior management and sales management, thereby creating a disconnect between what should be executed and what is executed.

• Hiring - the population that is supposed to execute the strategies and priorities are incapable of doing so because they are not the right hires-- wrong hiring criteria was used.

• On-boarding - Accountability standards to execute sales activities to drive early success are missing. Additionally, there is often a lack of a consistent process to keep a new hire’s pipeline full.

These are some of the major issues we uncover as we help companies reform their sales organizations. While you may be successfully treating some of your company’s symptoms, chances are there are deeper issues that will inhibit long term change and growth and, in order to compete in today’s hyper competitive environment, these issues will require deep diagnosis and consistently implemented accountability measures.

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No Sales Consultants

Sales Leadership - Sales Leadership

Written by Steve Young

Something is amiss! Today’s sales consultants are not sales experts; they are expert administrators of the prepackaged, template-based models they “tailor” or “customize” and superimpose onto a client’s business. They evaluate businesses from a narrow frame of reference (the program they want to sell), as if all businesses are alike. Not only is each business unique, the idea that one, two or even three sales methodologies could collectively encapsulate correct solutions for all the needs of businesses is absurd. So, why are sales consultants still hired by business owners and sales managers?

In the 1980’s, a shift in the sales profession occurred. In the interest of “maximizing profits,” companies started hiring sales representatives, who were inexperienced, less costly salespeople. The sales managers of these companies knew how to sell and created sales programs in order to educate their representatives. Over the years, this cost-saving business model created problems, the ramifications of which are experienced in many of today’s businesses. As competent sales managers retired, they left behind significantly less capable successors. Now, most of those employed in sales jobs—reps and managers—do not know how to sell correctly. Industry and product knowledge are prized over sales skills and strategic-thinking. And the sales consultant is depended upon as a sales improvement resource.

Ignorance is Costly

Sales consultants realized that they could increase their profit through the lack of knowledge among business owners and sales managers about differences between “tailored” or “customized” solutions and completely custom made sales solutions. These template-based, ready-to-go solutions are easier for sales consultants to develop, and much more profitable for them than the creation of custom made solutions, which are most beneficial to businesses.

Among the fallout from the programs of sales consultants, business owners and sales managers faced issues of “adoption” and “transfer,” which limit the effectiveness of consultants’ solutions. Consequently, the efforts of salespeople will return to routine and, often, careless work, sales will be more incidental than the result of competency, and companies will continue to lose money. Eventually, the pendulum will reach its limit and change will occur. Until then or the time when business owners recognize the problems presented here, their sales operations will retard their success.

The Return of Professionalism

Sometime ago, a business owner had greater expectations of their sales team. Salespeople were in sync with the times and changes in buyers’ mentality. An ability to connect with decision-makers was a fundamental skill of a salesperson. In those days, sales managers knew how to create strategies and analyze productivity. And, unless specifically designed for a business, the notion of a generic sales solution, sales seminar, and sales instruction book would have been considered absurd.

In today’s highly competitive business world, companies can no longer afford to be content with sales improvement; sales improvement is a short-sighted goal. Today’s standard for sales excellence is sales optimization, the attainment of a company’s sales potential, which necessitate custom made state-specific solutions, which are not available from sales books, seminars, and sales consultants. A return to sales professionalism is on the horizon. The days of the sales representative will pass. As companies traverse the course back to a greater ability to actualize, issues related to sales improvement will find resolve in highly creative and diverse ways. Among the sales-related issues that business face today are:

1.   reoccurrence of sales challenges;
2.   sales improvement compared with attainment of full sales potential;
3.   recession from improvement soon after sales training or operational change;
4.   reliance upon outside aids—consultants, books, seminars, webinars, etc.;
5.   continued dependence of salespeople on management to secure sales;
6.   inability or unwillingness of salespeople to think creatively, self-assess, and adapt;
7.   inability or unwillingness of sales managers to improve their ability to manage and train.

If you employ a sales manager and/or salespeople, consider the absurdity of a generic sales seminar, sales book, and sales consultant to help you understand how to sell your own products and services. Your investment in sales improvement is best applied to employment of an actual sales expert or the education of your sales manager. Doesn’t your business need expertise from the people on whom you most depend to be experts?

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Missed Sales Forecasts: Is it the sales manager or the sales team?

Sales Leadership - Sales Leadership

Written by Colleen Francis

It’s the second quarter of the year and revenues are running behind. Sure, it’s easy to point the finger and blame poor results on the sales team. But take an objective step back and ask the question. Is it you or your sales team that is falling short? There is an old saying, “The pace of the leader is the pace of the pack.” What kind of sales leader are you and where could you improve in order to create more sustainable and predictable revenues.

Here are three areas to examine your leadership skills and how they might be affecting sales results. Are you:

Recruiting ‘A’ sales players. The first question we ask prospects is: “Do you have the right people on the sales bus?” If you want to make your life easier and more profitable, examine your hiring practices. This is not a new idea or concept. So why do so many sales managers settle for ‘B’ players, not ‘A’? There are two basic mistakes made in hiring and recruiting salespeople.

• Sales manager recruits only if there is an open territory. This is the kiss of death because an open territory means there is an unmet quota hanging over your head and a CEO breathing down your neck. Desperation sets in and all the sales frogs you interview are not starting to look like sales princes. Practice what you preach to your sales team---prospecting is a process, not an event. As a sales manager, your prospecting activity is now prospecting for top salespeople, not deals. Make recruiting a continuous process, not an event, at your sales organization. Interview candidates each month, even if you are not actively looking. The wise sales manager follows the best practices of top athletic coaches: He buildsa sales bench before it is needed.

• No formalized hiring process. When you look back on a bad hire, you’ve probably said something like, “He just didn’t fit into our culture. She had a bad attitude. He didn’t have a work ethic.” Bad hires often happen because the salesperson’s values don’t align with the company’s core values. So how many questions do you ask during your interview process that uncover whether this candidate fits into your company culture? For example, if teamwork is a core value at your company, weed out the lone rangers by asking these questions. “Tell me about a time when you helped a colleague close a piece of business? Give me an example of how you’ve worked with other departments to solve a customer service issue.” Interview for soft skills as well as hard selling skills.

Lead by example. In Daniel Goleman’s book, ‘Emotional Intelligence,’Mr. Golemannotes that empathy is a fundamental people skill for sales and management. Empathy is the ability to read people and understand where they are coming from. It is the ability to identify a change in tonality, an irritated gesture and other non-verbal cues. One of the things I have noticed in this age of technology is that people are not present in conversations or meetings. For example, the sales manager holds the weekly sales meeting. She is there physically but not mentally. She looks like a fishing line with her head bobbing up and down, trying to maintain eye contactwith the sales team while checking email.

The sales team observes this behavior and models it in their daily business life. At networking events, they check their electronics while talking to a potential referral partner. (Now that’s a real plus for building a relationship and making people feel important!)Or they have their smart phone on “vibrate” during a sales call. When a new message comes in, they break eye contact with the prospect and check their phone telling the prospect that the incoming message is more important than the current meeting. Lead by example and teach your sales team to be present. Focus is the new selling and leadership skill needed in today’s high tech business environment.

Name the game. Political correctness exists everywhere. In an attempt to gain everyone’s approval, people rename things to soften the impact of the behavior observed. I’ve heard more than one sales manager complain that salespeople “fudge” on the data they are entering into the CRM tool. Call fudging what it is: Lying. Others give the excuse that a salesperson isn’t learning new selling skills because she is so busy. No, she is uncommitted and chooses to be average. Start naming things for what they are and you will see a dramatic shift in behavior.

One of our sales managers shares this truth telling conversation that changed behavior from one of his direct reports. The salesperson was always late to meetings with a variety of excuses. The sales manager stopped the excuses and told the salesperson that the next time he was late to a meeting he needed to share one of two reasons with the group for his tardiness. He was arrogant and felt his schedule was more important than the others in the room or he simply didn’t care about keeping others waiting. The salesperson started showing up on time to meetings because the manager named the game.

The pace of the leader is the pace of the pack. Recruit ‘A’ players, lead by example and name the game. You will enjoy sustainable and predictable sales results.

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Executive Effectiveness: Becoming an Effective Leader

Sales Leadership - Sales Leadership

Written by Michael Beck

Recently on LinkedIn I posed three questions that resulted in some very interesting conversations. Here they are:

1. An executive is only a leader if people choose to follow. How can you tell whether people are following or just doing their job?

2. Everyone says leadership is important, but why does it make a difference?

3. If an executive produces a good bottom line are they a good leader?

I think the first question is one that most leaders rarely ask but should. Unless you understand and observe the distinction between people who are following and those just doing their job, it becomes easy to have the misconception that you are being effective as a leader, even though the reality may be quite different.

When people are just "doing their job", they are essentially just doing enough work to keep their job. They'll do what's asked of them - but generally no more. They'll do a good job performing their tasks and fulfilling their responsibilities - but nothing notable. They're not argumentative or confrontational - but they're not passionate either. Basically, they do a good job. But there's a big difference between doing a good job and doing a great job.

In contrast, when people are following a leader, they become engaged and enthusiastic in their work. When a leader builds a team that is enthused and engaged, remarkable things happen. They take pride in their work and regularly strive to improve the efficiency and quality of their work. Instead of simply putting in the time to complete their tasks and fulfill their responsibilities, they make an effort to accelerate their progress, going the extra mile to be the best they can be and producing the best results. Apathy falls to the wayside and people begin to care - not only about the quality of their work, but in their ability to make a difference.

Rest assured, if your team is simply going through the motions, they're just doing their job.

The second question - the one about why and how leadership makes a difference - is also an important question that rarely gets asked. I've reflected on the answer to this question for years and I've been able to distill it down to one simple statement. "Eliciting excellence is the essence of leadership." A great leader doesn't directly produce great results. Instead, they work to bring out the best in the people they lead who, in turn, produce great results.

The key then, is to understand how a leader accomplishes that. Bringing out the best in people is accomplished in a number of ways. I believe a key to eliciting excellence is to adopt a coach-like approach to leadership. This approach is one of listening and asking good questions. A leader who is committed to bringing out the best in people promotes independent thought and personal growth, creates opportunities to develop people to their fullest, respects each person (which in turn earns their respect), and develops a vision which attracts and aligns people.

The third question about whether someone is a good leader if they produce good results arose as a consequence of a comment made during one of the LinkedIn discussions. The commenter's contention was that an executive's responsibility was to produce the desired results for the shareholders and was therefore a good leader if they achieved those results. My issue with that perspective is that, although a leader is responsible for achieving the desired results, if those results are achieved at the expense of the team, then the effort and the results aren't sustainable. Consequently, I don't believe that just because an executive achieves results he or she is necessarily a good leader.

So then, how does one become a more effective leader? There are many factors that go into making someone a good leader, but here are some of the more important ones:

Integrity: Acting with integrity means doing what you say you're going to do and being true to your stated values. Consistency of action creates trust and respect, which allows a leader to inspire, motivate, and influence.

Respect: Showing respect for others is essential. Human nature is to respect those who show respect for us. Without earning the respect of followers, leadership is ineffective.

Transparency: Being transparent means being who you say you are. We need to avoid putting on the façade of someone we're not. People eventually see right through a façade and if they find a different person, we lose credibility.

Vulnerability: Being vulnerable means admitting when you don't know the answer and/or when you've made a mistake. People respect someone who acknowledges their weaknesses along with their strengths.

Development: People appreciate being valued and appreciate when someone thinks highly enough of them to invest their time in developing them. When we invest in others it creates the feeling in them - almost an obligation - to invest in you and your vision.

In conclusion, most people will do a good job regardless of whether an executive is an effective leader. The art of leadership is getting people to be and do their best. Good efforts produce good results. Great efforts produce great results. The challenge we each have as leaders is to be mindful of how engaged and enthusiastic our team is, and then to be honest enough with ourselves to admit when the reality is less than we'd like.

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Sales Growth: The Bottom Line

Sales Leadership - Sales Leadership

Written by Steve Young

You and Your Company’s Growth

You are the most important person to your company’s growth. Your responsibility is to ensure the sales success of your company. You can pass the buck to salespeople or step up to your responsibility as a manager of sales.

Your decisions will either aid fulfillment or fail to aid fulfillment of your company’s growth potential. Salespeople depend on your support to help realize their efforts. If you cannot effectively strategize, develop related processes, administer training that is relevant to a strategy and process, and correctly manage productivity, then do right by your company and acknowledge your limitation, or accept the consequence of your limitation and be honest about where to place blame for struggles and failure to grow sales. If you can create, implement, monitor, and revise a sales operation in order to achieve reliable growth, then your success will be verifiable by quantifiable results from your well-defined strategies, processes, and management structure.

Note: Sales excellence requires a multitude of skills and capacities to function synergistically. Few people in the profession are true professionals; most individuals employed in sales—salespeople and managers—are ill equipped to provide a professional—as opposed to amateurish—level of performance in response to the demands of their positions. Companies that employ unqualified individuals will suffer their ignorance and incompetence.

Pillars of Excellence

Sales growth Effective sales organizations (those that can reliably achieve growth) value “outside the box” thinking about the profession. These professionals are beyond the simpleminded clichés and nonsense about Sales being a “numbers game.” (Numbers are an obvious aspect of the profession and, in many cases, are less important than other aspects.) Effective sales organizations are built upon four pillars of the profession. Anything that you might suggest as being a pillar other than what I present here is an element of: (1) Strategy; (2) Process; (3) Training; or (4) Management.

Sales is a dynamic occupation that engages an ever-changing world. In order to achieve reliable growth, your operation must be designed to evolve from the collection, assessment, and wise application of comprehensive data about the situation of your company relative to its ability to sell. If you resist change, you will hinder growth. If you’re ready to build an operation that yields sales as a natural and reliable product of its function, this foundation will lead you to success.

A Foundation for Growth

(1) Create a comprehensive STRATEGY based on accurate information. Synthesize sales-related information—information about your competition, industry developments, issues of your team, etc. A complete understanding of your situation is important for the intelligent design of a strategy that must be tested and built upon.

(2) Create a measureable PROCESS structured by clear steps. The steps of a process must be logically placed and, as “actionable,” yield accurate, objective data about each step in the process.

(3) Ensure correct execution of process by TRAINING relevant skills to your team. Relevant skills are determined by the strategy and process to be implemented. Knowledge of skills is not sufficient; skills must be well developed among salespeople. Use comprehensive role plays during training and develop skills pertinent to each step of your process.

(4) Monitor, assess, and evolve progress through focused MANAGEMENT. Excellent leadership manages a balanced and synergistic operation formed from strategy, process, training, and a management system. Management must safeguard and ensure progress through structure, and see salespeople as one aspect of their own effort to achieve excellence.

Note: the person who manages a company’s sales is ultimately responsible for the company’s growth. Salespeople are essential facilitators of growth who must be properly supported by the manager. The health of a team, enabled through on-going refinement of its work, will achieve growth and accomplish your goal.

This “simple” four-part method for growth is easy to understand but difficult to realize. Sales excellence requires a discovery process that reveals strategies and processes that reliably convert potential into actual growth. Many managers of sales simply do not possess the creativity and knowledge required to improve growth consistently, or they do not have the time required to create and test potentially superior strategies, and then train the relevant techniques to their team. For this reason, many companies lose money they—through operational improvements—could secure.

Key for Success

The key to the establishment and evolution of a successful sales operation is data. You simply cannot reach your potential without data. Data provides clues that can be steppingstones to higher levels of success. The daily work of your team produces a goldmine of data. Selected bits of this information must be frequently obtained and analyzed in order to achieve progress. Often, data will allow decision-making to be easy – simply a matter of selecting an obvious course of action from among a set of options. Without data, your success is left up to chance. An effectively designed and managed operation will allow you to collect, assess, and understand data, which will help you improve your growth reliably.

Data is essential for understanding your needs and making wise choices for solutions, which may include the development of new strategies and training regimens. Your data must be: (a) reliable; (b) broad (cover several areas); and (c) regularly attained (at least monthly). The issue here is not what you know about matters related to your sales; the issue pertains to what you don’t know about the matters related to your sales, which may be found in several areas including, but certainly not limited to:

•    industry and market trends;
•    developments with competitors;
•    changes in buyers’ interests;
•    technological advancements related to sales and marketing practices.

Data will help you identify your operation’s unique combination of practices that will achieve optimization and balance a step-by-step, revenue-generating process, relevant training regimen, and wise management structure.

Defining and Discovering Optimization

Sales NEVER occur spontaneously; they are ALWAYS the result of some process. In order to achieve reliable results from a sales process, data, strategy, relevant training, and management are critically important.

The extent to which a business owner is willing to allocate resources to a sales operation is one of several factors that impact a company’s growth and ability to achieve optimization. Other variables include: the interests of your buyers and their openness to your marketing and promotional materials; the strategies of your competitors; market and economic trends; new products; and each of your decisions about how to improve your operation. The numerous variables that impact growth and identification of successful strategies and processes are the daily challenges managers of sales must face.

Some sales managers equate sales improvement to a maximum amount of activity that a company and/or their team can manage at any given time. Operational capacity, inventory turns, schedule expansion can constitute “reaching sales potential,” and all or each of these may comprise your understanding of “optimization.” However, there is another aspect of potential that should be considered: profit. Operational capacity, inventory turns, schedule expansion, and all other sales-related activity are shortsighted objectives in and of themselves. Each of these must respectively contribute to maximizing company profit.

Quality and Quantity

Sales give life to our businesses, and the sustenance obtained from those sales is profit. Greater profits from sales provide a business with a healthier life. “Sale” and “profit” are not the same. Some companies sacrifice profit in order to gain sales. Therefore, sales improvement must consider sales in terms of quantity and quality.

Sales improvement is achieved through the discovery of a combination of resources and practices that are synergistically more effective than those presently separating you from greater sales. Business owners and managers of sales must be willing and able to learn how and why sales improved.

Strategy Over Experience

“Strategic thinking is the most valued skill in leaders today.”
- The Wall Street Journal

The improvement of your operation’s productivity is a simple matter of choice. Once you have decided to improve, you face the question of means: how will you improve? The decisions that you make here will lay a foundation for your growth strategy. Effective managers make decisions to safeguard the synergy of their operations – operations in which their teams are one of several critically important components. Another critical part of a healthy operation depends on the thought-process and subsequent quality of decisions made by managers, which determine the changes in and application of strategies. Strategy, unlike industry experience and product knowledge, depends on creativity and insight—attributes that many managers do not possess, which necessarily limits their effectiveness as managers.

Your Choice

Every company is unique, which means that companies differ in terms of capabilities, resources, and specific needs. Companies do share similar problems, but no other company employs you and your salespeople, shares your brand and market position, or applies your specific combination of resources in a growth strategy. Therefore, each company has a unique situation relative to its growth challenges.

Bottom line: your choice to achieve reliable growth must include answers to how you will:

•    ensure regular collection of accurate data;
•    systemize the evolution of a synergistic operation;
•    ensure operational progress through management structure.

Growth improvement is not sufficient in today’s world; companies should aim for optimization—attainment of their growth potential. The pursuit of reliable growth must include the four parts of sales excellence—strategy, process, training, and management—and aim for optimization. Among the benefits of optimization attained through these pillars are:

(a)    immediate improvement with long-term dividends;
(b)    an operation that evolves;
(c)    improved efficiency;
(d)    increased profitability;
(e)    reliable growth;
(f)    greater focus;
(g)    less stress.

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Page 1 of 26

Sales Leadership

Reform for Sales Success

No Sales Consultants

Missed Sales Forecasts: Is it the sales manager or the sales team?

Executive Effectiveness: Becoming an Effective Leader

Sales Growth: The Bottom Line

Sales Articles

Sales Articles

Sales Articles