Every day we hear from company owners, how do I raise my sales and get more out of my current teams?
The answer is normally complex but comes in 3 core tenants, People, Process and Systems and in that exact order.
People:
We all know the driving factor behind any success is the team of people powering it. The little addressed issue here that leads to stagnation or missing targets is how these people are measured, held accountable, and supported. So let’s tackle this with simplicity to avoid confusion.
Metrics:
Metrics need to actually drive our results and too many companies use lagging indicators which are the wrong levers to effectively scale results. Focus on leading indicators that directly correlate with your directives and if you don’t know how these work together, start to study the relationships immediately.
Accountability
Accountability is a hard nut to crack as each leader and team has different needs, dynamics, and styles so the suggestion here which is universal is to let the metrics do the talking with an ever-present dashboard for everyone to see. Let personal responsibility, competitiveness, and pride be your guiding light for the sales team, therefore, reducing micro-management and the need for rough conversations. This may be uncomfortable and people may quit but who wants salespeople who aren’t strong competitors, collaborators, and take pride to push results forward.
- A special note here is that compensation plans need to be worked correctly to keep a collaborative environment and make this strategy scalable!
Support
Support is the overall key and is so often the main reason we are called in as most leaders are either amazing strategists or amazing coaches but not both hence the fractional sales management and sales coaching S2C is called for to resolve. You can’t just hand salespeople targets and say “Go Get It” as the market, tools, and systems required are changing at breakneck speed and high performance is a constant art of continuous improvement. This is a little list we compiled of sales managers and sales leaders income-producing activities:
Sales Manager:
Coaching, Planning, Shadowing, Call Review, Role Plays, Pipeline Management, CRM Training, Sales Collateral Building, Sales Sequence Creation & Optimization and Communicating with Marketing.
Sales Leader:
Sales Channel Development (Emails, Targeting, Systems, Integration Optimization, Metric Optimization, Controlling Numbers, Finding new ways to push pipeline metrics, Filling the inbound lead pipeline with marketing, Holding sales accountable to service level agreements with marketing, and Allocating spend to make targets.
The most common problem we see here is the constant need to push sales management and sales leadership together which is ineffective in the short and long term. How do you do this with a small team? (Coming up in the next article).
Process
Many businesses put processes and systems in the same boat such as “a new CRM will solve it that has better features” and the truth is most companies use less than 5% of the total capacity of modern CRMs as their processes don’t support the automation & enablement features.
Mapping out your “current state” and “ideal state” for processes is essential to start optimizing results. This is most effective by applying supply chain methodologies in “Plan, DO, Check, Act, Repeat.” Processes can only be created and then tested and need to be reviewed weekly to see where bottlenecks are forming and work on increasing movement from one stage to the next.
Advice “Have a 30-minute weekly marketing meeting” which includes the sales manager, marketing manager, and leadership to look at the process and stats to see where improvement needs to be focused for the week. DO NOT change too many variables at one time or you will lose your ability to test incremental progress.
In the process, the main factors for the isolated sales process are contact time from time of lead creation, speed of cycle, lead to conversion rate, time to the booked call, show up rate, offer rate, closing rate, and of course customer success factors for post-sale. (These are the universal ones only)
We will bring you more on the process in further newsletters as this topic could fill a 12-part series by itself.
Systems:
The final core tenant and the most important when looking for scalability of a business. Systems can either help or hinder your team and need to be carefully evaluated before jumping at an option as too often a system is purchased for operations and doesn’t work with sales & marketing or vice-versa. Unfortunately, there is no magic pill to what to select but we encourage systems with open APIs and large-scale adoption already in the marketplace so you don’t have to forage new roads when adopting new systems.
With that said, we firmly believe in an integrated sales and marketing system that can clearly show intention data, visualize the process, track activities automatically, permit sales sequences to be enabled, and provide intelligent workflow processes to nurture customers. Typically with extreme customization comes extreme cost but not so with all technologies but we are definitely biased toward a couple for this very reason.
If systems do not generate higher amounts of leads, conversions, and customer success in less time with greater transparency then they don’t work. DO NOT let your CRM only be a contact management system, make it into an absolute machine that enables your sales team to spend more time selling to the right people at the right time with intention data.
The point behind this article was to provide you with a baseline and some questions to ask when considering critical new directions for your business but please just like a doctor when making adjustments in people, processes, or systems please get multiple opinions as just like doctors 80% of the time they will be different but also provide more clarity into the solution.
If you need a soundboard and want to chat on anything discussed then book us down for a strategic conversation and let’s get you a fresh look at your people, processes, and systems!
Looking forward to the chat:
