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Tag: sales accountability

Uber-ized Sales or Model T Sales?

We had the opportunity to attend the recent AA-ISP event in San Francisco on February 18, 2016.

As always, Bob Perkins, Larry Reeves and the entire team at AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals) put together a power packed event.

The day was full of cutting edge thinking in selling.

AA-ISP events are always so inspirational. It always strikes me that the ideas, strategies and techniques discussed by members of the AA-ISP are often 180 degrees out of phase with what I often hear customers talking about in terms of their current strategies. Meaning that there are trends and changes in the way customer shop and buy and the AA-ISP is always leading the charge to steer sales leaders to capitalize on these trends. The rest of the world often takes a while to catch up.

The most common example of this is the importance of responding instantly to customer inquiries. There have been lots of studies in recent years of how important it is to respond to inquiries via your website within 5 to 15 minutes. Odds of even talking with the customer drop off precipitously after that.

But, this trend is driving structural changes in how sales teams are managed that I hadn’t realized.

Josh Evans outlined many of these changes in his talk “The Uber-ization of Sales”. A fundamental point he made was that customers demand instant access to exactly what they’re looking for and organizations have to be designed to deliver that speed and “performance”. That need is breaking traditional paradigms of sales management such as territories.

If I need to be sure leads get instant response, then setting up a system where a given customer has to wait for a specific salesperson to respond won’t work.

And back here in the real world, there are still thousands of organizations that manage sales with excel sheets. Clearly, filling out and emailing around excel sheets is inefficient for the sales team. However, clearly the cost of using manual tracking, management and reporting systems instead of instantly accessible, sharable CRM and Lead Management solutions is far bigger than just inefficiency.

The cost is in fact that if only the salesperson has access to lead information for days or weeks, then that customer’s experience of your company, your brand is suffering significantly. There is no way they’re going to have a “personalized” experience on your website or when they call in to your customer service department. And that is what people expect today.

So, you’re leaving the door open for your competitors every time a customer contacts you and hears “I’ll have to check with your sales rep and get back to you.”

March 6, 2016
Sales Accountability, Do or Die?
Inmates running the asylum?

Salespeople doing what they do with no real accountability?

Salespeople are great at telling stories and that is precisely what makes them challenging to manage. “What did you do today?”, asks the manager. “I met with 5 awesome prospects today. One is big enough to make my quote for the year!”, answers the salesperson.

The problem is that the 5 prospects were all in the same company, not five separate accounts and the big one is not planning to make any changes for two years. But, the salesperson leaves that info out. The manager hears what he or she wants to hear and moves on.

If you’ve “gotten serious” about this problem and started tracking the number of calls or meetings each salesperson has, then you know even that is not enough. Dialing the phone 50 or 100 times in a day does not mean it was a productive day.

So what to do?

First, let’s address the elephant in the room…

Your salespeople WILL tell you that whatever you ask them to do to report on their activity and/or their pipeline of future business is way too difficult and time consuming and that it’s keeping them from making more sales. That’s just the fact. They’ve got it good now, they can get away with anything! Why would they want that to change?

And, you’re human. You don’t want to be a “micromanager” and you want them to feel trusted and supported. So, you’re going to have trouble looking them in the eye and saying they have to do it the way you want anyway.

But, the only alternatives are:
- Live without the metrics you need.
- Pay someone to spend hours per week collating information by talking with each salesperson, merging spreadsheets and generally doing it the hard way.
It’s very difficult to appreciate until you’ve experienced it first hand but, having instant access to actionable information on your sales funnel is essential to sustainable, profitable growth.

You already know what the little details are that make all the difference in your business. Things that make one prospect great and another not so good. Measure those things! Once you have reliable measurement, you can incentivize them.

As an example of how powerful that “last mile” of measurement can be, let me tell you a story from my past…

In the energy business, there are 5 or so major oil companies in any given geographical region that are the “whales”. They dominate the production of energy in the areas they’ve chosen to target. So, it’s easy for salespeople and businesses to assume that when a sales opportunity opens up at Exxon/Mobil, it’s a HUGE one.

However, in the business I was part of, the service we offered was of particular value to companies investing in new drilling operations, as opposed to just producing from previously drilled wells.

So, prior to implementing detailed tracking of opportunities, I could get a call report that told me we had meetings with Exxon/Mobil, Shell Oil, BP, Chesapeake Energy and Newfield Exploration in a given week.

And our organization’s entire focus was on Exxon/Mobil, Shell and BP for obvious reasons.

However, once we began to require the salesperson to ask a prospect the number of wells they planned to drill in the area in the next 12 months, things shifted 180 degrees! We realized that the need for and budget for our service was greatest within the smaller, independent oil companies that didn’t already have a bunch of wells in the area and therefore were planning to drill them!

So, the call report was prioritized by the number of wells planned for the year and goals were set for the salespeople to build their pipeline of prospects and opportunities within groups planning to drill at least a certain amount of wells. And sales tripled in 1 year!

Best of all, we only had to ask the sales team to collect and enter one additional piece of information.

Bottom line – you’re probably misinterpreting the information being reported by your sales team currently and therefore, making bad decisions about hiring, training and market strategies.

The best approach is to get the sales team involved in constructing the approach to tracking and pipeline management. Your top producing salespeople know what matters. Let them help you build the system. Just as importantly, let them help you select the CRM solution that you’ll use to capture, manage and report on all of this information.

None of this will change the fact that salespeople will push back on what they’ll call “micro-management”. But, the best ones will understand it’s importance and value. The squeakiest wheels are usually your worst reps.
March 1, 2016
Is Sales Training Worth the Investment?

Sales know how is essential to sales success in any industry. The learning curve of a sales person can be very slow and expensive if they’re relying soley on first hand experience.

Investing in sales training makes a lot of sense for new, inexperienced sales people and certain programs can even be valuable for seasoned pros.

In my previous life, I took over a sales team made up of former geologists who had been laid off from oil companies during an energy industry downturn. Short story: Scientists and engineers generally don’t make great salespeople without training. Their instincts make them too likely to have the most common killer problems for salespeople: Call reluctance, talking too much in high pressure situations and focus on features instead of value.

I connected my team with a local Sandler Sales Institute program and it changed everything! They learned a “system” that led them to focus on asking questions, finding customer pain, etc.

However, we learned that learning the technique was not enough for most salespeople. They needed a lot of reinforcement. It wasn’t until we drilled down to measuring which of the key questions got asked and answered did they really adopt the Sandler approach.

Our recent report, “You’re Wasting Sales Training Dollars” lays out the keys to holding your team accountable to implementing the techniques they’re learning. Without this accountability, you truly are wasting your sales training investment.

Download “You’re Wasting Sales Training Dollars” here.

January 26, 2016