Like any sports team, the goal of a great sales team is to win against their competitors. Success is not dependent upon a single sales leader or 'superstar' salesperson, but is built into the systems meaning the team wins again and again, year after year. Great leaders institutionalise sales success by building enduring structures and systems that align with their goals and strategy.
In our work with clients to enhance sales performance and grow revenue, we are actively engaged in designing and developing enduring sales training and coaching programmes that become adopted as 'business as usual'. These assignments are dedicated change programmes focused on sales and business development where training and coaching are only part of the solution.
The focus is creating a repeatable, predictable and sustainable sales system.
Training And Coaching Require Underpinning
If behaviour changes and the adoption of new mindsets, skills, frameworks and tools are to be sustainable, you need to look more holistically at methodology, process, enablement, management and leadership.
If all of the required elements for sales success are not linked, your organisation will not optimise the critical client conversations that lead to revenue growth. Imagine an old engine that is 'out of tune' – the elements required for success are not functioning like a well-oiled machine. Lack of alignment will result in wasted time and effort, inefficiency and narrow conversations that will inhibit growth.
Conversely, if all of the elements are linked up, your organisation will have more meaningful client conversations that drive growth.
Success is systematic, so let's look at the key elements of success that need to be connected.
Leadership
Leadership is primarily about aligning a clear vision, a well-defined strategy and the development of a winning sales culture. The business vision is your goal for what your business will be in the future and it will align with your business goals and aspirations. Your business vision is the formal way of communicating your business goals and commitments to others. Here's an example from Amazon:
"Our vision is to be Earth's most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."
Translating this into a vision for your sales organisation should be straightforward. The sales strategy then sets out how the goals will be achieved. A clear sales strategy is a set of decisions, actions and goals that inform how your sales team positions your organisation and its services to originate and win new business. The strategy may include the 'go to market' strategy for winning new clients or entering new markets, and the key account strategy to grow or retain business with your most important clients.
The strategy acts as a guide for sales managers and their teams to execute, providing clarity on market solution fit, targeting and segmentation, ideal client profile, messaging and positioning, competitive differentiation and sales organisational design and operating model.
Your culture is your sales organisation's most powerful and sustainable competitive advantage.
We define a winning sales culture as the combination of great sales leaders and effective contributors focused on successful execution of strategic sales and marketing initiatives. This sales culture represents the collective behaviour of your salespeople. It's what most of your salespeople do most of the time and it answers the question, 'How do we sell around here?'
A distinctive culture is a game changer. While your competition can copy virtually everything you have, what they can't copy are your people and how they behave. Sales organisations win when all the people are moving in the right direction – where every client interaction reinforces your core values and strategy. This means that the sales organisation has a common language and a set of values that are made real through day-to-day practice.
Great sales cultures must be created intentionally, not by accident. The key leverage point in developing your sales culture is the behaviour of your sales leaders. Your sales leaders determine what your people value and do by what they value and reinforce. In addition, leaders require a framework or operating system to create a winning culture.
Ways Of Working
When considering this element of the overall system, we are concerned with the critical processes and methodologies that enable success and the sales cadences that deliver optimal results.
A sales process can be considered singular and is described as a set of repeatable steps that a salesperson takes to move a prospective buyer from the early stage of awareness to a closed sale and beyond.
That may be a little simplistic, as there are numerous processes to consider both externally and internally in B2B markets where sales cycles are longer, more competitive, and higher in value. All processes need to be linked and related. Consider the simple and critical relationship between sales stages and an internal approval or risk assessment process.
There is abundant evidence that an effective sales methodology outperforms random or haphazard thinking and behaviour if you want to become more effective and efficient. This is true in business development. If business development methodologies are too sophisticated, they won't be used, and if they are too simple, they won't have a positive impact on results.
There needs to be effective processes and methodologies not only for how we advance and qualify opportunities, but also for how we originate them. We also need to figure out how we transition them to Account Management or Customer Success. It's critical that all the related teams understand the roles to be performed so it becomes a seamless system for the client to navigate through, and for internal partners to challenge constructively so everyone puts their best foot forward.
Sales Enablement
Sales enablement describes the internal ecosystem that supports client-facing team members' engagement with a variety of stakeholders. It depends on cross-functional collaboration and is often described as the bridge between a 'go-to-market' strategy and tactical execution.
Effective sales enablement comprises the tools, playbooks, client facing assets and models required by individuals, leaders and teams in every aspect of client engagement from prospecting through to closing.
Training and development is a broad subject and is often delegated to a Human Resources or Learning and Development role. Effective training and development interventions rarely involve 'off the shelf' solutions or programmes and should be carefully designed based on the needs of the business with a clear business outcome in mind. Such interventions should be considered as programmes delivered consistently over time, rather than a number of disconnected events. Leadership involvement, support and active sponsorship are required for success.
Finally, enabling technologies should be just that – enablers. With a poor ROI and all too often a label of 'unnecessary administration' rather than an effective job-aid, we rarely see technology being used effectively. Or worse still, it creates unnecessary noise and distraction for teams.
Management
Much has been written and said about management – in particular sales management, which we describe as 'getting sales processes completed through people'. The sales manager's role includes the process of hiring, training and motivating salespeople, coordinating operations across the sales function and cross-functionally, and implementing a cohesive sales strategy that drives business revenues.
Ruthless prioritisation and effective coaching set great managers apart from average performers, and we have identified a number of focus areas that leaders should relentlessly pay attention to that will enhance performance.
Effective sales managers ensure that all eight of these specific responsibilities are undertaken with rigour and consistency by all team members. There is a discipline to good sales management that is often understated and under valued. Yes, managers need to lead and inspire, but they also need to get the 'hard' and important work done, which requires discipline.
Great sales cultures that enable a competitive advantage don't automatically happen. They are created deliberately with a framework for implementing a common language and approach. They require leadership at every level and personal effectiveness in every role.
Client Conversations
In complex B2B environments, sales can't be automated or pushed online. There are simply too many variables.
Often, multiple personnel on both sides still need to be involved. Every organisation we speak to has invested, to varying degrees, in a system of success to drive consistency and more repeatable, predictable and sustainable revenue performance. This applies to individual contributors, multidisciplinary teams and across the business as a whole.
Here's the challenge: regardless of your 'tech stack', enablement tools, client value stories, efficient processes and operations, exhaustive performance data and revenue metrics, all of which are all highly valuable, achieving your desired outcome comes down to the quality of the conversations your people have with your buyers. The rapport they establish, the level of trust they create and their ability to foster a positive environment where there is a 'free flow of quality information' from both sides, are all vital.
All parties know when conversations are going well and can feel it when they hit a roadblock. We have identified 10 Crucial Conversations. These are not the only conversations your teams need to have, nor do they happen in a defined order. They are sometimes repeated or cut short to be picked up later. Our role as sellers is to steer and manage the conversations and to know which conversation we are having, all while executing well at every stage. However, it is misguided to believe we can control them. By definition, they involve two or more people exchanging ideas and information.
Purposeful curiosity, client-centricity and well-structured thinking as you plan and execute these conversations is critical to success.
Client Value
The essence of consultative value-based selling is to identify value and then develop a precise solution that can help the client realise the value they are seeking.
At The Sales Coach Network, we have developed a proprietary Value Framework which complements our Sales Accelerator Methodology to help sales professionals think and act differently as they navigate client conversations during a sales pursuit.
Our framework describes the four pillars of value that can be identified during discovery conversations with multiple clients on any given opportunity. Identifying what clients truly value at a level of detail superior to the competition will allow us to better qualify an opportunity and present a solution that closely meets their needs, while delivering the outcome they seek and differentiating our offer in a way that they appreciate.
Revenue
Regardless of the commercial model and favoured charging methods, we have witnessed a direct correlation between the value we help our clients realise and the value for our own organisation. The optimal model for driving revenue growth or sustainability occurs when all of the integral parts of the 'sales engine' are working smoothly and in harmony.
Summary
In summary, all sales organisations are perfectly aligned to achieve the results they get. Sales leaders may establish goals, yet have systems that are completely misaligned with those goals.
For example, they may say they want cooperation, but often their compensation model fosters destructive competition within teams or departments. They say they want high trust, but their bureaucratic approval systems communicate mistrust at all levels.
Many sales leaders complain that they can't do much about the systems they've inherited or the territory their team manages. We disagree! You have a great deal of control over how you develop and position the people on your team.
You also have a significant impact on the structure, systems and processes that you and your team use to get the work done. Creating systems of success is the responsibility of sales leaders at any level.
We take a holistic approach to our assignments, using a combination of advisory services, training and coaching linked to agreed business outcomes.
Your organisation will benefit from measurable results within 100 days as part of an intentional behavioural change programme, engineered to drive pre-agreed business outcomes. Imagine the difference if your client-facing teams were having more effective conversations at all stages of the buying process...
Get In Touch
Is it worth us having a conversation to see whether or not we can help you and your team achieve more? Email us today and we will put you in touch with one of our experienced coaches.
Comments