CEO Sales Guide

Creating a “Culture of Accountability” is the cornerstone of building an over-achieving sales team.  And really it’s fundamental to building over-achieving teams in general.  As a CEO, President, or Business Owner you probably understand this and chances are most of your leadership team understand this concept as well.  And yet, many sales managers (and managers in general) struggle when it comes to holding their people accountable.  Why is that?

Here are five issues and barriers we have observed through our consulting practice over the years.  There are many more we could list, but this will give you a good place to start if a lack of accountability has been a challenge in your organization.  How many of these apply to your managers? 

Unclear Goals

If your managers don’t have a clear line of sight to your company’s goals and a clear understanding of what their team needs to do to help achieve them, how can they possibly hold their team accountable to the daily activities and behaviors that will get you there?

No Coaching Rhythm

We recommend sales managers hold a regularly scheduled “formal” coaching meeting at least every two weeks (weekly is better).  This is in addition to all the “informal” coaching conversations that happen around the office or driving back from a joint sales call.  Without a regular coaching rhythm where your sales manager and each individual sales person review progress toward the goals, activities driving the goals, as well as potential barriers and challenges getting in the way, it’s very difficult to hold people accountable and keep them on track.

Too Much Complaining

There are a couple of ways to look at this issue.  In some cases, your sales manager is the whiner (“we don’t have enough resources….operations is letting us down….the competition is killing us in a price war….” and on and on).  In other cases, they are too sympathetic and tolerant of the whining and excuses they hear from their team.  When someone on their team is complaining about a challenge they have, strong managers ask questions (“What can you do to change the situation?” or “Are you telling me this because you want me to do something or are you just letting off steam so you can focus on solving it yourself?”).  Most managers join in and simply add gasoline to the fire.

Too Friendly

While it’s important that your sales managers build a strong rapport with their team and establish a high level of trust, many managers go too far and become too “buddy-buddy” with the people on their team.  Or worse, they become buddy-buddy with some members of the team but not all.  When that happens they start treating people differently and it breeds tremendous resentment across the team.  The key is to establish clear goals, review them regularly, stop accepting excuses, and manage agreements about what needs to happen each week/month to reach the goals.

Too Aloof

Some managers go too far the other way.  They don’t invest the time in getting to know each team member, what their goals are (both business and personal goals), and they really don’t know them as people.  These managers become unapproachable and come across as inauthentic when they try to be friendly.  When your managers can get to know the personal goals of each member of their team and help them see your company as the means through which they can reach that goal, it becomes much easier to hold team members accountable to the daily/weekly/monthly activities need to reach their goals (both business and personal).

The beauty of having an effective sales process is that it creates a level of consistency and discipline often lacking in sales organizations.  It also provides a coaching framework so your sales managers can help reinforce that consistency and discipline.

What would happen if your sales people applied the same rigor and consistency to every deal

Unfortunately, that is not usually the case. When there is not a clear sales process in place, or sales people do not stick to it throughout the process, prospects fall through the cracks. Two common ways that we see this occurring is when sales people either give up too early or celebrate too soon. While these may seem like opposite issues, they are actually two sides of the same coin.

Giving Up Too Early

We have observed a phenomenon in some of our coaching calls recently: Sales people who give up too early.  Selling is hard.  There are lots of ways to screw it up.  Even when you do everything right, you still might not win the business.  So why do we regularly see sales people take their eye off the ball in the late stages of the sales process? 

In some cases sales people take a pessimistic view and just assume that they’ve lost a deal when they really have not. They give up early, simply go through the motions, and fail to stay on top of the opportunity, shifting their focus to other stuff. Sometimes these deals they had written off come through and they are “shocked” to get the business.

By not closely monitoring and reviewing your sales team’s pipeline during weekly meetings, they are no longer held accountable for taking each step of the sales path and can give up too early in the sales process.  As you and your sales team become more efficient at following a well laid out sales process, their attention to detail and following through will become a natural habit.  Take the time to have these coaching meetings, and ask them to lay out each step they have taken.  Quite often you will see that there are several more opportunities for follow up, which may in fact save the deal.

Celebrating Too Soon

Sometimes, the problem is just the opposite.  What happens when your sales people are celebrating too early?

In some cases it’s a matter of sales people getting complacent.  Everything seems to be on track and they assume everything will just flow according to plan and then are surprised when they get the news that the prospective client has changed plans, eliminated the budget, or chosen a different supplier.  The reality is, you cannot take anything for granted.  You need to follow the process and stay on top of it all the way through the close – and frankly beyond the close and through client on-boarding and ramp up.

I was reminded of an infamous play from Superbowl XXVII. Take 15 seconds to watch the video below. The ironic thing is that everyone else can see what is happening except for Leon Lett, the guy with the ball. This is why coaching is so critical, bringing in some outside perspective and tangible accountability.

The best time to really hold these teams accountable is during your weekly sales team meetings.  Ask them to start ranking each prospect on how close they are to closing.  We often find in our Must Win Deal workshops that sales people are ranking these prospects at 75-85% closed, when in fact they haven’t done a good portion of the needed qualifying.  Take the time to ask some of these questions at your next sales meeting:

• Do you know their budget and timeline?
• Are you actually talking to the decision maker?
• Are they already working with another vendor?  If yes, how loyal are they to this vendor?
• Do we meet 100% of their needs?

Many of your sales team will have never even thought of these questions, and this is not even scratching the surface of what needs to be answered to ensure your prospects are 100% qualified.

Take some time this week in your sales meeting to ask your sales team about each step they have taken with a few prospects in their timeline. Are they following every step of the sales process, or are they skipping a few?  Is there a consistent sales process, or does each sales person have a different process in mind?  Are they, in fact, giving up too soon on great opportunities or celebrating too soon on luke warm leads?

High performing sales people are customer centric and have the ability to execute and produce positive results, in turn increasing revenue and profitability.  While the definition seems simple, when interviewing and reviewing potential candidates, it can be hard to narrow down exactly what you should be looking for to identify high performers.

Here are some characteristics which will aide in identifying high performers:

Autonomy

High performers have the ability to manage themselves, their projects, and their priorities. They are independent and can work well, even without a lot of oversight. Ask them about a project or accomplishment they completed on their own, without a lot of outside accountability.

Input and Feedback

High performers are able to communicate clearly and effectively with supervisors and peers, at every level of the organization. They openly accept feedback, seeing it as a way to continue their growth. They are also willing to give feedback to others.

Taking Initiative

They know what they need in order to succeed.  In other words, high performing sales people are resourceful executers! Period.

Networking skills

High performers are able to develop relationships inside and outside the work environment. Building and maintaining relationships is part of how they live and work.This broadens the knowledge and contribution offered to the organization.

Open Mind

High performers enjoy introducing and managing change; keeping the organization up to date with technology, new concepts and solutions, and leading edge products and services. If something offers the opporutnity to improve the company or sales results, they do not think twice about changing the status quo to move forward.

While these may not come as a surprise, why do your hiring managers continue to settle for subpar performers? High performers are scarce in today’s volatile work environment.  By implementing a boundary spanning talent acquisition strategy you will be able to place high performers across the entire organization!  While they seem simplistic, take the time to discuss them with your sales management team. 

Often when we assess the existing sales organization of one of our clients, we discover the need to replace or add new members to the sales team. One of our many valuable services is assisting our clients with their hiring initiative. 

Whether you are in the process of hiring a new position or not, you can take the time to review your existing team to identify if you have any high performers.

Please contact us for more information on how to achieve a high performing culture.

It’s the time of year when we take stock of where we are, and make plans for where we want to go. What went well in your business in 2013? What didn’t go so well (or “needs improvement” as some people like to say)?

As you create a sales plan for 2014, and map out where you would like your business to go, consider some specific things you can do to improve sales productivity. Here are five (5) objectives we suggest you consider.  Whether you select one of these or come up with a sales improvement plan of your own, pick at least one area to focus on in 2014 and stick with it for the next four quarters.

1.  Face the brutal truth

In Good to Great and the many subsequent books resulting from his research on what makes companies great, Jim Collins notes that the first step to being a great company is to face the brutal truth. 

In our opinion, the single most impactful investment a CEO or business owner can make in their sales organization is to conduct a comprehensive Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis from Objective Management Group.If you are serious 

2. Focus on your sales pipeline

Your sales pipeline is the single most accurate forecast of incoming revenue in your company.  Your management team should review it regularly and make adjustments accordingly.  Your operations manager must use your sales pipeline as a guide to adjusting capacity requirements.  Your Chief Financial Officer should use your sales pipeline as a guide for making strategic investments and managing cash flow more effectively. 

In fact, everyone on your management team should look at your sales pipeline and gain confidence.  Most companies don’t use their sales pipeline this way because it is usually a joke your sales manager tries to defend and justify at management meetings.  What would happen if you had a reliable sales pipeline your leaders could count on?

3. Commit to coaching

Your sales managers should spend about 50% of their time directly coaching your sales people.  It is the only way your sales people will make consistent improvements so that every week, every month, and every quarter you will be able to look at the behaviors and activities across your sales organization and say “Yes, we’re clearly getting better.  We’re having better conversations.  We’re getting into better opportunities.  We are winning business more consistently because our proposals are better qualified.  We are selling better work at higher margins.  We are improving customer satisfaction.  We have better communications from our sales team to the rest of the organization.”  To be able to say these things you need to commit to a consistent and rigorous coaching routine.

4. Hire stronger sales talent

Upgrading your sales talent can be a growth strategy.  How many people on your sales team would you enthusiastically rehire?  Who are the mediocre performers on your team that you tolerate because you don’t want to make a change?  What is your plan for these B and C-players?  Can you develop them?  Coach them?  Put them in a position better suited for their skills?  What would happen if you committed to an A-Player-only hiring strategy?  Perhaps this is the year to make that happen.

5. Narrow your market focus

Sometimes we just take the work our sales people can sell instead of being focused and disciplined around selling to accounts that best fit our model. 

Who are your best accounts?  The idea of “best” could mean most profitable, easiest to work with, most strategic potential, deepest relationship, or many other factors.  What would happen to your business if your entire account base was comprised of customers who really fit what you do?  Who are the customers that take up disproportionate resources?  Can you adjust your pricing to encourage them to leave (freeing up valuable resources for customers who are a better fit)?  Looking at your sales pipeline, are your sales people targeting the right types of accounts and are they having conversations at the right level?  Or are they just taking whatever they can get?  What would your company look like 12 months from now if you narrowed your market focus and aligned your sales organization around the accounts that best fit your operation?

Make it a priority to clearly define what your ideal account looks like, and include it in your entire sales process.

Where does your sales team “need improvement” this year? Let us know which one you picked and we’ll check in with you in 90 days to make sure you are sticking with it!

...About Their Sales Forecasts and Pipeline Reports

Many CEOs we work with either don't pay close attention to the sales pipeline reports they get from their sales managers (because it's rarely accurate) or ignore pipeline reports and sales forecasts completely (because they've lost faith in the accuracy of the reports, the sales manager who put them together, or both).

We work with middle market and large corporate clients in a wide variety of industries - selling different products and services, to different target markets, with different sales cycles, at different price points, with varying levels of complexity and competition, and several other important differences. And yet, nearly every CEO we work with has similar issues and challenges when it comes to the accuracy and rigor applied to the data tracked in the sales forecasts and pipeline reports they get from their sales managers.

With just a little bit of attention, these same CEOs could have a significant impact on increasing revenue, improving profit margins, accelerating sales cycles, improving accountability, and increasing forecasting accuracy.

How? By putting some focus on these common sales pipeline challenges companies face. 

With that in mind, here are six (6) questions your sales managers hope you won't ask about their pipeline:

1. How long has each opportunity we are tracking been in our sales pipeline?
2. What would the total value of our pipeline be if we eliminated each opportunity that is older than X months?
3. Under ideal circumstances, how much time should it take for an opportunity to move through each stage of our sales cycle?
4. Have we defined the committments we need from the prospective customer at each stage of the sales process so we can confidently move an opportunity to the next step?
5. When an opportunity gets stuck at a particular point in the sales process, what coaching feedback are you providing the sales person who is responsible for that opportunity?
6. How many opportunities should each salesperson on the team either move forward in the sales process or eliminate from the sales pipeline every week.

"What would happen to your revenue and profit margin if your sales organization became a coaching-centric group that got better and better every month?"

If you are a regular reader of our blog or if we have had the pleasure of working with your sales team, you know that we believe sales managers should invest significant time (ideal target is 50%) coaching their sales people. 

And this sales coaching should take place on a regular basis, both in a structured formal coaching session (regularly scheduled, ideally every week) and in more informal ways during joint calls, during morning huddles, during pre-call planning sessions, and during post-call debriefs. 

"What is the main goal of these frequent coaching sessions and how will you know if your sales manager is making progress?" 

Of course the best way to answer that question is in the context of each individual on the sales team.  

Not everyone needs the same coaching and the type of coaching your sales managers provide will depend on several factors, including: 

• The experience level of the sales person and where they are in the progression through their sales career (by the way, years in sales doesn’t always mean progress – a 20-year veteran could need more coaching than a relatively new sales person if they’ve had the same year of experience 20 times versus having 20 years of steady, continuous development and improvement).
• The sales person’s familiarity with your products, service, markets, customers, competitors, and other company and market factors.
• The sales person’s strengths and “hidden weaknesses” that may get in the way when they are on a call or in front of a prospective customer.
• A sales person’s openness to coaching and acceptance of their manager’s feedback.
• A sales person’s commitment to doing whatever it takes to get better, even if that means pushing past their comfort zone and failing at a new approach or tactic until they get it right. 

With all of these factors considered, your sales manager’s focus for every coaching interaction with their sales people should focus on answering two simple questions: 

• What did you just do on that call (or in that meeting) that went really well and that you should repeat on future calls?
• What did you just do on that call (or in that meeting) that didn’t go as you expected and that you should avoid on future calls?

That’s it.  If after every single sales interaction your sales people had a conversation with their manager where they could discuss these two questions, what would happen over time?  Would the quality of the conversations your sales people have improve?  Would they get better at asking questions, creating urgency, identifying compelling reasons for prospects to move forward, disqualifying non-prospects or prospects that don’t fit your business model?  Would the quality of your proposals improve?  Would you win more proposals?  At higher profit margins?  With better customers? 

That’s the power of consistent, structured coaching.  But of course even when a sales manager spends half of their time (50% or about 20 hours per week) conducting both formal and informal coaching conversations with their sales people, most organizations will have a difficult time having this type of conversation after each and every sales interaction your sales team has.  So then what? 

Ideally over time each sales person on your team should increase their "Sales-Awareness" and should be able to have this conversation on their own.  A few moments of reflection after every call or every meeting can make a huge difference over time if they really focus on these two questions.  In some environments, such as a call center or where inside sales people sit near one another in a bull pen set up, peer-to-peer coaching can also be very powerful.  And when this happens over time and with consistency, the quality of the formal coaching sessions will get better and better because the sales people will come to the meeting prepared with specific ideas of where they need help and what they need to work on to get better. 

Consistent coaching should lead to greater sales-awareness and increased self-reflection across your sales organization. Is that happening with your team? Are your managers having the right coaching conversations? Are they asking the right questions? Do they invest enough time with each team member? Do they do it consistently and effectively? If not why not? Lack of skills? Are your sales leaders too busy? Are your sales leaders too lazy?  Are they disengaged?

"What would happen to your revenue
and profit margin if your sales organization
became a coaching-centric group that got better
and better every month?"

Here's a radical idea - let's have your sales team qualify opportunities before you prepare a quote!  Too many sales organizations seem to use a "quote and hope" strategy that rarely drives consistent revenue growth.

Continuing our series on Building a Profitable Sales Process, this post will cover step 8 - qualifying the opportunity.

If you asked your sales people and sales managers what's the most important area to explore in the qualification process you'll probably hear "budget".  And that's good, profitable business begins by working with customers who can afford your product or service.  But there is much more to the qualification process than just finding out if they can afford to pay you.

Here are eight (8) questions to have your sales managers ask when coaching your sales people to review opportunities at the "qualification" stage of your sales process:

1. Have we uncovered all of the issues and do we fully understand the impact our product or service will have on the prospect's situation?
    
2. Does the prospect agree with all the issues we have identified and do they have urgency to make a change?
    
3. Have we discussed the investment required to implement our solution or purchase our product and does the prospect understand the value this investment will create?
    
4. Do we understand the prospect's timeline for when they need our product or solution and do we have the capacity to take on this work within the timeline the prospect requires?
    
5. Do we understand the prospect's decision process, know all of the stakeholders involved, and have a strategy to leverage our advocates and covert (or at least neautralize) our detractors?
    
6. Have we asked enough questions about the competitive context in which the prospect is making this decision?  Do we know the advantages our solution provides and how these advantages fit into and align with their buying criteria?
    
7. Do we have all of the technical information we need to produce an accurate quote?  Has the prospect provided contact information for any technical people on their side (engineers, quality control, etc.) we may need to contact with clarifying questions as we prepare our quote?
    
8. Have we clearly defined what happens when the prospect receives our quote?  Has the prospect agreed to make a decision?  Have we set up a meeting to review the quote and go over any questions?