Tag Archive for: productivity

How to Deal with Underperforming Sales Reps

in , ,

On any sales team, there are top, mid-level, and bottom performers. It’s easy to know what to do with the first two – keep paying them to produce results! Sales leaders often have more trouble dealing with underperformers.

When I consult as a Fractional VP of Sales, I typically see two problems with underperforming reps: 1) they are left on the team to dwindle or; 2) they have a high level of staff turnover. So, what is the right way to handle your underperformers? Hint: the answer is not to immediately fire them!

How to Assess Your Bottom Performers

As a sales leader or business owner, you need to approach unsatisfactory sales performance from a place of curiosity. In other words, you should be asking why your bottom performers are struggling to get results. Here are three questions you can ask to get to the bottom of poor sales performance:

  • Why is the person in question producing at that level?
  • Why is that person going about their sales job in the present manner?
  • What is motivating this salesperson to chronically underperform?

An astute manager will flip this hierarchy of questions around and start by asking about motivation. It’s something that I don’t see managers consider very often, but it is absolutely the most effective way to get to the crux of the problem. That’s because there are two main drivers for success as a salesperson: competence and motivation.

How Competence Influences Success as a Salesperson

If we consider competence to mean knowledge and the skill needed to apply that knowledge, then it’s possible to teach salespeople things to empower them to improve their performance.

If someone is performing poorly in sales, it could be that…

  • you’re not giving them what they need to succeed
  • they don’t know what tools to ask for
  • they know what they need but are afraid to speak up
  • they don’t know how to use the tools they already have

For example, the CRM provided to a sales team may be either insufficient or too complex for some salespeople. Or perhaps they are expected to use technology platforms they’re not adequately trained on, which negatively affects their interactions with potential customers.

Whatever the specific issue may be, you can ensure that competence is not the problem by providing all the tools and training necessary for a person to improve their performance.

How Motivation Influences Success as a Salesperson

If you understand a person’s motivators when it comes to their job, you can feed them those motivators to set the stage for success. To know what motivates someone, you as a leader need to get to know your people.

Whether you choose to do that in a direct or roundabout way, you need to understand exactly what drives a bottom performer. Is it achievement? Do they enjoy competition? Do they prefer to work as part of a team? Do they shy away from public recognition, or thrive on it? Perhaps they’re motivated by a mix of money and an innate desire to help people.

Every person has a different mix of motivators that drive them to perform. Note that not every salesperson has money as their number one motivator. With that being said, if money is not in their top three motivators, they’re likely in the wrong job.

The Influence of the Interpersonal

As a business leader, you need to know how your people are doing as human beings in general. What’s going on in someone’s life outside of work can have a profound impact on how they show up in their job. In fact, one of the top indicators of job performance is the direct relationship between an employee and their superiors.

If you have no idea how they are doing as people, you’ll likely be at a loss for how to help them succeed. How you choose to get to know your people is up to what is appropriate for you and your style. Take whichever path you’d like, as long as you get there – or else, risk high turnover.

How to Deal with Bottom Performers Based on Your Assessment

So, now you have your diagnostic checklist for assessing a poor performer:

  • Are they competent (have you given them the tools they need to succeed)?
  • Are their motivators the type that will position them for success as a seller?
  • What’s going on in their life outside of work?

With all this information, you can figure out whether you’ve got what Jim Collins would call ‘the right person on the bus’.

You may find that with the right training and motivators, a bottom performer is in fact in the right seat on the bus and can get results when given the right tools. But not all salespeople are cut out for the role.

Someone may be an amazing fit for a different role in your company. For instance, you may find you have a bottom performer on a sales team who doesn’t have a competitive streak and doesn’t like asking for business. In that case, they’re not right for a sales role, but may be amazing in a customer service or account management role. In other words, they’re in the wrong seat on the right bus. Now it’s a matter of moving that person to a different seat on the company bus where they can excel.

If you’ve been through the diagnostic list and determined that someone is not capable of performing well in any role in the company, then they’re not a fit for your business. They’re on the wrong bus altogether, and it’s time to exit them (in a respectful way that allows them to succeed in the future of course- but that’s a topic for another post)!

If you’d like to talk through how to approach bottom-tier salespeople on your team, reach out to me and I’d be happy to help.

Top Three Sales KPIs to Ensure Steady Revenue Generation

in , ,

When things are going well and your sales are up, you can sit back and relax, right? Wrong! Business leaders tend to sound the alarm when sales are already down – but if you’ve waited until your revenue has dipped, it’s already too late.

Find out why the best time to question your approach to revenue generation is when your sales are up, and the three leading indicators you should consider when doing so.

Why You Shouldn’t Wait for a Dip in Sales to Optimize Your Sales Process

Imagine you’re walking along in the mountains and you take a path going down toward a valley. If you go too far in that direction without being sure that’s the way you want to go, it’ll be a long hike back up.

If you’re already at the bottom of a sales valley when you realize you need to do something about it and ring the alarm, you’ve clued in much later than you need to and have made climbing back up the mountain very difficult.

Typically, sales are measured at the end of a quarter. When sales are trending down, business owners often don’t sound the alarm because they assume it’s just a temporary dip. The next thing they know, another 90 days have gone by and they’re in the valley of despair, sounding the alarm that something needs to be fixed. 

Unfortunately, two quarters have gone by and now there are only another two left to get sales back up. In other words, an entire calendar year can be negatively affected if course corrections aren’t made in the first quarter or two.

So, what can you do to make sure you’re not too far down the valley before you realize sales are going to dip? What you need is a map that can help you continue your journey without losing elevation. This is where leading indicators (KPIs) come in.

The Top 3 Indicators for Assessing Sales Performance from a Fractional VP of Sales

If you’re a business owner and you want to significantly decrease the number of times you find yourself in a sales valley, you need leading indicators in place that you and your team follow diligently to understand if and why your sales are going to go down. These are the top three sets of indicators to consider.

Leading Indicator 1: Sales Activity Levels

 This category of indicators looks at crucial activities that lead to revenue down the road. If two or three weeks go by and sales activity levels are below where they should be, it is virtually guaranteed that it will lead to a low-revenue month.

There are many specific indicators you could choose from, but the top three must-haves are:

  • On a per-sales rep basis, how many sales calls or meetings with potential buyers are happening per week?
  • How many proposals are being sent out weekly?
  • How many hours per week does the team spend prospecting?

In my role as Fractional VP Sales, I often encounter sales leaders in small to medium enterprises who are not comfortable checking in with their salespeople about these indicators because they don’t want to be perceived as micromanaging. If you want a clear picture of whether your sales are on track or not, you need to keep track of these metrics.

Leading Indicator 2: Top-of-Funnel Health Check

The next set of crucial indicators for assessing and optimizing your sales process relates to the top and middle of your sales funnel. Bearing in mind your conversion rate from proposals issued to deals won…

  • At the top of the funnel, you should have at least three times the revenue opportunities that you need to meet your target for a given period. For example, if your monthly target is 100k in revenue, you should have 300k worth of opportunities at the top of the funnel. This is because typically, two-thirds of your opportunities won’t convert into paying customers.
  • In the middle of the funnel, you should have at least two times your target revenue forecasted to close in the next 30 days (if you’re measuring monthly) or 60 days to close (if you’re measuring quarterly).

If at any time you’re not meeting one of these minimums, a month or quarter down the road, you won’t meet your revenue goals. Based on these metrics, it will be obvious what you need to do to course correct depending on where you’re stuck.

Leading Indicator 3: Revenue Closed

Although this is classically a lagging indicator that shows what you’ve done, it can also be a leading indicator of what your team is capable of doing. It helps you understand your conversion rate and forecast the results you can get if you continue to do what you’re doing. Thus, it’s another opportunity to gain some insight to inform course correction to achieve the targets you want.

When you’re at the top of a sales peak, your valleys can be anticipated by looking at these leading indicators. The pitfall for most business leaders is to be happy when things are going well and then focus their attention elsewhere. Instead, you should be asking what will happen to sales in 30, 60, and 90 days based on your assessment of these indicators.

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to applying these high-level tips to your business, and far more detail than can be covered in a blog. I’m always happy to have a conversation about how this applies to you, so please contact me for more information.

 

 

How to Assess Your Sales Strategy and Execution

in , ,

Even if a business is well established, the sales strategy should be assessed at least once every six months. A good leader will pause to assess the sales results, then course correct on strategy and execution to ensure the company stays on track to hit its goals. As the old saying goes “if you do what you always did, you will get what you always got”.

 

  1. Assess the Sales Execution

As a business owner, you can take many approaches when assessing your sales strategy and results.  The approach below starts from sales execution and works its way up to the overarching strategy.

Here are the core questions you should ask related to sales execution…

  • How well do we conduct thorough, professional sales meetings with buyers?
  • How well do we currently navigate our buyers’ decision-making processes?
  • How well do we sell the value of our solutions versus their features?

If your answer to any of the questions above is “not very”, take steps to get your team the resources and education they need allow them to be successful in the sales arena. If your team lacks the skill or knowledgebase to execute, even the best strategy will never work.

 

  1. Evaluate the Supporting People and Systems

Once you’ve assessed the ability of your team to execute on the strategy then look inward to determine how well the organization has been doing in providing the team the necessary tools to facilitate their selling.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself (on a looking forward basis) about how the organization can support the ongoing sales effort…

  • What new or different marketing support will your sales team need to help them attract buyers that match your ICP (ideal customer profile) and execute on their daily sales activities?
  • What new or different after admin support will your sales team need to free them up to execute on more of their daily sales activities?
  • What new or different products/pricing [if any] will your sales team need to help them improve their results?
  • Will the CRM (customer relationship management software) configuration need to be adjusted to support the sales approach?
  • How will the weekly team and one-on-one sales coaching need to be structured to support sales success?
  • Is the staff compensation plan structured to incentivize the sales behaviours that will act in support of the strategy?
  1. Review the Sales Strategy

Strategy is a broad topic in business. So, to assess your sales strategy start by considering the following questions…

 

Are our Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas accurate?

It might be that the people the team used to sell to are now in fact the wrong people to sell to. Double check that your team are having conversations with the right buying influences.

 

Is the business we are winning the business that we want to win?

Sometimes the sales path of least resistance leads sales to say yes to opportunities that are in fact outside of the strategy. Has this been happening to you? Is your team in fact applying sales efforts to the wrong type of prospect client?

 

How is our profitability?

Sometimes we aim for business of the type we believe we would like, but over time determine that it is problematic business (unprofitable, unwieldy to service, difficult to retain etc).  Such a revelation may in fact take you back to the start of your strategy planning and result in significant course correction interventions. In my experience as a fractional VP sales I’ve seen that companies unwilling to “rip off the Band-Aid” and re-strategize suffer greater in the long run than they would have by addressing the situation in the short run.

 

Plan-Do-Assess & Course Correct-Repeat

I recommend to business-to-business sellers as well as business to consumer sellers the simple approach of Plan-Do-Assess & Course Correct-Repeat.  The Plan piece is blue sky time and fun. The Do part is exhilarating and rewarding. The Assess & Course Correct component however is the heavy lifting element. The team needs to pause the exhilarating Doing and be ready to face the reality that they may have been marching in the wrong direction or climbing the wrong hill.

 

  1. Hire a Fractional VP of Sales

As always, there is a great deal nuance in applying the principles I’ve outlined above. And it takes time which not every leader has in abundance. My role as a fractional VP of sales allows me to facilitate this process and much more. I’m happy to speak with you if you would like to learn more [email protected].

 

The Top 5 Traits of Successful Salespeople

in , ,

Show me a salesperson who works 60-hour weeks and I’ll show you someone who is inefficient, ineffective, frustrated and likely to leave you sometime soon.  They appear committed and passionate, then they’ve quit and you have a hole to fill.

It’s been my experience that the best sellers don’t log a ton of overtime.  They may work late here and there (prepping for that big presentation) but otherwise they show up on time and leave on time. 

If the path to sales excellence isn’t paved with copious hours worked, then what’s the secret?

As with excellence in any endeavor, overachievement in sales is not due to any one trait, but several.

Here are the top 5 traits of successful salespeople.

Organization

The best sales representatives are organized.  Their calendars are full of meetings, often color coded by type.  Their Task list is ever present with only a few overdue items.  When there is a big presentation scheduled, there is corresponding prep time scheduled too.  When something is due from them, it’s on time.

 

Initiative

A good salesperson will spot things that need (or will need) doing to move their deals forward and they do them.  They actively look for ways to wow buyers, and they make them happen.  They invite the right internal stakeholders to meetings, grabbing a piece of their calendar with ample notice.

 

Desire

Your best salespeople have a burning desire to bring people (aka. buyers) to their way of thinking.  They enjoy turning a No into a Yes if they believe doing so will help the customer.  They want to earn an above average income.  They are competitive in a positive way and aren’t shy about it.

 

Learning

A top seller will regularly read books and articles, attend workshops and seminars as well as other learning opportunities related to their craft.  If asked, at any given time they’ll have at least one business book on the go.  They’ll also read in other disciplines to inform their approach to their craft (yes, they view sales as a craft).

 

Coachability

The best athletes on earth need a good coach to help them excel, as do your top sales reps. The cream of the crop will be salespeople that embody all of these traits while still being humble enough to receive feedback from their (fractional) VP of sales or sales manager.

In my role as a Fractional VP of Sales, I’ve had the pleasure to work with many sellers.  Some great, many very good and a few that were miscast.  The myth that the Gift of the Gab = Great Salesperson is just that, a myth.  Meet with your best and my guess is they’ll display most of the foundational traits and characteristics listed above.  Encourage the rest of your team to follow suit and watch results improve. 

As always, there is lots of nuance to the application of the concepts I’ve noted.  I’m happy to chat further about them with you [email protected].

 

5 Tips to Optimize Your Sales Funnel and Avoid Stagnant Revenue

in , ,

For business owners, it’s not uncommon for stagnant levels of revenue generation to creep up on you. Most often, this is because of a problem with one or more stages of the sales funnel.

Unfortunately, it typically takes one to three months to realize that your revenue is stagnant. By the time you become aware of flat revenue and start addressing your sales funnel, another quarter has gone by. It may even be that you realize there’s a problem halfway through the year, and it’s too late to fix it.

By not identifying problems with your sales funnel early, you risk setting the stage for an entire fiscal year of flat revenue. So, what can you do to prevent this?

Top 5 Tips for Addressing Stagnant Revenue from a Fractional VP Sales

To avoid a long stretch of stagnant revenue, it’s crucial to put in tangible fixes on time and at the right time. Here’s how you do that.

1.      Assess Your Revenue Generation Levels Monthly

To address a problem, you must understand what it is. By looking carefully at your numbers each month, you can identify flat revenue and then ask yourself what the reason behind it may be. You need to dig deep and search for the “why” behind the “what”.

Consider three different levels to find out why your revenue is flat:

  • Are you not getting enough deals into the top of your sales funnel?
  • Are the leads in the middle of your sales funnel not moving to closing fast enough?
  • Are you not closing enough of the later-stage leads at the bottom of your sales funnel?

Once you’ve identified which of these (or which combination of these) is the problem, you can do something about it.

2.     Fix the Top of the Sales Funnel

You may find that you’re not getting enough prospects into the top of your sales funnel. If this is the case, you need to assess how your sales team is doing with business development and ensure they are addressing the correct customer profile to increase their likelihood of finding prospects who are a good fit.

To determine whether your sales teams are doing enough outreach, you need to examine your activity-based metrics. If you don’t have any, there’s your first problem! If you do have them, are they at the right level? If you have goals for business development, determine whether your team is hitting them and consider whether the goals are the right ones.

3.     Fix the Middle of the Sales Funnel

If you’ve determined that the main reason behind stagnant revenue is a clog in the middle of your sales funnel, then you know you’re dealing with a lack of sales velocity. In other words, your deals are taking too long to close (and note that “too long” here depends on your product in your particular industry and market).

Once you’ve determined that your sales are taking too long to close, you need to drill down one level deeper and ask your sales team why – they have the answers. Next, you need to examine the reasons they identified and figure out which of those you can control or influence so that you can improve your process and nudge your deals forward.

4.     Fix the Bottom of the Sales Funnel

If your sales team is not closing enough, it’s a sign that something is amiss in the process that precedes asking for the sale. Again, speaking with your sales team should give you the valuable insight you need to course correct.

Walk through the sales process with your team and double-check how effectively and efficiently they are executing those steps. If they are ineffective or inefficient on some of those steps, you know where to make improvements.

5.     Map Out Your Sales and Business Development Processes

As you’ve seen from tips 1 through 4, it’s crucial to have your sales and business development processes mapped out so that you can easily assess where things are going off the rails. If you don’t have your processes clearly mapped out, then you can’t do any of the preceding steps.

This involves sitting down with your team and asking them exactly how they go about moving a customer from being a prospect to being a paying customer, writing it all down, and then determining how you can make the process more efficient and effective.

This comes full circle right back to the first tip, which is to assess your teams’ performance and processes regularly. That way you’ll identify where the problems are, put the fixes in place, and deal with stagnant revenue effectively.

What If These Fixes Don’t Improve Your Revenue?

If you assess your revenue every month, make fixes, and then reassess at the end of the quarter to see how effective your fixes were at getting your sales unstuck, you should be able to make up ground on declining or stagnant sales. Then all you need to do is continue with this cycle and optimize.

If, however, you find that none of the fixes worked, it could be that you don’t have a sales problem. You may have a product problem, meaning it’s the wrong product fit for the market or customer. Or, you may have a service delivery issue in which you’re not meeting client expectations, preventing them from coming back to buy from you a second time.

In my role as a Fractional VP Sales with a manufacturing client, I’ve optimized a client’s sales process to be effective and efficient only to find that production couldn’t keep up with sales. Interestingly, in this case, sales were a part of the fix because the way they were communicating with production was insufficient to have production be successful and meet demand. Internal collaboration turned out to be the fix, but if we hadn’t optimized the sales process first, we wouldn’t have identified this issue.

The bottom line is that in sales the opportunity cost of time is very high. If your salespeople squander their time doing the wrong things, they won’t have enough time to do the right things, and your revenue will suffer. By following the steps above, you can ensure your sales team is effectively and efficiently executing each step of the sales process so that you can make the fixes necessary to keep your revenue growing. Get in touch with me if you’d like to discuss this further.

How to Retain Your Top Sales Performers

in , ,

As a business owner, retaining your top salespeople is important for consistently hitting your sales targets. After all, recruiting is a costly and time-consuming process, and when you hire someone, you want them to stick around for the long haul to minimize disruptions to productivity.

As a Fractional VP Sales, I’ve seen how common it is for the resumes of salespeople to show a pattern of job jumping. So, how can you ensure that you hold on to your top salespeople? If you’ve ever had salespeople jump ship and found yourself wondering why, or if you simply want to avoid this from happening in the future, keep reading.

How to Find the Right Management Mix to Keep Top Performers

Retaining your top talent needs to be a purposeful exercise, and you shouldn’t manage all people in the same way. If you try to take a one-size-fits-all approach to management, there are going to be people who don’t respond well and often they will speak with their feet by walking out the door. Here are four ways to ensure you’re finding the right balance to keep your top performers motivated.

1.     It All Starts With Your Company Values

To address employee retention, you first need to have a clear understanding of your company’s fundamental values and principles. A strong values-based management foundation is the toolset from which you, as the business owner, and your managers can draw from to help manage your employees.

It’s worth noting that it’s not a matter of completely different management styles for different employees. The magic lies in the nuance of how you apply your company values and principles to manage and lead your people from day to day.

2.     Recognize That Top Performers are Always Different

In any team, you have top performers, middle performers, and some at the bottom of the pack. Whatever makes your top performers different from the rest of your staff is typically what makes them successful in their roles. These differences are precisely the reason you need to take a different management approach with them than with other staff.

Understanding exactly how top performers are different will help managers and other leaders figure out which leadership style or approach to take to keep them motivated, and ultimately, loyal to your business.

3.     Understand What Motivates Your Top Performers

Different people are motivated by different things – that’s as true in business as it is in life. Top performers often value different things than your lowest performers. That’s why if you want to hold on to them, you need to be able to recognize what your top performers are motivated by, and to what degree.

When it comes to sales success, top performers are typically more motivated by money. If you set up a compensation plan that does not richly reward those who are motivated by money, they will go elsewhere to find a plan that does. For people motivated by money, financial incentives like commissions are important.

Another trait typical of top performers is a high degree of initiative. Top performers who value freedom and independence will not respond well to micromanaging. If you try to make them always stick to rules, they are likely to feel restricted and leave.

Similarly, you need to consider whether your top performers are motivated by teamwork before setting team-based sales goals. A top performer who is a team player and feeds off team motivation may prefer this, but someone who is more of a lone wolf motivated by independence won’t want their performance tied to someone else’s. If a top seller who prefers to work alone has their income tied to something they can’t control, they’ll leave.

4.     Inventory the Traits and Characteristics Needed for Success

Just like there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for how to manage top performers, there is no blanket solution for retaining talent across industries. As a business owner, a manager, or another leader, it’s necessary to inventory the traits and characteristics needed when it comes to success in sales for your industry, with your products or services, and in your market.

Then, you need to provide those motivators for your top performers to keep them happy so that they can be as successful as they want to be. This may involve doing it in a slightly different way for different salespeople – as mentioned above, the magic is in the nuance of the day-to-day application of your values to how you manage your people.

After reading this, the steps for holding on to your high-achieving staff may seem fairly obvious. Yet, the loss of key talent is something I see business owners struggling with all the time in my role as a Fractional VP Sales. Maintaining a stable, productive team depends on your ability as a leader to identify, understand, and apply different motivators in your management of top performers.

Once you can successfully do so, you’ll not only be able to hit sales targets and reduce staff turnover but also create a more appealing environment for recruiting new hires. I’ve given you a lot of ideas here, and there are a lot of layers to consider. I’d be happy to help you think through how to apply these tips to keep your top performers. Contact me today to start a conversation.

 

Ways to Eliminate Over Promising by Sales Reps

in , ,

You’ve probably personally experienced the pain and frustration that results when your Sales team over promises to a customer. Nobody’s happy – especially the customer – and you are left to unravel the mess.  Luckily, there is a simple way to short-circuit such confounding situations.  Given that revenue generation is a team sport, ramp up your communication between team members.

When consulting in my role as a Fractional VP Sales, I find that companies facing over promising challenges always have poor communication between Sales and the departments responsible to deliver on those promises. 

When there is such disconnection, incorrect assumptions, misinformation and lack of mindful forethought results. It’s up to leadership to lay the groundwork for regular and open dialogue between departments as staff are often hesitant or feel it is not their place to do so.  Taking this approach institutionalizes interdepartmental communication and makes it “the way things we do things around here”.

Reaching Out

I recommend that Sales take the lead in initiating outbound communication between themselves and other departments. As they are immediately customer facing, the more timely and accurate their delivery capacity information the better positioned they will be to make appropriate commitments to buyers.

The simplest way to make connections with other departments is to have a representative from the Sales department sit in on their meetings. The frequency with which this should happen is entirely dependent upon your business. If you are in a fast moving industry where things change rapidly, maybe meeting weekly makes sense. If your industry moves slowly perhaps a monthly cadence would suffice.

Context

The presence of Sales in another departments’ meeting must be endorsed by the leaders of each department. They should position with their team why Sales is sitting in and the outcomes both departments desire. Without this context the presence of a Salesperson in an engineering meeting may be seen as weird.

Give to Get

Have the seller arrive at the meeting prepared to share Sales related happenings or voice of the customer feedback that is relevant to the rest of the people in the room. Giving in this manner sets the stage for the seller to ask questions about what the department in question is working on & challenged with. It also sets the stage for them to be happily invited back to the next meeting.

How Sales positions the information they’re sharing affects how it’s received. If it’s positioned as “Sales can’t sell if you folks don’t do this stuff for us!” it will of course be received poorly. If it’s positioned as “here’s what we’re seeing in the market and here’s what customers are saying – what do you make of it?” it invites dialogue and problem solving, both of which are healthy.

Send the Invitation

Now it’s Sales’ turn to extend the invitation to other departments to attend their meetings. Be strategic and invite the right department at the right time. Be prepared with questions to ask and input to provide so that all parties leave the meeting having moved the ball forward.

Such regular interactive communication between Sales and production, engineering, customer success, finance [and any other department that has a stake in finding-securing-retaining happy paying customers] significantly decreases the incidence of Sales overpromising. When they understand the needs and challenges faced by their colleagues they’re better positioned to be appropriate with what they commit to with customers.

As always, there is a great deal of nuance around how to initiate interdepartmental communication across your organization. I’d be happy to discuss this further with you.  You can reach me at [email protected]

You Are the Differentiator

in , ,

It’s safe to say that there are probably a thousand firms that do pretty much what yours does. This is why your sales team needs to stop selling the products and services you provide, and start selling why partnering with you will bring buyers more value than buying from anyone else.

Differentiation Is the Key

Selling based on product features and benefits is a risky proposition. Products and services can be so similar across providers that buyers are hard-pressed to spot the differences. If they happen to be adept at doing so, they then are likely put into a trade-off situation. Your offering does many amazing things but is light in one or two particular areas. The competitor’s product is strong where yours is weaker but is missing some features that yours has. This situation elevates price as a key deciding factor in the sale and the race to the bottom commences.

Shifting this buyer decision-making dynamic requires your team to sell fundamentally differently. Making your firm, your people and your approach to excellence the heart of the sale [rather than product attributes] is a powerful way to clearly differentiate you from your competitors.

Telling Your Company’s Story

In a previous post I discussed that customers don’t buy what you do, they buy Why You Do It.  Communicating this Why is part of communicating the larger picture of your company and what makes it so great.  How did the company start? What were the driving factors that brought it through the tough times and into today? In my role as a Fractional VP Sales I work with sales teams to tackle this deceptively difficult task.

Here’s why it’s difficult…The objective in telling your company’s story is to make an emotional connection with your prospects. If a salesperson attempts to tell it by listing how many years you’ve been in business, how many successful customer implementations you had, the impressive list of banners that sell your products etc. they don’t accomplish this.  They may be building credibility, but they are not making an emotional connection.

Making the Emotional Connection

We are all innately wired to be moved by the power of story [a quick Google search on this topic will give you more information than you can read that explains this].  Given this reality, to differentiate your firm from the others and ultimately increase your sales win rate, have your sales team put focused effort into developing Your Firm’s Story.

A compelling story has a clear beginning, middle and end.  It takes the listener on a journey where they experience the ‘aha’ moment that was the genesis of your firm. They come along as you tackle the challenges and climb the mountains required to refine and expand your offering. They feel how other customers have felt as a result of working with you. It’s the classic three act play.

Crafting Your Story

Another quick Google search, this time on the topic of storyselling will give you many references [and sales consultant options if you so desire] to help you get started constructing your story. In working through this with clients it’s been a fun and engaging experience for all.  It’s a different kind of sales training.  Everyone learns more about the company than they knew coming into the exercise. The excitement level rises as the story is constructed and the team feels its power.  Once completed the sales team knows they have created something that will help them connect with buyers in a far more personal way than they have been able to prior and can’t wait to use it.

Utilizing Your Story

Your Firm’s Story should be leveraged in the first meeting with a prospect. It should be woven into this conversation in a way that is most effective based upon your industry, market and buyer. Most effectively done, it is positioned as “Before we get deeply into talking about our products and services let me tell you a bit more about us…”.  Doing this at the start of the sale positions your sellers to come back to this touch point of differentiation along the way. As a buyer goes through their comparison of product attributes and price points they will have clarity around why they will get maximum value by partnering with you rather than the competition.  It’s true that some buyers simply want the cheapest price. It’s also true that many want to partner with the firm that can bring maximum value and meet all of their needs. Which one would you prefer?

There is of course a great deal of nuance in crafting your company’s Origin Story. If you would like to discuss this in further detail I of course would be happy to do so. You can reach me at [email protected].

Sales Process vs. Technique: Which Matters More?

in , ,

If your sales are not at the level that you’d like, the best thing you can do is have your salespeople brush up on their sales techniques so that they perform better, right? Wrong! Achieving predictable, long-term revenue growth is not as simple as sales training.

If you’re guilty of repeatedly investing in sales technique training hoping that it will boost your sales, you’re not alone. As a fractional VP Sales, I’ve seen many business owners fall into this trap.

Why Sales Training is Not the Way Out of a Slump

When your revenue generation is not at the level you’d like, you may assume that it’s because your salespeople are under skilled and that sales training is the easy fix.

What my experience as an outsourced sales VP has taught me is that virtually 100% of the time, the problem lies in the sales process, not in the skills of the sales reps. You could have the most talented salespeople in the world, but if your sales process is flawed, they will not perform well.

When I go to work with a team, the first thing I do is assess whether they know what to do. Because you need to know what to do before you perfect how to do it.

A story for you about this concept…I asked my son to paint the front porch this summer. I spent some time going over the painting technique (the “how”) and left him to decide the best way to apply that to get the job done. Well, he ended up doing a great job with the painting itself but he also managed to [literally] paint himself into a corner! I shouldn’t have been too surprised, since I hadn’t told him he should start on the opposite side and paint himself to the stairs (the “what”).

Aside from being a funny story, this is an example of why someone needs to understand a process before honing their ability to do specific parts of that process. In the context of your sales team, that’s why sales training won’t help if your sales team doesn’t understand the sales process.

A Diagnosis of What’s Most Often Wrong

When sales are down and business owners come to me for help, they’ve usually already self-prescribed sales training. My analysis of their sales process usually reveals one of the following:

  • There are things they should be doing that they’re not
  • There are things they shouldn’t be doing that they are
  • They’re doing the right mix of things, but in the wrong order
  • They’re doing things to the wrong degree

Let’s use a baking analogy to examine the difficulty business owners often have with diagnosing the problem with their sales. My clients come to me saying their soufflé is continually flat- they just can’t get it to rise. They wonder whether the temperature of the oven is wrong, or if there’s something wrong with the way they put it in the oven.

When we go back and look at their recipe, it usually turns out that they’re missing some ingredients or mixing them in the wrong order. When you have the process incorrect, the results are not going to be what you expect.

A Recipe for Sales Success

Speaking of recipes, a recipe for increasing sales is the magic 4 R’s formula. Sales training and a bit of extra motivation are not going to cut it. Your sales team needs to be doing:

  • the Right Things
  • the Right Way
  • to the Right Degree
  • at the Right Time.

If they do, you are guaranteed to get reliable and predictable revenue growth (you can read more about each of these 4 R’s here).

Where the magic comes in is the particular mix of these things that is right for your business, depending on your industry, your specific market, and your geographic area. Although there’s generally a list of the ‘right’ things to do in sales, the right way to do them usually varies according to the culture and customs of different regions. The right time refers to the need to approach buyers at the right time; sending a salesperson in to meet a prospect at the wrong time is setting them up for failure.

This is why the sales process is a bigger priority than the sales technique. If you don’t have the right 4R mix for your business, even the most highly skilled salespeople won’t get the results you hope for.

So, When Does Sales Technique Matter?

I’m not saying that improving sales technique isn’t important- just that it should come second to optimizing your sales process. Sales techniques such as rapport building, mirroring, and knowing which questions to ask and how to ask them are obviously crucial parts of sales.

Sales technique is about understanding buyer pain points, figuring out how their situation can be improved, and the business value they want to get from making that change. In chapters 4, 5, and 6 of my book Sell More By Selling Less, I outline in detail how salespeople can strategically identify pains, desired gains, and value drivers.

The way salespeople ask these questions is technique. Understanding the responses and putting together a solution that will solve pain points, make an improved situation a reality, and deliver value increases the likelihood that the buyer will say yes. To do these things is process, not technique.

Most people think sales training is the priority, and process optimization should come second. In reality, it should be the opposite. Process optimization should be the first thing you tackle if you want to see a sustainable increase in sales.

If you’re spending money on sales technique training without sales process optimization, you might as well be throwing that hard-earned money out the window. If you’d like to discuss more about why optimizing your sales process is more important than technique, reach out by phone or email. I’m always happy to help.

Revenue Growth Isn’t Everything

in , ,

One of the most common traps I see business owners fall into is making revenue growth the most important driver for their business. As ironic as this may sound [coming from me, a revenue generation consultant], revenue growth isn’t everything.

Why Growth Shouldn’t Be Your Only Metric for Business Success

Obviously, growth is vital for the long-term survival of your business. As a fractional VP Sales, I certainly appreciate the importance of revenue growth as an indicator of business health.  To ensure long-term success, growth of course needs to go hand-in-hand with profitability.

When you focus purely on growth, your attention gets shifted away from the efficiency of your processes and profit is likely to take a hit.

There are plenty of examples of companies that adopted the “growth at all costs” model of doing business only to realize they had scaled unsustainably, had customer acquisition costs that are way too high, and ultimately experienced a drop in profits.

Why Declining Revenue Isn’t Necessarily a Bad Thing

A plateau or even a dip in your revenue is no reason to panic. In fact, sometimes it’s a good thing.  It causes you to pause and reassess all things revenue generation.  Before you start worrying about decreased revenue, take stock of your cost of sales.  The resulting profit picture will tell you more about the efficiency of your sales processes than your revenue does.

Tips for Lowering Costs of Acquisition from a Fractional VP of Sales

When it comes to sales, your profit is related to lowering your cost of client acquisition. To do this, you need to optimize your sales processes so that you not only increase your throughput of leads but also increase your ratio of paying customers to leads worked. Here are some key factors for you to consider in order to streamline your sales function and decrease your costs.

Put the Right Processes in Place

Establishing repeatable, reliable processes is the first thing you need to do to optimize sales performance. Having a purpose built sales process in place guides your sales team through each sales stage and empowers them to provide a consistent experience to prospects.

Not only does this contribute to a higher win rate, but it also makes it possible to measure the effectiveness of each stage of your process to help you determine how you can optimize further.

Find the Right People for Each Role

Once you’ve got the right pieces in place, you need to make sure you’ve got the right people executing each of those process steps.

As Jim Collins points out in his influential management book Good to Great, it’s crucial to ‘get the right people on the bus before you decide where the bus needs to go.’ In other words, you need to ensure you’ve got the right talent in the right positions so that your team can operate as efficiently as possible.

Unsurprisingly, when you’ve got the wrong people in the sales department, they will be slower, less efficient, and less effective- not to mention quite unhappy about having to execute on those steps. Let’s look at a specific example of why this is the case and the knock-on effects it can have on your business.

Keep Your Closers Free to Close

Different roles require different skill sets…obvious, right? Yet you’d be surprised how often business owners have their best salespeople doing business development work or account management, to the detriment of the business. Sure, you may have that anomaly salesperson who happens to be excellent at both research and sales outreach. But chances are that’s not the case.

What’s more likely is that you have a great salesperson who hates research, who when given a business development task may take 2 hours to do what a research person who enjoys that task could do in 20 minutes. This is bad for business for multiple reasons:

  • It’s an inefficient use of time and resources.
  • A salesperson who isn’t good at research won’t get great data.
  • The salesperson in this scenario probably won’t want to record the detail in the CRM, leaving a weak point in the historical data your company needs to draw from.

Now consider these impacts in the context of how many salespeople you have and it’s clear why assigning a business development function to the right person is an easy win!

Similarly, once they close a deal, your star salespeople shouldn’t be responsible for onboarding the client and keeping them happy. After all, the first rule of business is to keep what you have, then to grow – so keeping a Closer bound to an existing account is a surefire way to have new sales grind to a halt as that salesperson focuses on keeping that customer satisfied and on board.

This responsibility can and should fall on the shoulders of someone who has the time and talent for nurturing accounts. Depending on your business, this may be an implementation team, an operations team, or some other type of internal support team.

Focusing on Growth Without Addressing Operational Issues is Lethal

As we’ve seen from the above examples, single-mindedly pursuing growth without addressing areas of weakness in your sales process and sales effectiveness can harm rather than help your business.

By taking the time to strategically address operational issues, you can improve the efficiency of the sales process, lower costs, reduce sales staff churn, and ultimately achieve sustainable revenue growth.

Want to know more about why it’s more advantageous to focus on profit than simply striving for growth? Reach out to me, and I’d be happy to draw on my experience as a fractional Vice President Sales to discuss how this is relevant to your business.