Name: Dave
Web Site: http:www//esresearch.com
Bio: Dave Stein is founder and CEO of ES Research Group, Inc., a service that objectively evaluates sales methods, training providers and tools. Through Stein's past work as a sales consultant, coach and trainer, he has a unique view of sales methodologies, sales training approaches and the cultural as well as business changes required for corporations to excel at the sales function. Author of the business best-seller How Winners Sell, Stein is quoted and recognized in leading business magazines and websites, including Fast Company, The New York Times, Business Week, Inc., Fortune, and Forbes. He writes a monthly column for Sales & Marketing Management magazine. Contact info: 1 (508) 313-9585 Ext 706 dave @ esresearch.com
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What Really Works for Sales Teams?
February 8th, 2010
By Dave Stein, CEO of ESResearch and author of "How Winners Sale." Photo courtesy of I.L. Piano
You can find top-performing sales teams in every industry. And just as many, if not more, that are so dysfunctional, their results hinge largely on lucky breaks. What separates the two? The most important factors that determine sales-function success are the degree of formality, organization and discipline in the sales organization.
When Sales operates the same way Finance, Production or Engineering runs, very often sales teams excel. But most sales departments don’t run like other departments. They don’t have the same discipline, order and process. They don’t have the same measurement mechanisms, or the same degree of experienced, focused leadership. That’s why something like 40 percent of salespeople in the U.S. didn’t make quota last year, and the average tenure of a Sales vice president in 2006 was only 21 months.
That’s not a big surprise when you consider that most sales executives and managers rise through the ranks. Take your typical right-brained, gut-feel, talk-my-way-out-of-anything salesperson, who’s surpassed quota for many years, and the next logical step is to promote him or her to sales manager.
Sales managers who fit this profile may be very intelligent, but because they are right-brained, they aren’t very comfortable with methods, process, order or discipline. What’s more, they may not come to the party with management experience or a solid grounding in management methods. And now they are running your sales force.
Guess what happens: They continue to sell, negotiate and close deals for their teams, but their organizations can’t scale, because the sales managers become the bottleneck. They have to negotiate every deal, because their ego is involved, and they don’t know how to delegate. And only so many deals can happen on a monthly or quarterly basis – because they shoehorn themselves one way or another into every sales opportunity.
And that’s the best case! In the worst case, the best salespeople see that they’re not getting the support they need, that the sales function is being run in a seat-of-the-pants manner, and nothing is optimized. They don’t get the help they need from elsewhere in the organization — Engineering, Finance, or especially Marketing — and vote with their feet.
There is a better way. If you want to optimize your company’s sales organization, here are three ways to strengthen your team.
1. Hire people with the right genes
Responsibility for the bottleneck manager really goes one level higher. CEOs, COOs and general managers seem to repeat the same pattern, year after year: hiring one ineffective sales vice president after another. You need to break out of that cycle, and resist the temptation to hire that bright, personable individual because they are so darn good at selling themselves. I know it’s hard, because top-notch salespeople usually come on strong and have great interview skills.
That means Step one is to have a very strong understanding of the skills and traits a sales vice president or sales manager needs to bring to the table. If you hire someone who doesn’t have a sense of discipline, and an innate tendency to stick to the process, you are asking for trouble. Think twice before you hire or promote people with great sales track records whose previous five jobs lasted 21 months each. That usually means their ability to sell the CEO on hiring them is much better than their ability to actually get the job done.
The real trick is finding someone who has the right stuff as a salesperson, along with the skills and traits required to be a top sales executive or team leader. You need a whole skill set beyond great presentation skills or competitive drive. As a manager, you need conflict-resolution skills, management skills and the ability to motivate.
One CEO I am working with just had the kind of “Aha!” moment I am talking about. He said, “I will not hire another salesperson that doesn’t plan things out in detail. I don’t want someone who decides to go to California and jumps in the car and heads toward the sunset because that’s west. I want someone who will stop to figure out how far it is, what stops to make, and whether the oil needs to be changed. Someone whose brain is wired to think about it and put a plan together.”
2. Focus on planning and process
To get a feeling for whether or not your sales function “needs work,” seek out the person responsible for an important new deal. Then ask, “Show me your plan. How are you going to win this piece of business for the company?”
If that person can’t produce a single sheet of paper, or even verbalize a plan designed to be communicated to the other people on their team, then that person is selling by the seat of their pants — and being managed by the same type of person.
In sharp contrast, if you have an institutionalized, well-founded set of processes in place, and a set of tools salespeople have been trained to use every day to get their jobs done, the company is likely to be successful at selling. Questions to ask:
* Do salespeople know their roles, and what they should be doing at every step along the way in a sales campaign to land an important piece of business?
* Can they predict in advance when they will need resources, such as Engineering or R&D support?
* Do they know, based on internal processes you have in place, what kind of customers buy, and in what way?
* Do they know what your competitors are up to?
Of course, the more complex a sale is, the more essential organization and discipline become. I’ve worked with sales teams running $200 million deals that take 18 to 24 months to close, with two-dozen influencers or approvers to keep track of. You cannot keep all of this in your head, Willy Loman style. People move around and resign, and the needs of companies change. You need to count on others and have people who stay on top of things and communicate what’s going on.
Order, process and discipline make all the difference. Here’s an example: One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had was working with a group of engineers who had never sold anything before. As part of a company restructuring, they became responsible for bringing in business. As it turned out, their sales results were unbelievable — off the charts.
These engineers didn’t have much charisma, or the personality-plus you find in the classic right-brained salesperson. But we gave them a 20-step process to follow, and they followed it to the letter, in a disciplined way — and became successful. They’re never going to get as good at people skills as someone who’s purely right-brained, but that left-brain ability is a critical piece of success. Step two is all about focusing on planning and process. You need people with the ability to imagine a critical path or think like a chess player. What’s going to happen five moves out?
3. Consider the way your customers buy
After reading this, you might be tempted to kick your entire sales force to the curb and start over. That’s not terribly realistic. But as part of an overall operational and behavioral “makeover,” it may be appropriate to rethink your approach from the customer’s point of view.
The latest best practice, especially when it comes to such complex sales situations as high technology or capital equipment, is to assemble sales teams with different — but complementary — roles and responsibilities. Typically, a lead person responsible for the engagement gets either the credit (or the blame). That team leader acts like a “virtual CEO” with technical advisors, a customer-service specialist and even a finance person on the team. The leader, like a project manager, brings all those resources together to apply maximum leverage to that sales opportunity.
Such teams work best when tailored to the way customers in your industry buy or behave and the relationship they are used to having with vendors. In some industries, a team-based approach, with multiple client touch-points, may not work. But it can pay off handsomely in terms of increasing the overall book of business.
For example, if customers in your industry have a reputation for very tough negotiations, with negotiators “in the trenches” 40 hours a week, you cannot send in a lone salesperson who only spends five hours a month negotiating. Similarly, if your customers expect fast answers to technical questions, they won’t want to wait while you “touch base with the home office.” Having technical advisors who respond quickly can win business.
Of course, this adds a whole other dimension to the management and organization of your sales force, including staffing. I can visualize a CEO objecting to the idea of hiring four specialists to replace one, but those four people may sell eight times the business, because they focus on what they do best. What’s more, that success will feed on itself — especially when you have people in place who are comfortable with the process, and get part of the classic sales “rush” from seeing a plan come together.
