I was presenting this information to middle school aged children during a Future Business Leaders event. During the dramatic pause I built in after the statement “Step one, hire good people” a wonderful young man named Travis looked me in the eye and astutely said…..”No, Duh!” Well, Travis, sometimes you still need to state the obvious.
- Hire and mentor good people. People can succeed in sales in a variety of ways with a variety of talents. Each sales leader for a b2b organization needs to define what they need – and not in terms of product experience, but rather the ‘type’ of person that can succeed with the organization’s sales needs. For most of my career, I’ve found that b2b sales reps who are most successful have the following attributes: a) They like people. b) They have an internal drive to push forward (NOTE: I used to say they must love the kill – in other words, they enjoy immensely winning the deal – however, I have known sales reps who have an internal drive to push forward for the sake of activity and work – not necessarily from the high from the contract signing itself – who still exceed 100% every year because they’ve learned how and when to close throughout the whole process.) c) They understand that having a way to keep track of “stuff” is critically important to their job, and d) They understand how to think in terms of the person they are talking with – not necessarily ‘empathy’ or ‘emotional intelligence’ (although these help), but simply having a knack for knowing what the person is thinking or is about to say before they say it – i.e., like in an argument when you can expertly argue both sides.
- Foster customer first culture with outside in thinking. Consultative selling, solution selling, outside in thinking, talking about the benefits – these ideas start with the basis that the sales person first has to understand the potential customer’s environment, then find the issues they are trying to solve – both for the organization and the individual person’s ‘wins’. Part of the sales leader’s job is to ensure that each conversation they have with a sales rep ensures that the rep is thinking about ‘them’ and not ‘us’ or ‘we’ – this concept is the key to the strategy needed to win the deal. A good way to understand if the sales rep is there is to ask “Can the sales rep have a conversation with themselves – speaking both for them and the prospect?”
- Establish expectations of how to work. The distinctive sales leader expects two fundamental elements from the sales reps – 1. Sales, 2. Reporting of future sales. In order to obtain that, the best leaders ensure the organization has expectations on how to work (and hopefully advocates for the infrastructure to make that work as efficient as possible – see next bullet). Some common questions to ask each sales rep - who do you need to talk to, how are you finding opportunities to work, how are you building and managing the funnel, what are your strategies for closing each deal, how are you closing something with every contact, where are you against this year’s goal, what does your future year funnel look like. Take time to write down how you are going to help the sales rep answer each of those questions – and deliver to the team the expectations to have these questions answered at any time. The steps along the path to the final sale is how to build the pipeline and ultimately be successful.
- Implement operations that are effective. I’ve seen the most successful sales leader take personal responsibility to have Corporate see sales as a positive extension of the business, not just closing deals, but ensuring a positive environment for all the other departments to do their job (customer support, development, installations, etc.). Working together with corporate to ensure sales operations are implemented in such a way to a) maximize the sales reps time and b) provide corporate with field sales status is critical to the success of the sales team. Read this article for the four ideas that sales leaders follow when focusing on sales operations.
Of course, there are many other areas to consider, as both this Forbes article and Dave Kerpen's "10 mistakes" article points out, including aligning compensation with business targets, positive motivation, building a winning sales culture, etc.
Although there is no one right way to build a winning sales organization, working through these four areas to make each successful will significantly improve sales communications and focus, increasing the chances of sales success.