Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
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Individual-Level Strategies
In larger organizations, “companies” themselves don’t relationships. Individual-Level Strategies In larger organizations, “companies” themselves don’t buy anything. Committees made up of individuals usually make decisions in a complex sale. People make up their minds first individually, and then they politically rationalize them or compromise them in the committee based on the decision-making algorithm.
Different stakeholders play different roles in the decisionmaking process and have different amounts of power within their organizations. Once you have determined which votes matter, you need an individual strategy to win their hearts or win without their vote. Building preference with everyone equally is inefficient and ineffective.
This scorecard is not for measuring what you know to do. Instead, it is for measuring your execution and consistency, for that is where sales effectiveness and competitive advantage lie. Within each cell are one or more best practices and, therefore, potential areas for focused improvement.
Once you have identified the gap between where you are and where you need to be, you must decide which areas are easy and which are hard to implement and then prioritize your initiatives.
We will discuss each column in a separate chapter. At the end of each chapter is an assessment, where you can score your own organization. (If you would like to see how your organization compares with others—you can take the survey online at www.complexsale.com.) In addition, it might be helpful to see how your sales managers and the rest of your management team would score your sales force to see if their opinion differs from yours.
In Chapter 9, we will discuss change management issues and the metrics needed to make any initiative a permanent change in process and behaviors.
| Sales Effectiveness Scorecard | |||||
| Talent | Technique | Teamwork | Technology | Trust | |
| Industry/market | |||||
| Account management | |||||
| Opportunity management | |||||
| Individuals |
SECTION II: Talent
CHAPTER 4: Talent
Take a group of ten players. The top two will be supermotivated. Superstars will usually take care of themselves. Anybody can coach them. The next four, with the right motivation and direction, will learn to perform up to their potential.
The last two will waste your time. They won’t be with you for long. Our goal is to focus our organizational detail and coaching on the middle six. They are the ones who most need and benefit from your direction, monitoring, and counsel.
Planning for Failure
Many sales managers start the year with an unwinnable hand. Their CFO won’t allow them to hire in advance of a year or to build a bench of salespeople within their firm. Some sales managers don’t even get their sales numbers until after the beginning of the first quarter. Then they have to begin hiring while carrying a full quota from the beginning of the year. And this doesn’t take into account any turnover that might occur during the year.
As a result, sales managers overassign quotas to the sales reps they have in hopes that a certain number will exceed their goals to offset the bottom 20 percent who aren’t going to make it, open territories that they begin the year with, or turnover they may have.
Many managers try to live with the lesser of two evils: (1) let a bad rep continue to work in a territory because at least there is a “body” there, or (2) live with an open territory that they must cover themselves. The most frequently made mistake is not trimming poor performers early enough. Not only does this demotivate the rest of the team, but it also takes the manager away from being a coach.
Some sales executives aggravate their turnover problem simply by increasing quotas every year based on what the analysts or CFO says the sales increase ought to be, with no thought to where the new sales will come from. Will these quotas come from better coverage, new products, new markets, increased prices, better margins, or an increased win ratio?
Without a bottom-up analysis of true potential, raising sales quotas doesn’t raise sales—it usually only raises turnover and discounts. This is one of the great myths of selling. And if sales quotas are increased as a percentage of an individual’s sales quota last year, then the great reward for a job well done, after the sales banquet, is an even greater quota for your best performers. How motivating is that?
While working for Atlanta-based Optio Software, one of our principals, Blake Batley, was asked to relocate to the West Coast to assume the newly created role of western regional director.
His challenge was to revamp the region, which had previously included only one salesperson and had never generated more than $500k in software license revenue.
Instead of managing the business for what was possible, the company was managing the business for the analysts. They put together a first-year plan to find and generate $10 million in the new territory. His tasks included finding office space, furnishing it with everything from chairs to computers, hiring ten new salespeople plus support staff, and getting them trained and up to speed so that they could produce $10 million in the first year of operation.
At the end of that first 12 months, they had a fully equipped office and a full staff. His team produced over $5 million in revenue on the $10 million quota. To everyone in the western regional office, it was considered a huge success. But, according to the analysts, it was a failure.
When financial strategy drives sales strategy, quite often the result is planning for failure. And if this overassignment of individual quotas results in discouragement or increased turnover in the sales force, a complete downward spiral begins.
When financial strategy drives sales strategy, quite often the result is planning for failure.
The solution is to improve our hiring and planning processes—to get the right people in the right jobs before the year begins. One best practice that we've seen in several companies is the hiring of junior salespeople who work either on existing accounts or on farming and marketing activities to learn the business and prepare themselves for territories when they open up. In my experience, we hired a number of these — about one per district — and many of them have turned out to be not only extremely successful sales reps but also vice presidents of sales and CEOs of their own companies. Without them, we would have begun the year behind the curve and would never have been able to catch up. The impact would have affected sales results and eventually shareholder value.
Get a Bench and a Pool
The worst recruiting practice is to wait until you have an opening. This means that you are reacting to the marketplace and only looking through the available candidates in your area. The best practice is to build a bench within your own firm and a pool of candidates in your industry on which you can draw when you have an opening. It may take years to build this network of candidates, but it means proactively going after people and companies that may not be looking for jobs at the moment.