Elevate Your Entire Sales Force to Its Full Potential

Your company’s West Region is firing on all cylinders.  The East Region is sputtering.  As new leader of the East Region, what should you do to position yourself and your company for a turnaround?

We work with hundreds of sales teams every year.  We have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of sales leadership.  For sales leaders new to their position and eager to gain traction, we recommend the following five-step critical path.  It helps them focus on doing the right things—not everything—to optimize their selling operations and successfully position their sales teams for increased performance. 

1. Mapping from sales lead to order:  know your customer

One of the overwhelmingly dominant characteristics found in high-performance sales teams is their almost innate ability to align and model their business to create value with their client’s goals and needs.  Do your sales teams strategically analyze their business opportunities to ensure client alignment?  Do they structure their selling processes to match their clients’ way of doing business?   Do they articulate the benefits to their clients, and constantly revalidate the value they are delivering? 

Whether your selling organization is responding to a customer problem, developing and executing sales and account strategies, preparing for and executing sales calls, or delivering and implementing products and services, they need to demonstrate value at every point of contact with the customer.

2.    Hire, review, promote:  know your people

Do your salespeople possess the skill set critical to success with customers?  Are your sales managers providing day-to-day leadership?  Successful sales leaders we have observed have been diligent in defining the skill requirements to do the job they expect of individuals, assessing each individual contributor, providing personalized access for skills improvement, and establishing career paths and succession planning.  They help enhance their teams’ performance not only by using formal classroom training, but also by mentoring, sharing top performers’ practices, and field coaching.

We can’t say enough about the benefits of coaching.  Sales leaders keep their teams on track by giving them advice and resources when required and recognizing their achievements along the way.  Coaching helps them establish goals to work toward, and at the same time, the discipline they need to work smarter.  The coached salesperson improves the selling organization’s performance, and improves their odds of success because of their greater confidence and esteem.

3.  Knowledge, predictability, discipline:  know your processes

Studies confirm that people are motivated to work hard by knowing that they are good at something and can achieve gratifying results from it.  Sales leaders can tap into this powerful motivator by putting in place simple directions, processes, and supports that will encourage sales team to move with confidence and competence toward their goals, one small step at a time.

A defined sales process is the selling organization’s backbone.  It facilitates everyone’s job by making the best use of resources, at the right times, for the right purposes.  Following a sales process that is clear to all salespeople increases the velocity of pipeline projects and focuses efforts where they will do the most good.  For sales leaders, the sales process helps them redirect salespeople to key actions, recognize performance, assess current resources, and bring new salespeople quickly into context.  The discipline of a sales process not only makes the selling organization more productive, but the whole business unit more productive in its business.

4.   Product/services offerings mapping:  know your solutions

Salespeople are asked to sell the breadth of a product line yet, in fact, they have selective experience in selling a particular product or service.  A high-performance sales team must be able to clearly communicate the value of their offerings so it is understood by their customers.  A solution framework encourages discussions of what is possible, both internally and with customers.  A solution value chain increases the courage and confidence of your sales team, enhancing their ability to deliver messages that are heard and stick to their customers.  The ease with which your teams and your customers understand your solutions and their attendant value can significantly enhance the scope of your influence with your customers.  Once the team and your customers understand what is possible, then the selling begins.

5.   Business reporting:  know your results

Given leading indicators, in-process indicators, and lagging indicators, what are the critical metrics for your new organization?  We suggest it is a combination of all three types of metrics.

Investing in these five steps and best practices will help improve the performance of sales organizations, optimize business operations and keep the focus on delivering value to the customer.

Best Practices

• Lead by articulating your vision, setting direction, modeling desirable skills, enforcing standards, and rewarding performance.

• Foster the fundamental sales skills of finding, winning, and keeping customers.

• Establish a climate in which salespeople know what is expected of them and feel that their performance will be recognized.  Create opportunities to provide coaching and feedback, and share common challenges and best practices.

• Instill and enforce disciplined processes around serving customers and achieving desired behaviors within your sales teams .

• Activate a solution framework process and a solution value chain to simplify a complex set of solutions.

•  Translate your metrics into dashboards for rapid, visual, high-impact communications.

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