In this month’s OTRA, John was in Philadelphia during the Eagles Super Bowl victory parade as well as leading a sales process workshop for one of his new clients. As a native Pennsylvanian, it was a fantastic experience to be able to celebrate this event. He also checks in from Tucson, AZ.
Creating a well-defined and adopted sales process for your sales team is vital to the sustainability and growth of your business.
If you struggle to see improved revenue and are looking for ways to refine your sales process, sales team training is the next logical step.
In our Online Learning Portal, we provide you and your team with the tools to gain a deeper understanding of buying behavior and hone the skills necessary to close more sales and improve revenue.
Our portal includes access to:
- Training videos for 6 stages of the sales cycle
- e-Toolkits and online quizzes to reinforce learning
- Support with live coaching sessions, and more.
If you’re interested in improving your sales team’s skills and driving more revenue through a better sales process, fill out the form to start your free 30-day trial of our Online Learning Portal today.
We just finalized work with three of our customers on their 2018 sales plans. The contributions we made fell into one or more of the five categories you can see below. Companies generally spend hundreds of hours to build sales organization plans defining managerial responsibilities, territory coverage, product introductions with cross selling opportunities, compensation, and strategic and key account designations. Usually these plans are delivered in January at a kickoff meeting, and the fanfare around their rollout contributes to the excitement for the coming year.
To ensure that all critical items are in place for a successful 2018, here is a checklist that can be utilized by senior executives and sales leaders.
1- Strategic Plan Communicated: One particular sales leader with whom we work says that the summary of the strategic plan should be no longer than 2 pages, and should be reinforced on a monthly basis with all employees. The plan’s brevity forces key players to make decisions on which channels to market, key strategies to penetrate each, and which team members will be assigned.
2- Clear Expectations Set: All players on the team must know what their revenue targets are, where their “patch” is to work, and how their success will be measured and compensated. There is nothing like ambiguity to distract from full concentration and effort. A sales process helps transform the overall strategy into a tactical execution plan, providing all customer-facing roles with clear direction on how to take each opportunity from lead to revenue.
3- Managerial Cadence on Reviews Scheduled: All of the front line sellers should know when and how they will be reviewed to discuss opportunities, accounts and overall pipeline. This schedule should be “cast in stone” and should include the information that sellers need in advance of the coaching session. Reviews that are done on an ad hoc or catch you soon basis are a recipe for failure.
4- Information Dissemination: You must establish how customer-facing roles will share information within the organization. For most companies, this centers around the use of a CRM system, but other tools such as configure/price/quote tools, customer service updates, and product inventory updates should also be documented. Marketing and sales must be on the same page here to ensure the message the customer receives is effective, and if not, to develop a feedback loop to course correct.
5- Identification of Leading Indicators: Clear, simple metrics should be in place to help sellers and their managers know if there is enough activity in the pipeline well in advance of the upcoming month or quarter end.
We hope these tips help your senior leaders to develop and communicate a clear, effective and actionable sales plan for 2018!
Our existing customers are rolling in the new year, and two new organizations have just brought us on board to help them to drive revenue. We will be conducting a Workshop in Center City Philadelphia from Monday, February 5 until Wednesday, February 7. Please let us now if you’d like to meet with John or join the Workshop for a view into how we help companies to drive revenue.
As a lifelong fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, my family was THRILLED to watch the Eagles beat the Minnesota Vikings, and earn their third trip to the Super Bowl. Growing up in Pennsylvania, the Eagles were, and still are, a significant component of the community in that region.
13 years ago, I attended the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida as the guest of my close friend Tom “Coach” Hannum. We had an amazing experience during that long weekend. The attached picture is from the game; what memories!
This year, the Eagles will WIN-the score will be 24-19. Let’s GO EAGLES!!!!
By Gerhard Gschwandtner
Today’s post from SellingPower.com is by Jamie Crosbie, CEO and founder of ProActivate. ProActivate has a unique sales talent acquisition model that provides working and winning sales and leadership talent through an in-depth sales behavioral interview process.
It’s a nail-bitingly tense moment. Everyone is holding their breath, focused on the drama of the launchpad. The countdown drones on. “10…9…8…”
Will the rocket shoot skyward? Or will it fail spectacularly? If you are a sales leader, you already know what pressure is. You live with it. Every. Single. Day.
One of the biggest sources of your stress is probably the performance of your sales team. You are accountable for everything that happens on your watch. Somehow, you have to hire them, pull everyone together, train them, and hold their hands if need be, to launch them into the sales stratosphere. To do that, you need to hire sales reps who burn brighter than the sun.
Where Are the Shining Sales Stars?
Let’s be honest here for a moment: top talent doesn’t respawn like a video game. It would be easier if they did. According to a recent infographic on Glassdoor, in which they asked 1,000 professionals about their plans to change jobs, 68 percent of the respondents stated that they plan to find a new job within the next year.
Only one in five said they had no plan to head for the exit sign anytime soon. Of course, this is a small study, but it dovetails nicely with a recent Bridge Group SaaS Inside Sales Survey that showed a massive 34 percent turnover rate in sales departments (20 percent of which was involuntary and not linked to internal promotions).
So, again, where do you locate talent?
Stop with the Job Boards
Here’s the deal. Hiring from job boards is like trying to find NASCAR drivers at the local mini-golf course or go-cart racing track. The rocket man (or woman) you are looking for is not going to be skimming job boards. They are out there working (possibly for the competition).
To find and hire the real sales stars, you have to invest in sourcing and targeting them in a meaningful way. Skip the outdated recruiting methods and go into hyperdrive instead.
Step One: Figure out Who You’re Looking For
First, you need to figure out what you are really looking for in a sales candidate.
What skills do your team members really need in order to succeed? Make sure to highlight those skills from the get-go. If you are advertising for a position, provide specific details about the qualifications. If you are not getting stellar results from a posting, do not simply keep re-running it. The results are likely to be more of the same.
Even though many companies want to slash training budgets, investing in your people should be a priority. Your team needs to be developed, but companies don’t always want to spend the time and energy required to grow their own. It may take a bit of convincing to prove the value of grooming your people to succeed.
Step Two: Go Forth and Find ’em
Next, go where qualified candidates are. There is no single silver bullet, but social media and niche market advertising are more likely to turn up those with “the right stuff” than a rehashed Craigslist ad. Your best bet is to create a flexible strategy rather than simply playing rinse-and-repeat with what doesn’t work.
Actively cultivate relationships by reaching into talent communities such as professional groups and education meetups. Millennials especially are more tuned in and, if you want them, you have to court them in the same way you seek to engage your clients – using market savvy to source and recruit them.
Over the course of a 30- year sales career, I have attended over a hundred Sales Kickoff (SKO) meetings. In some cases, I was the attendee; in others, I was a manager/leader within the organization. Over the past decade, I have often been a speaker/facilitator to help my customers get their year off to a strong start.
One thing I’ve learned that is sure to kill an SKO is when the organization tries to do too much in a small window of time. It’s easy to see how this can happen. Companies spend a lot of money to fly in team members from across the world, and it’s tempting to want to “take advantage” of having everyone in one room.
But, trying to jam too much information into one SKO almost always backfires. When attendees are bombarded with information from product development, customer service, operations, sales & marketing, strategic planning, learning and development and senior leadership; the result is a jumbled mess. Sales people walk away overwhelmed, confused and unmotivated.
Instead, here are a few ways to avoid information overload and create an inspirational and tactically beneficial SKO:
- Require that pre-work be done by attendees: What information can be delivered virtually that doesn’t have to be presented via a PowerPoint deck?
- Make the main session and breakout sessions fewer and shorter
- Build in follow up/feedback from attendees: Don’t let the sessions be passive—require that attendees provide specific feedback on how they will use the information shared to win more opportunities and improve their overall performance as a sales team.
- Coordinate Content: Have one person review all the content to make sure the material has clear connections and avoids redundancy
And last, but not least……
- Limit the Awards Given: Nothing will bore attendees more than a drawn-out award event that gives out too many trophies.
An extreme example of reducing the scope of an SKO is eliminating the event entirely. Some companies have gone this route, but I don’t recommend it. SKO’s have an important purpose in bringing a sales team together for face-to-face collaboration and learning.
So, here’s hoping that your next SKO adheres to my recommendations above. Some will say “more is better”. I suggest instead that “better is better”. If you can keep your content focused on painting an overall vision, providing tactical tools, and seeking to inspire, your SKO will be a success.
John Golden, the Chief Strategy Officer of Pipeliner CRM, interviewed me recently to understand the most important topics related to the creation and implementation of sales process. Listen in below on the topics we cover this week, and the recommendations made on how you can drive revenue through a customized sales process.
Q: You get your sales strategy down and you’ve done your proper homework and you want to translate this into a functional and well defined sales process, what are the first steps?
A: Well the first steps are to understand how people are buying from you, who are those individuals and what are the activities that they will be taking on as they determine what needs are in the organization. How will these individuals go through and make a purchasing process? How do they acquire products or services? Before we get into the selling and the misnomers of a sales process, we want to make sure we understand what’s happening on the customer or the prospect side to actually procure your product or service.
Q: One of the things I’ve come across a lot in the past is: you lay out a sales process but people interpret the stages differently. Define what happens within a sales process stage.
A: Yes, we define what happens in a sales process for the customer or prospect first, then we go in and figure out what things the seller or people who are supporting the seller should be doing during those stages. Are you advancing or are you continuing in stages? What’s the exit? The exit has to be agreed from one stage to the next by the prospect or the customer. We put these things in and don’t want it to be burdensome in a sales process. It doesn’t have to be contractual every time but we do need to get an agreement that we’re moving forward and it’s based on the definition within those stages.
It’s been thirty years since the inception of sales methodology as a product or service offering within the overall sales training industry. In the 80s, training programs like SPIN Selling, Solution Selling and Professional Sales Skills (PSS) were developed with the purpose of teaching sales teams to sell more effectively. This intellectual property (IP) was then licensed to organizations for their internal use. The burgeoning sales training field was accelerated with the Information Technology (IT) revolution in the late 80s, and even further with the explosion of the Internet in the 90s. And it remains ubiquitous today, as nearly all sales organizations have attempted to adopt one or more training methodologies to improve their performance.
We often speak to sales leaders who have been through two, three or four different methodologies and have become fatigued with the various iterations of what is the “best” way to sell. Too often companies try to get a certain methodology to work within their unique markets without taking the time to customize the steps, tools and content that will be used to approach their customers. This never works – instead of improving sales effectiveness, you instead lose the confidence of your team as they’ve invested their time and energy in a failed program.
Major shifts have occurred in buying behavior, as well as new strategies for customer engagement. Current sales methodologies have components that work and others that don’t. A customized sales process is good because it is designed solely for your organization, one that includes tools specifically geared for your teams and your customers. You can leverage the investments you’ve already made to make your sales organization even more effective.
What is certain with customization is that sales teams are much more likely to participate in a sales process that is uniquely theirs. A collaborative process helps create wide-scale buy-in from marketing, customer service, inside sales, technical support and other customer-facing departments.
If your organization has tried to adopt a sales methodology without success, or just needs some fine-tuning in your current process, please consider Flannery Sales Systems’ expertise to give your sales managers and teams a customized sales process approach. Visit our web site at www.drive-revenue.com. There are sure to be several questions and topics to consider, but whether you do this with us or with someone else, just remember — YOUR SALES PROCESS is the answer.
Pipeliner CRM visually empowers sales teams with their precisely customized sales processes. Download a free trial now.