Posts Tagged Sales Management
Four Big Mistakes in Managing your Sales Funnel
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on August 30, 2013
Many sales people are familiar with the concept of the “sales funnel,” with the idea that every sale starts with a large pool of prospects, which are eventually narrowed down by the various steps of the sales process (qualification, presentations, proposals, etc.) leading to a much smaller number of customers who actually decide to buy and close the deal.
A big part of success in managing sales leads is developing a better way to understand and manage your company’s sales funnel. Here are a few of the biggest mistakes that small business leaders tend to make in managing their sales funnels – and ideas on how you can get better results.
Mistake #1: Always asking for “more sales leads.” Many companies make the mistake of thinking that they can get better sales results just by constantly engaging in lead generation activities to “dump more leads into the funnel.” This is a costly and inefficient way of getting more sales, because it takes time, effort and investment to find more sales leads. Chances are good that your business can improve your sales results by doing a better job of managing the sales leads you already have, instead of constantly hunting for more and more sales leads.
Mistake #2: Focusing on CRM technology instead of your sales process. Many sales organizations make the mistake of investing in expensive customer relationship management (CRM) software but without a clear understanding of how they want to use the CRM software to improve their sales process. CRM technology can be a valuable tool, but it cannot replace a smart strategy for understanding and adjusting your sales activities to line up with your biggest priorities in your sales process. For example, you as a small business leader need to understand what is happening at every stage of your sales process. Are you failing to generate enough appointments during your initial contacts with new sales leads? Are your sales appointments failing to result in enough follow-up sales presentations? Where in the sales process are you having the most difficulty, and what can you do differently? These are the questions that CRM tools can help you answer, but you can’t rely solely on technology to do the hard work of identifying and fixing the problems.
Mistake #3: Not training your sales team. Sales training is not just for new hires. Sales people need motivation, coaching and a clear idea of what they’re selling and how to adjust to customers’ changing needs and expectations. You have to constantly keep your sales people up to date on the latest ideas and sales techniques. Help your sales team learn from each other and collaborate by sharing their experiences on what works and what doesn’t. Listen to your sales people during their sales calls and offer coaching and guidance on how to improve.
Mistake #4: Not measuring each stage of your sales funnel. Many sales organizations focus too much on their final deal closing ratios, and don’t pay enough attention to the conversion ratios that lead up to the final negotiations with the buyer. Take a look at all stages of your sales process and measure your success rate at each stage. For example, out of 100 sales leads, how many will agree to an initial appointment? How many of those appointments lead to a more extensive sales presentation? Where in your sales process are the biggest successes and the biggest opportunities to improve?
Managing your sales funnel needs to be part of an ongoing effort to see what is happening within your sales process and adjusting along the way. If you have a clear understanding of where your challenges are coming from, which parts of the process need to improve, and constantly coach your sales team to improve their efforts at each stage of your sales funnel, you will start to see a better result in the most important number of all – sales.
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The Five Best Sales Management Tips
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on August 19, 2013
Sales managers must be coaches, strategists, and leaders for their sales teams. Becoming a great sales manager takes more than experience – it also requires continual learning through actively seeking out and following through on sales management tips from others who have been successful. Learn from the five following sales management tips to build your platform for success.
Build Effective Communication Skills to Interact with Others
Sales managers must be able to communicate effectively with sales people at different career stages, their management peers, executives, and prospects and customers at all levels. Each interaction requires tailored communication, which makes this one of the important sales management tips for sales managers to learn. Hone your communication skills through:
– Picking the best medium for messages, whether it be in person, over the phone, or through e-mail.
– Being as concise as possible to communicate your key points.
– Paying attention to body language and other cues to inform and adapt your communication style for maximum impact.
Create Best Practices for Your Sales Team
One common problem for sales managers is a sales team of individuals following different sales processes, which predictably leads to inconsistent sales results. You can make sure that all of your sales people are on the same page by creating a best practices playbook that provides your sales team with clear guidance on how and when sales processes should be completed.
– Develop processes for lead generation and follow up; hold sales people accountable for following guidelines.
– Provide coaching on proven methods of overcoming the objections common to your selling environment.
– Create outlines of your organization’s typical sales cycles that include steps that your sales people should be following with every sale.
Develop Talent From within the Sales Team
Few sales people are a “natural” fit for sales. Even top sales people who make selling look easy are constantly honing their skills and integrating new knowledge. The guidance that you provide to your sales team sets the tone for your sales team’s success, and by developing talent from within your sales team you can ensure that you have all of the components for a flourishing sales team in place. Create a development plan for your sales team that integrates sales management tips like prioritizing coaching time so that the sales people who need your help the most can benefit from your advice and guidance and coaching your sales people on motivation and drive to get your sales team to consistently meet new quotas.
Know Your Business Inside and Out
Make sure that you are ahead of the curve and regularly follow how trends within your industry and the science of selling are evolving. The knowledge that you accrue will allow you to construct a path that leads your sales team in the right direction. In addition, by being able to predict conditions for your marketplace you will be able to create better-informed sales strategies that require less adjustment. This will make your job and the jobs of the sales people reporting to you easier.
Know What’s Important to Your Sales Team
If you want your sales team to deliver, you must understand the needs, concerns, and drives of your sales people. If your sales people feel understood they will have trust in your leadership, be more open to discussing issues, and won’t hesitate to follow your direction. Form these all-important relationships with your sales people with these sales management tips:
– Adopt a policy of transparency to keep your sales people well-informed.
– Treat your sales people consistently and fairly in all interactions.
– Always give more of yourself than you ask of your sales people; they will notice and appreciate the effort you put into the team’s success.
Remember that as a sales manager, your accomplishments are measured by the results that your sales team is collectively able to deliver. Follow these sales management tips to help your sales team thrive.
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This article was originally posted on the SalesForce Search Blog by Doug O’Grady on 8 August 2013.
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A Better Way to Measure Your Sales Team
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on August 12, 2013
It’s time we start measuring sales people on more than just quota attainment. It’s time we start looking at the entire body of work.
Determining what to measure isn’t a daunting task. We don’t need a plethora of complex, confusing and superfluous stats. We just need a few that tell the bigger story;
- Average Deal Size: How good is the sales rep at up selling? How quickly do they discount deals? How strong of a negotiator are they? Average deal size provides insight into how well a sales rep can maintain the integrity of pricing and drive greater value into the sale.
- Winning Percentage: What percentage of opportunities does the sales rep close? How effective are they with the opportunities they get. A higher winning percentage suggests an impressive ability to qualify or add substantial value to the sale. High winning percentages means less leads and opportunities wasted.
- Average Days in Pipeline: Take all the opportunities in the pipeline and add up the number of days they have been in the pipeline, and then divide by the number of opportunities. How long do deals sit in the pipeline? How good is the sales rep at knowing when to stop working a deal and close it? Is their pipeline stuffed with “stuff” that just isn’t going to close? Is there a decent ratio between average days in pipeline and average time to close? There should be.
- Average Time to Close: How long does it take for a sales rep to close a deal from start to finish? Who on your team closes deals faster? Who takes longer? How do average time to close rates compare with quota attainment and overall revenue attainment. Are those with longer sales cycles selling more? Or are those with faster close rates selling more. Average time to close includes both wins AND losses. It’s designed to measure the amount of time it takes a sales rep to bring a buyer to the decision.
- New Opportunities per Month (NOP): Who is best at building their pipeline? Which reps are focused on new opportunities vs. closing existing opportunities? How many new opportunities are your sales people putting into the pipeline each month? NOP is a critical metric few pay attention to. Knowing who is bringing in the opportunities is critical.
- Average Monthly Pipeline Size: What does the pipeline look like from month to month? Who is good at being able to keep it consistent, vs. those who see big shifts as they close, then prospect, then close. Tracking AMPS will allow you to see who is capable of maintaining a strong pipeline while closing deals and driving revenue.
Measuring sales reps around these individual statistics requires nothing more than a commitment to track them, share them and rank the team against them. The information generated around these six stats will change the sales game. Good reps will be found even in bad years, bad reps will no longer be able to hide. One hit wonders will not be able to bask in the glory of a lucky kill. Management will have more information to work with; trends will be easier to spot and opportunities will present themselves.
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Three Keys for Building a Sales Pipeline
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on July 18, 2013
You know what a sales pipeline is and you know that you have one, but how do you build and manage that pipeline to take your sales to the next level? Building sales pipeline success depends on the sales pipeline’s effectiveness, strength, and results, the three keys to building sales pipeline value. Take the first step towards building sales pipeline success by focusing on and managing these three keys to the sales pipeline.
Building Sales Pipeline Effectiveness: Maximize Your CRM System
The customer relationship management system you are using is only as useful as the information you put in. In other words, if you are putting in outdated, incomplete, or otherwise unhelpful data, the CRM will not be able to help you succeed. Yet consistently and properly updated CRM systems are one of the keys to building sales pipeline effectiveness. Make sure that you are using CRM to maximize results by:
– Habitually and thoroughly updating the system with new leads, status on existing leads, and other information as it is acquired.
– Avoiding removal of leads unless those leads are out of business or have requested no further contact. Leads that are unqualified and may be qualified later, or have said no but may be more open in the future, should be flagged with the appropriate time horizon for follow up.
– Checking your CRM daily to guide your activities for prospecting, follow up, and scheduling, and updating your activities as you work.
Building Sales Pipeline Strength: Quality In, Quality Out
A large part of building sales pipeline strength – that is, ensuring that there are healthy numbers of leads, prospects, and closes in the pipeline at all times – rests on getting quality leads into your sales pipeline. Getting as many leads as possible may seem like the right idea, but you will probably find more success in maintaining and building sales pipeline strength if you focus on quality, rather than quantity, of leads. To do this, you can:
– Start qualifying leads before you even make first contact, so that the contact you make can build on information you already have rather than starting at the beginning when you reach a live prospect.
– Be realistic about prospects’ qualifications and readiness to buy. Over optimistic projections can harm your productivity and sales pipeline results.
– Create standard processes for how and when you qualify and prospect for a system that can deliver you reliable results, every time.
Building Sales Pipeline Results: Know What You Need to Do to Reach Your Targets
If you want to reach your sales targets for the month, the quarter, and the year, you need a roadmap to get there. It is not enough to rely on your ability to sell and a constant stream of incoming leads; you need to know how many of each type of lead, prospect, and customer you need to have in your pipeline to reach your sales goals. This is easy to accomplish if you have been tracking your sales and activities over past periods.
– Look at your quarterly performances and analyze how many leads you followed up on, how many of these were viable prospects, how many of these were presented, and how many of these closed.
– Calculate averages for how long converted leads took you to close from the day the lead was initially entered to the day the contract was signed, categorizing these in ranges according to the contribution each made to your targets.
– Use these numbers to determine how many new leads, calls, presentations, and closes you need to have in your pipeline every quarter to meet or beat your targets.
Building sales pipeline effectiveness, strength, and results depends on your ability and commitment to update and maintain your pipeline through various tracking activities. However, the time that you spend on these activities will pay you back with interest as your more targeted approach to selling using the sales pipeline yields results.
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This article was originally posted in the SalesForce Search Blog by Matt Cook on July 9, 2013.
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Five SMB Sales Management Blunders
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on June 11, 2013
Hiring a sales staff for your small business comes with the responsibility to provide effective sales management. While many small to medium business entrepreneurs are also good sales people, not every SMB owner has a natural talent for managing a sales team. Here are some of the most common sales management blunders and how you can avoid them.
Mixing Recognition with Coaching. One common sales management blunder is to congratulate your sales force for a job well done and quickly move to areas of improvement. This tactic can often be interpreted by sales staff as a lack of appreciation. A best practice is to separate the recognition from the coaching. Save the performance improvement areas for coaching sessions. Set up separate recognition of your sales rep success even if it’s a small celebration. It’s the little gestures of respect and celebrations of achievement which gain the hearts and minds of the sales force.
No Sales Plan. Another common sales management blunder is: not developing a sales plan to help manage the sales team. A successful sales team requires regular planning tracking, and review to achieve their targeted results. Every sales representative requires their own action plan to direct day-to-day activities and set up accountabilities.
All sales plans have at least three requirements:
· Sales Rep Development: Where most plans fail is they are developed by the sales manager not the sales rep. To ensure a high level of plan acceptance, have the rep develop the plan and guide them toward the right objectives.
· Regular Reporting: Sales plans should be established on a weekly basis to provide flexibility in the planning cycle. Reviewing can take place on a monthly basis. Sales management excellence involves reviewing the results against the plan to determine missed opportunities and areas for improvement.
· Sales Metrics: A successful sales plan focuses on results and activities. Establish the proper sales metrics to drive your business results. Metrics can include: number of client phone calls, number of contacts, appointments set, appointments conducted and sales closed. Do not overwhelm your sales staff with excessive tracking numbers. Focus on the few measures that matter the most to your business.
No Sales Support. A common sales management blunder is to hire a sales person without providing them with the level of support required to succeed. Even if your new rep is well-versed in your industry and a top performer, they will still require help to familiarize themselves with your company, products, and markets.
Not all sales reps require the same level of support. For many small business owners, a hands-off approach to sales management is not the best strategy. Successful sales management requires a commitment to sales force training. Regardless of the size of your firm, an investment in sales training and support can pay big dividends on profitability. Spending the time one-on-one and in the field with your sales team will not only provide support but convey a sense of the importance of sales people in your organization.
Focus on Control Sales Management. Many new and unsuccessful sales managers will focus on the traditional sales management by intimidation or control approach. The top sales performers know they have a valuable skill set and will quickly walk to a competitor if treated poorly. Sales management is a partnership between the sales rep and the sales manager. Effective sales management requires sharing in the responsibility to find the problems and bottlenecks in your sales process. Seek the solution together with your reps. Be a champion for helping them achieve their agreed results.
Lacking Sales Accountability. There will be times when sales reps fail regardless of the support and training they receive. It is easy to pass off the lack of results to external forces such as competitors, the economy, or poor marketing. Remember the sales rep was hired to bring in sales. When support, training, and market potential are available, a lack of results often means it’s the rep’s performance.
A lack of performance can be traced back to your sales management program. If your small business lacks a clear policy of sales accountability, it remains your responsibility to implement the process. Creating a culture of sales accountability will not happen overnight. Expect to lose sales staff. A Sales person who has underperformed and will not accept personal responsibility for their own results will leave. This is a good thing. A sales accountability culture only accepts top performers – which is exactly what your business needs to survive in a competitive market.
Growing a small business is hard work. The sales management function is often overlooked by small business owners. Spending the necessary time wearing your sales manager hat will help foster a rewarding culture and build a successful sales team to boost your business to new levels.
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12 Elements of a Great Sales Playbook
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION, SALES LEADERSHIP on May 17, 2013
The implementation of a sales playbook can be one of the most impactful initiatives for any sales organization. There are two reasons for this tremendous ROI. First, by following some simple guidelines, it can be a remarkably easy initiative to implement, and second, research shows that this results in 33% additional revenue.
Here are twelve elements of a great sales playbook that you should use to guide your implementation.
1. Repeatable Winning Sales Processes
The key word here is ‘repeatable’. When everyone adopts the same sales process, there is a common language that is understood, not just by sales, but by the whole organization. Recent research shows that while only 60% of sales teams have a sales process that is well defined, and well executed – those who do are 33% more likely to be High Performers*.
2. Customized to the Buying Cycle
Customers buy in lots of different ways; some purchases are guided by a single decision maker, while in other cases there can be a large buying committee. Some issue RFPs (health-warning!), others invite recognized suppliers to discuss their issues, an increasing number learn in the Social Universe, and just a few remain with the incumbent supplier trading ‘the devil you know’ for potentially more advanced or competitive solutions. Unless you visualize the journey the customer wants to take, you won’t be with them when they reach their destination.
3. Sales Tools in Context at Each Stage
At each stage of the buying process, salespeople need to employ just the right tools – at the right time to advance the sale to the next stage in the process. A B2B sale is not a single event. In fact it is a collection of micro-sales events, each crafted to move closer to the eventual goal. Salespeople are busy and often don’t know which tool they need, where to find it or how to use it at the specific point in the micro-sale. Integrating sales tools into the playbook as part of the sales process is the solution.
4. Industry Sales Process Templates
It is widely accepted that tailoring your sales process to the specific needs of an industry will increase your chances for success. Third party industry sales templates are readily available from suppliers who have been tracking and analyzing millions of sales cycles. That is the catalyst you need to get started.
5. Many Simple and Complex Processes
One playbook or sales process does not fit all. Sometimes you are pursuing a brand new customer or a very large deal that demands a complex and sophisticated set of ‘plays’ to win the deal. In other cases, the transaction might be quick, one that suggests a different rhythm. Your sales playbook should have the requisite intelligence to support that automatically and serve up the right playbook at the right time.
6. Process, Benchmarks and Insight
Benchmarking delivers many advantages for companies looking to improve the performance of their sales organization. Your playbook must capture those benefits, learn from them, and uncover insights that help you to drive your sales velocity. When deploying a playbook, ensure that you have built in a capability that guides you to progress through these stages of evolution for your sales team.
7. Team Visibility for the Sales Manager
Being a front-line sales manager is one of the hardest jobs in sales. It is also the critical link in sales. Unless the sales manager has all the tools he or she needs to easily manage the business, the whole performance of the sales organization could suffer. You need to provide them with the ‘Easy Button’. Sales playbooks are often designed just with the sales person in mind. Remember that the sales manager is the critical link.
8. Integrates with CRM System
This one should be a ‘no-brainer’. The playbook must integrate tightly with the CRM system so when the sales person works with an opportunity, the playbook will always be present, just where it needs to be. That way the playbook (if it is smart enough) can react to the attributes of the opportunity, like the size of the deal, or the products included in the opportunity record to present the right playbook for that opportunity. Complete integration with your CRM delivers the optimum experience for the sales person, and provides sales managers with greater flexibility on how they view the data in the context of the rest of the business. It is important.
9. Informs Sales Forecast Visibility
Salespeople spend about 2.5 hours each week on sales forecasting, and for most companies, the accuracy of sales forecasts leave a lot to be desired. To maximize the impact of your sales playbook on the accuracy of your sales forecast, there are two things to consider. (1) Does the sales playbook incorporate intelligence that objectively monitors the close date of the sale? (2) Does the sales playbook provide the sales manager with insight into deal vulnerabilities and risks in the forecast?
10. Motivational and Visual
There are only two reasons why an individual does not complete a task. Either they do not have the competence, or they are not motivated enough to do it. Think about that – these are the only two reasons. Your sales playbook should improve competence and increase motivation. The competence piece is easily understood.
Motivation is a little more challenging. A study on What Motivates Sales People shows that, perhaps surprisingly for some, compensation is not the primary motivator. ‘Making Progress of Winning’ is ranked by sales people as the main reason they get up in the morning. To entice adoption of the sales playbook (rather than force compliance) your sales playbook needs to provide true value for the sales person – resolve that reward/effort equation, so that the salesperson gets more back from the playbook that they put into it.
11. Social and Collaborative
As B2B companies rely more heavily on social collaboration tools, some of the biggest gainers are going to be salespeople. Sales people who are the leaders in their organization are using social tools such as Chatter in Salesforce to improve collaboration in their own sales teams. Leading sales playbooks help by letting everyone ‘follow’ the plays, contributes to the conversation, and collaborate on the deal. The B2B world is constantly becoming more social and collaborative and you should ensure that your sales playbook accommodates this advancement.
12. Mobile and Cloud
Time is precious, and the sales person’s time is incredibly precious, both to them and to the sales organization looking to maximize the performance of their key quota-bearers. Since so much of a sales person’s time is spent moving between A and B and back again, they should be equipped with the mobility to connect to their sales playbook allowing them to be responsive, productive, collaborative and consistent at any time, wherever they are. In other applications, mobile and cloud capabilities are being leveraged to facilitate access anywhere, anytime. It must be the same with your sales playbook.
Unless mobile and cloud are core elements of your sales playbook plan, the initiative could face severe challenges in a very short term.
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This article was originally posted to the Dealmaker® 365 blog by Donal Daly on May 12, 2013
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Eight Reasons Great Leaders Let People Fail
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on January 28, 2013
Sales leaders, how comfortable are you letting failure happen? Are you OK letting your sales manager make a mistake? Are you OK letting the sales rep lose a deal? What do you do when you see a flaw in the strategy of your sales V.P.? Do you let them execute the plan?
What should you do when you see failure on the horizon? — Let it happen!
Letting failure happen is one of the most difficult challenges of sales leaders and other leaders alike. No one likes failure, especially when we see it coming. The best leaders know this however and let it happen anyway.
Why let failure happen?
Failure is the only way to learn:
Failure is the only way we learn. As leaders we need and want people to learn and grow. Failure is a part of the learning process. If people aren’t allowed to fail, they won’t learn and without learning, they won’t grow.
It creates ownership:
When we don’t let others fail, we strip them of ownership. When we don’t let people fail, we in essence make the decision for them. We don’t let them make the final call. When people don’t get to make the call, they don’t feel attached to the end result; good or bad. Ownership is important to creating accountability. We want our people to feel ownership for their decisions and the consequences; good or bad.
People need to make their own decisions:
At the end of the day, people have to make their own decisions. They have to be empowered to make the decisions they think will work best. Preventing people from failing takes away their ability to make decisions. We have to let people chose for themselves.
It creates accountability
When people make their own decisions, it creates accountability. We can’t hold people accountable for outcomes when they aren’t given the latitude to choose for themselves. When we don’t let people fail, it’s because we chose for them. We disagreed with an approach, we saw a flaw in the thinking, and we did the work for them. When we step into avoid failure we are taking over the decision making process. Taking over the decision means it’s no longer their decision and we can’t hold them accountable for the end results. People have to be allowed to make their own decision if we want them to experience the consequences — good or bad.
It’s empowering:
When we let people fail, we are empowering them. We are telling them, “We trust you.” People need to know they are trusted for their expertise. People need to feel valued for what they know and for what they do. When we don’t let failure happen, we strip people of a sense of competence. We send the message that says; I don’t trust your judgment and therefore I’m going to do this for you. Do this too many times and your will create stunted robots, as no one will make any decisions. They will just wait for you.
You could be wrong:
Has it ever entered your mind, you could be wrong? What happens if you are wrong? What if your idea wasn’t the right one and failure happens? What if they WERE right? Now what? Just because we think we know the answer, doesn’t mean we are right. We can be wrong too.
It creates diversity, creativity and innovation:
By letting people fail, we are giving permission for people to think for themselves. When an entire organization is allowed to think for themselves it creates a wide swath of ideas and approaches for creating opportunity and to solving problems. If there is one single greatest benefit to letting people fail, this is it. When we don’t let people fail, we stunt creativity. Idea’s are put through the leadership filter and stripped of creativity. When ideas or approaches have to be run by management rather than implemented they lose their ability to be proven out. Letting failure happens means, letting ideas go out without the constricting filter of you. Leadership can’t think of all the good ideas, nor can they determine what the good ideas are. Let people fail, you’ll learn more than by trying to keep them from failing.
It’s why you pay them:
At the end of the day we hire people to do their job. If you don’t trust them to make good decisions, don’t hire them. If you do trust them, then let them fail. They will only fail once. They will learn a lot. They’ll feel as if they have ownership and that they are empowered. The will grow and get better. Letting people fail is an investment.
Let people fail. You’ll have a much more creative environment and a lot more time on your hands to SUPPORT all this new found creativity — and that’s exactly what you should be doing.
Let failure happen. You’ll be happy you did.
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Ten Reasons Why Salespeople Fail
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on January 13, 2013
I have yet to meet a sales professional who doesn’t want to succeed, who doesn’t want to exceed quota and make more money. But the reality is salespeople still fail. Sometimes it’s a temporary slump, sometimes (unfortunately) it’s a career-long trend. In the work we’ve done with sales organizations, managers and individual reps, these are the 10 most common reasons why salespeople fail.
1. No experience
Honestly, this is a bit of a false crutch & excuse. If you have the right drive and make-up, you can succeed with zero previous sales experience. I’ve seen it happen countless times. Of course, a raw, inexperienced new sales professional can’t succeed without the proper support, training and management to help them accelerate through the learning curve.
2. No plan
If you come to work every morning waiting for the good leads, you’re going to fail. If you’re waiting for the phone to ring, reacting to what comes into your email inbox, that’s not exactly a recipe for success. And yet, many salespeople work without a plan – reactively and opportunistically going through the month or quarter without a strategy. Just because you have a plan, doesn’t mean you’ll always follow it. But if you don’t have a roadmap, how do you expect to get where you want to go?
3. No discipline
Sales can be incredibly difficult. Oftentimes, it’s not even fun. The daily grind, the never-ending activities required to get through the “no” answers and find the ready-to-buy prospects, that not only takes a ton of work but requires daily discipline to stay focused and actively on the path to success. Look at the most successful reps and you’ll find men and women who get up early, power through their calls, and do what it takes – every day – to make their number.
4. No training
This is more than just product training, which is critical. Every rep should know the details of their product or service, but that’s table stakes. They also need to understand the market into which they’re selling, as well as who their target prospect is – what they care about, what their problems are, and what they’re trying to achieve independent of your product or service. And this training needs to happen far more often than the annual sales kick-off meeting too. For world-class sales organizations, training and reinforcement is a regular, ongoing habit.
5. No support
To be successful, sales professionals need tools to help them work smarter. They need sales support and operations resources to provide the infrastructure, tools, processes and other execution best practices so they can spend more of their time in front of customers. And they need a proactively supportive management team, including managers who know that coaching requires more than just reinforcing process, but also proactively helping reps solve unique sales problems.
6. No leads
This is another place where many sales professionals find a perfect excuse for why they’re not hitting the number. In some sales organizations, reps are given leads for follow-up. Some leads are qualified, some are not. But even when reps aren’t handed leads, they’re responsible for finding their own. Yes, this can be a pain-staking, inefficient process. Yes, this can directly impact an individual reps ability to close more business. But you have two choices when face with no leads – get some yourself, or go somewhere else.
7. No motivation
Motivation can come in a variety of formats, of course. It can be material, such as a new boat or stereo system or exotic vacation. It can be fundamental, like putting your kids through school. But whatever it is, motivation to succeed drives performance and ensures consistent execution for reps who don’t let failure take hold.
8. No adaptability
The way you were taught to sell 20 years ago might not be as effective today. The tools you used, the approach that once worked, might fall flat today. If you aren’t able to adapt to the changing market, the changing customer – you’re likely to see declining results. Successful sales professionals constantly adapt their strategy and execution to what’s changing and working around them.
9. No customer insight
Gone are the days of one-sided selling (if they ever existed in the first place). Gone too are the days when the prospect allowed you to ask them questions to which they already knew the answer. Reps today fail in part because they don’t take the time to understand their customer before making an approach. This is far more than just having a solid introduction or insights to break the ice. This is about getting to the root needs your customers has, and differentiating yourself as someone who isn’t there just to sell, but to teach and enable the outcomes the prospect needs and/or has envisioned in the first place.
10. No focus
There are so many things that can distract you during the day. Things that feel important, maybe even feel urgent, but are neither. It’s incredibly difficult to stay focused on what’s important, what will truly push your results forward. But that’s why so many reps fail, and so few consistently hit their number.
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This article was originally posted to Heinz Marketing on January 8, 2013
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Having Problems With Your Sales Forecasting?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on December 20, 2012
In virtually every conversation with a sales executive, at one point we get into a discussion about forecasting. Usually it starts with the executive mumbling something like, “Damn forecasts are worthless, I might was well flip a coin.” Being sensitive to these types of verbal cues, I usually reply something like, “Forecasting system not working for you?”
Then I just sit back and listen. Too often when organizations are finding they have issues with accurate forecasts, they put in strange processes to increase the accuracy of the forecast. I see strange sequences of forecasts, the “This may happen forecast,” moves to “I hope this will happen forecast,” to “I’m sure this will happen because you’re telling me it needs to happen forecast.”
There are lots of problems with forecasts. And truthfully, it’s always a challenge in developing a completely accurate forecast, but here are some thoughts which should help improve your accuracy.
What are we forecasting? A forecast isn’t “will we close this order some time?” A forecast is: “We expect to get and order for this amount by this date.” It has to have specificity in time and value. Forecasting accuracy should be measured based on ability to accurately predict time and value. In other words, if that $1M order comes in 180 days after it was originally forecast, there’s a business management and forecast integrity problem.
A forecast is about a deal, not a number. I talk to too many managers who are achieving forecasting to a number, “I have to forecast $10M this month!” They then look at their pipelines, saying, “I’ve got $20M of deals going into closing, surely I can make $1oM out of those.” The forecast is about a deal, “We believe we will close this deal for this amount by this date or time frame.” The forecast number becomes the aggregate of those deals closing in the timeframe. If you fall short of your target number, then you have to look, deal by deal, determining: “What can we do to close this deal by this date?” It requires a specific action plan and very close alignment with the customer’s buying process. You close the gap in a forecast by identifying specific deals and the actions needed to close those deals.
Bad forecast integrity indicates deeper problems with pipeline integrity and your selling process. The forecast is a natural outcome of the sales process. At some point in our selling process, we have confirmed where they are in their buying process, when they will make a decision, and their attitudes regarding our solution versus the alternatives. Based on where we and the customer are in the process, we can forecast it. We won’t hit it all the time, unexpected things may happen, but the process is pretty simple and can be very accurate.
So if we start missing forecasts consistently it creates deeper concerns. What’s the quality of our pipeline? Is it high quality, or do we have garbage that is misleading us? How well are we executing the sales process? A series of forecasted deals which repeatedly miss the mark shows a problem with the selling process. You either aren’t using it, it isn’t aligned with the customer buying process, or it’s a bad process.
Bad forecasts bring the quality of the entire pipeline, the sales process, and deal strategies into question. Everything is up for grabs, not just the forecast. There is doubt and no idea what the problem is, and no idea what to do to fix it. Is it a skills problem? Is it a competitiveness problem? Are you seeing shifts in the markets? It’s no longer is an issue about making the forecast, but an issue about your organization’s overall ability to consistently achieve goals. You end up not knowing what to attack to improve your business.
When you have consistently bad forecasts from an individual, it’s probably a skills problem. They probably don’t understand or aren’t using the sales process, they may be having problems with certain parts of the sales process, and they may be chasing the wrong deals. It’s actually pretty easy to start identifying this looking at their pipelines and deals.
When your organization has a consistently bad forecast, you have a systemic set of problems that you need to understand and fix. You don’t fix these problems by putting more rigor or steps into your forecasting process; “We start with promises, then move to blood commits, and then move into be-headings?” Putting these phases into your forecasting process is dealing with the symptoms, not the root problems. Focus on the quality of your pipeline, clean out the garbage. Focus on the sales process, is it right, is it aligned with customer buying processes, and most importantly are your people executing it with integrity?
Leverage the reports in your CRM system to better understand the quality of your forecasts and begin to isolate problems. You can easily look at slips/misses. The pipeline quality reports should be directly correlated to the quality of your forecasts. Stuck deals, average age in phase, total sales cycles, pipeline velocity, win rates, all are indicators and impact forecast quality. Opportunity reporting gives you great clues. Consistently changing “estimated close dates,” lack of progression, and others are directly tied to forecast quality.
There are other things you can leverage to improve the quality of your forecasting. In some cases, data analytics, tied to your deals can help improve the quality of forecasting. Assessing “odds to win” and “timing” using tools focused on the customer decision-making and buying cycle can improve the quality of the forecast.
Bad forecasts are a problem. Consistently bad forecasts indicate you have a deeper problem—and it’s not about forecasting!
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The Three Critical B2B Sales Pipeline Metrics
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on November 20, 2012
How healthy is your sales pipeline right now? And what steps are you taking to progressively improve its fitness? Just as your own doctor might measure your body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure before putting you on a personal fitness regime, a pipeline doctor would want to understand your qualified pipeline value, average sales velocity and average sales win rate – and how these factors had changed over time – before coming up with their diagnosis.
Here’s why these three measures are so important…
There are three fundamental things you can do to improve your sales figures: you can generate more qualified sales opportunities, you can shorten your average sales cycles, and you can increase your average sales win rates. Steadily improving all three factors will have a powerful multiplier effect on your sales – and dramatically improve your revenue predictability.
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Bottlenecks and Best Practice
But if you’re not regularly measuring and reviewing all three factors at every level in your sales organization – from each individual sales person through to the whole sales team – you’ll struggle to identify either where your most pressing performance bottlenecks lie or (and this is equally important) to identify pockets of best practice which if adopted more widely would enable you to systematically increase your overall sales performance.
Value, Velocity and Win Rate
Proactive pipeline management involves paying particularly close attention to all three factors – value, velocity and win rate. Together they represent what we have come to regard as the essential pipeline success formula.
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And just in case you wonder whether the effort is worthwhile, a series of studies have shown that organizations that take a data-driven approach to proactive pipeline management show significantly accelerated revenue growth compared to their peers.
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Qualified Pipeline Value
The key word here is qualified. Measuring pipeline value without imposing a company-wide universally agreed definition of what a qualified sales opportunity ought to look like will simply generate misleading, unhelpful and ultimately useless data. And “leads” or “enquiries” don’t count. As I’ve pointed out before, tracking the number of leads generated in the absence of a consistent quality standard tells you nothing and may even lead you to do more of the wrong thing.
You’ll need to craft qualification criteria that address the specifics of your offering and your markets, but at minimum, a qualified sales opportunity must satisfy all of the following:
- Have they identified a clear need?
- Are they likely to buy something?
- Do we have a reasonable chance of winning?
- Would they make a good customer?
Sales Cycle Velocity
Most sales managers would acknowledge that the longer a deal hangs around in the pipeline, stuck at its current stage, the less likely they are to buy. Sales cycle velocity – the amount of time it takes for an opportunity to move from start to finish, and from stage to stage – is therefore an incredibly important predictor of sales success. And if you can shorten your average sales cycles, you have the capacity – without increasing your resources – to sell more.
Given all of this, it always surprises me to see CRM systems that are not set up to report on how long each deal has spent at each stage, or to throw up an exception report when opportunities have been stuck for long than the typical time taken for winning deals to progress. If you’re mot measuring or reporting on this, take an initiative today to deal with it. In fact, if your current CRM system can’t provide it, I would seriously think of changing it. It’s that important.
Sales Win Rate
This is an obvious metric, but even here not all organizations track it with enough granularity to learn the significant lessons this metric can provide. You need to be tracking all possible outcomes. In most complex B2B sales environments, there are at least four:
- You win the deal
- A competitor wins the deal
- The prospect decides to implement an internally developed solution
- The prospect decides to do nothing
You’ll miss the opportunity for incredibly valuable learning if you categorize the last three outcomes simply as “lost”. If you’re not evaluating the outcome of every opportunity into at least these four categories, I strongly suggest you start doing so today – and that you retrospectively analyze recent sales outcomes.
Measure at Every Level
My final recommendation is that you measure these three metrics at every level within your organization, as well as analyzing outcomes by source of opportunity – including comparing different marketing campaigns. You’ll inevitably find outliers in both directions: poor performance that clearly needs to be corrected, and exceptional success that needs to be replicated.
In fact, the latter may provide some of the most valuable learning opportunities: where are you currently being most successful today, what can you learn from this, and how can you enable the rest of the organization to embrace the winning habits you have identified?
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