Empower your sales manager to drive more revenue!

 

To increase sales velocity, most organizations either invest in marketing (buy more leads) or invest in sales (hire more sales people). The sad truth is that both of these tactics are wildly ineffective. While more leads may put additional MQLs into the top of the funnel, there's no guarantee that these leads will convert to SQLs or eventually customers. And similarly, hiring more sales people takes time and effort -- three to six months to recruit an inside sales person and bring them up to speed, twelve to eighteen months to recruit and enable a good enterprise field rep. By then your successor will be facing the same challenge! And...more sales people don't guarantee more revenue. It just doesn't work that way! You have a better option! Improve conversion rates and velocity at each stage of your sales funnel! No additional marketing investment is needed. No new sales headcount required...just a focus on skill and process improvement. And the ROI for this investment is dramatically higher! Given my background of 20+ years in enterprise (and early stage) sales enablement, you might expect me to suggest investment in sales enablement as the obvious approach. Years ago, as a newly minted CRO of a $20M professional services organization, I did not invest in enablement. I did something different...related, but different. And revenues grew by 75% in 18 months. While good sales enablement is a critical foundation for improving sales productivity, you cannot turn around an ineffective sales enablement function in less than eighteen months. Short term revenue acceleration requires focused process and skills improvement and coaching by the sales manager. The fastest route to increased revenue velocity is to empower your first line sales manager The job of the first line sales manager is to ensure the success and effectiveness of the sales team. Yet, in most organizations, first line sales managers spend most of their time not empowering their direct reports. Instead, they are burdened with managing up, conducting pipeline reviews, selling (acting as heros "saving" their reps), and dealing with administrivia. What a waste... In the meantime, their direct reports receive no coaching or timely feedback on their tactics, habits, techniques...they just keep doing the same thing that hasn't been working in the past. Oh, and by the way, the rep's manager is the primary reason why a rep will stay with (or leave) a company!

Steps to take First, this approach requires a shift in mindset, a focus on coaching and deliberate practice. How much of that happens in your organization today? Sales leadership must send a strong signal that coaching is the single most valuable activity for sales managers to undertake. Not pipeline inspection...coaching.

Too many sales managers are former lone wolves...they were great at selling, so they must be great managers. Wrong. Ted Lasso never played (European) football, yet he was a great coach! Assume that your sales managers need help in developing their coaching skills. Invest in a coaching workshop and ongoing support to ensure that they are indeed coaching and that their coaching skills improve over time. Measure the time they spend actually coaching. It should be 20-30% of their week...every week. Use your CRM data to identify where individuals and teams need coaching...and deliberate practice...focus. If early stage conversion rates are weak, focus there. If negotiation skills are lacking, focus there. Assume that discovery skills can be improved through skill building.

Professionals practice. You're a sales professional, not a sales amateur Devote time for deliberate practice. Professionals in many fields (and most athletes!) practice their craft and skills before they enter the operating room or step onto the field of play. To be good at what you do, you must practice. You must focus on the skills that make you good, and you will benefit from immediate, in-the-moment feedback. If you don't practice, you'll have to think your way through a difficult sales situation. And by then it's too late. Why don't sales people undertake deliberate practice? Role playing is uncomfortable. Ya. So is lifting weights or doing windsprints or practicing your keynote speech. Practice takes time away from selling time. Sure... Your sales people must build the "muscle memory" so they can pivot with the customer or deal with a challenging objection. They must build the muscle memory so that challenging selling situations go smoothly, that nothing rattles them, that the customer truly understands that they are on their side, helping them to achieve their strategic business goals.

Account planning as a team sport

 

Many organizations consider account planning as an opportunity to inventory opportunities. Others view it as a way of monitoring sales activity without getting too involved. A successful completion of the process results in a planning document being filed somewhere. A survey conducted by the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) found that, even within their membership, a few years ago a mere 11% of account plans were “effectively executed.” That’s a pretty dismal completion rate, given that these plans should be the primary pathway to better customer relationships and higher revenue generation! And I don’t have any evidence that this percentage has grown in recent years. Savvy sales leaders, on the other hand, view account planning as a co-creation and alignment process, a continuous mix of discovery, conversation, hypothesis building/testing and value creation. For field reps and KADs/SAMs alike, good account planning, as an ongoing process, is a fabulous way to engage the customer, solve real problems and maximize your opportunities within an account.

Customers don't know what they don't know It's your job as the external expert to help customers learn new things, "to see around corners" as one executive at a key account requested of my team. We talk with customers across industries and have a very different perspective of what's possible.

It came as a surprise to one operations leader at a major airline that he could receive realtime notification of operations issues, rather than the overnight batching of data that populated his dashboard each morning. While we may take that capability for granted, he wasn't aware that this was possible. He simply didn't know what he didn't know. Once he became aware of this new possibility, he moved quickly to incorporate both realtime and strategic operations monitoring.

Inputs and outputs Great field reps work with their technical counterparts, CSMs (if any) and others to identify the strategic opportunities and challenges for their accounts. Conversant in their customers' business operations, they build business value hypotheses on how the customer can more effectively achieve their desired business results. The process involves a lot of inputs, analysis and outputs. But...it is not a linearprocess...it's a continuous process, similar to discovery. And the goal is enrollment...enrolling the customer in believing that these larger goals are possible, and getting stakeholder buy-in. With that buy-in and commitment, anything is possible.

Great account planning is a team sport The team includes not only sales, sales management and leadership, technical consultants, SMEs and other vendor personnel, but also customer stakeholders.

Without the active participation of the customer, we're not conducting account planning, we're building empty hopes that likely don't align with the customer's goals, time frames, priorities and investment strategies. To have real impact, we must align with their goals and priorities. Sometimes we can help shape those goals and priorities. Budgets will follow. But...if they're not at the table while we conduct our planning, alignment and buy-in is simply not possible. And effective governance of the process ensures that this is not a one-time touch point, but an ongoing exchange of ideas and joint investments that lead to better business results for both parties. Suspect that your account planning could be more productive? Lets talk...