Restructure Your Sales Team? Shorten Time to Revenue
By Mark Roberts
Many sales organizations are reorganizing and retooling their sales teams. They are determining how their customers want and need to be served with voice of the customer research as well as net profit by customer analysis.
Market leading sales organizations are assessing their sales skills by salesperson to ensure they put the right salesperson in the right role. This assessment also helps salespeople assigned to new roles create individualized learning plans based on the sales competencies needed to be successful in that role.
If your organization is like many I’ve worked with, the first few weeks for sales representative in a new role are intense and their training often feels like they are drinking from a fire hose.
However, it takes the average sales rep twelve months to ramp up after training and apply the skills they have learned and that’s a lot of runway to reach full, quota-carrying potential.
Sales organizations that take the long view on salesperson on boarding have the best chance of producing a high-yield, low churn team. Here are some new sales roles on boarding and post-on boarding activities that can help to this end.
How long does it take a salesperson in a new role to be effective in your organization?
What value would it deliver to your bottom line if we cut that time in half or even more?
Given today’s business climate can you wait months or a year for a salesperson in a new role to add value?
What steps can you take to help on board salespeople assigned new sales roles?
Sales Effectiveness Assessment:
Does this candidate have the skills, beliefs and Sales DNA to succeed in your organization and the sales role? The quickest way to shorten ramp to revenue is have an assessment that looks for the sales mindset of your top producers.
We do not expect all salespeople to have all the sales competencies needed to succeed but they must have the right sales mindset and beliefs about sales.
We can improve skills, product and systems knowledge but changing mindsets like needing to be liked, working remotely, and or having difficulty talking about money are much more difficult and take longer to improve.
Post New Role Assignment:
Sales Welcome Packet- After you place a salesperson in a new role, but before they start is an excellent time to send them a welcome packet from the sales organization they are joining.
Include things like corporate history, sales org chart, high-level sales process workflow chart, high-level brand messaging, vertical market marketecture (how the product(s) solve problems for the major verticals, and some comprehensive case studies. Provide them a clear value proposition that you know resonates with the buyers they will be speaking with in today’s buying climate. On the salesperson’s first day, ask them a few questions about the material to ensure they’ve had the opportunity to absorb it.
On boarding:
Content- For on boarding a salesperson into a new role that better suits their skills , motivations and beliefs, it’s critical to have the right content and have it ready for consumption because they need to learn many things quickly. Think of your on boarding content as everything a sales rep needs to be successful in that particular sales role and when they need it. Start by deciding what topics matter for your salespeople and then back into engineering the content format.
When possible, a subject-matter expert should produce the content and use known best practices from top sales performers I that role today. Many teams are leveraging short videos from top performers by role.
Enlist marketing, sales peers, product management, management, and training to record themselves explaining selling strategies, solution offerings, sales wins, and losses. Supplement this content with quizzes to verify comprehension. This content should be available in a learning library the new sales associate can easily access from their cell phone or other mobile devices.
Sales Skills- In this case, skills refer to sales competencies. Did you know that according to CEB, salespeople only average 14 hours per year on sales training? Assuming you’ve used as assessment tool pre-hire, you now know what skills are needed to fill in the gaps. Competencies should be taught by outside experts or internal top-producers and focus on data-driven best practices. This prescriptive individualized learning is key to training engagement. Additionally, salespeople may require instruction in soft skills such as collaboration, communication and active listening.
Repeatable Sales Processes– Ensure salesperson is educated on your sales processes and funnel. A sale can quickly go awry by not understanding sales processes. Earmark time to teach new sales reps on lead follow-up, sales engineer resource requests, finding and using your sales collateral, proposal processes, contract reviews, and new client on boarding. Sales reps who understand and use your well-defined methods will outperform reps who do not and give your customers the best buying experience.
Practice and share tribal knowledge- Salespeople learn sales with application and repetition. Work with the salesperson to have them deliver an elevator pitch, value proposition, full-deck presentation, and objection handling in their own language. It is critical they do not sound like they are using a caned pitch and words they or the customer would not normally use in conversation.
Help them become a part of the process by assigning them a task to shape content to their normal language and that of their buyers. They should also know a few client success stories verbatim.
In the success story it is critical the story include: the situation and or problem, how you diagnosed the problem, the proposed solution and the financial impact of implementing that solution for your customers.
This practice can take place in front of a peers, for the entire team or on the salesperson’s own time with their sales manager. Tribal knowledge lives in every sales organization, but it doesn’t always filter down to every salesperson by role. Share your best practices and tips at scale with guided lessons, videos, or other interactive activities to draw out hidden ideas.
There are many LMS systems that offer peer to peer learning opportunities. If you have more than one salesperson starting at the same time, set up some friendly competition over who presents best, anything that gets reps to practice before conducting a call will increase training comprehension and build their confidence.
Scorecards- Gamifying achievements is a great way to keep the salesperson engaged in the training process, and it helps you know if your on boarding program works. Develop an on boarding scorecard that measures fundamental metrics by salesperson by role and then tracks how they perform over time.
If performance isn’t improving, adjust additional training and coaching accordingly. If you are starting multiple salespeople, new employees in the same roles will naturally compare themselves to each other.
Managed right, this helps everyone ratchet up their performance together. The peer relationships they develop in training often remain years after the new role on boarding program is over.
Social Selling- Many of your salespeople are probably millennials, so some of your training methods may be outdated. To reach these salespeople, the sales tech stack and social networks need to be a central part of your on boarding.
Use video, social media, and content sharing tools to encourage dialogue, development, and interaction.
Studies have shown that using social selling tools can increase win rates and deal size by 5% and 35%, respectively. Training is much stickier when it uses communication methods favored by the student.
Post new role on boarding:
Leverage start groups- A start group is an association of employees who start with your organization at the same time. On boarding groups of various roles of staff together has an efficiency and effectiveness advantage. Group new role on boarding makes better use of the time of all those involved. Cohorts can help and push each other along the way, especially naturally competitive sales reps.
Assign a sales mentor year one – This mentor is not their sales manager but an experienced subject matter expert who has years of sales experience in this new role and scores very high in sales effectiveness assessment evaluations. They need to have a strong knowledge of how we get things done here coupled with product and sales skills. What you are looking for is someone who coaches the new associate on how to find answers to their questions.
Territory Planning Sales Playbook- Salespeople assigned new roles often are suspect of their sales goals. Their sales goals can seem impossible to achieve. Encourage sales representatives in new roles to take their quota number and build their plan, their sales playbook. As most experienced sales representatives have found, the best approach to successful sales is having a territory plan and working that plan each day.
While sales territory planning can seem time-consuming, territory planning is a useful exercise, especially for salespeople in new roles, as it helps them learn the ecosystem of their territory.
Here some essential territory planning tips for new salespeople:
First, conduct an overall review to analyze the region and review the current situation before projecting future goals. A global review should include an evaluation of business from the previous year; an analysis of customers who are currently the strongest and which are the weakest, a review of the best-selling products, and a list of top prospects for future clients. Have your new salesperson help in gathering the data.
Second, identify and profile clients to target. Marketing can be helpful with customer modeling. Your data is a great source to identify your ideal customer profile. As discussed in other articles the whale curve is a valuable tool to identify the types of customers you want your salespeople prospecting based on their net profit contribution.
The salesperson should also make a list of specific discovery questions for approaching each customer type. What works for one customer will not necessarily work for another, so the salesperson should be making use of personas and targeting technology.
Your sales training for each sales role should provide market specific sales problems your product or service solves and discovery questions to find them so that new salespeople earn trust quickly.
Third, create growth goals and strategies that, if successful, will get the salesperson to quota. For instance, the representative’s goal might be to add a specific number of new clients to the territory or expanding sales of a product by a certain amount or growing current client share of wallet.
The growth strategies need to be data driven and focus on known behaviors that drive performance in your organization.
Fourth, the salesperson should review their plan regularly to ensure their performance is on target. It is easy to forget goals unless they referenced, so the sales plan should be a constant reminder of territory objectives as well as regular sales manager coaching.
This requires strong systems for goal updates and reviews. The data should not require salespeople to become librarians and key account data should be quickly and available in easy to read dashboards.
Fifth, establish a coaching cadence and expectations. Clearly explain what you want the new salesperson to report on each week and make the discussion data driven. A popular discussion is: What did we say we would do? What did we accomplish? What did we say we would do but have not done yet? What is our corrective action plan to get back on track? How can I help you?
Remember, the more you can do to help your salespeople internalize new information, the faster they will ramp up.
By using the salesperson in new role hacks above, you can scale and ramp up your new salespeople quickly.
How long does it take a new salesperson to ramp up in your business?
What would the value be shortening that timeframe by 30%?
Do new sales associates have mentors assigned to them?
Is your training accessible on mobile devices to review and refresh topics?
Have your sales managers been trained to coach?
If you need to strategically reorganize your sales team and would like to take a data driven approach in doing so please reach out and we can discuss the process I use that can be accomplished in most cases in 10 days.
