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How many of your key strategic accounts grew more than 25% last year? How many active opportunities at large key customers is your team working on? How proficient is your sales team at conducting a needs assessment with your key strategic accounts? Is this something your key account managers do frequently, on going or once per year? The needs assessment is the next key piece of the puzzle in fixing key account sales problems. Everything after needs assessment is about solving the problem identified in needs assessments with solutions you can provide.

I was asked to help a family run business fix a sales problem. They just learned they lost a large amount of sales at their top account and this account represented over 20% of the total revenues. This large account was their anchor account. It gave them the ability to negotiate competitive raw material purchase agreements. It gave their plants manufacturing efficiencies. Their president asked me to lunch to share the sales problem and discuss how I can help.

Very quickly the discussion turned to how do we target and new accounts to make up for this huge unexpected loss.

He was asking me a lot of questions:

How do you determine new accounts to target and why

How long will it take to open and grow these accounts?

How many accounts do you think we need to target to make up for the recent sales loss we just experienced?

Where do we get new account lists and how much should we expect to pay for them?

How do you suggest we structure our team so we are focused on bringing in new business?

What compensation plan designs have you used to drive net new customers?

I heard you are good at finding and opening new markets for current products? How long does that process take?

I see you have experience helping companies grow internationally? What does that process look like and how long will that take?

I said I would be happy to answer all these questions and more but first tell me more about the large anchor account you lost.

He shared:

We have served this customer for over 40 years and I thought we had a great relationship. They have toured our facilities over the years, we have supplied them high quality products and we have a strong relationship with the buyer. Every year we helped support their company golf outing and global sales meeting and trade shows. We have invested in new production equipment and processes to meet their growing demands over the years.

So what happened? Why did you lose the business?

We received their projection for the next calendar year and we noticed the majority of the key products we supplied them were not on the projection. We called and asked our buyer and she shared they were no longer manufacturing the machines those parts supported but there will be some small aftermarket orders. We did nothing wrong their business and market changed and unfortunately the bulk of what we supplied them was for products they were discontinuing based on their customer feedback.

How do you manage large accounts like this?

We have teams of people that keep this customer happy in quality, production, design and so on. We have a strong engineer who has been with our team for over 25 years who manages this account from our corporate office and he has one of the top independent representative firms, the firm that opened the account for us years ago and services the account.

When was the last time your team did a needs assessment for this customer?

[Silence …and I let is hang there as long as he would let it while I enjoyed my salad  ]

Well …as I said we have serviced this customer for years and the buyer as well as his design team has been in our facilities. They know what we do. I can assure you if there was a project they were working on we could have helped them with it would have come our way.

How often do your salespeople conduct key account needs assessments? Is it an ongoing process or something they do with accounts early each year?

I am not sure, I assume we are always listening for problems we can solve but I will have to get back with you.

But lets get back to my questions, how long is it going to take to make up these lost sales, I owe our owners and our board a plan.

A key part of any key account management process is constantly assessing needs and designing solutions to solve customer challenges. Many key account managers are excellent at building and leveraging relationships in accounts and managing large amounts of data to give the customer excellent service with their orders. Where they often feel uncomfortable and fall short is asking for unresolved problems. They worry these questions may somehow hurt their relationship when in reality solving customer unresolved problems builds their relationships to that of trusted advisors.

Where a number of teams struggle is in needs assessements.

We need to be asking questions and finding customer unresolved problems and the problems we find become our future sales growth opportunities to fuel our future profitable sales.

We need to build relationships wide and deep in our key accounts so we have our ear to the ground constantly listening for problems that need to be solved.

Our key strategic account managers need to be able to share stories, success stories we have with other similar accounts to open opportunities at their accounts by often challenging the way we do things around here.

If your team needs questions to ask, there are a number of places you and your team can find questions to have meaningful conversations with customers to discover unresolved problems at your key accounts.

MTD Sales Training published 450 sales questions

Hubspot Published questions 

Mycustomer published 100 questions to uncover customer needs.

The sales Blog published great questions to determine customer needs. 

The Center for Sales Strategy Posted questions here and here.

Once your team finds 5 questions they feel comfortable saying they will need to customize them to your customers and products and or services.

The sales process revolves around what you do, what you learn and what you find in needs assessments.

Every customer situation will have different requirements for needs assessments.

To make the questions more powerful, follow questions with suggestions (trial solutions) about what might solve the problem based on similar customer success stories. This technique could sound like this:

ARJ Corp had a similar had a situation, and they used our 132457 products and it resulted in saving them over $160,000 per year….do you think that might work well here for you?

By offering these success story examples of how you have helped other similar customers with similar problems as a part of your needs analysis questions, you are getting your customers to think creatively while also planting future product seeds and the value they can have on your customer’s bottom line.

It is a best practice to give your accounts options to solve the opportunities discovered in the needs assessment and let them feel ownership in choosing the right solutions.

When I have trained key account managers over the years I suggest the following:

1. Build and leverage your relationships with key accounts.
2. Create a relationship matrix in your key accounts and note who you already know, just met, and people you need to know
3. Constantly be listening for opportunities.
4. Conduct a cadence of needs assessments with your customers quarterly. Pick a week each quarter , put it on your calendar and spend the week asking needs assessment questions with your large key strategic accounts.
5. Log everything you discover , even if they sound like problems we do not solve today, in the CRM.
6. List and rank the needs you discover based on size of opportunity, time, your current capabilities, and impact to the customer’s bottom line.
7. Treat each opportunity like a project and develop a project plan with phase gates you and your customer develop together.
8. Decide how you both will monitor the projects.
9. What will your communication cadence methods and frequency be?
10. Understand how the customer will judge if this project was a success

Lets get back to my lunch….

I agreed to help this company and the first thing I asked to do was meet with the customer that just lost so much business and conduct a needs assessment. The president felt this was a waste of time and only agreed to this strategy if I would agree to design a new business development plan for his team as well.

We spent just under a week meeting with all the contacts this client developed over the years and found a number of current problems we could solve. We also discovered a new design project for the products replacing those being discontinued and offered our help with added value engineering and the customer agreed. We won a number of projects and won about 60% of the new part designs in the future projects.

We used a similar process at all their key accounts as well as voice of the customer research and more than made up the sales shortfalls.

Results?

New business development: over new accounts 200 in 18 months

New account sales as a % of total sales grew to 22% of total within 4 years

New account profits were on average were 6% higher than current accounts

Opened a new market it contributed $4 million in the first 12 months

I am still in contact with that team through LinkedIn and the projects we won at that large key customer eventually grew to far exceed the proposed shortfall. One of the 200 net new accounts grew to over $5 million and is expected to reach $7 million in 2019. Oh and that new market we found that really valued my clients capabilities? I understand it is exceeding $12 million and should hit $15 million by 2020. ( at 60%+ gross profit margins)

The needs assessment process is a critical part of the key strategic account management process.

How about your team…..

Does your team conduct formal needs assessments?

How often? (are you sure?)

Does each of your key account manager s have strong open-ended questions to discover unmet needs?

Do your key account manager know how to leverage success stories at other customers to uncover opportunities at their accounts?

It is a best practice to give your accounts options to solve the opportunities discovered in the needs assessment and let them feel ownership in choosing the right solutions.

In the next post we will discuss how to develop key strategic account growth plans.

 

 

 

Is your sales team prepared to win and achieve their sales goals  today? Do your salespeople consistently exhibit the discipline to drive profitable sales growth? Do your salespeople clearly understand your expectations and they are accountable to them? One way to ensure your sales team breaks the growing global trend of sales teams not achieving sales growth goals is to fix broken windows in your sales organization. In this post we will discuss where to look for broken windows that are hurting your sales performance.

I am very thankful to a number of my mentors over the years. They taught me how to capture and leverage the voice of the customer and how to serve customers by providing industry insights and best practices to improve their bottom line. One mentor taught me how to listen, actively listen for unresolved problems. Mentors help salespeople understand the discipline required to drive profitable sales growth and to be accountable for key behaviors that if performed consistently will drive profitable sales growth. Having disciple and being accountable is not about doing 1,000’s of things perfectly. Being accountable and having discipline is about is having clear goals and expectations on how you will achieve those goals. As the sales leader it is about inspecting what you expect and understanding the behaviors and attitudes to support key goals.

I am very proud of my children. My dream for my children was I would grow a business and give it to them one day to run. In running the business they would learn the life lessons I experienced and have financial freedom. I discovered about 15 years ago this was only my dream. My children had much different plans. My daughter became an amazing artist and now is the social media marketing manager for a company driving 3-5 times the traffic to their trade events and website leveraging her artistic skills creating innovative content. My son has a burning desire to serve and protect others and a police officer.

Over the holidays my son and I were talking and he shared something called “Broken Window Theory” and I thought it was fascinating. Broken window theory suggests that visible signs of crime like cars stripped and up on blocks in the street, street signs missing, traffic lights not working, people consuming alcohol in public and other anti- social behaviors create an environment for more crime and more serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, public drinking and others create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes.

In the 1969 a psychologist named Philip Zinbardo from Stanford ran an experiment. He parked a car with no license plates in two neighborhoods. One that was run down, broken windows and signs of crime and one in an affluent neighborhood in Palo Alto California. The car parked in the run down neighborhood was vandalized within 10 minutes. Next he smashed the front window and what he observed surprised him. Others in the neighborhood with vandalism and other crimes joined in and within 24 hours the entire car was stripped to the frame. Who did the vandalizing is what was disturbing: It was respectable adults in the community often with their children not …street gangs.

The car in Palo Alto remained untouched.

The findings from the study?

Unintended behavior leads to a breakdown of community controls 

One broken window leads to many if left unaddressed

Disorders drives fear and withdraw from community laws and norms

Even the best citizens in a community can start bad behaviors if the behaviors are left unchecked

My son has been a police officer in a large city now for a number of years. He has personally experienced how policing and correcting what seems like minor misdemeanor crimes helps bring a neighborhood back to life. He has seen the impact having the discipline to enforce common community norms and expectations that support a safe and prosperous community and how this reduces crime significantly.

“Ok Mark, this is all interesting … but how does this apply to driving profitable sales increases year over year?”

I thought you would never ask!

How many broken windows exist in your company’s sales organization?

Do you know where to look?

The good news is you have a good smart team and there are many things about your company you and your team should be proud of. When I did business development consulting work I asked a lot of questions and looked for broken windows that are signs of much bigger sales problems to be solved. It is not unusual for my past clients to not even see the broken windows they walk by each day. Many broken windows have been broken for years and they became “ how we do things around here”. New team members will see them immediately but if they want to survive they learn to look the other way. Instead of repairing the broken windows teams try to just cover them up.

Let me help you see the broken windows that I have seen because you too may have grown accustomed to seeing them and may walk by them everyday and they are hurting your business development and sales growth efforts…

Majority of salesperson’s time spent in non-sales activities

“Hi how are you meetings” …Salespeople bringing donuts to their distributors with no other business reason for the visit, no one at the distributor even knew you were coming

Not being properly groomed

Company car dirty inside and out

Not making eye contact with customers in meetings

Sales people not taking notes in meetings

Salespeople not having a pen visiting a customer job site and having to “remember” the requirements

No pre-call plans 

No CRM entry for future meetings or past meeting notes

Outdated company brochures in sales associate’s vehicles

Damaged and stained brochures from not being properly stored used in customer presentations

Poor or no customer follow up

Not following up on leads provided, QDD disorder

Salespeople leaving sales training to make/ take phone calls

Customer email not responded to in 24 hour

Out-dated sales process

Salespeople working on laptops in meetings and not paying attention

Missing team weekly meeting

Salespeople openly criticizing others on sales team, others on other teams ( not constructive criticism ) 

Not responding top your email of voicemail in 48 hours if you asked them to

No plan to achieve their sales goals

Showing up late to weekly meetings

Salespeople playing feature and benefit bingo 

Not being prepared for weekly meetings

No cadence for how often they visit with each customer

Not completing expense reports timely

Poor interpersonal exchanges with team members from other business groups

Talking too much in meetings with customers

Salespeople who have never been trained in sales (product-yes, sales-no) 

Not understanding their customers’ businesses

Not understanding their market or market language

No dollar value in CRM for new opportunities identified

Not understanding how your product or service impacts your customers’ bottom line

Not qualifying potential customers

Salespeople seen as just another rep not a trusted advisor

Salespeople not spending the majority of their time in sales behaviors

Not updating sales stage in CRM

Asking poor questions in meetings

Poor listening, talking over customers 

Selling on price not value

No ideal customer profile so everyone could be a customer 

Company vehicle not maintained

Poor to no relationships at key customers

Key account budgets/goals… but no strategic growth plans on how to achieve them

Only knowing the buyers at key accounts no relationship with other influencers 

Sales pipeline bucket not a funnel 

Poor new product sales 

Poor sales customer visit trip planning (more time driving and flying than in front of customers)

No formal sales process

Salespeople staying at very expensive hotel 

Salespeople submitting very expensive dinners without customer

If you see some of the above you have broken windows that need to be repaired before your team can experience explosive sales growth.

The above are some broken windows I have observed but there are plenty more I am sure.

How about you…

What broken windows have you observed in your sales teams that are negatively impacting your profitable growth plans?

Do you have associates in key sales leadership roles that have not been trained to lead salespeople?

Are their politically incorrect secrets that your salespeople know but are afraid to discuss?

If we allow broken windows in how we sell they hurt our ability to drive profitable sales growth and increase shareholder value. We are not saying everyone has to be perfect and 1,000’s of things. What we are saying is we need discipline and accountability in our sales teams. As the leader you need to set the expectation and insure compliance. If you observe a behavior that is not consistent with what your team has identified as your core values you must be safe to address it and correct it. If not the little broken windows become chaos and good team members in your sales community will start behaving in ways counter to driving profitable growth.

In our next post we will discuss common marketing broken windows to look for and repair.

Each day salespeople are meeting with current and prospective customers and their value is determined by how well they communicate effectively. The challenge is: Are your salespeople trained and prepared to have commercial conversations? In a recent study by Florida State 85% of buyers surveyed shared they expect salespeople today to connect the dots between what they are selling and the value to the buyer’s company. Sadly, the same survey determined only 15% of salespeople communicate value the buyer will realize. This is a common sales problem we need to fix. In this post we will discuss what commercial conversations are and how your salespeople can apply the advice of author Bernadette McClelland in her book: The Art of Commercial Conversations.

“Your enterprise value is a product of what your salespeople say, and how they sell each day”

• Mark Allen Roberts 

I recently attended an excellent AA-ISP conference in Chicago for inside salespeople. In one of the break out workshops I met Bernadette and was immediately engaged with her message and content. In her workshop she shared statistics how buyers today expect sellers to be skilled in commercial conversations.

Having been the sales training manager for a $4 billion company this was not new news. We strategically blended communications skills courses throughout our six-month training program. We included courses like value-based sales and how to build business cases, presentation skills, entrepreneurial skills, business acumen, and many more skills development courses. However, Bernadette’s content also discussed a missing element: the conversations salespeople are having with themselves each day. I found this topic fascinating.

French philosopher Rene Descartes said “I think therefore I am”

Could this impact sales results and I failed to include it in our training? Absolutely!

What do your salespeople think about?

What are their beliefs about sales and selling?

What are their motivations as well as fears?

Let me ask you a few questions from the book:

• Are sales today easier or more complicated than they were in the past?
• Do you feel buyer expectations of salespeople has changed in the last 10 years?
• Do you think it is easier or harder to get appointments with buyers today?
• Are you seeing more or less people involved in and influencing the sale today?

If you are like me you will agree you have experienced huge changes in how buyers buy, what criteria they are using today and how many people are involved in the buying decision. Buyers expect and reward a different type of seller today. As I have shared in the past, they want Trusted Advisors not reps.

The author does a wonderful job of explaining where sales has been and where we are now.

Sales 1.0 – Contact, Content exchange, Contract

Sales 2.0 – Connect, Consult, Conspire

Sales 3.0- Conviction, Context, Contribution

It should not shock us that 57% of sales reps failed to achieve quota in 2018 and the number is growing each year. Salespeople who do not understand the voice of their customers and are selling like they did 10, 15, or 20 years ago are failing. Buyers are rebelling and not giving them appointments, or they go dark after the first appointment. As the author shares in this excellent quote:

“Byers have found their voice and they are voting with silence”  

Buyers are more distracted than ever before, harder to reach and quite frankly are having far too many calls with salespeople prisoners to outdated sales processes. More sales are lost today to the status quo than to competitors.

Buyers are in charge and they have been trained. Over 70% of buyers have received formal negotiations skills training and less than 10% of sellers have been trained in negotiations. Should it shock us when we dee sale price discounts and overrides occurring in over 60% of the sales transactions today? The sad reality is 50% of salespeople today have never been trained. If they were trained it was in a one and done instructor led experience and not spaced over time online.

So, buyers are trained, most salespeople are not, and sales VPs are frustrated salespeople are selling on price. That is the reality I hear each day and a sales problem we need to fix.

The author recommends we reassess our approach to sales and how we sell and even why we sell.

Simon Sineck has done some incredible work on knowing your why. If you have not seen this click here. He shares how people don’t buy what you do but why you do it.

“It’s not just about value-driven commercial conversations but values driven conversations that are going to cause our buyers to be more curious about what we do.” 

• Bernadette McClelland

We must help salespeople shape the conversations they have with themselves on their why they sell.

What’s your Why?

What is your Companies’ Why?

The key is crafting your relevant personal message. The author shares…

“48% of B2B decision makers do not respond to sales professionals who don’t personalize their message”

We must train salespeople to have commercial conversations, build their personalization skills and learn the art of storytelling.

“78% of buyers surveyed did not belie sellers have case studies, metaphors, analogies, or stories to tell that are relevant to buyers”

Ouch!

The author closes her book with a challenge, and I want to give you and your sales team that same challenge.

How much time do your salespeople currently dedicate to the following behaviors?

Creating a Vision

Knowing who your buyer is

Emotional awareness- knowing buying criteria important to buyer

On the ball – able to answer questions quickly and accurately about products, features, benefits and how to do business with your company

Demonstrating they know your market, Product, value your product provides customers

Look the part

Have an open mind and actively listen

Build trust

Attention to detail

Understand customer expectations

Design and communicate plans with customers

Strategically keep in touch with customers

Create customer advocates

Build a relationship matrix in key accounts beyond buyers

Clearly know and can articulate your value

How about your sales team?

Do you know their commercial conversations skills?

Do you train your salespeople to have meaningful commercial conversations?

Is your salesperson’s day filled with transactional activity of value producing behaviors highlighted above?

I highly recommend The Art of Commercial Conversations by Bernadette McClelland to help fix sales conversation problems your salespeople are having with customers and themselves each day.

On a scale of 1 – 10 (one being not strategic at all, ten highly strategic) how strategic would you say your pricing is with your customers?

Do your sales teams’ price your products and services based on cost plus or value?

Do you have price tiers and discount structures?

Do you price by market or do you have one price for all the markets you serve?

Do you know what percentage of sales transactions had price overrides in the past twelve months?

If these questions make you pause or feel a little nervous, you are not alone. Far too many companies are breaking even and often losing profits on the majority of their customers without realizing it.

There is a solution. Every business has a Whale Curve.

One of the quickest ways to stop the bleeding and improve profits is using your Whale Curve to identify accounts that are not profitable and create strategies to make them profitable.

For years we have heard how the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, can be seen everywhere in sales results. In business, 20% of your customers produce 80% of sales. Within those customers, 80% of profitable sales are often generated by only 20% of your salespeople.

Unfortunately,even Pareto’s 20% number is shrinking to 17%, and we are experiencing a shift with up to 90% of sales now being delivered by 10% of customers for some companies.

We need more than Pareto to fix this sales and profit problem.

Traditionally, Sales Leaders work with sales teams to create strategic account development plans for LARGE key accounts.

We help our LARGE accounts improve their sales and profits, and
we grow top line sales in the process. This model has worked for years. When key account sales increase, CEO’s are happy (OK, happy is not the right word because we
can always sell more, am I right?), but if we bring in the sales and profit numbers they require, they have happier board meetings.

That strategy addresses LARGE key account sales, but what do we do with the smaller and small accounts that often create a great deal or equal amounts of activity and cost of sales but contribute little if any to the bottom line?

In April of 2019, I was asked to join SPA and SPASIGMA as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Since 1993, SPA has helped their customers improve their bottom-line profitability leveraging pricing analytics with proprietary tools, processes, and training.

When I am asked to serve a team and their customers I prefer to start in the market and
listening to the voice of their customers. During my first week with SPA, I met with one of our customers and listened to our team share how we have been on a strategic pricing journey with this account for the past few years. This key account’s customer price analysis and strategic pricing recommendations has resulted in an incremental $110,000 to the bottom line per month.

In the next meeting, the numbers were even more impressive: SPA’s work has added an
additional $26 million of incremental profits since starting their strategic pricing journey in 2015.

I have always focused my energies on helping sales teams with sales enablement, capturing the voice of their customers, and teaching their organizations to serve their customers and markets with a value based sales and price strategy. As I continued to have meetings with client partner after client partner, I grew surprised how little I knew about the Whale Curve.

Leading sales teams, I have always had several reports at my disposal. These reports show sales, sales by customer, sales by market, sales by region and sales by salesperson.

Each of these reports also showed profitability by customer, market, and salesperson. In addition to growing top-line sales, I often challenged sales transactions made at profits below targeted market pricing.

The one report I didn’t have was the Whale Curve.

Knowing what I know now, I wish I had because it would have been helpful.

What is this Whale Curve?

The Whale Curve shows you accounts where your team is making healthy profit margins and accounts where you are breaking even and where you are losing profit dollars with each transaction.

In a whale curve, customers are cumulatively ranked by profitability, from highest to lowest.The resulting curve is said to look like a whale coming out of the water.

Looking at the right side of the curve can be alarming because you can visually see the impact of the bottom customers draining your overall business profit.

According to Harvard Professors Robert Kaplan and V.G. Narayanan, the 80-20 Pareto rule does not apply to customer profitability for organizations.

The whale curve for cumulative profitability reveals that the most profitable 20% of customers generate between 150 – 300% of total profits.

Let that sink in a minute….if that’s true why is your business not more profitable?

The middle 60 – 70 % of customers break even, and the least profitable 10 – 20% of customers cause a decrease of 50 – 200% of total profits, leaving the company with its 100% of total profits.

Put another way, your bottom 20% of customers is draining your peek operating profits and in so doing you realize the profits you see today.

On the profitability whale curve, the difference between the highest point of the chart and current company profitability (100% profitability) represents unrealized profit potential for the company.

The average organization has both customers having a positive impact on company profitability, and customers who negatively impact potential profits of a company by generating less revenue than costs – creating a negative effect on company profitability.

Often even managers who understand the issue are not able to easily distinguish between
customers belonging to these two groups because they lack a price analytic tools that include the cost of sales.

The total sales size of customer does not always show the customer is automatically the most profitable; in our experience, the largest customers may turn out to be the most unprofitable.

How did customers not know?

When a manufacturer and or distributor has 1.000’s of customers and over 40,000
SKUs over time, 100’s of salespeople, various price programs, numerous product groups and many locations you would be surprised how often we see it.

How does this happen and why didn’t they see it in their monthly reports?

Is this something that happens slowly over time or is it something in response to new
competitors?

What is the best way to solve this problem?

How long does it take to identify customers and their profits and plot them on the Whale
Curve?

What are the best practices for improving profitability in managing the whale curve data?

How long does it typically take from the day we share the whale curve data to improved
profitability?

How much profit should a company expect to improve in the first 12 months?

How do sales teams react to this data?

Are most sales teams trained and capable to negotiate price increases?

Why not just cut the tail off the whale? Wouldn’t that quickly fix the problem?

Is the pricing analytics exercise a one and done exercise or something that happens over the years? Why?

What I am finding is the Whale Curve is a valuable tool to help companies realize what
accounts are driving their profits, what accounts are at break-even, and what accounts are eroding your profits. In essence, the tail of your whale is eroding your total gross margins the longer it is allowed to swim freely without price guidance and a strategic pricing methodology.

As I learn more about the Whale curve and pricing analytics, I will post content so we can all learn how to improve our profits and the bottom line in the hyper-competitive markets we serve today. We will answer the above questions and many more to help you and your teams improve your profits and gain a higher return on the value your organization provides.

Have you heard about the Whale Curve before?

If so, what did your team do to improve your profits?

Did you cut the tail off the whale or did it take on a new shape over time?

What are some other applications for the Whale Curve that can help us make better decisions?

Are there other cost considerations companies are not considering when they build their Whale Curve?

 

 

By Mark Roberts

As I work with sales leaders and CEO’s common questions and comments we hear are: “Where have all the hunters gone? We need more sales hunters. We need hunters to find and close new business at current and new accounts. We need more organic sales growth…” When we review an entire sales team’s skills, effectiveness and opportunities for growth there is often an obvious shortfall in the ratio of sales hunters to farmers in most sales teams’ todays. Many teams today are relying on an outdated strategy of relying on relationships alone to grow sales. However, without identifying and strategically recruiting sales hunters these sales teams often fail to hit their team sales KPI’s year after year.   Why should you add more hunters to your sales team? How do you identify current salespeople who can become hunters? That is what we will discuss in this article.

In a Harvard article: Selling is not about relationships the author shared salespeople fall into one of five categories and defined the relationship builder role:

“Relationship builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.”

When I refer to relationship selling, I mean the main sales behavior focus placed on building a relationship with your buyer and others in their organization over time. Could the relationship selling model that has served as a foundation of most sales training be failing us today?

Here are some alarming statistics:

●      From Biznology, 82 percent of decision-makers think that sales reps are unprepared for their engagement.

●      Furthermore－according to Gallop－68 percent of customers are lost because of indifference or perceived apathy, not because of mistakes.

●      Only 46 percent of customers said vendors deliver on what was promised.

●      In 2019 more salespeople failed to achieve quota that hit it. – Salesforce

Additionally, relationship selling alone just plain doesn’t work for many businesses.

A salesperson’s time is valuable, so unless it is a long-term sale or a huge complex opportunity, relationship selling is expensive to maintain. It also doesn’t work with every business model, so if you sell a product that is only purchased once, relationship selling isn’t an excellent strategy to use.

For years we were taught: “People buy from people they like.”

We have taught relationship building skills and we should not be surprised that many sales organizations rely on relationship builders alone to grow their sales.

Relationship building skills are still very valuable, but they must not be the only skills your salespeople have today to strategically drive sales growth.

What I am discussing is the belief that all salespeople have to do is build a relationship, a friendship with their buyer so over time and they will win more business. This is a flawed strategy today, and we need more sales hunters.

For decades, most companies have placed their time, effort, and energy on recruiting and developing farmers. That’s right, you’ve “bet the farm” on the sales profile which is least likely to prospect and close new business. Farmers have their place on your team and can add great value if they are in the right role. They are very likeable and build relationships through service but statistically most do not drive the organic sales growth organizations need today like a sales hunter profile.

The most important question: Who will close the sale?

According to the Harvard Business Review, the biggest driver of customer loyalty (53 percent) is the sales experience if we define it as a function of “how you sell rather than what you sell.” Prospects and clients reward suppliers who “offer unique and valuable perspectives and educate them on new trends, issues, and outcomes.”

 

So, let’s change what we were taught years ago to: “People buy from people they…trust to drive the most value.”

Therefor we need to clearly define, find and develop more sales hunters to achieve our sales growth objectives today.

In my opinion, the critical skill to providing an excellent sales experience is the salesperson’s ability to ask a lot of good, tough, timely questions along with the ability to push back and challenge prospects’ assumptions and decisions. Hunters not only know your product and applications but also clearly understand their market and the business financial outcomes of your products and solutions. They have meaningful business conversations based on financial outcomes- not the need to be liked.

A sales hunter is constantly looking for problems to solve for customers and are not afraid to have uncomfortable conversations new accounts. To researchers, this ability may have simply appeared to be industry intel and perspective but make no mistake exceptional hunter salespeople know exactly what they are doing with their questions. The skill sales hunters have mastered is asking the tough questions to drive the maximum impact for their customers. Top hunter salespeople need to be respected as trusted advisors and do not have a high need to be liked by their accounts. They do not fear rejection. They hope being liked and building a relationship is an outcome of providing value for their customers, but it is not a deep need inside the DNA of a sales hunter.

Most sales organizations need more sales hunters! 

From my observations assessing sales teams globally we have enough farmers. Farmers add great value managing key accounts and giving the key customers value. They manage product portfolios and lead cross functional business unit projects to give the customer the best overall experience. They identify ways to add value to the key accounts’ bottom line and have a strong relationship matrix they have strategically built over time in their accounts across many job functions and many management levels.

Sales hunters are constantly looking for new business opportunities in current as well as targeted strategic new accounts and markets. They are hunting as the name implies for profitable new opportunities.

These hunter salespeople have common sales skills and competencies like:

·       They are comfortable talking about money

·       They don’t need to be liked but seek to be respected through adding value in each interaction

·       They have strong business acumen

·       They ask great discovery questions that help them, and the buyer discover the root of their problems to be solved

·       They take a data driven approach to driving value for their customers

·       They have Grit

·       They are rejection proof

·       They sell based on value to the customers’ bottom line

·       They prospect continuously

·       They have a strong sales process and use the sales process strategically

·       High time management skills

·       Continuous learners seeking the best way to drive the maximum results in the shortest period of time

·       They think and behave like entrepreneurs focused strategically on driving the maximum ROI for each of the sales behaviors they execute 

If you need more hunters, how do you identify current sales team members who have these traits?

How do we recruit hunter salespeople from outside your organization?

The answer to both of these questions is: through predictive sales effectiveness assessments  and pre-hire assessments. Leveraging the power of these instruments you will identify salespeople with sales hunter DNA characteristics and with pre-hire sales assessments you can target hunters in your recruiting efforts.

By evaluating salespeople based on their sales DNA, a combination of sales-specific skills, strengths – their beliefs and motivations you can identify the very best hunter salespeople.

Because prospects are more knowledgeable (due to the internet), increasingly skeptical, and empirically proven to contact salespeople much later in their buying process, hiring managers must identify a salesperson’s DNA and skill gaps very early in the recruiting process.

Sales DNA, competencies, and grit are not easy to spot during an interview; long-established sales organizations and startups new to building sales teams struggle to find talent. Utilizing an assessment tool allows hiring managers to measure the specific skills and behaviors required by your unique sales roles. Competencies tied directly to each sales role can be measured using a predictive assessment that can anticipate sales success related directly to these situations.

If you are looking for proof that assessments work-here it is:

“75 percent of the candidates that aren’t recommended via our assessment but hired regardless, fail in less than six months. However, 92 percent of the candidates that are recommended and hired rise to the top 50 percent of the sales force within 12 months.”  

The key is knowing what kind of salespeople you need by role. You can look internally and recruit externally based on the sales role and competencies required to perform that role effectively. If you want to hire sales hunters, then use a sales assessment tool that assesses sales hunting competencies.

The good news is if your sales team is like most, you have salespeople on your team today that could become the hunters you need today and tomorrow to achieve your strategic sales growth objectives. If you assess your current team and find you lack the bench strength in hunting skills, there is still hope. Working with your HR partners you can develop pre-hire sales assessments that identifies and measures hunting characteristics your top sales hunting performers. Once you find these candidates with the right sales DNA for the sales hunting role you can train and equip them with the right sales process and tools to hunt and close the new business your team desires.

As our markets evolve, we need to ensure we leverage technology and make sure sales roles are populated with team members who have the right sales skills, beliefs and motivations to be successful in their roles. A strong predictive sales assessment tool is critical to finding and recruiting more hunters in the years to come to drive organic sales growth.

How about your sales team?

Do you have more famers than hunters?

Do you need more sales hunters to achieve your strategic sales growth objectives?

Does your organization use a sales skills assessment tool to align the right candidates for the right roles?

If you do not use sales effectiveness assessments what tools do you use to find and develop sales hunters?

How does your organization develop sales hunters?

Can a farmer become a hunter? 

We keep hearing: “where have all the hunters gone?” The good news is they are probably on your team today waiting to be identified and trained and they are available in the marketplace if you have an assessment tool to identify them based on hunting skills beliefs and motivations. Build a sales hunting capability in your sales organization to meet and exceed your sales team’s objectives.

Would you like to find your hunters or those who could be hunters?

Let’s chat