Accountability is not a 4 Letter Word When Fixing Sales Problems
Are your salespeople accountable? When I ask you that question what is the first thing, first emotion, you feel? Why do you think that is? Did less than 60% of your salespeople hit or exceed their sales goals last year? Has someone on your senior management team said: “ we need to hold our salespeople more accountable “? How do we improve accountability and achieve the profitable sales growth we want and need?
If you have experienced discussions about sales accountability lately this post is for you and your team and you all need to read: How Did That Happen by Roger Connors and Tom Smith of the Performance Group.
I was asked to help a company whose sales had stalled for the last five years. In the first senior management team meeting I attended I heard:
The furious young President and CEO shared: “We need to hold our regional sales managers accountable to their growth goals”
Marketing quickly chimed in: (or threw kerosene on the fire…you pick): “Why can’t our salespeople follow up on the good leads we send them, if they did we would be hitting our numbers?”
Engineering decided they had best pile on: “Why can’t sales sell the innovative new products and features we launched”?
Which triggered the CFO to look up from his laptop and share: “ We need to start getting a return on all the investments we made to grow this business”
The COO needed to contribute; “Why can’t sales provide accurate forecasts? Its killing our manufacturing efficiencies, inventory costs and on time shipment goals”?
The Partner from the Private Equity Firm who is now attending meetings due to poor financial performance added: “ When will we see results? What specifically are you doing to turn these results around? Do we have the right salespeople?”
Their HR Vice President added: “Our salespeople who work from their homes need to stop cutting their grass and golfing and get out in front of customers and make some sales, they need to put in 12-15 hour days like we do”
I wish this was a rare meeting and the comments were unusual…but they were not and unfortunately I have heard the above or something similar with many of my past clients. Everyone assumes the solution is sales just needs to work harder and become more “accountable”. Some managers assume salespeople hate to be held accountable, as if it will somehow hurt their motivation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Top Performing Salespeople Hold Themselves Accountable”
– Mark Allen Roberts
The reality is top performing sales super stars love to be held accountable and serve on teams of accountable leaders. Sales super stars are like elite athletes. They are very competitive, they train relentlessly, and they are always learning and practicing their craft. From my observations over the past 35 years, most elite salespeople were athletes and now sales is their sport. Top performing salespeople own their goals and strive each day to hit their objectives and drive profitable growth for their organizations.
So where’s the disconnect? …And more importantly how do we fix this problem quickly?
The authors of How Did This Happen do an excellent job of explaining that accountability has two sides:
Taking Accountability For Yourself
Holding Others Accountable
What we often quickly assume, as the team above thought was a sales accountability problem is actually an organization wide accountability issue. (Sorry) While all of your team is firing missiles from their silos, the true problem is your entire organization lacks a culture of accountability and this must be corrected.
Have you ever worked for someone who assigned you very specific objectives and held you accountable to your goals but they never follow up on emails, signatures needed, budget approvals and other tasks they committed to? How did that make you feel? Were you more or less motivated to achieve your objectives?
So if our manager is accountable it impacts our performance? ….Absolutely!
The good news is your team is motivated by meaningful work. They want to help the organization grow profitability and in the process contribute and one day retire from your organization.
The elite salespeople are accountable. They are out everyday hunting for opportunities to serve your current customers and searching for new accounts with problems your organization solves.
Still doubt your salespeople are accountable?
Let me ask you a few questions…
Where else in your organization are people as accountable as your salespeople?
- Their sales are tracked real time, you can see their activity and results
- You can see what they plan to do next in the CRM
- You can read what happened in the last meeting in the CRM
- In your weekly call in meetings they share what they set out to do, what they did, what they will do and what help they may need from you
- You can see who they are selling, what they are selling them and at what price
- You get reports showing profit by customer, salesperson, region, district, country (there is no hiding in sales)
- Their expense reports tell you if they are making good decisions based on return on investment, if they are managing their time appropriately and you can see where they have been and how long they were there
- They often do weekly call reports
- You complete customer surveys and ask about their service
- Other executives attend customer meetings with them
- If they do not make the sales to achieve their sales goals they do not make the targeted income they were promised
So again, are you sure you have a sales accountability problem?
The book: How Did This Happen is brilliant!
It introduces the concept of an accountability sequence that is broken down into two parts.
The first half is the outer ring as they call it. Here is where you form, communicate, align and inspect expectations. This is where most managers fail. This step is about your managers setting clear reasonable expectations.
The second half is the inner ring where you engage in accountability conversations in a professional way to deal with unmet expectations. (Emphasis on words professional way)
What I enjoyed most about this book is it sets the tone to lose all your emotional assumptions about accountability and it teaches you how to be and lead your teams in a professional and accountable way.
This book provides many tools and assessments to help you determine where your team is in the competency of accountability and guides you how to improve.
The book shares five reasons people do not hold others accountable:
- Fear of offending someone or jeopardizing a personal relationship
- The feeling they lack the time to follow up
- A lack of faith that the effect will make a difference
- A worry that by holding someone else accountable their may expose their own accountability failures
- A reluctance to speak due to fear of potential retaliations
(Did any of the above resonate with you and your team?)
Lets get back to the small company. The senior management team meeting ended and the CEO and CFO asked I stay in the room. They were concerned I was taking notes but did not offer any advice or solutions. I shared I have a process and I have noted everyone’s concerns assumptions and perceptions and now I need the voice of your customers and your salespeople and we will develop a strategy to improve your bottom line results.
What did I find after spending just under six months in the market traveling with their salespeople and and doing voice of customer interviews with top distributors and end customers?
- Customers openly shared how difficult the company was to work with
- Their order follow up was poor and orders often had pricing errors
- On time delivery was under 60% hurting distributor relationships with their customers
- Their product was plagued with quality issues resulting in warrantee claims
- Warranty claims just after purchase negatively impacted distributor relationships with end users
- New products over the past 5 years were historically launched before they were ready. Distributors now wait at least 18 to 24 months before buying new products because they feel the company will have “worked all the bugs out by then“
- Their salespeople, regional managers and distributors were never trained in commercial selling skills
- Their salespeople were exhausted and spending more time of tracking late orders and warranty parts than selling
- Their customer service team was never trained and over 70% of incoming calls went to voicemail
- Their sales compensation plan was so complicated their salespeople did not understand it, trust it, and often found the company made errors in their commissions and it often took over 90 days to correct them
Did this company have a sales accountability problem or a company wide accountability issue?
In chapter 9 the authors give you a simple yet brilliant model to assess accountability. It starts with asking: Is the person above or below the line
Above the line
- Do it
- Solve it
- Own it
- See it
Below the line
- Wait and see
- Cover your tail
- Blame others and finger point
- “Not my job”
Accountability is not a 4-letter word to elite salespeople. They hold themselves accountable and they must know you are accountable as well. They are constantly training, learning and practicing to improve their skills.
We must also understand accountability moves above and below the line for your people ( and yourself) . Once you have read this book you will quickly identify when a victor has become a victim and you are provided tools to help coach them to get them back on track.
I highly recommend you add this book to your library, read it, share it among your leadership team then share it with your sales managers and salespeople.
As for the company above…their sales grew from $14 million to over $80 million in the next 6 years once everyone understood their customers expectations and aligned their strategies and goals to achieve them. We became customer centric and when we did the silo’s went away. We all shared cross functional goals and the bottom line became healthy. So healthy they were acquired a few years later.
I saved the tough questions for last.
How accountable is your team?
How accountable are your salespeople?
Has anyone on your team said: “Our salespeople need to be more accountable”?
How accountable are you?
If the last question hit a nerve then you really need to read this book and help your team understand what accountability is and how to hold others accountable in a professional way. We all drift above and below the line of accountability. This book helps you identify it sooner and provides many tools and coaching ideas to getting your team back on course to profitable performance.
Increase Sales: Fix Broken Windows in How Your Team Sells
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 hours
Salespeople working on laptops in meetings and not paying attention
Missing team weekly meetings
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)
Salespeople staying at very expensive hotels
Salespeople submitting very expensive dinners without customers
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.
Solve The Puzzle of Strategic Account Development Plans: Part 1 “The Why”
I just read recently the percent of salespeople hitting or exceeding sales plan goals dropped again from 63% to 58%. Why are salespeople failing to achieve the sales plans their organizations? How can we fix this common sales problem and grow our sales profitably? In this series of posts I will share how to develop strategic account development plans.
I feel I need to warn you now strategy work is not easy, they take time and discovery and that is why not many salespeople strategically develop them. With a strategic account development plan your sales will grow profitably. Without account development plans your sales are at the mercy of market highs and lows, buyer dispositions, and your competitions’ ability to execute.
Without account development plans every day feels like your hair is on fire. Customers are demanding your time and there are not enough hours in the day to firefight all their demands.
You are in reaction mode and not strategic.
We have all heard the quote:
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
― Benjamin Franklin
And yet when I coach salespeople and ask to see their account development plans I get that deer in the headlights look.
What are common reasons salespeople have shared with me (off the record of course) on why they cannot develop account growth plans…
#1. “I don’t have the time”
#2 “I am so busy”
#3 “All I can do is keep up with my customers and distributor requests”
#4 “I am so busy answering emails”
#5 “I would love to write account growth plans but….Do you know how much time entering information into the CRM takes?”
#6 “Everyday is a firefight, putting out fires and you want me to pause and be strategic?”
#7 “What is an account development plan and how do I build one?
#8 ” I have a plan its just not written down”
I am sure you too have heard all of the above and more.
Salespeople are like customers; their perception is their reality.
As sales leaders we must create a new perception. We must move our sales teams from reactive to proactive selling with strategic account development plans.
Just as we want and need our salespeople to evolve from “reps” to “strategic trusted advisors” for their customers, we need to teach them how to develop strategic account development plans and coach them to execute those plans.
When I teach and coach salespeople, anyone for that matter, I like to use analogies to help what I am sharing stick.
Developing strategic account growth plans is much like solving Rubik’s Cube.
In 1974 Ernõ Rubik, a professor from Budapest In Hungary, wanted to help his students understand three-dimensional problems. His solution? He invented the Rubik’s Cube!
His solid cube did things that the world hadn’t seen before. It twisted and turned yet it didn’t break. Adding 54 colorful stickers to the six sides gave this amazing puzzle its iconic look.
When Ernõ Rubik built his first Cube, it took him over a month to solve it himself.
This toy forced people playing it to think in 3 dimensions and that is why it has been one of the best selling toys in the last 40 years.
When you look at a scrambled Cube, you know what you need to do. But – without instruction, it’s almost impossible to solve!
Strategic Account Development Plans are like Rubik’s cube …most salespeople do not know how to solve this three dimensional problem.
What else do we know?
When you have a plan in place, you can ensure you’re growing key relationships, giving each customer, client, the appropriate amount of attention on topics and creating value for them.
Strategic account development plans help you think in 3-D and when you learn to do so, your account plans will result in…
- Increased sales
- Higher close rates
- Higher gross profit per sale
- Increased new product placements
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Reduced customer churn
- Winning targeted new customers
- Customers supporting your portfolio of solutions
- Increased value for the customers business and your company
If you’re ready to get started on creating your own strategic account management plans, these next series of posts can help you solve the puzzle of developing strategic account development plans and help your sales team achieve sales quota.
The next series of posts are the steps I was hired to execute and or taught for years to develop strategic account development plans that drive profitable growth. (Explosive growth in a number of cases!) .
What are your thoughts so far?
Do your salespeople have account development plans?
Are they strategic?
More important…
Are your account development plans driving the sales and profit growth you need?
The Quickest Way to Increase sales and Profits is…
By Mark Allen Roberts
“What is the quickest way to increase my sales and profits…turn my sales around?” This question is by far the most frequent question business leaders and owners have asked me over the last 30 years. I wish there was a magic “create sales velocity pill” we could all take and everything would be fixed tomorrow, but unfortunately it does not work that way. It took time to get where you are today, and it will take time to get sales and profits back on course. However the quickest way I have experienced to turn sales around and quickly increase sales and profits is; Win Loss Analysis.
What is Win Loss Analysis?
If you are not familiar with conducting win loss analysis, let me share from 45,000 ft what we are doing. When you conduct Win Loss Analysis what you are desperately seeking is the answers to a few questions;
Why don’t buyers buy from me?
What criteria are they using to make buying decisions?
What process are they using to make those buying decisions?
Before we go much further I want you to add the word “today” behind each of the above questions. Why? I have helped so many companies over the years who at one time clearly knew their market, buyers and how their buyers bought so well that they could almost finish buyer’s sentences for them. They built repeatable sales processes based on their market knowledge, created sales tools, and taught their sales teams how to use them. The trouble is markets are dynamic and constantly changing, evolving and we must constantly be aware of the answers to the above questions. Fail to understand you’re your buyers are buying today and your salespeople will resort to feature and benefit BINGO hoping they figure it out and close the sale. However buyers want to buy from partners who know them, understand their problems and quickly demonstrate they are capable of solving their problems. When your salespeople resort to playing BINGO, they become just like every other sales guy trying to sell me something and not help me.
If you plan to take my advice I want to share rules I learned the hard way…
Never let the salesperson that was involved in the sale or attempted sale to conduct the interviews. Why?
- They fail to listen to details we will need in the next step
- They filter what they hear
- If sales was won, it was won because of salesperson ability and relationships, if lost it was price( an price is rarely on the list of why people do not buy) The biggest reason is when a sales person starts hearing why they did not win they start selling and stop listening and the interview is pretty much over.
- Gain senior management buy in to make changes as needed early ,their commitment if you conduct win loss analysis you will act on the results. They say the pain of change must be less than the pain of not changing. If your senior leadership team is not committed to make changes you will find some very interesting information but sales will be told to;”just make it happen” or “try harder”.
- Never conduct a win loss interview with a customer currently in one of the stages of your sales process on a key sale.
Once you gather information from your current customers, customers you lost and potential customers you have always wanted, you need to group like buyers. Once you group like buyers map how they buy and the criteria that is important to them.
Mirror what you have learned against how your team sells today and the tools they use. Quickly you will identify new tools needed based on how buyers are buying today. One common outcome is your current repeatable sales process will change based on the needs of buyers in your market(s) today.
One word of caution again and that is you must have senior leadership buy in to act on what you learn. The only time I have not seen this process increase sales and profits is when I unknowingly enters a Borg Culture where this is how we do things around here trumps achieving sales and profits objectives. If you find you are in a Borg Culture the best solution is to hire a consultant to conduct the win loss analysis. Senior leaders in these cultures are often much more attentive and willing act on information from a prophet from another land than an internal employee with fresh ideas that seems like they are not on board.
Do you want (need) to increase sales and profits quickly?
Become intimately aware of how your buyers are buying today!
If you would like to learn more about win loss I recommend the following links;
Win Loss and customer satisfaction
Why What How Win Loss..
5 ways CEO’s learn from losses
What will a Win/Loss ….
A competitive tool
Typical questions loss analysis answers
Win Loss and value propositions
A real win loss analysis
How to Create “Sales Velocity”; Turn “Street Legal Salespeople” into Servant Salespeople
I am often asked by business owners and leaders; “What is the best way to create sales growth that becomes repeatable and predictable?” I prefer to phrase this somewhat differently to achieve what the business leaders really want;
“How can I create real Sales Velocity?”
When I hear someone say;
I want more sales
I need more sales
How do I increase sales quickly?
What I immediately think is ; how do we create sales velocity for this team? In this post I will share one way to insure you build a foundation for achieving and often surpassing your sales goals by creating Servant Salespeople .
So what is “sales velocity”? In a previous post I said;
Sales Velocity is Sales Acceleration, with Direction and creates Momentum.
Sales velocity is not just “more sales”. When you ask your team to “go get more sales”, or my favorite with regards to hitting their sales growth goals; “just make it happen” you are in essence saying any sale is a good sale. We all know this is not true, but what will happen is sales will take a shotgun approach to the market and often bring in business you may not want and worse yet may not be able to execute effectively and create brand damaged buyers. In addition to often permanently damaging your brand in the marketplace you also run the risk of turning your salespeople into “snake oil salesmen” and they will make all kinds of promises your product or service was never meant to do. If left unchecked you will receive crazy orders you never should have received from customers you will never extend credit to and your team will jump through costly hoops to try to fulfill them.
When I used to conduct sales and marketing seminars, I would share the worst kind of business to win is one order. Once you win that “one order” you now have the liability of servicing it, hearing customer complaints (often now through social media), and sales assumes the position you want more orders like this.
I was in church last Sunday at Grace United Methodist Church and Pastor Don was talking about how it’s not enough to be a “street legal Christian”. Don does a great job of telling stories that have analogies to help people understand the message. In this message he shared how he and a buddy when they were 16 years old had this old beater of a car. He shared how the steering wheel had about 90 degrees of play in it and how the floorboards were all rusted out and you could see the pavement while driving. They had a rear brake light broken out so they covered it with cellophane and used red paint to make it look and somewhat work like a brake light. The car had all kinds of issues but technically it was “street legal”. The car met the basic requirements to be on the road, but really should not have been driven as it was an accident waiting to happen.
Don later pulled this analogy full circle and shared how Jesus taught us we are not to just be street legal Christians that go to church, maybe read a bible once in a while and go through the motions. As I drove home it dawned on me I have seen this many times over the past 30 years in leading sales turnarounds with “street legal salespeople” too. They have the title of sales and they go through the motions of sales but really do not have the heart to serve their clients and solve their customer’s problems.
What is a Street Legal Salesperson you might ask?
Received some basic product training.
They have some understanding of how to reach buyers.
They want to hit their sales goals and corresponding commission checks.
They often have some bad sales habits.
They come close to hitting their sales goal each year, not terrible but not sales super stars.
They try hard.
They are often commission junkies. (not their fault by the way)
At or below the acceptable targeted profit margin for your product or service.
Have problem customers, who complain, pay late or not at all.
When you hear them on the phone with a customer you cringe, but if it works… ah what the heck…
They go through the motion of sales…
The role of sales has evolved over the last 30 years from my perspective. At one time the salesperson was the keeper of the information keys. They did not need to be as good at listening and understanding customer needs as they needed to be aggressive and persistent and know their product inside and out. The salesperson had all the product information and used their sales product binders to answer questions as they arose. They worked hard on relationship selling. Back in the day we taught salespeople the objections buyers would probably make and how to overcome objections.
Next we saw sales consultants/ consultative selling emerge as product experts who would help buyers understand how their product or service might solve the buyers’ problems. In essence they were sales translators who translated what their products did in a language buyers understood once they found a problem they can solve.
Then the internet shifted the power from the salesperson to the buyer. The buyer now can Google almost anything and now has access to the product information keys. We have seen social selling emerge as buyers investigate products and their salespeople with tools like LinkedIn, blogs, online case studies and industry group forums where they openly share poor buying experiences. Buyers are connecting with companies who are seen as thought leaders and they make it their quest to understand buyer problems, criteria and buying processes.
I believe the next sales person emerging is the Servant Salesperson.
What are the characteristics of Servant Salespeople?
They understand the various buyer personas in their market.
They understand why buyers buy and how buyers buy.
They understand the buying process and criteria buyers use to buy.
They are constantly sensing their market for any changes in how buyers buy.
They listen for problems buyers’ share that can be solved by their product or service.
They have a continuous improvement approach to both product and sales training.
They do online research prior to reaching out to a potential customer.
They have large social networks with many customer referrals praising their service.
They ask open ended questions to understand buyer problems.
They seek first to serve and believe if they solve customer problems income will follow.
The days of snake oil salesmen promising their products and services do whatever the buyer needs is over. Buyers are seeking authentic sales servants who seek to win their business by completely solving their problems,providing the best total buying experience, and salespeople who help them buy. Buyers today see a commission junkie coming from a mile away. Aggressive salespeople are blocked and filtered with email, voice mail and gate keepers. Buyers are looking for salespeople who are focused on serving them.
What stage of selling is your sales team in today?
Would a “servant salesperson” be welcome in your organization? Why or why not?
Why wouldn’t a buyer in your industry welcome a “servant salesperson”?
Just as we are not designed to be “street legal Christians” buyers today do not want “street legal salespeople” who go through the motions of trying to solve the buyers problems.
Servant Salespeople create sales velocity because they authentically seek to solve buyer problems.
How do I Improve My Sales Team’s “Lead to Close Percentage”? 10 steps …
In my previous post I shared how your lead to close percentage is a canary in your coal mine, an early warning for your future sales performance. Market leaders track and constantly fine tune their lead to close process to drive sales performance increases. In this post I will share 10 steps I have used to improve your lead to close percentage.
Improving your lead to close percentage increases the return on your team’s market dollars invested while adding predictability to the sales forecasting process.
When you ask sales people what they need to grow their sales and hit their sales numbers they often say: more leads. I have found in 95% of the cases this is not true. You do not need more leads you need to improve your sales teams close rate on the leads you already have.
Here’s some stat’s for you to chew on….
50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy ( Hubspot)
57% of B2B companies identify converting qualified leads into paying customers as a top funnel priority (Marketing Sherpa)
65% of Marketers have not established lead nurturing (Marketing Sherpa)
79% of markets have not established lead scoring (Marketing Sherpa)
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost ( Forester Research)
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads ( The Annvitas Group)
Companies that have lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps make quota ( Gartner Research)
Trigger based marketing, event based marketing is 2 to 12 times more effective than old school direct marketing ( Genroe)
How do we serve our customers and help them to buy what they want when they are ready to buy?
- Know why customers buy from you and why they don’t
- Tear down internal Silo’s between sales and marketing
- listening, truly understanding your buyers problems, criteria and buying process
- Teach, develop content , drive demand
- Create lead nurturing processes
- Make it easy to buy from you and stop protecting the fort in your sales process
- Create buyer persona’s , speak to their pain
- Use trigger based marketing, event based marketing
- Make sales a part of the lead nurture process and make sure you understand it is different than the lead generation process
- your job is not to “sell” your customers but “serve” them and help them buy
If you do not have a lead nurturing process in place start one today. Keep in mind the best lead nurturing programs touch prospects with relevant insightful content perfectly timed based on their intimate understanding of how buyers buy and the criteria they use. You are building a relationship. You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, so why would you expect to close the sale immediately?
The landscape of sales today has changed dramatically compared to how it used to be. Market leading sales and marketing teams work together with cross functional goals. Salespeople spend time on the internet researching their customers and prospects leveraging technology to identify problems they can solve instead of hours of windshield time and logging air miles. Market leading sales and marketing teams have adapted and leverage technology to improve their lead to close percentages. They increase sales and return on sales dollars invested.
Want to Improve your Sales and Profits? “Reboot Your Business”… (and yourself)
If you have been in business for a while like I have one thing we can always count on is “change”. Markets change, the way buyers buy changes, and how customers find you have drastically changed over the past 10 years. Like it or not, there has been a huge shift in power from the company and salesperson to the buyer who can now find more information about your company and products (and you) with a few simple mouse clicks. Has your business been agile and identified these changes and adapted? Or are you waiting for business to get back to normal as I hear so many say? Well, I hate to be the one to tell you, this is the new normal! If you are one of those business leaders that recognize changes have occurred but are having a hard time getting your head around what to do about it, there is a brilliant book by thought leader Mitch Joel titled; Ctrl Alt Delete, Reboot your business. Reboot your life. Your future depends on it.
My wife and I had a plan over the July 4th holiday. We invited all my wife’s relatives and my daughter’s college friends over for an old fashioned July 4th cookout. We planned a simple menu per my daughters request with hamburgers and hot dogs, baked beans, my wife’s aunt Shannon’s famous potato salad and my daughter planned to make another one of her creative desserts. I bought charcoal and decided to grill old school instead of over gas. We bought the supplies, invited everyone, and planned an afternoon out side that included some bocce ball, Frisbee, and watching the fireworks from the deck. We had a plan.
Ohio weather decided to change our plans with rain on and off all day. I hoped it would stop long enough to grill the food but around 4:00 pm I needed a plan B. So I moved the grill under the shelter of the front porch and although “no one grills on their front porch” we adapted, the food was great and everyone had a great time together.
This experience reminded me of the book I just finished this week; Ctrl Alt Delete. It reminded me of how environments and business landscapes change and will be changing again and we must and need to adapt or we risk going hungry. I wonder why it is so easy, second nature for us to adapt in our everyday lives but in business we struggle to change, we fight the tendency to be nimble and agile. Why? Is it hubris, laziness, and or even fear? Or is it something deeper, something that was blended into my generation’s’ DNA? I was born in the early 1960’s and my father started out his career as a meter reader with the local natural gas company. His company sent him to college at night and after 25 years of moving up the corporate ladder held a senior level financial position when he retired. This is the way we were taught how it works, how it was supposed to be… right?
So imagine how I feel, and how my dad must scratch his head with the crazy life I have led. I have served many companies over the past 30 years as you can see from my Linked In profile. My titles have included Account Rep to VP of Sales and Marketing, from COO for one assignment to Managing Director for another company. I have been a sales coach, entrepreneur, marketing strategy consultant, author, and public speaker. I led a few start ups and turnarounds as President and CEO. However admittedly if I am being totally transparent with you (and myself) a part of me has felt there is something wrong with me. Why have not I not been able to do what my dad did and work for one company for 30 + years retire with a pension, benefits and winter in Florida like everyone else from Ohio? In the second part of Mitch Joel’s book he discusses how we as individuals must also adapt and change. He calls it embracing the squiggle. The squiggle is what I have done….a number of different roles based on the problems to be solved, many different industries and if you were to graphically plot it it would not look like my fathers straight line career trajectory, but would be a squiggly line with little if any ability to plot or predict the next data point.
Another area where I feel I do not fit in and quietly has made me feel anxious and sometimes guilty is… I like to work. I enjoy bumping into problems to be solved. I have developed over the years the ability to see around corners as I share with my children. I use this gift of pattern recognition and shape strategies that work. What I do for companies does not feel like “work” but more like my sport, play, my art. In the early 2000’s I even branded it “the art of thoughts” trying to explain the service I provided but quickly stopped using that description as my customers and market were not quite ready for it yet. This book shares how today and the future will challenge all those leave it to beaver work life models we have had woven into our DNA and how there now is a blend of work and non work life. Technology enables us, affords and empowers us the ability to work anywhere, anytime, and because of this make more time for our families if we use it correctly. The future strategies that will drive explosive sales growth will not be developed in boardrooms but in coffee shops deep in the markets you serve.
Not since David Meerman Scott’s book: The New Rules of Marketing and PR has a book grabbed me like Ctrl Alt Delete and I wanted to share it with you. I highly recommend if you have been waiting for your business to get back to normal, searching for a crystal ball that will give you some hint of what the future has in store you, or like me have seen and felt a blending of your work and non work life, …you buy and study this book.
How about you…Have you too seen and experienced major changes in your business?
Have you adapted and embraced social marketing?…or do you still think it’s a fad?
Has your business raised the surrender flag and admitted you no longer have the power, or have you dug in like Colonel Custer who also had a plan?
The reality of today is buyers can now find more information about your company, product, salesperson, and the leaders of your organization with a few simple mouse clicks. How buyers buy, how consumers shop, and how employers search for and hire new team members has forever changed and will continue to evolve and change. Will you adapt and survive or dig your heals and do it the way we have always done it around here? ( and how’s that working for you?) It truly is your choice; I hope and pray you chose wisely.
What are the top 12 ways to keep and attract top sales super stars?
By Mark Allen Roberts
I believe there is a problem festering deep within a number of companies that may, if left untreated be the single biggest threat to your team achieving sales, profits and your bottom line objectives. A study not long ago said 60% of your employees plan to leave when the economy improves. Well the economy has and is improving? Is your organization at risk? Most companies think they clearly understand salespeople, what motivates them and how to motivate them to achieve super human sales results…and most are wrong. In this post I will share what sales super stars need, why sales stars will leave, and how to keep and attract top sales performers.
Like all my posts this post has been swirling around inside my mind for weeks. This one however has bounced around much longer. I have my opinions based on leading sales and marketing teams for over 30 years…do I share them? what if the experts have different opinions? My desire when I write it to share what I have found to work to help you make strategic corrections , adjustments before you find your business in a crisis of chaos. So how do I best serve you? The more I thought about it the more I delayed following up my last post; Why Do Star Salespeople Leave? (it is not what you think)… I decided to share what I have experienced and provide thought leadership from others in hopes of helping better serve you and your organization.
When I am asked to help a company turnaround their sales, increase sales, I always use the same process and it starts by identifying current market truths. I bring them into the light as the Bible guides us to do for once in the light we can clearly see them and address them before they become terminal. Then I seek internal truths about your companies’ true strengths, weaknesses and ideally clearly define your distinctive competence in the perception of your market. Once we have this information we can shape and design a go-to-market strategy that drives explosive results. So I want to use this same process to identify what I am referring to a “Sales Force Sink Hole” that could result in one….two…or even three of your top sales producers leaving your team and crippling your results. I hear that voice of clients past saying; let them leave I will just hire more… Before you quickly jump to being defensive you need to ask yourself some practical questions;
How long does it take for a new salesperson to gain traction and start truly adding value to your bottom line?
What is the cost of lost revenue when a Sales Super Star “just leaves”?
If you are truly honest, it takes much longer than it should for a new salesperson to gain traction and losing a top producing salesperson (or two or three) is estimated to cost you up to 10 X their annual compensation package. Note; When I keep saying one-two- or three it is because when your top salesperson leaves, studies show there is a high probability your other top performers will leave as well. So why not intentionally create a culture that keeps and attracts sales super stars? Why not understand what truly makes sales stars tick and meet those needs?
What are the top 12 ways to keep and attract top sales super stars?
Trust
Be a company that has a history of doing what it promises, doing what it says it will do for internal and external customers
Communication
Take the time to clearly articulate expectations, objectives and why those objectives must be met, and quickly follow up on questions and concerns
Competitive
Top sales people are competitive, they need it, and they thrive on it so intentionally build it into your culture
Be a winning team
Top salespeople win, its what they do. They win new business, more orders from current customers and they desire to be on teams of other winners. Do you have a team of winners or do you need to fix areas of your company that are underperforming and have been for some time?
Driven
Most executives that do not have a sales background assume its all about “money”, but in reality top salespeople thrive in organizations that are driven to be the best just like your top salespeople.
Leaders have High Emotional Intelligence
Teams that are open and transparent, that welcome new solutions attract and retain top salespeople, they have the courage to say “I don’t have all the answers today but I know a process to find them, and I will”
Strong Values and Integrity
Do not ask your salespeople to compromise what is best long term for the market and its customers to hit short term financial objectives
Strategic Compensation Plan
A results driven plan that is easy to understand, reinforces desired objectives of your strategic plan, and has no cap, no claw backs
Listen
Organizations that learn to actively listen to identify and bust through common roadblocks in the sales process, listen and sense their market, that are agile and adapt quickly to strategic shifts in how buyers buy and the criteria they are now using to make buying decisions
Sharpen the Saw
An almost paranoid drive to constantly improve your people and processes with training and new technology
Passion
Make what you do about more than you, your numbers, make it a quest , top sales performer embrace objectives much bigger than themselves
Lead and Coach, do not Manage
We lead and coach people, we manage processes, don’t confuse the two
If you are committed to focusing on this area and intentionally creating a culture that keeps and attracts top sales performers then I recommend you also visit the below links to content to serve you and your team.
Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?”
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/
Micromanagers: 6 Reasons your Employees Don’t Like You
http://www.recruiter.com/i/
War underway for top sales talent http://blog.sellingpower.com/
10 laws of successful sales management http://www.thepeasegroup.com/_
Communicate clear expectations http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-
How to hire, find a sales star http://www.salesforcesearch.
Hire recruiter if you can http://web2.salesforcesearch.
10 tips to motivate people http://humanresources.about.
How people are motivated to work http://
How to motivate sales people http://sales.about.com/od/trainingasalesstaff/a/Motivating-A-Sales-Team.htm
Want to Jump Start Sales and Morale? Write a “Passion Statement” For Your Business…. https://www.nosmokeandmirrors.com/2010/05/24/want-to-jump-start-sales-and-morale-write-a-%E2%80%9Cpassion-statement%E2%80%9D-for-your-business%E2%80%A6/
Does my business need a “passion statement”? Take a short quiz… https://www.nosmokeandmirrors.com/2010/05/26/do-i-need-a-passion-statement-for-my-business-take-the-short-quiz%E2%80%A6/
I hope you found the above useful and you agree keeping sales happy and productive is about much more than just “money”.
“Sales Super Stars leave when their intrinsic needs are not met and they validate this decision with extrinsic conditions”
– Mark Allen Roberts
What have you found to keep and attract your top sales performers?
Do you agree with the above 12 ways to keep and attract top sales super stars?
Which of the above do you believe is most important? Why?
How Understanding Your A B C’s is the first Step To Driving sales growth …
How Understanding Your A B C’s is the first Step To Driving sales growth …
As leaders of sales teams what do we all have in common? We all want to have our team hit their sales numbers and we want to insure our teams are working the sales process to insure they are creating sales velocity. However when we travel with sales people making sales calls it often becomes apparent they need help prioritizing their time to insure the sales plan is met and or exceeded. One of the best ways to increase sales today while filling the sales pipeline is helping your salespeople understand their A B C’s.
I remember working with a salesperson and we were out making four legged sales calls. My goal was to mirror this guys for a few days to determine how he spends his time, what he feels his job is and how that compares to the companies expectation and overall assess why we can’t seem to open net new customers in his region. Here is what I observed;
- we called on accounts who were already customers and they were all very happy
- the accounts we visited with included one large customer and a number of small customers
- we did not call on any new accounts ( although we drove by a number of them as we worked his bread route)
- the salesman was excellent in what I refer to as the “no smoke and mirrors approach”
- I asked how many accounts he had in his area of responsibility and at first he was not sure , but later said “ I think I have around 1500 customers”
On the one hand, if our time together was any indication of how all his customers feel, he probably has a number of very happy customers who value his approach and experience. I asked him how he can serve so many accounts. And he quickly replied “it’s really hard but they love me because I treat everyone the same…big or small I give them all the same amount of attention and I think that’s why they are loyal to me.” However it quickly became apparent why this region was basically flat in sales and not opening net new customers: this rep did not know his A B C’s.
Let’s take a little deeper dive into this situation.
In reality he had 986 customers, and was not touching all of them every year
Average number of work days in a year: 251
Holidays, vacation days, sick days: Approximately 30
So this salesman has approximately 221 days to see 986 customers
To just see his current customers once per year he would need to see 4-5 per day, every day without any extracurricular activities (ECA’s) getting in the way (and that’s a whole other blog post waiting to happen)
In addition part of his responsibility is to reach out to 2-3 net new customers per week, but we discovered that was just not happening.
My next step was to work with the VP of sales and shared my findings and wanted his feedback. He said he never looked at his sales regions like this before and wanted to know what I would do. Very quickly I said we will establish A B C’s for this region.
A Account
This is a list of top producing revenue accounts you currently have in a region who you suspect will be buying more products and services from you. Most people sort it by sales history descending, and often add accounts that you are currently selling, but could be buying quite a bit more with some attention. I always add new target accounts in the market you are not selling but have similar characteristics to accounts you serve today and probably have similar problems like those you solve for your current accounts every day.
B Accounts
These accounts are in the middle of the road, revenue wise, accounts that you have sold, continue to sell, but you do not see a huge sales growth potential in. You obviously value their business and you want to insure they are happy and continue to be loyal to your company. If one of these accounts grows and they often do, you want to be there when they become an A account. If this list is not too large I may add other new account targets, often based on proximity to current customers, but would not be considered to be one of your core markets.
C Accounts
These are the smaller accounts revenue wise but often take the greatest amount of your salespeople’s time. When something goes wrong with this customer type all hell brakes lose and they expect your salesperson to drop everything and help them. They may have once been large accounts who now only buy small amounts due to downsizing or some other shift in their business. These may be small mom and pop customers who again you want to serve and make happy fans, but their overall future sales opportunity is limited.
I usually have everyone agreeing to this point and then everyone’s mood changes with the next question….
What is the best way, from the customer’s needs perspective, to serve them?
This is where the sales guys immediately get nervous and argumentative. In reality they are not arguing with what I am about to say, but more with what they perceive the personal impact will be in their compensation. Sometimes I have sales VP agree up to this point but fail to execute any changes because it feels like a lot of work sorting through accounts. If you have been in your market for more than 10 years it could be a large undertaking. So I share a quick way I have used that is not too scientific but results in the desired new customers and sales growth we are looking for.
A B C Account segmentation according to Mark:
- Print the salesperson’s account list , sorted by customer in sales descending
- Draw a line about 1/3 of the way down through the list of accounts
- Everyone below the line is now a C account
- In the 1/3 of accounts above the line, draw a line ½ way through this number of accounts
- everyone above this new line is now an A account and everyone below the new line, but above the 1/3 line is a B account
- Gut check step – sales VP and salesperson review B and C accounts and make sure none should be A’s based on opportunity, if so add them to A list
Let’s get back to the salesperson I was working with…so out of 986 customers (who he really was only touching about 400 per year anyway) now 740 are considered C accounts and 123 are now A accounts and 123 are B accounts.
How do we work our A B C’s?
A Accounts
These accounts will be seen frequently to add the most value without being counterproductive to the sales process. In this market we identified over 60 new target accounts in this companies’ market, sweet spot that are like those they sell, but do not sell today. So on our example this rep now has 193 key accounts that can drive his sales objectives.
B Accounts
We will establish a call pattern that best serves this customer base and it is often 1-2 face to face meetings per year and quarterly calls and monthly emails. This rep has 123 B accounts.
C Accounts
All C accounts will be served by inside sales customer service and not field sales. They will use email, phone calls and direct mail to keep in touch with these smaller accounts and actually provide a better overall buying experience than what they were receiving.
When I applied this model to one of my sales teams that was struggling with net new customers and selling new products at current customers we realized the following;
- we achieved new product sales objectives
- exceeded our sales plan numbers
- We achieved new customer acquisition targets
- Our C accounts grew, 115% to prior sales within 90 days of implementation and in the following year grew over 146%
- My field sales people made more commissions and were less stressed
- Billing errors decreased
- Overall customer satisfaction in all categories increased
- Our account attrition decreased
Helping your sales team understand their markets A B C’s is one of the quickest ways to insure your sales plan is met and exceeded.
How do you segment and align your accounts for your sales people?
How do you transition accounts from inside sales to field sales?
How often do you transition accounts from B to C status?
Have you segmented your sales rep’s market and if so what results did you realize?
Helping your reps understand their A B C’s improves focus. This also will provide the time and incentive to pursue those accounts your owner always seems to drive by and then you get an email or phone call; “Why aren’t we selling these guys?”
