Once upon a time, sales success was defined by the high-energy, entrepreneurial sales rep who relied on his own set of tricks and strategies, personalized and honed over time, to help him land and keep big accounts. Sales managers might not have much control over them, nor did they always understand what they were doing, but as long as these “top gun” sellers kept retiring quota, it didn’t really matter.
Those days are long gone, or they are about to be. The current economic client demands that sales organizations rethink their whole approach to the sales process. Sales is the lifeblood of any company, and yet too many companies still can’t honestly say they have a good handle on what is going on with their sales teams most of the time. The problem is especially troubling when it comes to high dollar/high value deals with enterprise clients involving long sales cycles. Many sales organizations still have a disturbing lack of coordination or control over what their sales teams are doing, or when and why they are doing it. The biggest problem with this approach – among many – is that it is very difficult to tell which sales processes and strategies work, and which don’t. If you aren’t sure what is broken, how can you know what needs to be fixed? And perhaps even worse, if you don’t know what is working, how can you ensure you are doing more of what works?
The current economy, facilitated by the Sales 2.0 revolution, has turned tradition selling concepts upside down, and has perpetrated a drastic and permanent shift in the way sales organizations must function. Many products and services now require much more complex solutions. Companies are now global in every sense of the word. The cost of complex sales is high; long sales cycles, large teams, travel, etc., can all contribute to these costs. However, those costs pale in comparison to the price an organization pays for not rigorously managing their sales teams according to a consistent, well-conceived sales cadence. If sales organizations don’t operate according to what is known today as a tightly integrated sales cadence that defines how and when the sales process rolls out and also captures vital information that can be leveraged to quickly respond to changing solutions, they will miss opportunities and lose more than they should.
Creating an effective, consistent cadence must take into consideration a number of factors including:
Ultimately, sales cadence will involve adjusting internal processes for the whole organization, and will probably hinge on learning how to redeploy or redesign the organization’s CRM in order to more efficiently track, manage and organize information across all divisions. However, in addition, the sales manager will need to concentrate on imparting a new vision to the whole sales team, one that is built on communication and collaboration as the teams pursue a uniform process based on a well-defined strategy to manage larger and more complex opportunities.
Here are the questions that the sales manager must ask and answer in order to move his sales organization in this new direction:
Because each industry, market, company and sales team is unique, there aren’t standardized “right” answers to these questions. The important thing is to ask the questions and then let the answers guide you to the next steps – and the next set of questions and answers – you need to pursue. The important thing is to immediately take whatever action is necessary to embrace these changes and move your organization forward. In today’s whirlwind economy, failure to change – even failure to change fast enough – equals failure, period.
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