There was a time when sales and prospecting were almost synonymous; it was just assumed that anyone in sales was expected to dedicate a great deal of time to identifying and developing new opportunities. However, more than a decade of unbridled growth and prosperity, from the late 1990s right up to the present severe downturn, lulled many sales professionals into thinking that prospecting was no longer a priority, because customers were plentiful and ready to buy. Now, with customers postponing purchases and slashing budgets, sales organizations must rapidly shift from farming – nurturing the same customers year over year - to hunting – getting back out into the market place and aggressively pursuing new customers, as well as new business with existing customers.
This is by no means a simple proposition. A change like this requires nothing less than a complete transformation of the underlying culture of the organization. Attitudes must change, values must change, strategies must change, expectations must change, and, in many cases, personnel must be replaced or retrained as the entire organization takes on a new mission and a new identity. There are six processes or stages that must be orchestrated in order to realize this total cultural transformation.
1. Senior Executives must formulate and drive the vision – This can’t be emphasized strongly enough: cultural/organizational change can only occur when senior executives take ownership of the process, articulate the new vision, and hold the rest of the organization accountable to implement that vision. As long as top level leadership is content to keep doing what has always been done, no amount of brilliant thinking and initiative from the middle or bottom of the organization will be able to accomplish transformation.
For example, in recent years, several of the world’s largest and most successful technology companies have determined to reinvent themselves in order to remain relevant in their segments. All of these companies originally built their brand around marketing leading-edge technology solutions to a customer base made up primarily of IT managers embedded inside customer organizations. However, with that market now saturated and competition more ferocious than ever, this strategy is no longer effective. In response to shifting market conditions, executive leadership at all of these companies made the decision to leverage their technology IP to grow new business by repositioning it as a component of a grander strategy: partnering with customers to help them achieve their most important business outcomes.
A major component of this new strategy is a commitment to prospecting; sales professionals must expand their level of influence to work with high-level decision makers at their current customers, and also expand outside that current customer set and find new opportunities with companies they have never engaged before. A change this profound – one that will force every single person in the organization to adopt new priorities and learn new skills – creates a lot of pushback and institutional drag; it can only come from the top, and it will only succeed if the people at the top refocus their priorities and activities to make sure the organization doesn’t falter until this vision is achieved.
2. Aggressively communicate and promote the vision – As mentioned above, the pushback and institutional drag related to moving from a sales culture based on farming to one based on hunting can be very significant, for a variety of reasons. First of all, change is hard, inconvenient, confusing, and threatening; people just naturally resist and avoid dealing with it because they prefer comfort and stability over practically anything else. Especially if the organization has a history of announcing new (and short-lived) initiatives, most people will pay lip service to the change but keep the status quo based on the assumption of “this too shall pass.” For this reason, the new vision must be consistently and prominently promoted across the organization. Messaging must be created around the new vision to spell out the reasons for the change, the outcomes that the change will achieve, the process for the change, and how that change will challenge and benefit everyone in the organization. This can’t be done via a global email and posting flyers on break room walls; this new messaging must infect the vocabulary of every manager and be the foundation of every sales meeting. People will initially have questions and concerns. Managers and senior leadership must be prepared to answer these questions in ways that provide clarity and direction.
3. Align training and activities with the prospecting vision – This is where the battle for transformation is won or lost. The skills and processes required to succeed in an order-taking/farming culture have very little in common with a hunting/prospecting culture. Senior executives often fail to grasp just how profound these differences are, and assume that by simply redefining the outcomes they want the sales teams will shift gears and get the job done. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Farming and order taking usually involves responding to requests from the customer, who will then make the final decision based on features and price. Of course, there are opportunities for farmers to provide value propositions and up-sell to a certain extent, but most of the time they are starting with warm, qualified leads who have already decided to buy, it is just a matter of from whom and how much they will pay. Prospecting, on the other hand, requires the sales professional to find the customer, contact the customer, uncover viable opportunities and work with the customer to develop the opportunity and close the deal. Skills needed to successfully implement a prospecting strategy include:
In addition to all of the above, sales managers must also be trained and become confident in how to train and coach to these behaviors, and in most instances that will also require extensive training programs for them.
Senior leadership must embrace the reality that they must invest whatever it takes to deliver comprehensive, ongoing training and activity management programs to help sales professionals obtain these skills and support and encourage them while they become proficient in them.
As a footnote here, one possible shortcut to ramping up a sales force with the right skills to support a prospecting culture is to go out and hire experienced and highly successful sales professionals with a proven track record in this area. It is understood within the industry that some people are inclined toward hunting and others are more naturally suited for farming. Sometimes shifting culture may, regrettably, require making changes in personnel. There will always be room for farmers in any sales organization, but you may not be able to keep all of them. During the training process, be aware of who is making progress and who isn’t, and don’t make the mistake of hoping some people will get better when it is clear that better may still not be good enough. Keep who you can, hire the best hunters you can find to round out the team, and keep on training for success.
4. Measure for prospecting performance – Most companies do a pretty good job of measuring the sales cycle. The most common metrics include number of opportunities by stage, value of opportunities by stage, pipeline to quota ratio and closed/won ratio. Prospecting is quite different and in fact must be measured separately from the sales cycle. Just like in the sales cycle, prospecting has its own unique set of stages and each of the stages has to be measured in order to identify performance gaps on a rep by rep basis. Like everything else, overcomplicating the prospecting cycle with too many stages only leads to confusion. I’ve found that keeping the stage count to 5 allows the sales rep to stay on track while providing management the metrics needed to monitor and enable the process. Those stages are:
With these stages in place, management now has the ability to identify on an organizational and on a rep-by-rep basis specific choke points and specific prospecting metrics can be measured. Each sales professional can then be coached on their specific skill gaps. Key metrics to follow and coach to are:
Nothing will get the message across that your organization is serious about shifting to a prospecting culture like consistently tracking these kinds of metrics and holding people accountable to improve them.
5. Direct and equip sales managers to coach for prospecting performance – This is the Achilles heel of many prospecting organizations, even when the rest of the culture seems to be properly aligned. Sales managers are charged with overseeing the performance of their sales teams, but too often sales manager activities are focused on managing – evaluating metrics, filing reports, conducting pipeline meetings and sales meetings, and solving personnel issues. This leaves the sales team to fend for themselves when it comes to most customer facing activities. In this environment, most reps do the best they can, but they don’t know what they don’t know, and often they don’t find out until the sales manager calls them in for a heart to heart about their poor performance.
If organizations want to excel in a prospecting culture, sales managers must be equipped and empowered to spend whatever time and resources it takes to support and train their team members through regular coaching. The metrics outlined in the section above provide managers the specific areas to monitor and coach. Without them, management can only guess. The sales manager must be able to create a coaching plan to help each team member continue to grow and improve. Coaching puts the teeth in accountability, and delivers the solutions that team members need to achieve the goals the organization has set for them.
6. Reward based on prospecting performance – In order to improve and sustain sales team buy in for a prospecting culture, make sure rewards are tracked to prospecting activities as well as to overall results. Sure, they usually work hand in glove, but rewards tracked to different key prospecting activities can also reinforce the message that this culture is here to stay. Spread the rewards around, but make sure everyone can connect the dots and see that the rewards are keyed to prospecting activities rather than just getting lucky with a big deal from a run rate customer.
Here are some ideas for rewarding the team or an individual rep:
Shifting from farming to hunting, especially in a large organization, can take a long time; it might take a couple of years or more, and it may involve significant personnel adjustments along the way. However, in the end, the organization will not only survive but thrive in any economy, anytime, anywhere. It is hard work, but it is a small price to pay for lasting success.
Action Items:
Do you have the right metrics in place?
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
This article may be reprinted in its entirety if the following conditions are met:
