Transformation: Executing a Prospecting Culture

Lin Fisher
VP of Play Operations Center and Marketing
Baker Communication

The current economic climate is placing extraordinary demands on sales organizations, as old sources of revenue dry up and competition for new opportunities grows ever more intense. Sales organizations must rethink their whole approach to the sales process, and for most of them, that will require an "all in" commitment to ramping up their prospecting activities. However, as intimidating as that may sound to organizations that have grown complacent in recent years while prospering through order taking and run-rate business, it is actually possible to quickly execute a highly effective prospecting culture if you know implement one simple process: a comprehensive, well-defined, sales cadence.

Even now, 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 traditional 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:

• How to track customer contacts, in order to make sure sales opportunities and cycles aren‘t missed and customer relationships aren‘t being neglected.
• How to implement a unified strategy that creates a consistent sales culture adopted by every member of the team.
• How to make sure all the right data is getting into the right hands at the right time.
• How to align and evaluate the metrics to make sure everyone is on the same page and comparing "apples to apples".
• How to make sure that teams separated by geography and working on different opportunities within the same account are adhering to the same standards and coordinating their efforts.
• How to more effectively coordinate sales efforts with marketing, finance, and executive leadership.
   

Ultimately, the 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 prospecting culture 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.

The first step in deploying a sales cadence that will execute a prospecting culture is to create a realistic timeline defining how long it takes for an opportunity to move through the pipeline. A lot of organizations still rely on the old 30-60-90 day predictive approach, as in, "it looks like this opportunity is about 60 days from closing." The sales rep bases this estimate on the level of progress that still must take place within the account. The problem with this so-called predictive approach is it makes it very easy for deals to get stuck and then die before anyone realizes what has happened. The sales rep can just keep pushing the deal back another 30 days, waiting on things to happen, rather than being proactive and working with the customer to make the deal happen (or put it out of its misery and mark it as lost).

A more sensible way to manage the pipeline is to monitor opportunity progress based on the length of the sales cycle, and link the work being done on the opportunity to the time it should take to close the deal. This is the foundation of the sales cadence strategy.

The cadence approach works like this: What is your typical sales cycle? If it is 24 weeks, then begin by determining what tasks need to be done each week in order to guide the opportunity along so it can close in 24 weeks. For example:

• Who do you contact in the account, and when do you contact them?
• What kind of information and materials do you send out each week?
• When do you schedule the product demo?
• What external and internal resources do you need to leverage to develop the proposal, and when do you meet with those folks?
• By when should have the proposal in front of the decision maker?
   

You get the idea. So, what if you have an opportunity that has been in the pipeline for 10 weeks? If you have a cadence in place, it is a simple matter of checking to see what should have done at week 10. If it hasn‘t been done, you know the opportunity may be in danger of being lost. As a sales manager, your responsibility at that point is to get with the sales rep, find out what the roadblocks are, and provide the coaching and support required for the sales rep to get the opportunity back on schedule.

Once you start managing the forward pipeline this way, forecasting becomes less urgent but also more accurate. Sometimes people try to attach a forecast to an opportunity based on the time it has been in the pipeline, which is not helpful or at all accurate. An opportunity shouldn‘t be assigned a forecast status until certain key objectives have been met. For example, does it make any sense to attach a forecast status to a deal when you haven‘t even submitted a proposal? Can you forecast the success of a deal with any degree of accuracy when the customer hasn‘t agreed to any next steps? As part of your cadence process, you should create a set of benchmarks that define when an opportunity is forecastable; anything that hasn‘t hit those benchmarks remains in the forward pipeline and the rep should work diligently to keep it on track.

Managing the forward pipeline using the cadence approach makes it much easier for the sales manager to implement effective coaching. Again, using the 24-week sales cycle as an example:

• Let‘s say that after 10 weeks the sales rep should have developed a thorough needs analysis, built a set of contacts within the customer organization, and have prepared a list of solution options to discuss with the customer. If your sales rep is now at 14 weeks with this customer and still doesn‘t have these steps completed, that might be a good indication that he needs help with questioning skills to uncover needs and identify opportunities.
   
• If, at 20 weeks, the final proposal should be headed off to legal to be reviewed by both sides, but we are now at 24 weeks and the rep is still wrestling with pushback on some issues from the decision maker, this could mean that the rep‘s ability to handle objections and move through to closing is weak.
   

Here are the questions that the sales manager must ask and answer in order to begin to execute a prospecting culture based on the sales cadence strategy:

• Is the sales team participating with the rest of the company to improve the overall health of the business, or are we off in our own little word? What steps must be taken to align our activities with the rest of the company?
• Are sales efforts integrated and coordinated across all teams and accounts? If not, where is the disconnect and what can be done about it?
• Am I happy with the timeliness and the depth of sales, pipeline and performance data I am receiving now? Do I truly have access to enough data to make timely strategic decisions and coach to the needs of the team?
• Does everyone on the team have a shared understanding of, and a commitment to, functioning as a team, using the same process, tools and standards in a way that will drive revenue instead of just generate more activity? What one thing could I do right now that would begin to make this situation better?

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.

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.

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