The jury is still out as to whether the economy has finally turned the corner. For that reason, some sales organizations are still using economic uncertainty to explain their lackluster sales numbers. However, the truth is that there are plenty of opportunities for sales organizations who understand what it takes to uncover and develop them. Customers haven’t stopped buying; they have only changed what they are buying and how they are approaching the procurement process. The challenge for sales organizations, then, is to develop effective strategies and tools to uncover and win that business. This challenge can be summarized in one word - prospecting, and even though marketing has critical role in prospecting, ultimately the responsibility for executing the final mile, connecting with and converting new customers, rests on the shoulders of one person – the sales manager.
Sales managers are uniquely positioned to influence and empower sales reps to greater levels of success. However, typically, sales managers are too focused on monitoring forecasts and managing personnel issues to devote attention to coaching and training for their teams that could ignite performance and drive new revenue. By contrast, sales managers whose teams are developing new business and driving greater revenues have a set of skills and characteristics in common that set them above all the rest, and which enable them to help their teams to achieve results that are also way above average. These skills include:
- Deploying and supporting a clear, effective prospecting process - Sales representatives need to have some guard rails to know what is expected of them, when it is expected, and how it will be measured. However, it doesn’t have to be complicated; sales representatives just need to effectively execute a basic set of steps when interacting with customers in a prospecting cycle. It is the responsibility of the sales manager to support the corporate prospecting process, or to outline what that process will be if it is not provided by the company, and provide the coaching and the unique support each team member needs to be successful in that process. The key here is to recognize there is a difference between the prospecting cycle and the sales cycle, and that difference is significant. Most companies invest all their time and energy training and coaching their sales teams on the sales cycle while leaving prospecting to best efforts. Best efforts is not a strategy.
- Identifying, communicating and monitoring a defined set of Key Performance Indicators with the sales team - Sales is a numbers game. For the sales manager to effectively manage the sales team and help them develop business, drive revenue and outperform the competition in an uncertain economy, they must decide what metrics are the most important to track, and how to communicate those metrics to the team so they understand why they are important and what to do with them. Five key prospecting metrics that all sales managers should track for each team member, as well as for the team as a whole, are:
- Lead response time ratio
- Average time per lead stage
- Lead conversion ratio
- Pipeline to revenue target ratio
- Year over year pipeline trend ratio
- Build sales activities around a specified prospecting cadence - Creating an effective, consistent prospecting cadence must take into consideration a number of factors including:
- How to implement a unified strategy that creates a consistent prospecting culture adopted by every member of the team.
- A clear and agreed upon definition of a “lead” and “prospect”
- A step-by-step communications process to convert a “lead” into an opportunity, including the tools needed to execute that process
- A coaching plan to help sales professionals advance prospects through the pre-defined lead stages
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 prospecting process based on a well-defined
strategy.
Note: for some organizations, measuring prospecting cadence will involve
adjusting internal processes, and may hinge on learning how to redeploy or
redesign the organization’s CRM in order to more efficiently track, manage
and organize information. CRM and process reconfiguration are normally
outside the scope of a Sales Manager so this may require some workarounds if
organizational changes are not possible.
- Track all aspects of the process, the KPIs and the cadence in the CRM
system - Information is power, and the CRM system puts an incredible amount
of real-time information at the sales manager’s finger tips. Want to know
what deals a sales rep has in the pipeline? Want to know how many calls a
sales rep has made this week, who they have called on, and what the results
were? Want to know what kind of solutions a sales rep is discussing with a
particular account? All this information should be in the CRM. CRM allows
the sales manager to collect and manage huge chunks of data faster and more
efficiently, more accurately forecast pipeline, better target solutions
customers need, shorten the sales cycle, and provide sales managers with
better snapshots of what is going on across the team at any given time. With
this information available at the click of a mouse, the sales manager can
nimbly shift priorities and develop new strategies that respond effectively
to changing conditions within specific markets or accounts. The sales
manager can also conduct more productive forward pipeline reviews and
provide effective just-in-time coaching that will immediately impact sales
rep performance.
- Manage the forward pipeline in addition to managing forecasts - Most
sales managers rely on one key tool to monitor sales rep productivity:
forecasting. However, highly effective sales managers understand that there
is a difference between forecasting and managing the forward pipeline.
Forecasting is focused on later stage deals – the ones that are far enough
along that you can forecast in the current period. However, forecasting does
little to help with future periods. Technically, pipeline refers to every
opportunity a sales rep might be working on – including the ones that are
far enough along to be at the forecast stage – but there are many other
opportunities in the pipeline that are not that far along yet. We can
designate these deals as being part of the “forward” pipeline, because they
are focused on the future development of sales that ultimately impacts later
forecasts. By separating energy and focus between forecasting and the
forward pipeline, sales managers are building in greater success down the
line. To ensure this, sales managers should alternate between forecasting
meetings and forward pipeline meetings throughout the month, always ensuring
that current targets are met while building a pipeline for the future.
- Hire the motivation, coach the Talent – Hiring correctly can save a
sales manager a lot of time and effort in the long run. The basic principle
in this concept is that it is a lot easier to coach and train a highly
motivated new hire than it is to motivate a highly trained sales
professional. If choosing between the two, always pick motivation. A highly
motivated sales professional can achieve anything with the right guidance
and coaching. A highly trained sales professional that lacks motivation will
more than likely underperform objectives. When building a prospecting
culture, hiring sales professionals with a motivation to prospect is of
paramount importance.
- Don’t sacrifice “doing thing right” at the expense of producing “the
right result” – There is no question that producing results is the job of
the sales manager, but results should never come at the expense of “doing
the right thing”. Examples of not “doing the right thing” include things
like approving a deal knowing that delivery will not occur on time but not
sharing that with the customer or allowing a sales professional to
miss-represent capabilities in order to close a transaction. These
strategies may deliver short term results, but in the long run they reduce
the sales manager’s credibility in the eyes of the sales team and they
certainly reduce the company’s credibility in the eyes of the customer.
- Use all the data and benchmarks defined in the above to identify sales
rep skill gaps and coach to help sales reps improve their skills in ways
that change behavior and boost productivity – By far the most powerful
impact sales managers can have on the success of their teams comes from
spending less time managing and more time coaching. Once all of the above
strategies are in place, the sales manager will have all the necessary data
to identify skill gaps for each team member and develop a plan for helping
change prospecting behaviors. However, sales managers who take the “manager”
approach tend to be reactionary and unstructured in their coaching. They
view it more as a task or a distraction rather than as a mission and an
opportunity. They tend to reserve coaching conversations for scheduled
evaluations or when it is necessary to fix a major problem. Not only is this
not efficient, it is also not effective if the goal is to foster exceptional
performance and growth within the team. Sales managers who take the “coach”
approach are committed to making coaching the center of their management
strategy on a consistent basis. They have a coaching strategy or system in
place and they are also always looking for coaching opportunities. Sales
managers with a coach’s perspective recognize when it is important to step
in as needed between scheduled coaching appointments to provide coaching and
feedback while the issues are still fresh, and when the benefits will have
the most impact.
When the sales manager is focused on helping the team get better, instead of
just managing territory assignments and personnel issues, they will be able to
ignite the potential of their teams to uncover new business and drive greater
revenues. If sales managers aren’t focused on these activities, there is very
little hope the sales organization will remain competitive in the current
environment, or any environment, for that matter.
Action Items:
- Make sure your sales managers are focused on coaching and skill-building
activities.
- Make sure that your CRM is optimized to support all sales and
prospecting functions, and create a strategy to drive CRM adoption for all
sales managers and sales team members.
- Encourage your sales managers to sharpen their coaching skills by
providing training and support for them to grow in these critical areas.
