Transformation: The Role of Sales Managers in Building a Prospecting Culture

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication
 

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.