Do you find
that your company sales culture could be stronger?
If so, you're not alone at all.
In fact,
the world of business has just become so much more dynamic
in just the past few years.
In fact, since 2000 alone, a whopping 52%
of Fortune 500 companies have either gone bankrupt,
been acquired, or disappeared completely.
And at this current rate,
about 50% of all S&P 500 firms will be replaced by 2027.
And at the same time, the average life expectancy
of a Fortune 500 firm was around 75 years in 1960.
Today, it's less than 15 years,
and it's declining all the time.
And so specifically in the world of sales,
the data is in some cases equally bleak.
The average tenure
of a VP of sales has dropped precipitously from 26 months
just about seven years ago to now 19 months today.
And that's across all industries and geographies.
Quota attainment has dropped as well
from 26% about five years ago
to 53% today.
But there are some tactical and tangible strategies
that you can implement as a manager or as a business owner
to start building that world class sales culture.
In this sales management training video,
I'm going to show you the nine strategies
to a world class sales culture.
Check it out.
Number one, thoroughly assess your existing team.
Now, I cannot tell you how many managers
or business leaders come to me and say, "You know what?
"I need you to train my people
"because they're just doing a terrible job."
And now, that may sound logical to some people.
It's completely illogical when you really think about it,
because the reality is
is that there are probably some people on that team
who shouldn't be on that team.
And so what we want to first do as a manager or as a CEO
or whomever it is,
we want to assess the existing sales organization.
We really want to understand.
Are the people on this team the right people
in the first place?
And if they're not, then my suggestion is,
either remove them to another department
where they might be happier in places like operations
or in customer service
or let them go and find a job elsewhere.
You need to have a team of people who are coachable,
who are buildable, who are willing to implement the ideas.
And if not, then quite frankly,
everything else we're going to be talking about
moving forward is going to be a waste of time
because you need to have those right people from the start.
So assess the existing people,
and what I'd suggest you do is rate them on an A to F scale.
So A is obviously superior performers.
F is obviously someone
that just really needs to be elsewhere.
If anyone is below a B minus,
then they're probably not the right fit for your team.
You want to be focusing only on those higher performers.
Number two, use a hiring process
for identifying superior talent.
Now, you may not be actively involved in the hiring process
of your organization for sales people,
but if you're a manager or even a CEO
of a good size organization, you need to make sure
that the strategy and that the process for hiring talent
is really going to yield superior performers.
And so that means having a systematic process for hiring
that has multiple steps that forces salespeople,
potential sales hires, to demonstrate their selling ability
throughout that hiring process.
This is something that I implement
with my clients all the time because we need to understand
that the people we're hiring are going to be the right fit.
Now, nothing's 100% certain, but what you can do
is you can mitigate a lot of that uncertainty
around that hiring process by making sure
that it's systematic, it's intentional,
and it uses all the existing tools that are available
to make sure that someone is a superior fit.
And some of those tools might include things
like online assessments to make sure
that you're getting people
ho are not just a fit behaviorally
but are also going to be a cognitive fit
using pre-screened calls
that are going to test someone's ability on the phone
throughout the interview process
to make sure that they're the right fit.
Using role plays, having this all structured out,
knowing exactly what questions are going to be asked
in the hiring process to make sure
that you're getting the best possible hires.
Number three, know the strategic math to growing your sales.
Now, this isn't a very long video,
so I can't get too deep into the weeds here,
but what I suggest every manager,
every CEO, every sales leader
does, is understand the exact math
that is going to go into increasing sales.
Now, there are only three ways to actually increase sales.
First, you need to increase the conversion rate
of every opportunity that's in front of you.
Next is you can increase the average sale size of each sale,
so selling bigger sales,
and then lastly is increasing your sales pipeline,
so the actual raw number of prospects
that you're getting in front of.
Now, most organizations tend to focus on the first
and the last.
They think about "How can we increase the conversion rate?"
And they're thinking,
"How can we get in front of more people?"
But very often, the easiest one is actually,
"How can we increase the average sale size
"of each individual sale so that our sales increase?"
And by the way, if you combine all three of those together,
it has a multiplicative effect
such that you can actually double sales
by increasing each of those areas by only about 26%.
And so you can actually make smaller tweaks to each area
to have a knock on effect that's huge.
Understanding that math is going to be so important
to understanding exactly how
we're going to ultimately grow our sales.
Number four, implement leveraged prospecting.
Now, I cannot tell you
how many CEO's or managers
or CSO's come to me and say, "You know what?
"We want our salespeople to be making more cold calls."
And my first response is always, "Well, help me understand.
"Is cold calling the most effective use of their time?"
Now, in some cases, it kind of can be, but very rarely.
Now, this doesn't mean that making a call
to a person you don't know is ineffective.
It just means that the act of a pure cold call
which is that the other person has no idea who you are,
they've never received anything from you,
and they're just getting a random phone call,
that's probably not going to be the best use
of a salesperson's time.
What we want to do is we want to use leverage
to make sure that every action of our salespeople
is going to have the highest likelihood
of leading to either a meeting or leading to a sale.
And so leveraged prospecting simply means
that in our prospecting efforts,
that
we use every tool possible
to make sure
that salespeople are going to be most effective,
and so that typically looks something like
having a real sales prospecting campaign
that salespeople are following.
So that will include a combination of emails, phone calls,
LinkedIn messages, voicemails left, packages sent, right?
You want to give the prospect lots of content
throughout this process or lots of ideas
that they can then implement so that way,
by the time you actually get the person on the phone,
it's most likely to lead to some kind of a real next step.
We want to have leveraged prospecting.
We don't just want our salespeople to be making more dials.
We want to make sure
that those dials that they're making are most effective.
Number five, have a structured sales process.
(sighs)
This is a tough one because this is so difficult
for a lot of organizations
because so many organizations are looking here,
and then they're looking here,
and they're all over the place,
and so at the end of the day,
they just end up usually just letting their salespeople do
whatever it is that they've decided is their sales process.
And the problem with this is that it's like herding kittens.
Everyone is going off in different directions.
Everyone's doing different things,
and so there's no common sales philosophy
within the organization, and quite frankly,
what most salespeople are just doing
is probably not the most effective use of their time.
Bring in a structured sales process
that walks salespeople through how to get prospects
on the phone or how to get in front of prospects.
What does that initial discovery process look like?
How are they then presenting?
What are do the proposals look like?
And then how are we, once we actually close a sale,
how are we onboarding prospects into
our
general processes?
Really structuring out that sales process is so key,
and depending on the size of your organization,
if you're small,
then it's probably just finding some basic sales training
where you can have a structured process.
If you're a bigger organization,
you can really customize that process
to make sure that it fits exactly in line every step,
every question, every line is understood
so that way even if people aren't following it exactly
by the script, there is a process that they can follow,
and we can manage to that exact process.
Number six, track discovery meetings closely.
Managers,
CEO's,
CSO's,
VP's of sales,
always,
always say,
"Marc, what is the most important KPI
"or what is the most important metric
"that we can be tracking of our salespeople?"
There is no one answer to that question,
but if I were to generalize
and come up with one answer
that is most likely to be accurate for most organizations,
it would be that the most important metric to track
of salespeople from an accountability perspective
is the number of discovery meetings
that salespeople are setting.
And discovery meetings are those initial sales meetings
that are in the calendar, that are scheduled,
and that are to be kind of that first introduction.
If managers are tracking that number,
then you're going to have the most likely indicator
of that salesperson's success
because discovery meetings is the ultimate leading indicator
of success.
It's telling you if a salesperson has tons
of discovery meetings on their calendar,
then you probably have a pretty good idea
that they're likely to be successful
in the following months.
So using your CRM to really track those discovery meetings
and making sure
that salespeople are setting enough discovery meetings
because 90% of the issues that I see
in terms of a prospecting perspective
that organizations have
or from an accountability perspective
is simply that salespeople aren't setting enough
of those discovery meetings,
so they have this empty pipeline,
and all of the issues snowball from there.
Make sure that the one thing you're really tracking
besides, of course, sales numbers,
is the number of discovery meetings
that salespeople are setting or that they have on the books.
Number seven, let your CRM do the heavy lifting.
I always ask
managers
and owners
and CEO's
the same question, which is,
"Do you know exactly what your salespeople are doing
"on a day-to-day basis?"
And what's amazing is that so often,
managers cannot answer that question in the affirmative.
They say, "Oh yeah, you know,
"I think we generally have an idea."
I say, "No, no, do you know exactly what they're doing
"on a day-to-day basis?
"Can you track that?
"Can you see what's actually happening?"
And most,
most managers, even VP's of sales,
even in pretty sophisticated organizations,
simply cannot say yes to that question.
But the success of the organization depends on your ability
to know what salespeople are doing.
This isn't about being Big Brother.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
It's about letting your CRM be able
to present to you a story
of what salespeople are actually doing,
and so that way, you don't have to stop in on their office
or kind of poke your head in and say,
"Hey, what's going on today?
"What are you doing today?"
It's the exact opposite.
It's that you can see exactly what's happening in the CRM.
You know exactly how many meetings they've scheduled,
how many calls they've made,
ow many referrals they've asked for,
whatever it is that you're very clear on those key metrics,
and that they're being tracked in the CRM
so that way, you don't have to play that Big Brother role.
Let the CRM do the heavy lifting
so that way, when you're in your sales meetings,
it's already understood what's happened
and that there's a lot of transparency there.
Everyone knows what others are doing,
so that way, we can really hold our salespeople accountable
in a way that's helping them grow their businesses.
Number eight, run a structured sales meeting.
Ah, have you ever been in a meeting
that was just completely unstructured,
and it's just all over the place,
and it's just haphazard?
And suddenly you look on your watch.
It has been 19 minutes,
and you've accomplished exactly nothing?
Well, this may be the experience that your salespeople feel
when they sit in on your sales meetings.
Now, I don't mean to be aggressive about this,
but it is so important
that managers run structured sales meetings
with their salespeople, that there is a clear agenda
to every meeting, and that in every meeting,
there is going to be a clear set of commitments
that each salesperson is 100% committed to accomplishing
over a specific period of time.
Likely a period of time
that will then lead to the next sales meeting
when we will then check up on those commitments
to see if they've actually done
what they've said they were going to do.
You start to run those structured sales meetings,
and it's amazing how meetings suddenly become more valuable.
Now, a structured sales meeting means
that it is regularly scheduled, there's an agenda,
and that the followup is consistent.
And so you may run a meeting once a month,
or you may run it once a week,
depends on the type of organization that you have.
There's a lot of factors, but what you want to make sure
is that it is completely consistent, and so that way,
salespeople can start to expect that consistency,
and that's where accountability starts to drive performance,
when they start to know that there's real consistency.
Be sure to run that structured sales meeting.
Number nine, coach with intention.
Coaching is one of those things
that most managers know they need to be doing more of it,
yet they don't do much of it at all.
It tends to be very reactive.
It might mean that hey, you know,
occasionally I'll visit with the salesperson,
and we'll go in, and we'll meet with some of our clients
or prospects, and there's no real intention
behind that coaching.
It's just kind of random, and then the manager sits down
and says, "Hey, so, you know, let's talk
"about what was good, what was bad."
You know, they do the old sandwich thing,
which is good, bad, good thing.
But that's not really intentional,
and that's not going to really help your salespeople grow.
So as a manager, when we coach with intention,
it means that we have a systematic process
to coaching people.
One of the things that I teach my clients
is how to coach in a way
that is leading to the answer
but not leading with the answer.
It's really hard for a manager to not just say,
"Hey, so I just watched what you did,
"and here's what I think you should do differently."
It's really easy to do that.
We tend to as managers be very driven,
and we just want to get right to the point.
But what we actually want to do
is have a systematic approach to asking questions
of our salespeople to actually get them to lead themselves
to the answer, and so what I often think about is,
you almost want to use that ideal sales process
as the coach with your people.
We never want to just jump to the solution in sales.
We want to ask questions to help the prospect see the value
before we present.
Same thing comes with coaching.
We want to ask questions of the salespeople.
I call it the rule of three.
Anytime you have a coaching point that you want to make,
ask three questions to get there.
You know, let's say you're in a meeting with a salesperson,
and you know,
they really just completely botched the budget part
of the conversation with the prospect.
Rather than saying, "Hey, you know,
"you really want to be getting right into budget,"
you start with, "So, George, walk me through.
"What do you think could have been done differently
"in that meeting?"
And maybe they recognize the budget thing.
Maybe they don't.
You say, "Well, you know,
"help me understand the budget piece.
"What was your takeaway
"in terms of what their budget really is?"
And obviously budget wasn't discussed,
so now we want to dig into that and keep asking questions
to get them to articulate that there was a challenge.
That is what coaching with intention is all about,
whether you're the CEO managing the VP level,
or you're the VP managing your managers,
or you're the manager managing your salespeople,
or you're the business owner managing your own salespeople,
we need to be coaching with intention.
So there are the nine strategies
to a world class sales culture.
I want to hear from you.
Which of these ideas did you find most useful?
Be sure to share below in the comment section
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