The Street-Savvy Sales Leader

A Guide to Building Teams that Consistently Win New Business

Mark Welch

• Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781773270449
• eBook ISBN: 9781773270456
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

As a sales leader, this is what you know now. Your pipeline needs filling and you need more conversions. You're dealing with high turnover, your boss is demanding higher performance, and your team is constantly being pressured to do more non-selling activities. You are challenged with differentiating yourself in the market and the shift in buyer behavior because your customer has the power seat in negotiations.You are competing in a highly fragmented, highly competitive marketplace where decision makers are more knowledgeable, less risk averse, and busier than ever. As a result, making your numbers is tougher and more challenging than ever.You're trying to figure out how to get the attention of new customers and to add value along the sales process to close business. And you're coping with a potentially underperforming and unengaged sales team, despite investments in sales resources, such as training and technology, marketing content, CRM, and other tools to increase sales effectiveness. But you, like other sales leaders you talk with, are not getting the payoff from these investments. You see the data: • Businesses are spending more on training, but there is little correlation to ROI (ATD, 2015)• Without follow-up and coaching/mentoring, salespeople fail to retain 80% to 90% of what they learned in training within a month (Sales Alliance, 2014)• CRM holds a <50% adoption rate, and between 25% and 60% of CRM projects fail to meet expectations• 70% of marketing content is not used by sales (Sirius Decisions)Mark Welch understands your pain points. He's been there. He has led sales organizations out of the morass and turned them around by following a process called the "10 Imperatives." This process is the foundation of this book and has been a powerful tool for Mark, a tool built out of trial and error, success and failure, and one that puts the salesperson first in building a best-in-class team. The Street Savvy Sales Leader is a toolkit for you—the sales leader—who has to lead change by identifying the root problems that are the cause of less than optimal performance, addressing those problems, and building a best-in-class sales team that is equipped and coached to consistently hit and exceed targets. It is Mark's goal to support the sales leader as effectively as he can by providing an end-to-end sales solution based on his own extensive experience and that of more than 100 sales professionals across many industries whom Mark interviewed.

Part 1: The Sales Leadership Imperative

1

Challenges Facing the Sales Organization

How to meet growth targets is the most important issue facing business leaders today. If results don’t meet expectations, the consequences can be a change in direction, a downsizing or even the end of a company if sales revenues can’t sustain expenses. Unfortunately, though, not meeting growth targets is a common occurrence.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Why are a significant number of our sales resources not meeting their quota or our expectations?
• Why do we keep struggling to fill the top of the funnel?
• Why are we having difficulty moving opportunities through the funnel to closing?
• Why are we challenged to differentiate our value proposition?
• Why is our sales rep turnover so high?
• What have we implemented in an attempt to improve results?
• What money have we spent to improve results? Is it money well spent?

Are you able to answer these questions clearly and confidently? Are you satisfied with the answers? If not, you’re not alone!

In fact, the truth is that not only are you not alone, you have lots of company. Indeed, most leaders are in the same boat, frustrated by poor results and unable to pinpoint the cause.

Without identifying a cause, what happens? A sales leader gets fired and a new one gets hired. Or the company brings in expensive resources to introduce a new sales process methodology, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or a new knowledge management tool, aka Sales 2.0, in an attempt to fix the problem. The company might modify the compensation plan or change the structure of the sales organization. Each of these scenarios may or may not help, but without an overall review and improvement of the entire sales continuum, the sales team will never be best-in-class.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every company faces different challenges that can be due to a variety of factors. For example:

• type of industry
• state of the industry (growth, plateau or decline)
• geography, client size and complexity
• life cycle of the product line
• single product or service versus multiple products or services
• existing culture and legacy of the organization and its systems and processes
• levels of change and transformation experienced
• tenure of the sales force
• sales cycles
• target market
• type of buyer Sales is typically calling on (e.g., CEO, CIO, Marketing, Procurement, Engineering, Finance)

The Top-Three Challenges in Selling Today

While companies all face different challenges, there are three universal ones plaguing the sales industry today:

1. The buyer’s journey has changed dramatically. There are now more decision makers in every sales situation; the buyer is busier, more knowledgeable and more risk-averse; the buyer’s expectations of the sales profession are much higher; and the decision process is more complex. Thus, it is harder than ever to move a buyer to make a change.
2. It is tougher than ever before to differentiate your offering. Companies and salespeople are struggling to stand out and truly offer something of sincere value in every step of the sales process to their customers in a very crowded market.
3. Sales reps are facing increasingly complex and time-challenging demands. Companies want more data (typically through CRM platforms), reps need to be more knowledgeable about their product and more prepared for every sales interaction than they ever have and there is greater pressure on reps to provide consistently higher sales. The reps may not receive sufficient support, so they need to work harder to balance increased internal demands against winning more sales.

Buyers Have Power in Knowledge

Clients today are armed with more readily available information than they ever had access to in the past. This challenges reps to be relevant, as the client is well informed about organizations and their products or services. Like sales reps, clients do their research before a sales meeting. Clients’ internal purchasing processes are more rigorous than ever and, typically, more people are involved in the decision-making process.

“In a typical firm with 100–500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions.”

–Gartner Group

Increased risk aversion has led to this increase in stakeholders and to a more formalized and politicized purchasing process. At the same time, management has become much leaner, so the majority of your contacts are in a daily grind of trying to get more done with less and, therefore, they must be more careful with their time. This presents significant challenges for sales reps trying to get the attention of potential clients.

It would be natural to assume that the buying process would be shortened now that buyers have better access to information. In fact, the opposite has happened: the buying process is longer than it has ever been. No matter what many people say, buyers buy on their schedule, not yours, unless you can provide a compelling reason for them to change. There are certainly ways to reduce the sales cycle, and this book refers to many of them, but as a seller, your ability to influence the speed of the outcome is limited because buyers have decision-making processes that they have determined to be necessary.

In his book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink noted, “The balance has shifted. If you’re a buyer and you’ve got just as much information as the seller, along with the means to talk back, you’re no longer the only one who needs to be on notice. In a world of information parity, the new guiding principle is caveat venditor—seller beware.”1

It has been suggested that because buyers have access to more information than ever before—and, as a result, are more informed than ever before—they don’t need salespeople anymore. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In 2017, ManpowerGroup reported that filling sales roles is the third-highest challenge for organizations, with hiring skilled trades and IT staff ranked first and second, respectively. The demand for good reps is outpacing the ability of the market to meet that demand.

Relationships are still relevant when making complex, high-cost and high-risk decisions. Interpersonal relationships help buyers make more informed decisions.

As David Hoffeld puts it in his book The Science of Selling, “To be sure, in our technology-saturated world, potential customers are now forming initial impressions about a company, product or service from information they glean online. But this doesn’t negate the importance of salespeople. In fact, it makes them more essential than ever. Buyers rarely make purchases based solely on information provided over the internet, unless the product or service is a very low-priced, low-risk item. In any other situation, and especially for higher-priced, higher-risk purchases, potential customers need to interact with a salesperson to make an informed and confident decision.”2

Salespeople Have Fewer Weapons to Differentiate Themselves

There are more competitors than ever before, resulting in a saturated market for most products and services. With much more commoditization, it’s even more difficult to differentiate your product, service or even company from those of your competitors.

If your product is the same and delivered with similar value at a similar price, how do you make it stand out? One of the very few ways this can be done is through the sales reps. For sales reps to stand out in this market, you must be more prepared for every situation than you have ever had to be before. You need to be more creative, and you must figure out ways to add more value and insight than your competitors.

One sales leader I interviewed put it this way: “It used to be that you built a relationship and then you built value. Now, you have to build value or show value before you can even begin to think about a relationship.” A very insightful comment. With customers essentially viewing everything as a commodity, and there bein...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Tara Talbot
• Introduction: Why I Wrote This Book
• Part 1: The Sales Leadership Imperative
• 1: Challenges Facing the Sales Organization
• 2: What Is a Best-in-Class Sales Organization?
• Part 2: The 10 Imperatives
• 3: How to Recruit and Keep the Best Talent
• 4: Effective Onboarding and Talent Management for Accelerated ROI
• 5: Breaking Down the Sales Process: From Prospecting to Closing a Deal
• 6: The Sales Funnel and Account Planning
• 7: The Science of Selling: Sales Management Reporting, Metrics and Analytics
• 8: Sales Planning: The Key to Execution
• 9: Sales Methodology: Creating and Delivering Your Story
• 10: Sales Coaching: We All Need a Coach
• 11: Sales Compensation: Reward and Recognition
• Part 3: Change, Culture and the Future of Sales
• 12: Change Is Here to Stay—Capitalize on It
• 13: Sales Culture: The Glue that Binds
• Afterword: My Closing Advice
• Appendix: The Hallmarks of Top Sales Professionals
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author