'Our people don't know how to
sell' is a common refrain that we run into in our work with clients from
Telecommunications to Banks. There is this idea that sales people are 'born',
some kind of genetic dispensation to creating leads and closing sales. And where
companies feel they are not blessed with enough of the grafting, they resort to
all manner of schemes to 'convince' the customer and ultimately achieve sales
targets.
Sounds good, not until you begin to peel the onion. Row Moriaty in a 1995 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article which focused on variability in productivity as a function of job complexity and identified Sales as almost infinite variability. The point was that the fewer decisions a sales person had to make (about activities, offerings, target markets, value propositions, etc) the greater their productivity. So true.
So rather than 'our people don't know how to sell', it is real issue for the productivity of the sales force is clarity and focus. Clarity of the key activities that the sales person has control over that is predictive of the sales target and focus on developing the skill of how to engage a client in uncovering the issues and results that the client is concerned about.
And this is what we have done in Franklin Covey in a single graphic called the sales wheel. At the centre of the sales wheel is the Face-to-Face (FTF) client meeting. The FTF is the single most important activity that the sales person must accomplish daily, especially in the business to business segment. Ideally, every account manager should be able to do 9 client visits per week, where the average duration of each meeting is 45 minutes. The more the sales person is able to do this, the better yield (value per transaction or single sales objective).
Next to the FTF is the lead generation - the process for filling the sales funnel. Here is dedicated resource/s is assigned to ensure that leads are identified from referrals, research and marketing events. This step in the process is vital for the health of the sales funnel and a great predictor of your ability to maintain a healthy balance between the FTF and the number of leads.
Next to lead generation is task substitution, the process that ensures all the activities that impede a sales ability to have FTFs are substituted with a resource, usually of a lower value than the sales person. We use sales administrators of inside business partners to handle these issues. Research from Miller Heiman (MHI global) shows that 67% of a sales people time is spent in non-selling activities. In one engagement in Kigali, Rwanda with a group of business bankers, the participants identified everything from checking client balances to picking up Know Your Customer (KYC) forms are activities that consume their time. This is also similar to experience as a national sales manager with a telecommunications company. Back then, our account managers spent more time in collections than in building long term profitable relationships.
The last and perhaps most significant step in the sales wheel is sales management. Here sales managers - including senior management folks should be out doing ride-alongs with their sales team. During this time sales managers coach account managers on the selling and buying processes as well as remove any constraints in closing the sale. MHI Global in its 2014 Sales Best Practices Survey (SBPS) found that 96% of world-class sales organizations agreed with the statement that ‘Our management team is highly effective in helping our sales team advance sales opportunities’. And in another finding from MHI in previous years, there the presence of a coach correlated with great success in closing the sale.
However, the experts from Miller Heiman warn that, ‘Sales management can be viewed as an asset or a liability by the sales professional. Sales professionals quickly separate those managers who are able to help them win business through effective and regular coaching from those simply seeking data to satisfy requests from higher-level management. To be seen as an asset, sales managers must be masters of the customer-management strategies. They must also be knowledgeable about the market, job roles and business issues that customers face and be fluent in mapping product and service capabilities to customer concepts. Before the sales manager can be an effective business manager and coach, he or she must be respected and valued as a sales professional who reflects World-Class sales behaviors’.
And organizations that have applied the focus and task clarity that Row Moriaty talks about have not only experienced more than 20% growth over their peers but have had higher sales person retention rates as well as improved employee engagement.
Sounds good, not until you begin to peel the onion. Row Moriaty in a 1995 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article which focused on variability in productivity as a function of job complexity and identified Sales as almost infinite variability. The point was that the fewer decisions a sales person had to make (about activities, offerings, target markets, value propositions, etc) the greater their productivity. So true.
So rather than 'our people don't know how to sell', it is real issue for the productivity of the sales force is clarity and focus. Clarity of the key activities that the sales person has control over that is predictive of the sales target and focus on developing the skill of how to engage a client in uncovering the issues and results that the client is concerned about.
And this is what we have done in Franklin Covey in a single graphic called the sales wheel. At the centre of the sales wheel is the Face-to-Face (FTF) client meeting. The FTF is the single most important activity that the sales person must accomplish daily, especially in the business to business segment. Ideally, every account manager should be able to do 9 client visits per week, where the average duration of each meeting is 45 minutes. The more the sales person is able to do this, the better yield (value per transaction or single sales objective).
Next to the FTF is the lead generation - the process for filling the sales funnel. Here is dedicated resource/s is assigned to ensure that leads are identified from referrals, research and marketing events. This step in the process is vital for the health of the sales funnel and a great predictor of your ability to maintain a healthy balance between the FTF and the number of leads.
Next to lead generation is task substitution, the process that ensures all the activities that impede a sales ability to have FTFs are substituted with a resource, usually of a lower value than the sales person. We use sales administrators of inside business partners to handle these issues. Research from Miller Heiman (MHI global) shows that 67% of a sales people time is spent in non-selling activities. In one engagement in Kigali, Rwanda with a group of business bankers, the participants identified everything from checking client balances to picking up Know Your Customer (KYC) forms are activities that consume their time. This is also similar to experience as a national sales manager with a telecommunications company. Back then, our account managers spent more time in collections than in building long term profitable relationships.
The last and perhaps most significant step in the sales wheel is sales management. Here sales managers - including senior management folks should be out doing ride-alongs with their sales team. During this time sales managers coach account managers on the selling and buying processes as well as remove any constraints in closing the sale. MHI Global in its 2014 Sales Best Practices Survey (SBPS) found that 96% of world-class sales organizations agreed with the statement that ‘Our management team is highly effective in helping our sales team advance sales opportunities’. And in another finding from MHI in previous years, there the presence of a coach correlated with great success in closing the sale.
However, the experts from Miller Heiman warn that, ‘Sales management can be viewed as an asset or a liability by the sales professional. Sales professionals quickly separate those managers who are able to help them win business through effective and regular coaching from those simply seeking data to satisfy requests from higher-level management. To be seen as an asset, sales managers must be masters of the customer-management strategies. They must also be knowledgeable about the market, job roles and business issues that customers face and be fluent in mapping product and service capabilities to customer concepts. Before the sales manager can be an effective business manager and coach, he or she must be respected and valued as a sales professional who reflects World-Class sales behaviors’.
And organizations that have applied the focus and task clarity that Row Moriaty talks about have not only experienced more than 20% growth over their peers but have had higher sales person retention rates as well as improved employee engagement.
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