(This is a guest post from Charlie Dorrier on the SEC Solutions team. Solutions helps members generate customized insights, tools, and training programs to improve the overall performance of the sales force.)
Stop for a second and think about the individual sales people on the front line of your organization. Picture their faces and the diverse set of styles and messages that emerge in front of customers. It’s a powerful vision that motivates many of us to be in sales in the first place: the collective voice of a sales force, driven by a single objective but made up of many different parts.
This vision is also terrifying. Mass chaos comes to mind: lost deals, missed opportunities, isolated information, and sometimes unsatisfied customers. The chaos needs a little order. And your organization needs to learn from the front-runners.
I recently heard a sales manager sum it up very well: “I’ve got 15 people on my team and there are 500 reps I never really see – I’m not sure I know exactly what drives success in our organization.” By studying in aggregate all of the individual approaches to selling, a sales organization can learn a lot from itself.
This means adopting a methodology to study the “chaos” described above, then building a flexible process that helps all sales reps succeed. Here are a few tactics that often lead to significant improvement for our clients:
- Figure out the company best practices: Conduct a detailed focus group with your top 15 sales people – what is working best right now?
- Study time spend across your sales cycle – where is your team spinning its wheels?
- Make improvement targeted: Survey your sales team around potential skill areas where more support is needed – is there a clear area of need?
- Ask your sales managers what coaching means in their universe – are the answers consistent?
Knowing the answers to those questions is the first step to improved productivity, higher engagement, and stronger customer satisfaction.
To truly take advantage of the amazing talent that exists on your sales team means that you know why your best people are so good.
Related posts:
Commenting Guidelines
We hope conversations will be energetic, constructive, and provocative. All posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.