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Imagine being in an executive committee meeting for your company and you’re having the budget discussion. Part of that budget discussion includes revenue. Assuming that the company you are part of is a growth-oriented organization, there will be a discussion about revenue growth – part of that being organic sales growth. Our sweet spot is organic sales growth, so let’s focus on that.

Using the Sales Effectiveness and Impact Analysis (SEIA) from our partner, Objective Management Group, we help companies identify where the sales growth opportunities are within their company. The SEIA consistently answers 4 critical business questions:

1. Can we be more effective?
2. How much more effective can we be?
3. What would it take?
4. How long would it take?

The findings here answer several questions. One of which is: What are our current sales capabilities? The chart above identifies two important findings. 

The RED area identifies the current sales competencies and the GREEN area represents the potential for improvement in sales growth if a company focused their improvement efforts on these areas. Understand that these are symptoms and not root causes. Treating/training the system will maintain the current status but will do little to nothing to drive growth. Identifying the root cause for the current sales capabilities still need to be addressed!

As I have said to hundreds of sales executives and sales people over the years – “Your organization, your business, is perfectly designed for the results you get today.”

So imagine for the remainder of this article that this one chart represents your company. 

The sales competencies of the sales team are 1 of 13 different factors that contribute to a company that generates the $15M in new sales to your company. You might be thinking – “Tony, given some time to think about this I probably would have arrived at the same conclusion(s) that your evaluation has. So we need to get better at hunting, qualifying, consultative selling, selling value and closing?” Yes, that is true- you might be able to arrive at the same information we did but that begs a question doesn’t it?

If you could have come to the same conclusion then why is consistent and predictable sales growth still a persistent challenge for your company?

Sales growth today requires science and research. A leader of an organization needs to be able to find a reliable way to expose the exact framework of how your sales organization is built and how it operates. The leader needs an in-depth look at the people, the process, the culture and the systems that are contributing to results. Then based on those findings, develop a more strategic and intentional approach to building, developing and training a high-performance sales team.

Need more assistance identifying what makes your top sales performers the best? Click here to register for an upcoming Live Broadcast on The Role of Benchmarking, EEOC Compliance and Predictive Sales Selection in Hiring Great Salespeople for Your Company. 

Before reading this article, please download our free e-book "Why is Selling so #%&@ Hard" to better understand the effort required to guide and lead your sales team to extraordinary results.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been in a Dave and Busters establishment. There was a time when I would go at least once a year. When I was younger, my source of entertainment was hanging out at sports bars with pool tables, shuffleboards and basketball games. About 25 years ago, that entertainment became watching my kids enjoy the arcade games Dave and Busters offered.

It was there that I learned about Whack–A–Mole and sales management. I really didn’t tie the game to sales management immediately. That is a more recent realization I have come to over the last 10 years as I’ve visited with executives who are trying to figure out sales growth (SGO) within their company. 

What I learned about Whack–A–Mole is that it did not require any specific talent. It did require effort – which requires no skill. And, it did require a couple of strands of specific athletic DNA:

1. Hand/eye coordination
2. Fast twitch muscle fibers

The same holds true for managing salespeople relative to effort. Putting forth the effort to coach and motivate people, as well as hold them accountable to performance, requires no skill. Let me repeat – THE EFFORT requires no skill. Therein lies part of the problem with growing your sales team.

With Whack-A-Mole, I never got a sense there was a systematic way to approach the game. The moles did not appear to be popping their little heads up in a particular sequence. They appeared randomly much like they used to in my back yard when I lived in Blue Ash, Ohio.

This is exactly what I observe and hear when talking to executives about identifying the sales growth opportunity within their sales team. Specifically:

• What is the ideal model being used to eliminate hiring mistakes?
• What is the coaching routine and methodology?
• What is the culture that helps foster motivation?
• When performance management discussions take place are they; consistent, punitive, additive and predictable based on exact metrics and standards?

The answers to these questions are what reminds me of Whack-A-Mole. There isn’t a consistency within the organization let alone consistency between one organization and another. To be clear, we do NOT work with broken companies. We work with companies that recognize there is greater potential within the organization and they realize that they need to figure out:

• What is our sales growth opportunity?
• What would it take go from where we are now to where we could be?
• How does our current team, systems and processes help or hurt our ability to close the gap?
• How long will/would it take?
• What would need to be invested to close our sales growth opportunity gap?

The problem of not realizing full sales growth potential exists for many reasons. Too many to cover in one article so I will go about the process by writing a series specifically dedicated to help you identify what it would take to close the sales growth opportunity gap.

If you haven't already done so, please download our free e-book "Why is Selling so #%&@ Hard" to better understand the effort required to guide and lead your sales team to extraordinary results.

Assuming for a second that when you think about hiring for a position in your organization, you are thinking about hiring the best- especially in the early rounds of looking for talent. No one reasonably goes about writing a job description like this: 

"ABLE Sales Company is looking for the most unbelievably average salespeople we can find. We already have enough top producers and those that are failing. What we really need are some people to bump up the middle of our bell curve. If interested show up and you’ll get a job.”

No, you are not looking for average- you are looking for people who can get your organization to the next level. You’re looking for the best of the best.

Which leads me to today’s story: I was listening to ESPN radio and tuned into The Golic and Wingo Show. They were sharing stories about the Baseball Hall of Fame inductees that a reporter (I didn’t catch the name but it might have been Tim Kurkjian) had heard from each during his time as a sports reporter. I would like to share 3 of those stories with you today and how they are great analogies for recruiting the best of the best.

(Image from Getty Images)

Vladimir Guerrero: Vladimir is a Dominican born in 1975. He arrived to his first professional baseball try-out on a bicycle. He was wearing baseball shoes that didn’t match and one was so big he had to stuff it with socks so that it wouldn’t slip off. He was on the field for 5 minutes hitting, throwing and catching when the scouts told him he was finished. They signed him to a contract and now he’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame. So, how does this relate to recruiting talent?

• When you got it, you got it
• Don’t judge a book by it’s cover

Trevor Hoffman: Trevor was born in Bellflower, California in 1967. When he tried out to play professional baseball, he did so as a shortstop. However, after a few minutes of taking the infield, somebody told him he was terrible as a fielding shortstop and he was a weak hitter. They said if he was going to make it in the pros he might want to try pitching. He did and now he’s a Hall of Famer. What’s the hiring lesson here?

• When interviewing people don’t be afraid to push a button that might upset them. It’s going to happen in their sales career anyway so you might as well find out how they are going to react. Will they absorb the challenge or get emotional?
• Every candidate you interview and eventually hire is going to come with some warts. What you want to know is – are they coachable?

Chipper Jones: Chipper was born in 1972 in Deland, Florida and played his entire career with the Atlanta Braves. Chipper was the #1 MLB draft pick in 1990. As the story goes, the Braves were ready to make him an offer but his dad was encouraging Chipper to hold off because he could probably get more money from another team. Chipper told his dad that he wanted to be the #1 draft pick and that the money didn’t matter. He knew that he was going to be successful and that he would earn his ‘big’ money based on his performance rather than what another club thought he was worth today. Again, why is this important when hiring salespeople?

• You have to be patient. Just because it’s hard to find the right person, doesn’t mean you should hire one that is close. Close enough isn’t good enough (you already have some of those on your team and you don't need more).
• Hire people that are willing to bet on themselves. Often recruiting managers, HR, and recruiters shy away from those that don’t exactly fit the pedigree. When interviewing and working the compensation into the hiring contract, be bold enough to challenge the candidate to put some money at risk. If they are as good as they think they are they will make up for it in spades in the long run.

There is nothing easy about hiring. If you listen to the stories of these recent inductees you will find that there was nothing easy about getting into the Hall of Fame. Congratulations to the 2018 MLB Baseball Hall of Fame Inductees: 

Chipper Jones

Vladimir Guerrero

Jim Thome

Trevor Hoffman

Jack Morris

Alan Trammell

Need more help hiring the best of the best? Download our free Recruiting Success Formula document and Interview Questions guide to improve your recruiting process, today!

Also, click here to complete the Objective Management Group Hiring Mistake Calculator. 

Whitey Kollmeier, my friend and greatest center of influence, told me a story about Coach Scolinos. In January of 1996 he was a speaker at the American Baseball Coaches Association. His topic: Stay at 17 Inches. He approached the stage with a home plate hanging from his neck. The short version of his message was this:

• What do you do with a pitcher that can’t throw the ball over the plate?
• What do you do with your best athlete that breaks the rules (outside the plate)?
• What is happening inside our schools, businesses, and government institutions when people are breaking the rules (widening the plate)?

This message alone is powerful and one that you should read, digest and think about as you build and lead your company, sales team, family, or community organization. I’m taking the concept of ‘staying at 17 inches’ and applying it to your sales process to help you and your company achieve your sales growth objective by closing more business, more quickly and at higher margins. Sound good?  If you respond with a yes then I’ve thrown a strike!  Hitting it is up to you. 

Solution #4: create a “strike zone” to help you select the right prospects to target and attract to your business

The “strike zone” is a list of criteria you establish to identify what type of prospect is right down the middle, a little inside and a little outside of your core target market profile. The criteria for the type of business you want might look something like this: 

In addition to that checklist, you also need a process to determine if the potential prospect qualifies to do business with you within your framework of how you do business. For example, asking yourself questions like:

• Is the decision maker involved and invested in the process?
• Are they willing to provide all needed information in a timely fashion?
• Have they agreed to make a decision in timely manner?

With this approach – staying within your ‘home plate’ you can now:

• Focus your attention more specifically on the needs/problems/challenges of your target market and build your lead generation efforts to attract the right prospects
• Build a reputation as the ‘go to’ source for your services within your target market
• Build better solutions and relationships with partner providers as well as make better decisions on what opportunities to work

Also as a producer/manager, you must pay close attention to what is actually going into the pipeline and be courageous enough to not swing at those pitches that are low, inside, high or outside. This is where your CRM system comes into play. Not only should your CRM system have your mapped sales process but beneath each step in your sales process there should be further qualifying points that need to be checked or clicked. Here is an example for ABC Company.

Step 1: Qualified Appointment – Prospect has a compelling issue to address or an opportunity to leverage:

• Met with decision maker and they have a significant risk management problem
• Company fits our profile for sales revenue and potential revenue
• We will have access to all information in a timely basis
• Prospect has acknowledged a ‘have to fix’ problem

Step 2: Qualified Prospect- Prospect has determined capacity to invest time, money and resources to ‘fix’ the have to fix problem

• Have discussed and monetized the existing or potential problem
• Prospect has confirmed that price is important but solving compelling issues within a monetary range is more critical
• Prospect has agreed that a change in current relationship will happen providing we can solve the problem per specs within budget

These are just two examples of how your CRM process has to support staying within the strike zone. If you, as a producer, or your salespeople cannot ‘check the boxes’ then this begins to help you see the pitch more clearly and identify if this prospect is ‘over the plate’.

For more information on Selection Criteria or other services that can help close your sales growth gap, go to our website and download our e-book "Why is Selling So #%&@ Hard".

Of course you have sales problems. If it’s not a production problem, it’s a productivity problem. If it’s not a productivity problem, it’s a servicing problem. If It’s not a service problem, it’s a sales/sales support turnover problem. In the words of Rosanne Rosannadana,“It’s  Always Something”

Conduct an Emergency Pipeline Anaylsis (EPA) for a simple but effective way to determine what stays in the pipeline and what goes to the pipedream (delete folder). EPA originator, Dave Kurlan, wrote a blog that goes into detail about the 16,000+ proposals presented to unqualified buyers by B2B salespeople every day. This data comes from the 1,000s of Sale Evaluations and Improvement Analysis (SEIA) done yearly by our firm and others around the world. In the SEIA we analyze the state of the current pipeline. Figure 1 identifies the quality of the pipeline assessed for a large sales organization. When assessing for closable opportunities the green area at the bottom should be much larger than the blue area at the top if the opportunities are truly qualified. If your closable opportunities are not really qualified you end up with a similar pipeline configuration to the one you see in the chart.

Figure 1

The process to get this information is simple but effective: Create a number of qualifying questions that are based on the steps in your qualification checklist. Those questions may include but are not limited to:

• Is there severe mental anguish to make a purchase/change and is it personal?
• Did I attach value or monetize the problem or failure to leverage the opportunity?
• Did I eliminate the incumbent?
• Did I ask, “Is this a have to fix or want to fix problem” and did the prospect say ‘have to fix’?
• Did they agree to invest the appropriate amount of time, money and resources?
• Due I have a date of execution, purchase, contract?
• I have met with the decision makers (not I will be meeting with decision makers at time of presentation) and they have agreed to make a decision when I finish my presentation.
• I rehearsed the prospect on what they will do when the incumbent returns to beg for the business, fix the problems and match our fees, structure, contract.

Answering/scoring these questions simply requires a 1 or a 0. You add up the scores vertically for the opportunities in your pipeline and then make a decision to either;

1. Call your prospect and deal with the open items
2. Reconcile that you have asked these questions and didn’t get the right answers and therefore make the ‘go, no-go’ decision to present.

There is a world of difference between managing the pipeline and looking at the pipeline and reporting the results. Managing is an active process. As a manager you must constantly and consistently evaluate the opportunities in the pipeline for:

• Quality – are they true opportunities
• Quantity – the number and value volume must match each individuals success formula
• Movement – based on your buyers’ buying cycle you should be able to predict movement from one step in the process to the next
• Measure the conversion ratios from one step to the next to evaluate effectiveness of the sales person’s execution of the process
• Evaluate for credibility and validity
  • Credibility – did the projected close volume actually close
  • Validity – did the accounts in the pipeline actually close and account for the volume forecast and actual sales

This will take time but it’s important for you and your salespeople to do because it will ultimately result in closing more business, more quickly at higher margins.

CALL TO ACTION

Set up a 1-on-1 coaching call with one of our Sales Development Experts to discuss how to effectively build and manage a credible and valid pipeline report, regardless of the CRM you are using.

EMAIL: traci@anthonycoletraining.com

Subject line: 1-on-1 coaching call