6 Things every Sales Leader should do right now!

Every sales leader has but one goal.........growth !

They try many many things to achieve this goal. Introduce new sales approaches, focus on cleaning up / out the funnel, put sales professionals in more training. Run acquire / defend programs, increase cold calling, seek to put executives in front of every customer, run account or opportunitiy reviews.

The only problem is that is what every other sales organisation is doing also.

More over none of this is actually about helping the customer.....it's all about their own selfish goal of more bookings.

So how can sales leaders shine a LIGHT on the path to growth ?

There are 6 very very simple things that can be applied right now, by sales leaders with their teams;

1. PROACTIVE (If you wait it’s too late)
2. PREPARE (Proper goal research and ideation)
3. PLAN (Powerful questions)
4. PRACTICE (It’s good enough for others)
5. PERFORM (Every performance is a lesson)
6. PROBE (Inspect what you expect)

Lets look at each briefly.

Proactive

Reaching out to "get budget" people such as IT and Procurement and setting up meetings to discuss opportunities is NOT being proactive. While these relationships are important for reactive transactional business, that business is highly contested and usually very very hard to win with low conversion rates.

Successful sales leaders don't wait until "get budget" people have budget. They help the "set budget" people see what they can't see. So what does this really mean. It's not the cliche "sell high and wide" advice is it ? No. It's more specific than that. Sell high and wide is a bit of a shot gun approach, in the hope that something will transpire. Being proactive is far more sophisticated than that. It's being outcome-led. Identifying the individual or departmental goals of key business executives and generating ideas that have a direct impact on those desired outcomes and engaging in meaningful dialogue around those highly specific and targeted ideas.

Recommended action: For each account have your sales team select one non-IT / non-Procurement executive. Such as the CMO or CEO or COO for example. Have them commence doing proper research on those executives. This can assist in even unlocking, progressing or accelerating and existing opportunity that maybe stuck in IT.

Prepare

This activity is often given lip service. Sales professionals believe that if I am meeting with technical people I don't need to know the business outcomes. But that, by default, means you will be challenged to create any real level of differentiation. If your job was to help people successfully parachute out of a plane, you wouldn't let them go up without checking their chute, without making sure they know how and when to open it. Therefore why do we let sales professionals go to customer meetings so poorly prepared ?

Recommended action: make sure as a minimum sales professional can articulate the key 3-5 corporate business outcomes of the target clients. Also that the offering they are pursuing can be directly linked to those outcomes. Ideally revenue or risk related outcome. Cost savings are important, but everyone's value proposition is cost savings based, so it offers little to no real differentiation. Every proposal should have a cost or time savings value.

Plan

By failing to plan you are planning to fail - Abraham Lincoln

What's a good plan ? How many sales calls do sales professionals make that are poorly planned. From the customers perspective. I mean a "set budget" customer. Not a "get budget" customer. get budget customers will take meetings with you all day every day. It helps them justify their role. They are hearing what the vendor has to say, learning, gather info, that will be used to "squeeze" you when the time comes. They really can't make any decisions. Rocking up with 78 slides all about you and your product is fine with them.

But it's not with set budget folk.

Recommended action: Set budget executives want a conversation. Not a presentation, nor an interrogation. They want to engage in discussion that helps them see what they can't see. This requires both good questioning technique and story telling. Have each sales professional create three powerful thought provoking questions to ask during the discussion. Have them envision one story. ideally a "day in the life of" the prospects customer. Help them think differently about their customer.

Practice

I know. Every professional in every other field practices more than they perform. Athletes, Military, Opera, Artists, etc. But that's OK we as professional sales people don't need to practice. Sure all those mentioned need to perform at their best in real time with no second chances. But that situation isn't what happens in our profession....oh wait...hang on...actually it's exactly what happens. Why do they practice so much and we don't ?

Reccomended action: Simple one. Before any sales professional goes to meet a customer get them to role play / simulate / practice the conversation. It can take as little as 10 mins. In fact flip it. Have the sales person be the customer and you be them. Let them see it from the customers eyes. Debrief it and refine it. Ideally you would do this 3-5 times before the meeting. But once is way way better than the average practice activity today.

Perform

Sales people have so many meetings with customers, internal or external and partners. Yet performance is often measured merely by lagging indicators. Was the deal closed, has it moved forward in the sales cycle etc.

Every performance offers a lesson. But that lesson is only accomplished if time invested to learn.

Recommended action: Take 10 mins after every meeting. Every one. Ask 2 questions:

1. what worked well
2. what could have worked better

From that agree 1 maximum 2 things that you will do differently in the next meeting. Then make sure these new things are incorporated into the next practice session

Probe

Probably the last thing you'd expect to see in a list such as this. Most sales people would feel they are over managed by metrics and that adding more inspection would be overkill.

However all the metrics used in most sales organisations are:

1. ultra lagging indicators (outputs not behaviours)
2. solely focused on sales professionals not leaders

Yet it is leadership (being a leading LIGHT...per graphic above) and different behaviours that create genuine differentiation.

Recommended action: How will you inspect your actions as a leader in helping change habits and behaviours of your team? You could start with just the 5 items above. How will you measure your ability to help your team be more proactive through better preparation, planning, practice and performing ?