Could your Sales Process be Broken?

Could Your Sales Process be Broken?

Sales and sports share an abundance of parallels, most notably that the athletes and salespeople engage in an activity that brings them face-to-face with an opponent whose primary objective is to make them fail.?Engineers do not wake up knowing there is a counterpart at a competing company who is taking direct measures to ensure their designs flop.?In sales, as in sports, that opponent is always there promising more, costing less, being more flexible, or simply having a better track-record.?Sales is hard and, unfortunately, some companies’ sales processes make it even harder.

Process is not new to sales.?Even in the early 1900s, sales books emerged with ideas around trust-based selling, mood selling, and scientific selling.?These promoted more conceptual approaches to selling rather than todays rigorous sales methodologies – heavier on tactics than strategies.?However, the common thread puling all of these together is the simple truth that, to be effective and consistent, the salespeople have to buy in and trust the tactics, strategies, or methodologies their companies have opted to embrace.?No trust, no buy-in, no adoption, failed return on process investment.

Earlier this year, the University of Georgia Bulldogs won their second consecutive national championship in football.?Historically, they have been a good team – but winning consecutive national championships puts them in rare company.?What changed??A new coach came in several years ago and established a process – rigorous, consistent, demanding, with a clear vision and track-record of delivering excellence – to which the players and coaches bought in.?BUT, it’s not just the presence of “a process”.?It’s the right process, with differentiating nuances that propel excellence.??As the people on point for designing and supporting our companies’ sales processes, we can learn something from our sports counterparts.?If you believe your sales team has significant room for improvement, your process may be the culprit.

Sorry bud, the basketball courts are over there

Not all sales processes are fit for all selling situations - obviously.?Unfortunately, software often gets lumped into one bucket needing a “solution” sales approach.?As much as there is in common, even complex solution sales differ across a spectrum and require processes that emphasize different elements of the normal sales stages.?Imagine a football team’s practice schedule being applied to a basketball team – it wouldn’t work no matter the elite caliber of the athletes.?In software sales, the selling process has to fit just like practice has to fit the sport.?The key question - does your process make sense for your solution size, deal flow, market maturity, customer buying motion, target buyer persona, pursuit team composition, installed sales tech stack, sales team’s work mode (individual, team, hunting, farming, blend, etc.), and pipeline generation momentum??Misalignment on any of these and salespeople face one more impediment to success.

The most simple, and unfortunately least used, approach to determining how well your process fits is to directly ask your salespeople.?They are not slackers (or you wouldn’t have hired them); they want to be effective and efficient, make money, and contribute to the company’s success.?Ask them what’s broken, what works, and what could be adjusted in the sales process and selling administration.?If you get answers that start to sound like a trend, you may have found an opportunity for improvement.?The bottom line is having a process is not necessarily a good thing; it has to be the right process for your specific go-to-market strategy.

Does a 3-team Tug-of-War win a race?

In the course of everyone trying to get their own jobs done, the internal voices across sales teams often break out something like this:

·??????Sales Ops – “Good grief, can’t you see our CRM is more jacked-up than a pile of coat-hangers??If you would just enter all 150 fields of data and submit the cover sheet with your TPS report, I could get all the non-sales people off my back and we could live in peace and harmony.”

·??????Sales Management – “I’m not asking that much.?I just need the next three quarter’s deals updated every week, MEDDICC updated in real-time, your account plans updated, an attack plan for getting unknown people to meet with us at a conference we are not formally attending, an account review form completed for every intro call, QBR progress reports completed, and be ready to walk me through it all in our weekly pipeline call.?Now remember, your priority is talking to customers.?Ready, set, GO!”

·??????Sales Person – “If this stuff helps me win business, I’m not seeing the connection.?WTH, I’ll just do what has gotten me through in the past – forget the process.?I’ll use it when it I see it help someone else.”

When there are conflicting motives, priorities, plans, and procedures, no one is buying into a common, synergistic way of doing things.?Getting everyone pulling in the same direction requires a common goal and aligned perspectives.?Unsure??Start with a direct connection to corporate strategy; that connection yields the GTM strategy, that feeds sales plans and processes.?Everyone’s role then has proper context.?That leaves a key second step – individual objectives must be based on congruent priorities.

The process and associated roles must reflect an agreed upon priority hierarchy.?That hierarchy should dictate how processes lean when conflicts or gray areas arise.?Does the company strategy compel everyone to recognize revenue growth, operating efficiency, cost, forecast accuracy, data, inter-departmental visibility, etc. as priority #1??While each of those objectives is important, there has to be one overarching objective that dictates the direction when subordinate objectives come into conflict.?It is important to note, other than in rare temporary periods of company repositioning, if your sales process and priority #1 don’t overwhelmingly shout REVENUE GROWTH, the sales team will not buy in and performance will suffer.

Phil Jackson: “Hey MJ!?Run the offense or you’ll ride the bench!”

Well, we all know that statement was never said.?When the Jordan-led Chicago Bulls were rewriting NBA record books, did they have an offensive blueprint??Absolutely.?Was there a central plan to the offense and a structure to get people open, position players for offensive rebounds, and create mismatches??Yes.?Did Michael Jordan follow the offensive plan??Mostly, until circumstances dictated he use his skills, experience, and instinct to move beyond the plan and go win the game.?Hence, two three-peats.

Sales process is vital to ongoing, predictable performance.?It’s the common path the whole team is on to drive business.?However, if the pressure to adhere to the plan – the administrative pieces, in particular – stifles the energy, creativity, and experienced judgement of the seller, the process has become counterproductive.?Consider the graph below.

The time invested in the sales process should correlate to the steepest part of the upward curve.?The more time and commitment to the process, the more success salespeople should achieve.?As with many processes, there is a point at which the incremental increase in performance is reduced (and even begins to fall) with each incremental step in time invested – diminishing marginal returns, so to speak.?It is easy to understand at the extreme – if a sales executive spends all their time updating the CRM, reports, forecasts, entering data, etc., they have no time to actually engage prospects.?Which parts of your sales process would fail an ROI test??A good question to ask yourself, which parts of the sales process make someone else’s life easier other than the sales person?

A quick aside about the above idea.?It goes without saying, the selling motion engages other team members and tees up activity in other groups.?For example, a successful implementation requires the professional services team to be able to plan and allocate resources with ample lead time, and it is up to Sales to make sure the PS team is aware of potential deals.?The problem arises when these intersections begin to drive the process down the backside of the curve, killing selling time at the alter of efficiency.

Tell me something I don’t know

How effective would a golf coach be standing behind you on the driving range and simply pointing out the bad results??“Oooh, you shanked that one.?Yikes, short.?What is this a deli – enough with the slices.?Thin, fat, chili-dipped that one, gonna start calling you Captain Hook.”?Unfortunately, that is what many sales processes are set up to do – track where in the process a deal was lost.?They point out the obvious – when and where something went wrong, just not what. ?Sure, there is a win-loss report, big deal.?Win-loss reports further reenforce what we already know – get to the economic buyer, fully understand the pain, develop a champion, quantify the problem.?They don’t tell us how to fix the issues.

Salespeople want to improve.?When there is a wrinkle in their approach, they want to know more than it exists; they want to know a better way so they can win more deals.?Sales processes can and should be set up with ongoing tactical improvement in mind.?For example, instead of one, post-deal win-loss review, why not micro win-loss reviews at every step (not stage)??

Let’s revisit the UGA football team on this.?The position coaches and head coach do not just point out mistakes, they also show the players how to do things correctly and then, through MANY practice repetitions, drill that correct technique until it becomes a habit.?When was the last time you sat with senior salespeople and actually practiced overcoming a certain objection or getting past a gatekeeper??If college football coaches know that tactic-level practice is required to achieve excellence, why do sales organizations expect something different?

Sales is hard.?Salespeople willingly sign up to face rejection, time-wasting inconsiderate tire-kickers, lying buyers, at-risk compensation, public scrutiny, and the unrelenting pressure of a quota.?But they do it with the reasonable expectation their own company will support them, and the sales process is part of that support.?Your salespeople will buy into a process that actually helps them close more business.?The above are just a small sampling of the ways you can assess how well your process accomplishes that “sell more” objective. ??If you would like to exchange more ideas on this, feel free to reach out.