The four pillars of sales tech...

How can you make sure you're combining the best in sales leadership with the best in sales technology?

There are four key areas, or 'pillars', that sales leaders need to focus on for optimal efficiency. Missing any one of them can be a huge strategic mistake. They are:

• Sales process
• Sales methodology
• Leadership
• Buyer journey

Here's a look at each one individually:

1). Sales process

The sales process comprises the steps we consistently follow from the phase in which teams are looking for prospects to the time they're servicing a happy customer.

This process is unique to each organisation and selling team, and it’s something sales leaders are responsible for mapping out, refining and sharing with every member of the team.

The sales process should be the same within a given sales team.

Teams in the same company that sell completely different things may have differences in their sales process, or may have areas of overlap, but within each team, there needs to be a process that each member of the team follows.

Leaders must ensure the technology they use to interact within their teams is able to not only share and reinforce the sales process ... a strong solution should also help update that sales process over time.

It’s a mistake to think of our sales process as a static document, as something you can codify in a file or a spreadsheet and be done with.

Markets are constantly changing. Best practices are constantly changing.

Communication strategies with prospective buyers are constantly changing. Why wouldn’t we want our team’s sales process to reflect that ever-changing dynamic?

Would we really want the team to be using the exact same sales process three months from now that they’re using today? Wouldn’t that put us at a competitive disadvantage??

Whether it’s via a CRM, a weekly videoconference or another communication platform or combination of platforms, one strategy leaders should consider is the incorporation of a live, continually updated document of the steps which the team will take to identify opportunities and move them forward.

Everyone on the team needs to see, hear and implement the updated version of this process on an ongoing basis.

This live document must give the best current answers to questions like: "What is the goal of this process — keeping business, attaining new business, recapturing lost business or expanding business — within this account?"

There are likely to be separate processes for each of these goals.

Different teams and different salespeople may have different priorities, so it’s our job as leaders to ensure that we are all on the same page about the priorities and processes used.

• How do we find opportunities?
• With whom do we engage?
• How do we qualify opportunities?
• When and how do we upsell?
• When and how do we cross-sell?
• ?How do we handle the handoff to the service and delivery teams?
• And so on.

The creation, sharing and continued reinforcement of a live document expressing the right sales process is the first, and arguably most important, duty of the sales team’s technology.

If that’s a CRM that serves two hundred salespeople, the CRM needs to empower you to share, reinforce and easily update your live sales process document(s).

And if that technology is a shared Google Docs folder that serves five sales people, that too, should empower you to share, reinforce and easily update your live sales process document(s).

2). Sales process

Let’s begin by taking on a question I hear a lot: “Isn’t sales process the same

thing as sales methodology?”?

The answer we give our clients is NO — and here’s why. Identifying the right sales process is no guarantee that anyone on your team is executing that process in the most efficient and effective way!

Your sales process is the steps you follow — the "what to do." Your sales methodology is the tactics and strategies you implement to execute that process the — “how to do it.”

With that much settled, it’s time to take a deep dive on the critical question of how your technology can best support your implementation efforts with your team — so that each person who reports to you works at optimal efficiency and produces consistent, predictable revenue for your organisation.

Once you have clarified the sales process, a number of essential questions emerge for you as the sales leader. These include:

• Is the sales process built into our onboarding process? In other words, once someone is hired and onboarded, will they have internalized our sales process?
• Are we effectively training and reinforcing the sales process to both new hires and current employees?
• Do our coaching initiatives support our sales process?

Here’s the potential challenge. A lot of sales leaders tell themselves that the CRM they select will, on its own, somehow address and resolve questions like these. But that’s simply not true.?

Think of it this way: A spreadsheet application, on its own, will not automatically address all of your organization’s finance and accounting decisions. Just as a spreadsheet application is a tool that can be used wisely or unwisely, the CRM you choose to use with your team is also a tool that can be used or misused.

Someone needs to deploy that CRM intelligently to solve problems and achieve important goals. In the case of the CRM, that “someone” is the sales leader … and the #1 goal of that leader, we believe, is to create and sustain both a methodology and a team culture that supports the sales process they’ve identified.

That doesn’t happen automatically. It takes conscious effort over time, and the decision to lay launch and sustain multiple initiatives that make it second nature for the team to consistently implement the sales process at a high degree of proficiency — not just read about it or pay lip service to it.

Taken together, these initiatives constitute a sales methodology that’s supported by the CRM (and/or any other platform used by the team).

When it comes to methodology, of course we'd love you to choose Sandler. But whatever methodology you pick, we recommend that you make it one that fits your organisation like a glove, is focused on the buyer, and gives your team a viable conversational model, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all script that handcuffs them.

We recommend you create a methodology that your people will buy into and use, and that you make the methodology consistent across your organisation.

Below are some best practices we’ve picked up over the years about using technology to design and support an effective sales methodology.

• >>> Work with the sales team on this. When methodologies fail, it’s often because the leaders have gotten together and simply dictated what’s going to happen in terms of methodology and the technology that supports it, without consulting the people on the front lines.You want their feedback about the access, the resources, and the applications they will need to implement your sales process. And you want them to own the methodology just as much as you do. So… listen.
• >>> Review your sales process with team members and ask for their insights on the specific technologies that will best support the team and its process. Don’t just look at the front end: “We need X number of clients this year.”Look at what comes before then in your sales process: “We need to have Y number of conversations with prospective clients, and we need to generateZ number of contacts with qualified decision makers/influencers out of those conversations.” Now that you’ve got the broad outlines laid out, start asking questions. For instance: Could a predictive dialing system help your teammembers reach Y more easily and quickly — and earn higher commissions? Could a “conversational intelligence” system, driven by today’s astonishing AI technology, give you and your team the most up-to-date information on the questions, topics and phrases that correlate with successful outcomes on sales calls? Generate (and record) as many ideas as possible … and lean into the best ones.
• >>> Ask yourself: Does the technology that a given team is expected to use regularly offer easy access to all the resources that? are? appropriate? to? the role? If your top-tier enterprise salespeople have the exact same resources available to them as the members of the customer support team, there are going to be mismatches and inefficiencies. To avoid problems like that, customise the resources to the specific role.For instance, if your team has developed a 30-second commercial that has been proven to deliver good prospecting discussions with a specific kind of decision maker in a specific vertical, the leader’s job is pretty simple:Make sure it is easy for everyone reaching out to the same decision maker in that same vertical to pull the text of that talk track from within their CRM when they’re prospecting. Do that for all the resources they will need at all the different stages of the sales cycle.
• >>> Make the tech that supports your methodology as close to seamless as possible. The fewer times someone needs to leave an application, and then return to pick up where they left off, the better. We’ve worked with some companies where the salespeople are asked to be familiar with dozens of different apps, each with a different look and feel, and each located in a different place.That’s too many apps and too much trouble! Ask yourself: is the methodology built into the flow of work, so the salesperson has it at their fingertips… or is it living in multiple locations and hard to access?Does the technology have your methodology embedded in it once the salesperson starts to use it?For instance: Vidyard is an amazing tool, and salespeople who use it are likely to be better off than salespeople who don’t. But how easy is it for salespeople to use Vidyard at the right point of the sales process, using bullet points that have been proven to deliver a high-impact message to the prospective buyers they’re targeting?
• >>> Perhaps most important of all, be sure that your methodology and the tech you use to share it creates and reinforces a common? sales? language.People who sell for your organization may play different roles; they may have radically different behavioral plans; they may need different resources at different times. Yet your sales methodology needs to unite all the members of the sales team under the same basic vocabulary, especially when it comes to the designations that identify particular? pipeline? categories.Until you have a set of common definitions that everyone is using, there’s no way to assess and refine your process or the results it produces. Once there’s a common sales language that all the team members are using, you can coach people and teams to more effectively implement the sales process. You can work together to identify what's working that you should repeat — and what's not working that you don’t want to repeat.

3). Sales leadership

Now it’s time to take a look at the third pillar, sales leadership itself. As an effective sales leader, you want to ensure, through your personal example, that you are walking your talk when it comes to decisions that support the first two pillars, sales process and methodology. Here are three important ways you can do that.

• >>> Establish exit criteria that are stage-specific and role-specific. If? you? and your team use a CRM, that means every time someone on your team wants to move from one stage to the next, they’re going to need to confirm, within the system, that certain clearly defined conditions have been met.Who identifies those conditions? You — the sales leader. Who evangelizes on the non-negotiability of meeting those conditions before moving out of a given stage?You — the sales leader. If you don’t use a CRM, you will want to embed the right exit criteria in whatever system you do use. You might not think of this as a cultural issue, but it is. They say numbers don’t lie; neither do criteria.Someone on your team has either met the criteria to move a given opportunity forward … or they haven’t.These are not judgment calls. Everyone on your team needs to play by the same rules. You want your sales culture to be one that’s rooted in facts and data, not hunches.If someone hasn’t met all the criteria, the opportunity does not move forward. It doesn’t matter what your personal relationship with that person is, how charming they are, or what promises they make about what’s going to happen next with the prospective buyer. By setting clear and measurable expectations up front, you ensure that the sales group knows exactly what they need to ask prospective buyers and when they need to ask.The whole dynamic of the relationship with your team changes once you establish clear exit criteria. Instead of you focusing on why a given deal fell through, the focus on the salesperson fulfilling the stage criteria that make closed business possible. Once you establish the right exit criteria, you also have a powerful, effective coaching tool. When people are coached to improve their ability to meet the exit criteria, the hygiene of their sales funnels improves dramatically!
• >>> Remove distractions and keep your team focused? on? revenue? production.? I look at sales leaders as air traffic controllers. They’re usually juggling several dozen different things at once and have a lot of issues to keep track of.But just as an air traffic controller doesn’t share irrelevant information with the pilot for fear of causing him to lose focus, we’re going to make sure that one of our priorities is using our technology, tactfully but purposefully, to edit out potential distractions.We don’t want to devote a lot of bandwidth to anything that could take our people off course. This choice, too, sends an important cultural message to your team: Revenue creation, via execution of the sales process, is the priority.Here again, it’s important that we walk our talk. If we don’t want others to get distracted by company updates that aren’t relevant to them, or by gossip, or by sports, then we need to be sure we’re not using team communication channels for anything other than revenue-related matters.
• >>> Make it measurable. An effective team selling culture is rooted in verifiable data — as opposed to hunches. As the leader of the team, it’s our role to make sure the technology we use to communicate with the team is focused on metrics — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. There’s a famous management maxim credited to Peter Drucker:“If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” If we don't measure the daily selling behaviours of our team (which are really the only levers they can control), then how will we know how we are doing in terms of reaching the weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals we’ve set?It’s our responsibility as leaders to be sure we’re building our technology leadership? strategy around setting and tracking the right daily numbers. If the tools we’re using aren’t providing the metrics we need to track the outcomes that matter, it’s time to either change the settings — or change the tools!

4). The Buyer Journey

Now, it’s time to look at the final pillar — and for a lot of teams, this pillar is the easiest to overlook. It’s all about the ways that you can use your technology to support your buyer’s journey.

It’s usually pretty easy for us to think about the seller’s journey. That’s our sales process, and most of us are accustomed to thinking about that journey, simply because we already know what our own decision-making process looks like for deciding who we want to work with (and who we don’t). But what about the buyer’s decision- making process?

It’s not all about us. As sales leaders, we want to learn to take a step back and ask ourselves what the buyer’s journey looks like. We want to know what their investigative process is, what events are likely to trigger that process, and how they will typically make important decisions about what they’re going to do next.

Of course, different organisations are going to have different ways of mapping out the buyer journey. Some are going to be very sophisticated; some will be more intuitive and informal.

But no matter what your approach is, no matter what the size of your company or your team is, and no matter how complex or simple your selling cycle is, you can improve your team’s efficiency by leveraging your technology to support the buyer’s journey.?

Consider: Your selling process has different stages. So does the buyer’s journey. A prospective buyer in, the first stage of that journey is likely to be preoccupied with certain questions that you and your team can learn to predict — and be ready to address. Not only that — there’s going to be a backstory.

That same prospective buyer is going to have gone down certain predictable roads by the time they get to the first stage of the journey. Your team should understand what twists and turns those roads were likely to have presented, and what challenges and expectations the buyer is likely to have as a result.

In other words, if you’re not well briefed about the typical backstory that connects to each buyer stage, you’re at a market disadvantage.

Once you have a deep understanding of your buyer’s journey, you can use technology to give your team a better chance of meeting the buyer where they are. This is important, because where the buyer is at that moment is where all the best discussions happen.

So — what kind of information should your team members, as sellers, have readily available for buyers at any given stage of their journey? What types of facts and figures do buyers at that stage typically need to see? Which white papers? Which articles? What pressing problems are those buyers most likely to be grappling with?

What options are they likely to have already explored? What white papers are they most likely to want to download from your website? What third-party stories are going to be most relevant to their world?

You really can identify all of this information ahead of time — and use your CRM (or whatever internal system your team uses) to make sure the right buyer-focused information is easily accessible at the right time.

Your technology needs to empower both your salespeople and your prospective buyers to take part in conversations that connect the dots and uncover the truth.

In conclusion

Remember: Buyers want different things at different stages of their journey. It’s your responsibility as sales leader to map out all the touch points and deploy all the relevant messaging and resources for each touch points. Most sales team do not do this. They don’t make it easy for buyers at a certain point in the journey to welcome the chance to have a conversation with someone on the sales team.

Is this mapping and deploying process easy? Maybe not at first. That’s because we’re accustomed to viewing the sales process from the perspective of the seller. But if we can flip that around and start thinking about the buying process from the perspective of the buyer, and leveraging our technology accordingly, we’re going to create a significant competitive advantage for our team and our organisation.

Once you get into the habit of supporting your sales team by making good technology choices for each of these four critical pillars — sales process, sales methodology, leadership, and buyer journey — you’re going to find that you’ve created a well-oiled machine.?

Your team really can be the kind of machine that compresses sales cycles, creates more repeat business, and claims greater annual market share. Just understand that designing and running that machine means stepping up as the kind of leader who creates a steady stream of best practices for the team — and who is committed to becoming more of a scientist than an artist when it comes to aligning all of those best practices with the buyer journey.

Date for your diary

Our next Sales Management Fundamentals bootcamp is on October 12th at our HQ in Longbridge, Birmingham. You can get information and register for more details here: >>>?Sales Management Fundamentals Bootcamp

Tom Mallens is training director at Birmingham-based Sandler Training, Heart of England*.

Want clarity on how you can improve your sales team's performance?

Book an initial chat or give me a call...

Tel:?+447917 005 938

[email protected]

BOOK TIME WITH ME

*He's also somewhat obsessed with exercise. You can get his book 'The Lean & Mean for Life Formula' on how middle-aged men can lose 10kg and within 90 days >>>?here .