Sales is not broken, it just follows its own rules

Looking at the news, blogs and other content, it seems that sales is broken. There are definitely symptoms that point in that direction:

• Depending on the source, 54% hit quota (CSO Insights) or 57% miss quota (Forbes)
• There is a growing sense that sales orgs will become less important in the sales process
• Gartner claims a large part of the population does not want to be involved with sales reps and buy without any interaction
• Growth slows down and sales initiatives don't work
• It is very hard to find 'the right sales hire' ...

The reality is different:

It is not sales that is broken, but your sales process. And this is normal.

The reason is that sales, just like nature, follows its own set of physical laws. While nature has Newton's laws (gravity), Thermodynamic Laws, Entropy Laws, and E=MC2, sales has laws around velocity, conversion, distribution and more...

The majority of us entrepreneurs and sales professionals work in the dark and don't take into account - and don't even know- those laws, and so we hit every ceiling during every transition, leading to loss of revenue, loss of growth, loss of people and clients...

If you look at the illustration in the beginning of the articles, there are distinct phases and situations.

And while there is no space to give an in-depth analysis on each and every of those steps, + I am no academic and miss the knowledge to do this, it is my ambition to help you forward by giving you 4 elements you can work on today.

1. Check the context: In what stage are you?

We all are in our unique situation. Are you a solopreneur or do you have a startup doing founder led sales? Or do you work in a mature organisation with a strict set of policies and rules?

Depending on your context, your organisation's sales approach will be different as will your personal approach.

At the same time, when you approach a new ceiling, depending on your timing and approach, your growth will remain, or even accelerate.

In one of the companies I worked, we noticed that growth started to slow down. During that time, the sales organisation was set up in territory management teams, and while this setup helped us gaining hyper growth, it was now starting to slow us down: sales reps started to focus on upsells within their existing customer base, rather than growing market share by signing on new logos. The company immediately set out to segment the sales organisation in new logo teams and account management teams. Literally within the quarter of the change, growth started to accelerate again.

For me, this is a brilliant example how an organisation saw they were running against the limits of the sales laws at that moment, and found ways to, within those laws, break to their ceilings and continue to scale.

2. Check the hire: Are you hiring for today or tomorrow?

All the companies I work with are looking to hire. When I talk to candidates, I always take the context of the hiring organisation into account.

While my basic principle is to hire for tomorrow (I am looking for that growth mindset), a company that is shifting from FLS to building sales teams needs sales people that will bring value from day 1, not from day 500 which is good enough for big tech.

Recently I helped hiring a senior sales rep for a tech company that is just in that stage. While the new hire doesn't have sector or product knowledge, he is a strong hunter with loads of experience in closing new business in a complex sales environment. In my opinion, that same candidate would struggle in a scale up selling 20k ARR solutions following a solution selling approach.

3. Check the system: What systems do you have in place and work?

Using systems is crucial for everyone, regardless of context and stage, and they help to overcome the major challenges for all sales orgs:

The big challenges for:

Founders: to move from an intuitive approach to a systematic one.

Startups: to focus on market segment and execution with full cycle sales reps

Scale ups: massive hiring to have a number of sales people do a limited set of the sales systems next to one another with smooth handover systems (e.g. SDRs to create opportunities, Inside Sales to close mid market deals, Account Managers to upsell existing customers, Customer Success to optimise usage and retain customers, …)

While they are different, they all make use of the same 30 basic sales systems! → On that note, go to https://www.jump.foundation/survey/ to see what sales systems you have and what impact it has on your sales maturity.

4. Check the fluff: Are you listening to bad advice?

We avoid change, we are always looking for an easy way out. It's human nature.

Look at the wellness industry: we prefer pills, fillers, make up and instagram filters over adjusting our daily eating and moving habits.

The big danger I see in sales, is that when sales doesn't work out, that we are looking for that pill or filler, rather than analysing how we can systematically improve sales: we read an article about product led growth, buyer journeys, inbound growth hacking, flywheel methodologies, content strategies, … and make the wrong conclusion that sales is broken and should shift to another strategy.

While you will invest in content, demand capture and creation strategies,… it does not replace your sales strategy and will definitely not replace your sales team.

I have literally seen people making the wrong conclusion that “outbound didn't work for their product”, and when I looked closer, I quickly noted that nobody is calling out, when people were calling out it was 5-6 dials per day, to the wrong ICP, role and even the wrong territory. Fixing this, meant fixing multiple systems (positioning, lead gen, outbound cadence, ICP, Use Case, KPIs, ...) and behaviour.

Sales is not broken, it is your process, your timing, your hire… but not sales itself.

The ONLY thing you can do is checking those 4 elements I just described, and tackle your sales in a systematic way.

Good luck breaking through your sales ceilings!

If you have questions, feel free to DM me.

Whenever you're ready there are 3 ways I can help you:

Advisory & Technology

When you look to scale and systemise your sales engine, by building your revenue playbook

Coaching

3 Coaching tracks for solopreneurs, startups or scaleups (www.jump.foundation)

Free tools:

Sales Mastery Score https://www.jump.foundation/survey/

The New Way of Sales Newsletter (https://www.dhirubhai.net/newsletters/the-new-way-of-sales-6989561866842738688/)

Ebooks and other content https://www.jump.foundation/free-tools/