Selling is No Longer a Numbers Game

If you still believe selling is a numbers game, its time to recalculate your numbers.

I just finished a 60-day consulting project with a 25 employee company that is almost 4 years old. The company consists of their forty-something CEO, 6 people dedicated to sales and marketing (including the CEO) with the balance consisting of customer support, coders and admin.

This CEO had a background in coding and wanted to revamp his sales operation because they’d hit a wall. Growth had been flat for the first half of 2019 and the CEO was tired of repeating what wasn’t working.  

I was brought in as the sales enablement expert tasked with implementing change. 

The company's first sales hire is now their sales manager. 

He is pretty much untouchable in the company and set the culture for the team. 

In our first meeting together he told me…

“Sales is just a numbers game.”

I cringed. 

"If selling just a numbers game...what have you been miscounting?" I wanted to ask.

The sales manager is a great guy... I like him...he came from a background of car sales, and was trained in this old school philosophy of selling.

It was not just the sales manager that had a distorted view of “the numbers”. 

The CEO shared his business plan with me saying, “These numbers are very conservative... if we just get 5% of the market, our revenue will explode. Plus every dealer needs our product.”

Double cringe.

When I started talking with the inside sales team, I was not surprised to find the team somewhat discouraged, for the obvious reasons. 

They were being told their job was just a numbers game and by conservative estimates, they should be bigger than they actually were. 

In other words, they felt like the blame for the flat growth was their fault.

I knew immediately before we started implementing new tactics or training, I had to get buy-in that selling is more than a numbers game.  

The funny thing is if selling were just a numbers game why are 75% of all start-ups out of business in 5 years?  

A recent study by CBI Research analyzed why startups fail. 

No surprise lack of sales is at the top.

Making more outbound sales calls is not the answer. Sales managers that believe that should be fired now and just get it over with.

Changing the selling is a numbers game mindset is critical. It breeds a fast-food culture, with sales teams looking for the quick deals. Often resulting in customers who are poor fit.

To me, this is nothing more than lazy selling and taking the path of least resistance. In other words, your sales team's working as order takers... unable to influence the sale and create value.

Selling may be a numbers game for McDonald's but your company is not selling BigMacs, are they?

We all know what the path of least resistance produces... mediocracy. 

Having a mediocre sales team is like giving your best customers to your competition...while you settle for the leftovers.

Believing sales is a numbers game is believing your team does not have the skill to control their own outcomes.

Why do I say this?  From experience.

Looking at the best companies I've worked with over the last decade, none of them had a selling is a numbers game mindset.

Instead, they did an amazing job of positioning their company around a problem people were willing to pay to have solved. For example, 360Booth focus is on ensuring their customers have the best vehicle photos, in the fastest and easiest way possible. Not every dealer worries about what their vehicle photos look like, but for the ones that do, they turn 360Booth.

In other words, they anticipated what their prospects pain and worries were and became experts at helping them solve their problems. Subsequently, the sales team become experts at helping their customers become more successful, they're mission is to help you, not sell to you.

If treating sales as a numbers game produces mediocracy, why is it still common to hear?

Because it’s safe, easy to digest and understand. 

It oversimplifies the selling process and allows everyone to believe they can be successful based on probabilities. But everyone can’t, otherwise 75% of startups would not fail in 5 years.

I’ve learned from experience that selling is a game of discipline.

Disciplined with your decisions, words, actions and time management.

A disciplined sales process will outperform mass dialing, every time. 

When you have a disciplined process the numbers will happen. But when selling is a numbers game the numbers rarely make sense.

Is a disciplined sales process right for you?

Every organization has a process to turn prospects into customers.

Unfortunately, the process is operating out of the head of the sales manager or sales leader, which was the case with my recent client. 

This does not promote a consistent, repeatable and scalable department. Worse it creates a very inconsistent experience for the prospect depending on the salesperson. Which creates more work for support and higher churn.

Creating a formal and documented process allows a sales team to scale efficiently when hiring new members. 

Additionally, when the sales team is included in documenting the process it creates a sense of inclusion that their experience and knowledge are valuable.  

Now we’re team building and creating subject matter experts, not order takers.

Transferring the knowledge from the sales team to a document creates a valuable asset for the organization as well. 

This structured approach to selling will shorten the sales cycle, growing the businesses faster.

One aspect not to ignore while creating your disciplined sales process is technology. 

Technology has changed the competitive landscape and the way companies engage with customers. Inbound lead generation, prospect targeting, LinkedIn, marketing automation, and proposal submission should be optimized while developing your formal process.

As your company matures, you should become more selective in the type of client your team pursues. When the process of selling to prospects remains the same, why should you expect different outcomes?  

Instead of playing the numbers games, focus all your efforts on maximizing your team’s selling potential with a disciplined selling process.

Is your organization ready to raise its selling IQ with a disciplined sales process?  

Creating documents, reviewing technology and formalizing the process, while running your day-to-day sales operations is a lot like trying to build an airplane while you’re flying it.  

Companies often created their sales process based on how they wanted to sell when the initially launched, not necessarily how the modern decision-maker prefers to buy today.  So changing while pursuing new business can be an overwhelming task without help.

If that’s the case, I am confident I can help.

I wish I could say I’ve hit a home run every time, with every client, but I can’t. The clients that I’ve been most successful are generating leads (even if just a few), have full-time salespeople and generating annual revenue near or over $1 million.

If your organization is a match, I can help build a disciplined sales process by working with your current team. A process capable of impacting the sales metrics that matter: 

• Shorter Sales Cycles
• Increased Revenues
• More Wins Ratios
• Lower Churn
• Greater Profitability

Before you think about re-designing your website, investing in another trade-show, or hiring a new marketing company, schedule a 30 minute call and let's review your sales process.

To schedule your call directly with Andrew click here.

Andrew Compton is the founder and principal consultant of Compton Consulting. He's been teaching companies how to grow B2B sales since helping his first automotive SaaS client scale to over 2,500 dealers. With nearly 2 decades of sales experience and over a decade in SaaS sales leadership, he helps firms grow predictable revenues with a disciplined sales process.