Signs Your Sales Strategy Is Broken

A Straightforward Self-Assessment to Evaluate the Quality and Effectiveness Your Sales Strategy

It’s easy to tell if your sales strategy is effective, right? If your revenues are growing and your salespeople are making budget, then your sales strategy must be effective.

On the other hand, if you’re struggling to win business and your salespeople are grumbling, then maybe your sales strategy stinks.

Right?Not so fast, my friend.

What if there’s much more growth to be had? What if that 7% quarter-over-quarter growth you’re seeing could really be 15 or 20% with a better sales strategy? And if you’re struggling, your sales strategy could be spot-on while at the same time being plagued by issues with poor tactical execution.

It may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but financial performance alone just doesn’t tell you very much about the efficacy of a sales strategy, due to all of the other factors involved.

• So, what do you do?
• How do you know?
• How can you tell if your sales strategy is really effective or not?

Well, you can carve out a couple of quarters and bring in an army of consultants to study your market situation, talk to hundreds of prospects and customers, audit your capabilities and training programs, analyze your wins and losses, benchmark your strategic development processes against other companies, analyze and compare your competitive set, and so on.

Or if that doesn’t sound very appealing, you could start by just?assessing the odds.

Which Dish Will You Bet Your Stomach On?

Let’s say you’re visiting a strange town and you go to a strange restaurant. At this restaurant, you’re served two dishes, each prepared by a different chef. You have to choose one dish and eat the whole thing before you’ll be allowed to leave. (Remember, it’s a strange restaurant…very strange.)

But here’s the catch: You can’t taste or smell either dish before choosing.

So, how do you choose? How do you decide which dish to eat? Simple. You start asking questions—questions that help you determine which dish is?most likely?to taste good, and which dish is?most likely?to make you wretch. For example:

• Did one chef go to culinary school and spend seven years as an apprentice? Did the other chef just get promoted from his two-month stint as a dishwasher?
• Did one chef use a recipe that’s been featured in Bon Appétit magazine? Is the other chef just throwing things together that are within reach?
• Were the ingredients for one dish purchased earlier that day? Were the ingredients for the other dish “discovered” last week in the very back of the walk-in freezer?

You see, by assessing the people and processes involved, you can assess the likelihood of each dish either being good, or giving you food poisoning—without actually tasting it first.

Now, can a good chef, using a proven recipe and fresh ingredients, still produce a dish that tastes terrible? Of course…but the odds are stacked heavily against it.

And that’s the point.

Simply put, quality processes are much more likely to produce quality outputs than inferior processes. And turning it around, you can assess the odds of having quality outputs by assessing the quality of the underlying processes and inputs.

Assessing Your Company’s Sales Strategy

Here are some simple questions that can help you determine the odds that your sales strategy is as effective as it really could be:

1. Do your sales and marketing leaders actually have training and experience with rigorous strategic development processes? Or are they just executing the same generic tactics they used at their last three jobs, expecting them to work in your unique situation?
2. When asked, would the members of your sales and marketing teams all describe your sales strategy in the same way? Or would everyone describe a different set of target customers, value propositions, and competitive differentiators?
3. Do you segment your market to reflect meaningful differences in buyer needs, behaviors, preferences, and profit potential? Or do segment by meaningless descriptors like “the Fortune 500” and generic firmographics such as industry, geography, and number of employees?
4. Do you proactively target the specific segments where you have an advantage and are more likely to win the business, faster, and higher margins? Or do you just take the business as it comes—just waiting to see what kinds of “opportunities” drop into the pipeline and hoping that things will work out in the end?
5. Do you regularly execute marketing research and competitive analysis processes to inform and refine your sales and marketing strategies over time? Or are your forward-looking directional decisions based largely on opinions, competitive actions, and the most-recent wins and losses?
6. Are you deliberate and specific about the products and/or services you really need to sell in order to develop profitable and defensible strongholds in the long-term? Or is sales dollar generated by any product in your portfolio viewed as a being equally valuable and equally desirable at the end of the day?
7. Have you articulated and documented a compelling, complete, and evidence-based “case” for how your products and/or services solve customers’ problems better than the alternatives? Or are your value propositions and competitive differentiators nothing more than generic platitudes that could apply to virtually any company in your space?

Scoring this simple self-assessment and determining your odds is fairly obvious and straightforward…

If you answered in the affirmative to the first question in each pairing, the odds go up that your sales strategy is thoughtful and effective.

But if you answered in the affirmative to the second question in each pairing, your odds go down. And the more second-question affirmatives you have in total, the lower the overall odds that your sales strategy is as effective as it really could be.

It’s simple. It’s straightforward. And in less than ten minutes, you can get a pretty good idea as to whether or not your sales strategy is effective.

Now…what do you do about it?

The Little Secret About Great Chefs

While all of these questions are significant and telling, there’s one question that stands apart. There’s one question that is significantly more predictive and influential than all the rest. Can you guess which one?

Well, here’s the thing about great chefs: They can make an old shoe taste pretty darned good.

A great chef will find great ingredients—somehow, some way. A great chef will come up with a great recipe—somehow, some way. If the chef is great, the odds that you’ll get a great meal go up exponentially—regardless of anything else.

It’s similar with sales strategy. With people who actually have training and experience with strategic development processes, your odds of ultimately having an effective sales strategy go up exponentially—because they’ll make sure that everything else happens as it should.

Our mission here at the Predictable Success is to research and disseminate leading-edge practices and innovations in sales operations.

So we’re always learning about different approaches, new technologies, changes in focus and priorities, what’s working well right now, what’s not panning out anymore, and so on.

The GOAL of every high performance sales team should be to…… Proactively create the conditions where more deals, that are more profitable, with better customers, are the natural result. This is achieved by engineering the overall sales process such that it reliably generates the desired outcomes as a matter of course.

Predictable Success can examine your sales processes and deliver an accurate road map after determining where you’re on track and where you need course correction. Predictable Success can provide a cost / benefit analysis and expert recommendations to improve your sales performance on every level.