What if Selling Was Like an Olympic Sport?

Ask an Olympian 'what is your role?' And you'll get a very explicit response.

Ask a Seller and...

The likely response will be ‘to sell stuff' or 'to meet target.' But is that it? Is there not a more important (and higher) purpose? I believe so. I’ll return to that, but for a moment, let’s stick with ‘to sell stuff.’

If that’s it, what is the goal? I mean, what does good or excellent look like? What is a Gold Medal performance?

'Achieving revenue targets' is a simplistic response. Targets are company and business unit-specific. And how are they set? Who is to say a target is achievable (or a reasonable stretch more likely)?

In addition, business-specific goals seem limited, given they're tied to (just) that business unit. Should there be a more generalized ‘global’ standard that transcends business unit goals?

If there was, we could compare the performance of individuals or sales teams across companies and industries. Like we do athletes and sports teams.

After all, sales, like sports, is a performance-orientated pursuit. Yet, this Seller, at least, has yet to come across any generally accepted performance goals.

For example, in sport, there is/was:

·?? the four-minute mile or the sub-two-hour marathon

·?? The Perfect 10 in gymnastics

·?? 100 points in a single NBA game (Wilt Chamberlain in 1962. Still stands)

How would it be if selling had equivalents?

The nearest we’ve come is probably Joe Girard’s appearance in the?Guinness Book of World Records?as the Seller of the most cars in a year (1,425 in 1973). An interesting point to note about that is that he produced similar results year after year after year!

How did he do it? He had a repeatable formula. Any Seller could do the same. Hold that thought., as it speaks to the point of this article.

A Gold Standard

As there is no global selling standard, I will suggest one. At least for this discussion:

Gold Standard: 70:30 Win/loss ratio

Why 70%? Well, as best I can tell from what studies there are[1], that is what the top 10% of B2B Sellers achieve. It is also a pretty widely accepted anecdotal standard.

Top Sellers win 70% of their so-called ‘Sales Qualified Leads’ (SQLs), which are leads they themselves qualify as being winnable by them, as distinct from ‘Marketing Qualified Leads’ (MQLs), which are leads passed to Sellers by others, i.e., not personally qualified.

To put that in perspective, the win ratio of 70% that top Sellers achieve compares with the 20% or less that most Sellers (80%) achieve. The remaining 10% of Sellers range between those extremes.

The Current Standard

Why do most Sellers win just one in five of the sales they pursue?

Rhetorical question. We know the reasons.

They are myriad, but they can be summarized as poor strategy, poor tactics, or both, or an unpredictable curve ball. In my experience, a post-mortem will inevitably surface the reason for a lost sale. However, loss reviews are rarely done.

Could it be that the lack of performance reviews, e.g., win/loss analysis and subsequent skill and process improvement (as opposed to the ubiquitous 'pipeline review'), is ultimately to blame for the endemic lack of sales success?

The unfortunate reality is that:

Most sellers spend most of their time doing what doesn't work.

What other professions could live with an 80% fail rate?

When fails in other trades and professions reach an unacceptable level, an alarm of some type sets off a troubleshooting process. The level may not be formally defined, but instinct, if nothing else, raises a flag.

How many post-repair flooded houses would it take for the average plumber to realize: ‘We need to look at what we’re doing here. It’s not working!’

Not in sales, though.

Could it be because there are no performance standards, there is nothing to trigger an alarm?

Yes, I appreciate that a forecasted 50% shortfall in the second month of a quarter sets bells clanging, but that is hardly insight. As a result, the usual remedy is increased handwringing and exhortations to do better.

If instead, they had appropriate performance measures, Sellers wouldn’t even be in that position. Alarms would trigger much earlier, and thoughtful and well-considered action taken.

The Case for Standards

Everyone who sells knows the crushing feeling of a lost sale. It ruins your day, if not your week, month, or quarter. Most Sellers and their leaders simply live with the disappointment, often with the associated feelings of being rejected or not trusted by Buyers.

The feeling is compounded when, in the absence of forensic analysis of the failure, there is no reconciling with it. There’s no ‘ahh, so that’s where we went wrong. ' Next time, we’ll do A, B, and C. Let’s add that to our stock of lessons learned for ready recall’.

Here’s the thing. We know what wins sales and what loses them. It’s not a mystery. Given that, isn’t it reasonable that we nominate a performance standard? Let’s say the ‘Gold’ Standard is a win rate of 70%. We can even have various levels below, e.g., Silver, Bronze, or whatever.

When we have a standard, we have a basis for measurement and can focus on measuring the inputs that we know result in sales.

‘Wait one!! you’re saying. We already have a performance measure: revenue against target’

Really?

Measurement

Consider this. Do athletes train by Gold Medals won, football teams by goals kicked, or basketballers by points scored?

No. Those are outcomes and signs of success, like target achievement, but they don't provide useful information that informs training and leads to improvment.

You can only train on inputs. In sports, people use Personal Bests (PBs), such as speed, height, and strength.

In selling, equivalent measures could be:

·?? Opportunities Identified.

·?? Opportunity qualification (pipeline accuracy).

·?? Buyers identified.

·?? Decision (need/value) criteria confirmed.

·?? Stage qualification.

·?? Effectiveness of sales strategy.

·?? Effectiveness of sales tactics e.g., interaction skills.

·?? Relationship building (yes, it can be measured).

That is just a small set.

You’ll notice I haven’t included calls made, emails sent, and other ‘busyness’ indicators that regularly appear in Seller KPI's. Activity doesn’t per se translate to results.

Primary Role

I mentioned at the outset that I believed Sellers have a primary (higher) role beyond ‘selling stuff’—one that is more noble. The Seller Code summarizes this well and provides a context for each of the performance measures above.

In summary:

A Seller’s principal role is to be of service/value to Buyers.

If you’re to win a sale, you need Buyers to buy from you. Sales are the result of how well you serve and are of value to Buyers. If they don’t buy, you don’t make a sale. They must come first.

It's like if you want to harvest a plant, you must first sow and then nurture it.

That is an important distinction. You can’t ‘do’ a sale any more than you can do a plant; it isn’t an activity but the result of your activity. To win a sale, perform the actions to make that happen!

Those actions are all about optimizing Buyer/Seller interaction (and yes, with the right Buyers), be it directly or indirectly. The Seller Code, provides a model for that interaction.? It is not a prescriptive ‘how to’. There's plenty of scope for individualization.

Rather it is a set of tenets to enable:

The object of selling is to create environments in which people buy.

If we are to succeed in that objective, we should set performance standards fo the activities (inputs) that will result in that outcome.

In that light, revenue achievement against target seems irrelevant. Much like plumbers keeping a tally of the houses they haven't flooded while remaining blissfully unaware of the ones that have and why.

There's a well-established maxim that 'if you measure it, you can manage it.' It seems to me we do that in exquisite detail in marketing but hardly at all in selling, and that's a theme I'll be exploring further in future articles.

What do you think?

Join the conversation, have your say on The Seller Code,on value-focused sales approaches; the?Resources page of my website has plenty of free materialtion of sellers in the?Implementing the Seller Code?Group.

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My focus is value-focused sales approaches; you will find plenty of free material in the?Resources page of my website.

If you would like some insight into how Buyer—and value-focused your sales processes are, try this FREE self-assessment. There are two versions.

Individuals or Sales Teams?and one?especially for MSP's

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[1] Sales statistics are notoriously rubbery. A number of organizations e.g,, Gartner, Rain Group, Marketo, Aberdeen etc conduct regular surveys that reveal average win rates range between 10 and 40% (at the lower end for higher value sales). My anecdotal observations are that 20% is a fair average with less than 10% of Sellers winning 70% or more of the time.