About 50% of teams are going to hit their sales goals this year. That's not a pretty picture. It's usually around 70%+
Imagine your business development teams as T-shaped people:
The cross-bar represents their Transversal skills, the breadth and collaboration across domains. The down-stroke is their Domain-specifics, their depth.
So why are we missing the mark this year?
Transversally speaking
Productivity
- Be honest - remote work doesn't fit everyone. Some of your team are naturals, but the others? They are flapping about the digital water cooler making noise and looking busy. Managing people from a distance can be like playing darts with cooked spaghetti.
- It's hard to evaluate and manage people you don't actually sit with or see in action every day.? Count the hours you actually spend with each of your direct reports. It's not much. Even less 1-on-1. 10% of your team are the sharks - your top performers that have always been ok. 80% are floundering in need of a life-jacket of goal-setting and management. 10% could be better off swimming in someone else's pool.
- We think everyone knows how to work hybrid / remotely given that we've been doing it for a few years now. We think we know how. My conversations with candid execs tells me the reality is that our productivity has tanked and stayed low. We are not thriving like this. We're barely surviving and the tide is going out and we're starting to see who is swimming naked.
- Productivity needs focus. Both leaders and team members need to master new versions of the skills of time management and working in a remote or hybrid way.
Accountability & engagement
- That meeting could have been an email.
- In turbulent times, 'phoning it in' or doing the bare minimum has become an art-form for some.
- We all lack core management skills that are tough enough to do in a normal environment.
Inexperience / misaligned desires from organisations
- We've hired young thrusting types for our rocket-ship startups thinking that these are the types of people we need.
- Some founders have discovered that managing people is harder than convincing a cat to take a bath. Some decisions are based in the fear of more experienced people making them look bad.
- We think we're hiring flexible, agile people who will grow into a non-existent job description and learn as they go, the reality is high-management overheads and low productivity.
- If I hire an experienced older person, they'll get bored and move on / be too expensive / make me look bad.
Domain reasons - specific for revenue / sales
Your GTM model has come unstuck like expensive wallpaper pasted up badly in a poorly built house.
Market saturation / noise
- It's harder than ever to breach the noise of the market.
- Lots of money meant lots of startups creating lots of noise using great tools to shout louder and louder until we all just stopped listening.?
- Your approaches to demand gen no longer work (noisy trade shows, spray-pray email, cold outbound calling) they have reached their natural end.
Changing dynamics of sales processes
- Sales cycles are 2x longer - buyers have less urgency, they are much more indecisive, consensus led, conservative buying committees.
- Conversions are much lower, your sales teams panic and open up their targets 'for more opportunity' adding more people to the bucket (people & personas, and not accounts) which increases the problem rather than diminishing it.
Financial constraints and renewal challenges
- Renewals are harder - buyers have much tighter budgets, many more approval levels, CFOs involved in the smallest of spends.?
- If an incumbent or all-in-one solution can do some or most of what you offer, they'll chose that vs. the pain of change.
- There is less opportunity for expansion as customers are not growing their teams either.
- Original sales quota was 'over ambitious' (!)
What can we do about it?
Transversally
Leadership development & workplace dynamics
- Train on the basics of management particularly for hybrid work.
- Get people back into the office, but for the love of coffee, do it for the right reasons and in the right way.
- Become more like stage managers and less like absentee landlords.
Talent management & team make-up
- Hire fewer, more seasoned pros who want to roll their sleeves up. There are lots of senior people who don't want to manage anymore, just make some money and do a good job. (fewer egos here, self-directed easier to manage people).
- Listen to your folk. Understanding what truly motivates them is like finding a map to buried treasure.
Communication & culture
- Help people understand where they fit and remind them why they matter.
- Repeat this last point. A lot.
- Get external help to lead better (hello!)
Domain specific
Strategic review & data
- Take a step back and critique your GTM with fresh eyes (I'm here for you).
- Know your numbers - what worked before might just work again, build on 3 data types (quant, qual, tacit). Sales managers just don't know this well enough.
Fundamentals & messaging
- Be solid on the basics within your teams. Qualification, Discovery, Stakeholders etc.
- Have one solid story across the business about what you do, why and how and be sure it is known better than the wifi password.
Customer engagement & market fit
- Find out what your buyers (via going to see your customers) actually want to hear about, where they actually are, how and what they consume.
- Feed them genuinely useful stuff in the right way. (Is it digital? Is it your own high value events, somewhere interesting?)
Planning & investment
- Lastly, be realistic on how long it may take to develop plans and improve poor performance (18 months…) - match that to your available capital / funding environment.?
- Clear the investment / changes with your board and get them bought in on the time to fix.
If you're in need of an objective, I-don't-care, critical friend, then get in touch for a chat. Always happy to help.
