The quality of the interactions between your sellers and clients has to improve—not simply increase in volume.
When there is uncertainty in markets and pressure on growth, executives often push the sales organization to do more, believing that if sales activity metrics rise, results will follow. In the current environment, that pressure is greater.
Growth is harder to generate, costs remain elevated, and performance expectations remain demanding. Yet leaders are still being asked to deliver strong results without much help from the market. This manifests as pressure or micromanagement to extract greater efficiency. While efficiency in sales can produce gains, it can only get you so far. At some point, the quality of the interaction between your sellers and your prospects and clients has to improve, not simply increase in volume. That interaction accounts for 25% to more than half of the purchasing decision in B2B sales cycles, so it’s a major factor in whether you win or lose. The last thing a senior executive ought to be doing is getting in the weeds and taking on the role of sales manager. The C-suite should focus on building the capability in their sales function to compete more effectively and win more of the right kind of business. Here are three ways leaders can stay close to sales at a strategic level and build a high-performance sales organization. Systematically build your sales capabilities Here’s a conceptual equation that I often use with clients to frame the drivers of sales performance. I call it the Commercial Results Equation: C=Profitable Growth. Coaching x =Profitable Growth Start by addressing the three key factors required to design and deliver a successful sales experience: Process: The sales process is a framework centered on how your clients make buying decisions that defines the actions sellers take that move a sales cycle toward a close. Skills: These are the interactive skills of consultative selling or value-focused selling that are required to create value when working with clients. Knowledge: This is the knowledge of your products, services, and capabilities, as well as industry and customer knowledge and business literacy. Think of the process as your sales team’s playbook. The skills are their talent and ability to effectively run that playbook, and knowledge is their understanding of the prospect’s industry and depth of learning about how your product can improve outcomes and change the game. Together, these are the primary factors that your sellers draw on to design and deliver a sales experience from initial contact with a prospect to expanding a multi-year relationship. Coaching appears outside the parentheses because it is the force multiplier. It is how leaders improve the performance of the team. When done well, coaching increases the effectiveness of skills, process, and knowledge and strengthens the team’s ability to design and deliver a valuable sales experience. You may ask, where is technology in this equation? Technology is, of course, an important enabling factor across all these areas. But tech tools alone rarely improve sales performance unless they strengthen the process, skills, and knowledge that shape how sellers engage with customers. Senior leaders cannot delegate this responsibility, because building the capability to compete and win in the market is a leadership job. This formula provides a way for executives to stay out of the weeds of sales management while remaining strategically engaged with the sales organization. Leaders can define what strong performance looks like in each of the areas, guide the effort, invest in capability, and support improvements in the factors that have the greatest influence on sales success. It can be tempting to assign these efforts to human resources or sales operations. Those teams can support implementation, but responsibility for building sales capability belongs to senior leadership. When executives take on the strategic role of strengthening the organization’s sales engine, they elevate the performance of the entire team while leaving sales management responsible for day-to-day execution in the field. Balance efficiency and effectiveness Many leaders focus on driving sales efficiency to get more out of each member of the sales team. They push for increased sales activity when there is rarely a one-to-one correlation of “more calls equals more sales.” Efficiency eventually plateaus. Effectiveness compounds. I advised a technology distribution company after it had already redesigned sales territories to maximize efficiency and increased sales call volume from five meetings to eight meetings per day. With a 60% call volume increase, their revenue increased 17% in year one based on efficiency gains. But this was a one-trick pony. Revenue plateaued in year two because there was no room to further increase sales call volume. Digging into the data around their sales calls, it was clear that out of eight meetings per day, only three were calls where sellers engaged with decision-makers, meaning more than half of all their sales calls could never result in a sale. Discovering this massive waste of effort, company leaders implemented a major effort to focus sales management on improving the sales experience and the quality of meetings. They got very clear in their strategy about their ideal client profile and the characteristics of quality sales interactions. Managers became deeply involved, coaching sellers through pre-call planning to ensure access to the right decision makers, observing sales calls to evaluate effectiveness, and debriefing post-call to improve performance. Meeting efficiency was steady at around eight calls per day, but interactions with decision-makers increased to between four and five calls per day, resulting in a revenue improvement of 24% during the next year. More important, this approach still had room to improve because the company had only begun to strengthen the quality of sales interactions. Getting your sales team in front of the right people is not only a numbers game, like engineering more efficient routes in territories. It’s a matter of developing greater capability and expertise within your team, and in turn, creating value for decision makers. Redefine the role of sales For many executives, the role of sales is mired in stigma and outdated views. Granted, sales stigma—the negative perceptions and stereotypes associated with the selling profession—has often been earned by the behavior of sales professionals. But even though the sales role has evolved since the early days of the U.S. census when sales jobs were relegated to “huckster” or “peddler,” the stigma lingers. That matters because leaders’ beliefs about sales shape the choices they make about the function. Whom do we hire? How are they managed? How are they paid? How are they developed and deployed in the market? If culture is about the beliefs that shape behavior, then it’s time to change the way we think about sales. A few years ago a WSJ article reported that a primary barrier to filling sales jobs is stigma. The perception of all sellers as used car salesmen and Mad Men–style pushy closers is persistent in society. Even though the concepts of consultative selling and the solution sale have been around for over 40 years, we have been curiously resistant to changing our beliefs. Too often, the sales function is thought of as purely transactional: sellers are fast-talking, aggressive, and motivated only by commissions. But the most effective salespeople are intensely interested in helping customers solve problems and are driven to provide value with their experience, knowledge, and industry insight. So shifting that perspective is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to supercharging the sales organization. I recommend that leaders start by redefining the role of your sales organization, from merely transactional to producing strategic value. Every sales call reflects the success or failure of your strategy in the market, where it counts. It’s either a massive accumulation of wins or death by a thousand cuts. Sales is a strategic, specialized, and sophisticated discipline requiring considerable skill to perform at a high level. When you start thinking about the sales function differently, you hire, manage, compensate, and develop talent differently. . . . In uncertain or shifting markets, growth does not come from simply squeezing harder. It comes from a concerted effort to build your sales organization muscle, balancing your measures of progress and evolving how you think about your sales organization. Growth leadership requires direct and strategic involvement in sales.
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