Sales Leadership – The Bitter Business

Sales leadership is about getting the balance right between “Activity based management” and “Results based management”. Strong sales leaders empower their sales managers and sales reps to succeed using results based management. This means that Sales VPs or senior management sets the results and vision; they then empower the sales management and sales teams to execute the agreed sales tactics.

Leaders lead and managers manage, this is why sales management is more focused on day-to-day sales execution and coaching the sales teams to sell more effectively. Sales leadership focuses on the data coupled with business mission to map out plans that gets buy-in and commitment from all the sales to the point where the sales team(s) WANTS to follow the sales leader and believe in the vision and strategic direction that the sales leader has communicated.

The effort and dedication to earn the title “sales leader” is high, and the business acumen along with business skills sales leaders must master require time and learning.

The path to sales leadership is no easy walk, and not every sales manager will join the ranks of company sales leader (usually a director or VP title. Why? Well research suggests that the average lifespan of VP sales is about 24 months. Why the short career? Today’s tough business market means the CEO has to deliver growth and change. If the sales leader does not manage the change, the CEO changes sales management.

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Sales Leadership – The Bitter Business

The Sales Managers Role

Managing a sales team is about leading people to higher levels of achievement to deliver company growth and implementing the sales process the company uses to target prospects and convert them to paying customers.

The starting point to managing a sales team is not with the sales team but you, the sales manager or sales leader. To successfully manage and build a high performing sales team, the sales team needs a high performing manager.

                         “People tend to follow those who will lead them somewhere”

To manage the sales team to high levels of performance, the sales manager needs at a minimum the following four competencies: (1) general business and market acumen, (2) ability to deliver effective coaching, (3) strong leadership skills and (4) evaluating and communicating individual salesperson performance. Sales managers who build on these core competencies are on the right track to managing the sales team.

In today’s highly competitive market with longer sales cycles and maybe smaller sales values, for a business to successfully sell their products or services, the sales leader needs to have these competencies to effectively manage and lead the sales team. The sales manager responsibilities also extends so that the sales team not only understands the sales objectives but the company’s overall strategic direction. It is about managing the sales team so they want to fully apply themselves to their roles and maximise their selling skills to sell solutions to customers.

Walk the job: As a sales manager, you need to allocate the time to work closely with your team so that you develop an understanding of each person's motivation, strengths and weaknesses. This walking the job and communication will over time help a sales manager to put the right salesperson in the right sales role (hunter, miner, and farmer) that best suits the requirements of the sales process. A sales manager needs to organise the sales teams so that there is a range of different people bringing a range of different skills and experiences to the business.

Control: A sales manager can only control the outcome if they control what the sales people do! A balanced approach to managing sales people is about mixing activity based management with results based management. This is also known as Task V Individual in management schools. “Activity based management” is about giving the direction and coaching on the sales process and ensuring the associated activities get done. This could be coaching and educating sales people how many calls to make, how many appointments to set, what suspects to call, which products need to be pushed, etc.  The activities or tasks may be set by senior sales management or by the sales manager to assist the sales people to take ownership in managing their own sales business.

Remember that activity based management is not about trying to kill creativity or initiative in the sales process. It should be used to define the sales role expectations so that a sales person can take ownership of their role and clarifies the sales person question of “what do you want me to do?”

The “Results based management” aspect for a sales manager is to focus on the individual sales member’s goals, actions and target results.  It is about giving the sales team ownership and the ability to approach a sales process or task that suits their style. If a sales person likes to make a LinkedIn introduction prior to a sales call, then fine. This is about asking the sales person what their plan is to hit the sales target or what their personal goals are for a given sales period. Don’t be afraid to listen to the sales team’s views or insights on getting the desired results. It gives them freedom and shows you value their input.

If a sales manager gets the balance right between Activity and Results based management, sales teams realise their manager is leading them somewhere (bigger earnings, recognition, promotion, job enjoyment).

Now, I want to introduce “Playing Lines”.
Playing lines are set at an individual sales person level, they are at their widest when a sales person is delivering the results, and the playing lines are at their tightest when the results are not there.
Playing lines represents how much scope (weekly rather than daily reports, less drill down on the pipeline, reduced focus on the activity etc.) a sales person has earned from the sales manager when they are hitting their targets or results. If the results are there then the sales person employee enjoys the wider space in which to perform and be successful. The only things outside the playing lines are company policies, human resources issues, unethical behaviour or actions that could affect the sales team. The sales person understands they have a level of autonomy earned from the sales manager due to past performance and can only be retained by continuing to perform.

The flip-side is if the sales results start to suffer or the numbers are not coming in, then the playing lines start to narrow. When the lines narrow, activity based management or task dominates. Now the sales manager needs to work the basics with the sales person bye spending more time challenging approaches or activities. Ask more questions. Deeper drill down into the metrics and status updates. The sales person still has the space to determine their own plan, just not as much. If over time, results are still not achieved and progress is not made then the playing lines will get even tighter to the point of performance management.

Quick sales management tip: Want to boost your sales team performance? Then get the sales team spending more time selling. Managing a successful sales team requires the ability to spin the plates that matter.

A few more tips for managing a successful sales team.

Become a great sales coach

Create the space to let them do what they do best. Sell! 

Give them recognition and constant feedback.

Always remember, in sales management it is not just about the final numbers. As any high performing sales manage will testify, you need the business acumen to know that the sales pipeline needs to be constantly filled and kept filling via sales activities, and this requires the competencies of a proper sales manager. In order to maximise the revenue of the sales teams pipeline, the sales manager needs to be able to analyse what actions and activities are working, and what is not. A high performing sales manager will always focus on the realities in the sales process of what works for the company and the sales team.

As written about earlier, managing a sales team is a balancing act. Clear guidelines on the “playing lines”, sales role documentation and time spent on sales analysis can help sort the “what’s wrong from the “what’s working”. Strive to create the space to let the sales team do what they do best– sell the product. By working on the sales manager’s competencies and focusing on the sales process and sales training, a sales manager can enjoy a widening of the playing lines and drive bigger revenue streams to contribute to company growth.

Getting Sold on Selling

Salespeople need to get sold on sales not just the sales process. One of the big questions any sales team needs clarification on is "what do you want me to do". Simple I hear sales mangers say, "Go sell". Which leads on to the bigger question, what is selling inside your company. You see time was selling was easily quantified. In the day of the door to door, all a sales person needed was the product to demo and enough streets with enough door bells to ring. Simple numbers game, keep knocking until someone opens, give the sales pitch and close.

As time went bye, sales moved inside, online, blended, push,pull, hunter,miner, gatherer and the systems supporting the sales process got more complicated. First we had contact management with software programs like Goldmine, then came CRM and now Sales Force Automation.Which makes me wonder, has selling got lost in the sales process?, are sales people more engaged in the sales process and systems than the actual selling itself.

The sales models for many companies have become more complex and less efficient, putting pressure on the rate they can acquire customers, productivity and even shifting the focus point from selling time to admin time.

To illustrate this point a friend of mine recently asked me to do a review the sales division of a growing software company. They have fifteen sales people and five people in marketing. I found that both teams spent over 60% of the time on sales process,reporting,updating and forecasting. These are all important tasks but the time allocation was skewed.

The guiding principle of all sales and marketing teams is to maximise selling time, lead generation and relationship building. That may sound obvious to any sales leader, but it is important to remember that the drive for data and sales insights can collide with the forces of rising complexity in the sales process. In fact, sales teams can over time slip comfortable into being sales processors against being sales winners. Companies must understand and clarify the scope of their sales teams while promoting efficiency throughout the sales process.

There are thousands of ways to kill a sale but only a few ways to win them. Some ways to kill a sale are obvious like not showing up to a meeting prepared, not following up, not listening, not establishing trust, going to proposal too early, not speaking to decision makers... the list goes on. These can be easy to identify and with some training and practice can be overcome.

Then there are the sales killers that hide beneath the surface that many companies and sales managers do not even know exist. They are the sales weaknesses in the sales process which when combined with a salesperson’s own make-up can act like weights pulling down the sales efforts and results.

Aligning your selling efforts with sales process takes work. Sometimes companies can be cautious about meddling with the sales force—directors and even owners need to overcome the common fear that disrupting it will hamper revenue. Then, other stake holders from not only sales, marketing and sales support but also other functions, such as finance, must work together to identify and prioritise the expected outputs from the sales engine. Next, successful sales teams transformations require support from the very top: someone has to take the lead, get the senior people from across the company to sit down, share data, and be willing to talk about what’s not working. This leader must override internal concerns, see the big picture, and focus on the best solutions to boost sales time  regardless of past practices.

Changing the sales focus may mean changing the sales talent as successful sales teams refocusing may change how people carry out their roles and the ways other stakeholders interact, from customers to marketing and back offices.
Finally, winning back and protecting selling time for sales people to sell requires vigilance. The growth of multi channels marketing and sales channels in the  B2B and B2C markets can demand non-selling activities into the sales teams day. In addition, old habits chip away at selling time: a salespersons ingrained response when a customer needs a quick answer to something is to drop everything and dive in, even when a well mapped out sales support or customer support mechanism is in place to handle any issue faster and better. The new mantra has to be “A sales teams time is better used to sell.”

An example of refocusing the sales team selling time, was an Internet company who set aggressive targets for sales metrics such as the number of new customer interactions per week. Giving the sales people goals they could not meet without changing their behavior forced them to adopt to the change in sales focus. Success became self-reinforcing: the more they stayed business of selling the better they performed.

In larger companies, viewing sales operations across departments may not be easy, nor is implementing changes that affect the entire sales process. Yet the more sales operations can be streamlined and admin reduced, the more likely customer satisfaction will improve as deals close quickly and sales pipeline grows faster. At these companies, the result can often be millions of Euros in higher revenues and lower sales costs.

Get the right sales people and channel in front of the customer at the right time.

It may not be enough to transform the sales teams by hiring people with the skills and capabilities to sell solutions to target sectors. Companies might have to restructure their sales coverage model, which means defining the sales roles differently. The questions to ask, include how much hunting versus gathering capacity to employ; what the role of sales specialists should be; whether to use one or multiple sales people to serve a segment or customers across different geographies.
When to hunt for new customers and when to mine deeper within current customers is one of the answers that needs to be made explicit to any sales team. Too many sales people often get comfortable serving their current customers, so an obvious initial step is to charge them with becoming more aggressive about mining the largest customers to their full potential. At the same time, however, the life blood of any business is acquiring new customers.

That’s why an effective coverage model needs to be deliberate about who should be hunting and where. Sales managers and sales mangement should meet regularly with hunting sales people to understand and actively refine their target prospects and beach-head plans. Given the degree of sales difficulty and the strategic value of acquiring new customers, sellers should receive a compensation recognition for breaking into new accounts.

Whether hunting,farming, social selling or mining, it’s critical to get the mix and sequence of sales skills and specialists right. Do not ignore a sales stream because there’s no sales expert in-house to cover the area with the skills the target customers considers crucial.
Sales people need to learn and be taught how to orchestrate effective teaming. Like musicians who seamlessly improvise back and forth after they have played together several times, salespeople who get to know and trust one another tend to sell together more effectively.

Sales people need to get sold on selling again, start a new romance with more new customer conversations, fall in love again with sales time and get an answer to "what do you want me to do?.

Brian
TBB

    

What do we mean by Business Leaders

Everyday in the press or online, we read articles and quotes from business leaders. What are these so called business leaders?. I was taught a business leader was a wealth generator, someone who took a risk, set up a business to create wealth while generating employment. So real business leaders are the legends that are Bill Gates,Michael Dell, Larry Ellison,Steve Jobs to name but a few right down to the real heroes of a local economy, business people who create opportunity and employment for their local area.

So how come middle or senior managers in large multi-nationals often get referred to as "business leaders" in press articles?. Maybe I'm missing something but surely a business leader is someone who leads a business in that they define strategy, how the business operates, the culture and the direction of the business. So the business leaders I see quoted in the press in most cases are business managers (even if they do have the title VP or director they are in reality managers).

Some business managers aspire to be business leaders but most don't. Having an MBA with a C level title while working within the cushion of a large organization does not a business leader make. The role of these business managers is to "Implement". That is to take the pre-defined strategy and Business goals and implement them whether its sales,marketing,finance or product. They may lead the unit or division from a tactical stance but they do not lead the business.

The world seems to fallen in love with titles and in a centralised decision making business world maybe bigger titles such as VP or Country Manager are a way of compensating for the true role a manager is expected to perform.
I love business, the cut and trust of sales,marketing, trying to win a customer, managing people to deliver higher results but I am not a business leader. Knowing ones place in the business world is healthy and honest. No need to perfume the pig, a great manager is a great manager, no need to embellish it with titles that do a disservice to the title "business leader", a title many aspire to but few earn the right to be called it.

Till the next time

Brian.

TBB
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