- March 12, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You know the stories of the Three Stooges, The Three Little Pigs, The Three Bears, and baseball fans have just heard about The Three Batter Minimum (how stupid!). We’re not going to discuss any of those threes today but we will talk about the three things companies must do, right now, in this quickly disintegrating economy, to drive revenue.
First, I’ll share my Three Rants.
In the past couple of weeks, I recorded three, very powerful, very important and very relevant 2-minute video rants.
Rant #1 – Less is More So Don’t Talk So Much
Rant #2 – What’s Wrong with Value Propositions and Elevator Pitches
Rant #3 – Why You Can’t Wait Another Day to Change the Way You Sell
With those three rants digested, let’s discuss business The economy is in trouble – not forever, but for now – and things will unravel in this order.
- Large companies will enact spending freezes, stop issuing PO’s and hold up payments on orders in progress
- Those spending freezes will trickle down through the shipping industry, the suppliers that sell to large companies and those firms who sell to them
- The consequences of bullets 1 and 2 will quickly hit consumers in the form of layoffs
Salespeople, who just yesterday were crushing their numbers, won’t. Those who were missing quotas will be unable to sell anything. Transactional selling (why you should buy it from us/me instead of them) will stop working all together. Consultative Selling (why you should buy this despite the lack of funding) is the only approach that will work at all.
Here’s the problem with that. According to Objective Management Group (OMG) and their data from the evaluations and assessments of 1,958,990 salespeople, only 15% of all salespeople have Consultative Selling as a strength. And that number is misleading because most of those 15% make up the top 5% of all salespeople. 60% of the top 5% have Consultative Selling as a strength but only 3% of the bottom half of all salespeople do. And bad news, most of your salespeople are in the bottom 50%!
There are three things you must absolutely do, right now, today, to have any chance of getting out in front of what’s coming.
1. Have OMG evaluate your sales force. While the findings and insights are incredible, the specific findings and insights that should be important today are:
- How to make the right decisions to right-size or down-size your sales organization. Who is most well-suited to grow the business in each of your selling roles and who isn’t?
- How big is the gap that your salespeople must overcome to become proficient at a sales process that supports both consultative and value based selling, who will be able to make the transition, how long will it take, and how much training and coaching will be required?
- How big is the gap that your sales managers must overcome to become proficient at sales coaching to support those salespeople?
There are dozens of other relevant, useful and important insights and findings but those are the three that you must have the answers for today.
2. Optimize your Sales Infrastructure.
- Your sales process must be optimized to support this kind of selling
- The sales process must be milestone-centric and it must build upon itself.
- Eliminate the dead wood on the sales force – less is more.
- Replace them with great salespeople who will suddenly be available but make sure you use OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessment to select them. Now is not the time to lose 8-12 months because you value gut instinct over science!
- Now is the time to dump the CRM tool your salespeople refuse to live in (bye-bye salesforce-dot-com) and replace it with one that integrates your optimized sales process and pipeline, has built-in playbooks and focuses on sales opportunities instead of data entry (hello Membrain.com.
- Eliminate unnecessary layers of management and right-size the reporting structure. Ideal=6-8 reps reporting to a sales manager and 3-5 sales managers reporting to a Regional sales manager.
3. Train, Train, Train, Drill, Drill, Drill, Coach, Coach, Coach
- Get the proper sales management training that will turn your sales managers into coaching machines
- Get the proper sales training that will turn your salespeople into consultative sellers
- Run daily drills so that they can practice on someone other than their prospects!
You really can get out in front of this and continue to drive revenue if your salespeople can effectively side-step the resistance, create urgency, properly differentiate, sell value instead of price, and not become discouraged over all of the rejection they will be facing in the coming months.
Or you can put your head in the sand, believe that what worked last month will work next month, and wait until your cash flow is upside down and by then it will be too late.
Your choice.
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