Understanding the Sales Force

Have you ever noticed that when you choose the Express Checkout it always seems to have either the slowest register clerk, or there’s an old lady paying who has already taken 10 minutes to find her wallet?

Today I worked with a group of salespeople from different companies and when I asked how many of them followed a formal sales process only 2 people raised their hands. That’s even worse than Objective Management Group’s statistics about sales process. The statistics show that 91% of the more than 500,000 salespeople assessed to date did not have/follow a structured sales process. And the two who did raise their hand? They claimed that their process was 20 steps! Who can remember that?

When a salesperson fails to land a deal, sale or order which they expected, projected, forecasted and pre-banked, nine times out of ten, you can lay the blame on one of the following ten conditions:

It’s amazing what Harvard Business Review will print on their pages when it comes to the subject of sales. This post marks the 6th time that I have strongly felt the need to question an article appearing on their pages. The November 2013 issue featured an article titled Dismantling the Sales Machine.

This morning I placed a bagel in the oven, turned on the oven light, and experienced an epipheny. This is one exercise you’ll want to try at home – really.

Before an inside or outside expert can help you develop your sales force, there are at least 25 milestones that must take place or the initiative will probably fail. Development has much less to do with content, curriculum, and methodology than it does with the person, or people who will do the developing. I am not saying that content, curriculum and methodology are unimportant! They are very important. I am saying that much like everything else you do, the people have more impact on the success or failure of the initiative than the tools being used.

If your company is about to begin a sales development initiative, do you know the factors that will determine its eventual success or failure?  There are many and ultimately, like most systems and processes, they are only as good as the weakest link.

I just finished a great novel called Law of Nines. A traveler from another world visits Earth in hopes of saving her own world. They have no technology where she comes from but they do have magic. Alex, the main character, just can’t wrap his hands around the magic. Jax, the alien, tries to help. She said, “that little black thing you talk to where messages appear – in our world, that would be magic but we would do it without the black thing. That box that brings you up and down in a building – to me that’s magic. Those enclosed carriages without horses to make them travel? Magic.”

We read about yet more school shootings, abductions, madmen dictators’ plans to rule the world, and any of the other recurring events that must be the work of pure evil. Do you get to the point where you say to yourself, “The world is going crazy!”? I do. I also think the sales world is going a bit crazy too.