Seven Basics for Achieving Top-line Results in Mid-sized Organizations
Selling is costly and difficult for many entrepreneurs. It involves certain kinds of people who are expensive, hard to find, and even harder to keep.
But what is a business without new customers, and how can you get new customers without salespeople? For a short time, the founders and principalscan keep the sales coffers full by calling on "friends and family" — the "friendlies" who buy from you mostly because you’re you.
But in time, every business has to begin selling on purpose, and in volume, to people who don’t know you, don’t trust you, and aren’t terribly interested in giving you their money.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, usually start a business because they see a "better way." They sell for a time on their passion for their product and the problem it solves. But few entrepreneurs have much talent or passion for building a supportive sales engine for their product that can go purposefully beyond themselves, their networks and their personal limitations.
So they begin what we call the selling curse of the entrepreneur. They solve the sales problem the only way they know how. They hire a salesperson — probably someone like them, someone who fits their mold of the "perfect salesperson." That person fails, and they fire the salesperson. Then, they hire a costlier salesperson, and the cycle continues.
Hiring a salesperson looks affordable enough — experienced ones usually begin at around $50,000-$75,000. But once you’ve added benefits and burden, incentive upside and perquisites, hiring costs, firing costs, and coaching time — it’s easily double that figure or more.
Then, with little guidance, or even worse with bad guidance, the hiring executive turns the salesperson loose — too often, to fail. From there, the solution looks easy; "we need a more expensive salesperson." And so the cycle continues.
The lesson: selling is costly, and the odds of making a successful sales investment are astoundingly against you. So, what can be done about it?
Doing it right requires that the sales process and function be designed and managed like any other process or function — with clear standards and accountability, defined goals and metrics, consistent evaluation and feedback — all tuned into and aligned with the strategy of the business.
Here are our Seven Tips for "getting beyond friendlies", and ending the never-ending Selling Curse of the Entrepreneur.
1. Begin with clarity in your strategy and a selling approach.
Strategy is about what combination of experiences — some superior, some par, and some inferior — that your company will deliver to some set of customers to be perceived by those customers as, all things considered, their best possible choice in the marketplace. It’s about who those customers are, and how they can be identified. It’s about what superior value proposition you offer, and how you deliver that value to
those customers in a sustainable and profitable way, better than anyone else. It’s about how you communicate that value to those customers credibly and compellingly.
Broad targeting descriptors like "small business" or "mid-market manufacturers" aren’t good enough. Fuzzy messages like "we’re the high value provider" and "we’re friendlier" aren’t value propositions, and they’re not compelling.
A salesperson will require "dead on" information of this kind to succeed. Without it, he or she will have to "make it up" — with far less market insight than you may have. If you don’t provide clear targeting and messaging information, the outcome may be limp sales results.
Once you’re certain your strategy is clearly defined, think about how best to construct a sales process to deliver it. Will you have a few large target, annuity accounts, or will you "hit and run" on a larger group? Will you use a direct sales force, or will channel, referral, or distribution partners be invaluable? Is your sales process short or long? One-time or ongoing? Is your offering a commodity that buyers know they need, or is it an offering whose value has to be explained? Is the need constant, or is it event driven? Is it highly competitive, or are you a clear "best choice"?
On the delivery front, can you deliver as much as you can sell? Or do you need to pace your selling activity? Finally, what kinds of salespeople will you need? Are they fairly available, or are they perhaps rare, and hence more expensive?
2. Start with the right people in the right roles.
Salespeople come in all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and personalities. Few outwardly observable traits tell you much you can depend upon. Effective salespeople represent such a complex blend of talents, passions, and skills that it’s hard for even the most veteran employer of sales talent to confidently pick a great one. A candidate might look bright, articulate, personable — everything you’d want and more. But if they are at the same time afraid to discuss money, or any number of other possible hidden inhibitions in their approach, they’ll fail nonetheless — costing you time and money.
The people you hire also have to match the sales role you have in mind in experience, talent, and interests. Will they be calling on the CEO, the HR manager, or the janitor? Is it a multi-step close that ends with the Board, or is it a one-step close that the HR manager can sign? Is the average deal $100, $10,000, or $10 million? Does the buyer have to be educated on the offer and why there’s even a need, or is it simply about knowing more about the product? Is it a complex team sale, or a simple individual sale?
Mismatch on these, or any other variety of alignment issues, and the candidate will likely fail. It’s why one of the most important attributes of a great sales candidate is versatility — the ability to adapt to any setting or style with relative speed and ease.
3. Understand the sales process, and provide the right support to make it happen.
Too many entrepreneurs, upon hiring their bright, shiny new salesperson, expect immediate results. The process goes awry from the start with an inadequate description of the focus.
But there are many more places where the process can be stymied. In every company the sales process will have an initial structure and specific tasks associated with it:
- Build a list of candidate prospects, with contact information. Hopefully building from an accurate view of the target audience. Vet the list for accuracy, answering with certainty "do we have the right person, and do we have the right contact information?"
- Create and test initial contact communications. Again, hopefully built on a clear view of the superior value proposition. How will we make initial contact? What is the storyline and approach in each case that will work?
- Make initial contact. Someone has to create, mail merge, and mail perhaps hundreds of letters. And someone has to sit down and probably make multiple phone calls to hundreds of contacts who probably don’t want to talk.
- Prepare for the sales call. Initial company information is very important, so valuable client facing time is not wasted collecting easily available information.
- Manage sales calls and call outcomes. If there is more information, a proposal, or other more positive next steps indicated, this work needs to be done.
- Develop and deploy supporting tools and market communications — proposal templates, backgrounders, collateral, bios, success stories, etc. — all of these items can be important contributors to getting deals.
4. Provide sales team leadership by beginning with your own sustained focus and courage.
When launching a new and/or improved sales engine capability, there will almost always be a period of time when you’re "figuring things out." The list may not be exactly right, the pathway around the gatekeeper may not be exactly clear, the message may merit a slightly different emphasis then you first imagined, or the implementation may not be quite smooth enough.
To win, you have to begin with measured confidence in the strategy and the approach you outline. Expect, until proven differently, that your well considered strategy is right, and focus on fixing any failings that might exist in the implementation.
Recognize also that it’s natural for all to wander away from your strategic focus, justifying the changing focus as "flexibility". Some of that is natural and appropriate, but be on guard. Don’t wander from strategy easily — recognize doing so will be the natural but wrong tendency of the team. Stay ruthlessly focused on your strategy until and
unless it proves wrong.
5. Don’t make it up. Get expertise.
The sales process, for anyone paying attention, is easy to understand at a broad brush. But its intricacies and interwoven dependencies are everywhere, and any small mis-step can render sub par results. Each piece has to work, and it has to work in the context of the market and your market strategy.
If you’re not sure you have it down, don’t choose this moment to scrimp and "do it yourself." Get help from somebody you trust to help you put the pieces together and to show you how it can all work together. Somebody will also need to be there as you continue to refine the effort based on real lessons learned. But pay attention; ultimately, the responsibility will be yours.
Make sure that the expertise you buy is what you need. The backgrounds of possible advisors will vary — some will be sales focused by training, some will be systems or management focused. Many "sales and marketing" consultants, it turns out, are in truth marketing communications focused — often more interested in color, creative and
design than in content, strategy, and selling.
True to the adage, "...if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail...", the wrong expertise will get you the wrong results. The expertise you want is about how to make the process integrate, so you’ll need multi-dimensional expertise, with strategy, sales, marketing, AND communications background, if possible.
Beware the one-dimensional savior.
6. Inspect what you expect.
There are myriad credible approaches to selling. Virtually every approach, every expenditure of time, can be justified by somebody as having worked somewhere before. But not every approach will work for you.
That’s why it’s important to be clear on your expectations, and the metrics by which you’ll measure achievement. More, it’s vital that you monitor those metrics continuously and forcefully to get the results you expect.
Know the metrics behind the science in your sales process. How many dials does it take to get through to a prospect? How many phone conversations are needed to get a meeting? How many meetings to get a deal? What are the steps in your sales process? What is the cycle time associated with each?
You want to measure outcomes, not action. But in the sales process, warnings that you’re not getting results often come too late. You need to know that your sales person is on the right track — or not. More, if you know the measures that matter, you can work to make your team’s performance continuously better, and the sales force continuously more effective and productive.
7. Plan for success, and work to make success happen.
If your company’s offering is the best choice in the marketplace for some set of customers, it will sell — unless the selling process is just downright incompetent. So do your homework, build a credible plan, and let patience and persistence pave your way.
If the offering is not a superior choice, make it so by changing or adding some elements important to customers. Or pick a different set of customers who will be able to see your offering’s existing value as an asset to them.
For offerings that are a "best choice", the key is getting "in market" with conviction, patience, and persistence — but with an open mind that allows for experimentation and improvement, and a demanding mindset that makes the experimentation pay off in sales results.
Our Conclusion
Creating a well functioning sales process is not hard, but it is complex — and it’s certainly not for amateurs. Entrepreneurs who can "solve anything" are often eager to prove their selling mettle despite a lack of know-how. Successful entrepreneurs resist that temptation, and view sales as an expert process that requires specialized talent, a superior set of skills and the ability to function as a committed team player.
