Last week, in part one of this article, I reviewed for you the areas that would concern me with a sales manager:
- If they lacked tenure on their team that matches the efforts to add sales professionals
- If the productivity per sales professional is less than $550,000
- If the team isn’t growing revenue year over year
- If the team struggles when the company launches new products or services
Now let’s review a solid management process:
If quota is an objective measure of sales success, then the ability of a sales professional to achieve success rests with their ability to attain quota. If you truly want to measure a sales professional’s success you need to ensure you, as the manager, understands that quota. For example, let’s say Billy, a new hire, is given a Zip code as a territory and that Zip code has $300,000 in “upgradeable base,” meaning that if Billy upgraded your company’s devices that are going to upgrade this year in his Zip code, and didn’t write a single net new customer, he’d write $300,000 in revenue. Sally is hired at the same time as Billy and given a different Zip code that is a little more remote than Billy’s and she only has $50,000 in “upgradeable base.” But, the manager conducted no research and both sales professionals are given a quota of $480,000.
Nine months in Billy has $265,000 billed and is at almost 75% of quota. Sally has $180,000 billed and is only at 50 percent of quota. Despite the fact that Sally seems to be doing everything correct the owner is putting pressure on the manager to fire Sally because she is only at 50 percent of quota. But actually Sally is doing a far better job than Billy. With ¾ of the year gone, Billy has $225,000 of upgradeable base sales in his total of $265,000, so only $40,000 in net new business. Sally on the other had has only $37,500 in upgradeable base (3/4 of $50,000) and has written $152,500 in net new business. Sally is a star but we’ll be showing her the door because we don’t have a solid approach to setting quota.
You could debate the amount of net new business in Billy’s and Sally’s results; maybe Billy actually has $150,000 in net new but if that were the case it would certainly indicate that he is doing a terrible job of upgrading the current customers in his territory, and that would not be good. But the point of the example is that if you are going to measure somebody’s success by quota, and I agree you should then make sure you understand how he or she will achieve that quota.
Once you have the proper territory structure you need to put the right people in those territories and you need to ensure they get the proper training to be successful. In our management training we cover these two areas as selection and onboarding. Each of these areas could be there own article so I am going to give you a high level summary.
- Have a profile of the type of person that achieves success at your company and stick with it.
- Make sure that prior success is part of that profile.
- Have a rigorous interview process that tests for the skills you are looking for.
- And, once the hire is made make certain that you have a solid onboarding training program.
After your new hire completes their onboarding training help them achieve success. My equation for revenue is quite simple: Prospects X close ratio X average transaction = revenue. If you look at the three variables in that equation prospects is the easiest one to improve. So help your sales professional improve the number of prospects in their pipeline. We immediately go back to logic in this phase as well; is it easier to improve the number of prospects you have in the next 90 days or 6+ months out? The answer is simple, if you enter a sale 6 – 12 months before it is going to actually occur you have a much better chance of changing the direction of the sale and closing the business for you and your company. So the manager works with the sales professional on the accounts in the rep’s territory that aren’t buying for six or more months.
How does that occur? It occurs in account planning sessions (APS) that take place once per week with each sales professional on the manager’s team. The sales professional comes to the meeting with 5 – 10 accounts to discuss with the manager. Remember, these aren’t the same accounts being discussed in the 90-day pipeline because they aren’t buying for 6+ months so the discussion is on how to penetrate the account at the correct level and find a business case that supports a change to you as vendor.
My experience is that the sales professional doesn’t know 50 percent of what they should about their own accounts and almost nothing about competitive accounts. That is not necessarily the fault of the sales professional because all this industry seems to focus on is tactics to close the accounts buying in the next 90 days. But it is a sign that the sales professional isn’t building a long-term pipeline. Focus on pipeline growth over a 12-month period. I track pipeline in three buckets, 30 day, 31 – 90 day and 4 – 18 months. Make sure every bucket is growing every month and that over a 12-month period your total pipeline is growing by at least 20 percent, which would give you 20 percent year on year growth.
The manager can’t be on every appointment with every sales professional on his team, and shouldn’t be. But the manager can ensure that the sales professional is ready for each appointment and has next steps at the conclusion of the appointment. Using pre-call planning and post-call debrief is what we teach. In simple terms picture that Billy has an appointment at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow and I send him a five-minute meeting planner to discuss the appointment at 10:00 a.m. the day before. I ask Billy some simple questions in that short meeting: Who are you meeting with (title), what are your goals for tomorrow’s meeting, and what are your concerns? Picture asking one of your sales professionals those questions. You would not be pleased at most answers but our job as managers is to develop the team members and after doing this for a month your sales professionals will start to have goals for every meeting.
For the post-call meeting simply ask how the sales professional did against their goals, if any of the concerns surfaced, what came up that wasn’t expected, and the next steps. Both the pre-call planning and post-call debrief meetings are developmental so the manager needs to be able to provide true guidance to help the sales professional. Calling back in three months with no clear goal for why is not moving an account forward. Make certain that the goals and the actions move the account forward, not sideways.
You have a lot of information on each sales professional at this point. They were put through a rigorous interview process, you on boarded them, you sit in APS with them every week and do pre-call planning and post-call debrief with them daily. You know where they are strong and where they could use some extra development. You now put together an individual development plan (IDP) that works the specific areas of development of the individual. I’ll use an easy example, but let’s say a sales professional is very strong at getting first appointments but needs help in presentations. I’d have this sales professional give a presentation on getting first appointments to the sales team. I’d review his presentation a week before the meeting and help him with flow and content but I gave him a level of comfort in that he is presenting on an area of personal strength. Just a simple example but the point is that I help every team member develop professionally and I do it deliberately.
At this point you see that the manager is spending time in APS, in pre-call planning and post call debrief meetings, ensuring pipeline is growing, and working with his sales professionals to develop them. I can’t imagine there is a single person reading this that wouldn’t consider each of those areas highly valuable. There are other areas of focus for the manager, but this article is starting to get long so just come to one of our management training classes to get the entire program.
Getting back to the opening of this article: Where is the field time? That’s simple; the APS drive appointments and the manager would select the accounts he feels are worth his time. If I were the manager that would be an appointment at the correct size company, with the correct contact, and in a situation where I could add value on the appointment. Correct size doesn’t mean the largest. Maybe I just launched MNS and I have a sales professional that hasn’t been probing for need in the discovery meeting so I want to go model that discovery for him. He has an appointment at an accounting firm with 15 employees and it is with the senior partner. This is the perfect opportunity for me to go with him and help him understand how to probe for a business case then position our MNS offering. The point is that the variables really follow the same path of the IDP, in that I want to spend the time with the sales professional where they could use the help.
Make sure you have a solid measurement in place—well thought through quota—then spend time on activities that develop your team and grow your pipeline. If you do that your revenue growth is guaranteed.
