For companies with sophisticated sales operations territory design is paramount to maximizing their investment in sales professionals. Can you imagine starting your sales career at IBM, GE Aviation or Oracle and being told, “your ZIP code is 19010 go out and find some business?”
These companies realize how expensive it is to attract, hire and train a qualified sales professional and they are certainly going to make sure that they use their sales professional’s expertise to maximize revenue and profit. Yet isn’t telling sales professionals to go out and randomly find business exactly what many of you do that are reading this sentence?
When I am asked how I would design a territory I focus on two parts, device in field accounts (DIF) and zero based accounts (ZBA) with a maximum of 250 accounts per sales professional, fewer if they are calling on larger accounts. I almost always get a response similar to this: My reps have 2,000 accounts each so who is going to call on the other 1,750 accounts in their “territory.” My rejoinder, “the same person calling on them today—nobody.”
Let’s look at some simple math: There are 520 hours in a quarter and a star sales professional could probably spend half their time engaged in selling activities, or 260 hours. If an account were worth a sales professional’s time it would have to be worth at least one hour per quarter, wouldn’t you agree? Now see how I arrive at the maximum quantity of accounts a sales professional can effectively call on? The next concept in territory design is that not all accounts have the same revenue and profit potential so make sure you use that knowledge when designing an account based territory.
Now that you have your account-based territory, the sales professional’s job is to get appointments at the correct level within those accounts. I consistently see sales consultants, trainers, and industry players talk about “getting to the C level,” but is that really logical? The accurate answer is it depends. If you are calling on very small businesses, under $10 million, then yes, you want to get to the “C level.” Unless you are in a very rural area or your sales force is selling a service focused on the small company, such as managed network services, the very small customer might not be the best use of your sales resources. If you are calling on companies smaller than $30 million, the CEO may still make the decision on what you sell, but you’d have to expand your target to the top finance person as well; greater than $75 million and you can almost certainly drop the CEO/owner and add IT to your prospect list and over $75 million you’re probably at a director level, more than likely in IT.
What’s this have to do with management? First and foremost, territory structure belongs at a management or executive level and guidance on who to target also falls to this group. But once those two decisions are made it is the manager’s role to help the sales professional develop these contacts. How frequently have you been told that your sales force cannot get enough appointments? What do you do track their phone calls? I wouldn’t. Rather, I would have the manager work with each failing sales professional to help them get more appointments. That help could include reviewing the communications the sales professional is sending out and helping them improve them or focusing the sales professional on the correct type of communications.
This employee development carries into every step in the sales process. There may be some sales team members who can get the appointment but don’t ask enough questions to conduct a good discovery during the initial meeting and miss the business case for what they are trying to sell. Maybe the sales professional identifies the business case but can’t design the proof of concept or justify it financially. It’s up to the manager to identify each team member’s developmental areas and then compose a plan to address them. Does that mean the manager needs to be super human? Not a chance. It is simply the manager’s job to design the developmental plan, not necessarily be the person doing every aspect of the training.
Now comes field time, which is critical to evaluating many required skills of a successful sales professional. In order to be effective, field time needs to be well defined and planned. Before a manager accompanies a sales professional on a meeting with a prospect or client they should get together to define the goals of the meeting as well as to discuss what is expected to occur. This happens in a location where both parties can concentrate on the meeting and where there is Wi-Fi access to research and validate discussion points. That means it doesn’t happen in the car ride to the appointment.
Optimally, this planning session occurs the day before the client/prospect meeting and lasts about 10 minutes. I could write an entire paper on how the meeting would play out in different scenarios, but I’ll use a proposal presentation with a ZBA prospect for this example and I’ll assume the manager has not been engaged with the client to date. First and foremost, the manager is not going out on the proposal presentation to “close the sale” and try to be a super hero; what he/she is doing is using the meeting to evaluate and coach the sales professional.In the planning meetings I’d want the manager to know:
- The company we are visiting and what they do, validating on their Website
- Who we are meeting, including titles and our relationships with the individuals. I’d validate their titles on LinkedIn before the meeting
- How did we get to the proposal stage—what happened to date and why are we engaged in the buying process
- What the buying process is: Who is involved and their area of responsibility
- Which critical players we haven’t met and why
- Is the incumbent vendor involved, who are their relationships with, and how long have they been the vendor
- Why would they leave the current vendor
- What is distinctive about our proposal: What business case will it address
- What questions or concerns do you expect the prospect to have
- What could go wrong in our meeting
- What aspects of our proposal do you believe the prospect will appreciate
I could go on, but you certainly get the point. At the end of the meeting the goal is to have asked enough questions to get the sales professional thinking of the flow of the meeting and to be prepared for questions. At the end of the 10 minutes you enter two or three critical events you expect to occur in the meeting in your CRM as well as the goals you are going to accomplish. You then go to the meeting and allow the sales professional to “run it” from beginning to end, with you observing. After the meeting, and again when you are settled in a place where you can both focus, you review what you expected to occur and the goals and let the sales professional take you through how they did. By combining the two meetings you will discover areas to help the sales professional develop.
Finally, I unequivocally believe that a “selling sales manager” is a “doomed to fail” position. Does it work in Tupelo, Mississippi where there are two sales professionals, one designated as a selling sales manager? Sure, but really what you have is a senior sales professional that mentors another sales professional. But if you are in an area that can support a sales team and you have a selling sales manager they are going to lean on their strength, either selling or developing their team members. In other words, they are more than likely going to either fail as a manager or fail as a sales professional, and in my experience they fail as a manager. If you truly want to grow an area then invest in full-time manger to develop the team.
If you want to grow you company your sales management is the key so invest some time and money to get this critical group trained.
Don’t miss Strategy Development’s Strategic Sales Management Training on May 6th and 7th in Philadelphia! Click here for more information.
