The life blood of most companies is their selling competency, capacity and results. But what does that mean beyond looking at the sales numbers for last month? There are 4 areas that determine the health of a selling organization:
Strategy
Strategy refers to how you will go to market, what you will sell, to whom, and how you will sell it. We’ll assume you know what you’re selling, but do you really know why it’s being bought? Look past the dollar justification to understand what the product/service does for the purchaser on a personal level. People buy emotionally and justify intellectually, even in highly technical fields. To whom will you sell? Will you be more successful in small, mid market, or fortune 1000 companies? Will you sell to existing customers or find new ones? Will you sell value or compete on price?
Structure
Structure means having a repeatable and predictable selling process. It’s understanding the linkage between selling activities and sales results. It’s setting goals, plans and actions to achieve those goals from long term, to daily behavior and having appropriate accountability to drive success. Structure also pertains to wearing the many hats of management: Supervisor, Trainer, Coach, Mentor and knowing when to wear them. Structure is creating support systems to ensure proper account management while still growing the customer base. It’s knowing how to leverage the talents of the people you have today while recruiting your next star player.
Staff
To borrow from Jim Collin’s book , Good to Great, do you have the right people in the right seats on the bus? There are basically four styles of selling, Commodity, Account, Consultative and Unique Value. The attributes for determining the style are selling cycle time, short or long, and the needs of the prospective customer. Do they recognize the need as current, or must the need be created by the salesperson? While all of them require ambition and drive, each of them require different behaviors or core competencies such as Problem Solving, Control & Close, Relationship Effectiveness and Process Orientation. I often share a comment with managers of salespeople: “8 out of 10 salespeople hired are the wrong people”. Sounds a little outlandish but I’ve only had one manager argue with me because he thought the number was too low! While the comment is anecdotal, if you consider all the variables listed above, it’s not hard to believe.
Skills
The skills of the professional salesperson are varied and complex. They must be adept in making a human to human connection in a great deal of circumstances. They must have finely tuned questioning skills, understand how to effectively prospect, qualify for pain budget and decision, and then get decisions to move forward or close the prospects file.
Each of the four, Strategy, Structure, Staff and Skills are interdependent and dynamic. Examine each of them on a quarterly basis to see if any of them require minor therapy or major surgery.
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