One of the 25 Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned
What one thing in your sales efforts that, if changed and improved, would make the quickest and biggest improvement in your sales revenue?
That’s a question I’ve learned to ask whenever I get involved with a client company.
First, a little background. As a 30+ year veteran sales consultant, I’ve personally and contractually worked with over 500 sales organizations as well as interacting with thousands of others through association conferences, seminars and webinars.
Regardless of the size and the business model – everything from solopreneurs to Eight-Billion-dollar international companies – these B2B sellers have all one thing in common:
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Regardless of the type of business, the size of the business, the market served, or the business model, almost every B2B seller has at least one place in the sales system where a little bit of time and thought and resources can make a disproportionate impact on the sales performance. |
They wanted a quick and measurable return on their investment in me. The consistent pressure to bring quick and dramatic results has honed my approach and fostered the development of principles, processes and tools that brought about those results. I’ve developed this observation – one of the 25 most important lessons I’ve learned. Regardless of the type of business, the size of the business, the market served, or the business model, almost every B2B seller has at least one place in the sales system where a little bit of time, thought and resources can make a disproportionate impact on the sales performance.
Unfortunately, that PSO (Primary Sales Obstacle) is too often hidden from the current management, and it often takes an outsider to identify it.
There are pretty significant reasons why most people can’t see the Primary Sales Obstacle:
What Hinders Our Ability to Identify the Primary Sales Obstacle
· History — This is the way that they have always done it. Since the process or principle is habitual, no one stops to question if it is the best way to do something. They don’t even notice it. So, it remains outside of their radar screen.
· Ego — The person responsible for sales sees the outside consultant as a threat and shores up his defenses – protecting anything that might be improved as he/she sees that as an insult to them.
· Overwhelmed — They are just too busy working in the business to take the time and objectivity that is warranted for them to work on the business. So, broken processes and faulty policies and proceeds linger on for want of attention.
· Personal agendas — There are often some individuals with the organization who have created comfortable situations for themselves based on the status quo. To threaten the status quo means that their comfortable worlds may be attacked.
· Ignorance — They just don’t know a great deal about sales systems, sales management or producing greater results from the people and system in their organization. They go forward with less than effective systems, and less than effective people, simply because they don’t know any better.
While every company is different, over the years I’ve seen certain patterns develop. Chances are, you may have one or more of these common PSO’s. Here are some typical examples for each of these three business models:
1. A solopreneur
2. A small (2- 5) sales force, with the CEO as sales manager
3. A larger (20 – 250 salespeople) salesforce with multiple levels of management.
Let’s Look at Primary Sales Obstacles for Each of Three Models.
1. If you are a solopreneur.
You are often caught in the ebb and flow of sales activity. In other words, you spend a lot of time in business development, and your efforts are rewarded. Business begins to grow. So, you neglect your sales efforts to take care of the work you’ve gained. Since you neglect the sales efforts, the future business hurts and in a few months, you are back to where you started from.
While some progress can be made with a disciplined schedule approach to investing your time, that is a band aid covering the real issue. The real issue is that you often like doing the work and aren’t so enamored with the sales side of things. You keep thinking that if you could just find someone to sell for you, business would really grow. You started this business because you liked doing the work, not selling your services.
Unfortunately, the solution lies in the opposite direction. You are almost always the best person to sell your services. If you are going to grow your business, you need to invest more time in sales. Hiring your first salesperson is a high risk, costly effort that will almost always fail. It is far easier to hire someone – even a part-timer – to take some of the administrative load off of you, and for you to then invest more and more regular time in sales.
If you can free up your time to spend more of it in sales, you’ll find your business growing like you had hoped. Hiring your first salesperson can wait a year or so.
2. Small sales force with the CEO as sales manager.
In this situation, the most common PSO is a lack of sales leadership. The CEO, since he/she has far more to do than manage salespeople, operates under the assumption that the salespeople can manage themselves, and trusts them to be effective and make decisions in the best interests of the company.
While that may be occasionally true, the far more typical situation is that the salespeople default to comfortable habits and routines, and don’t tap into the potential of their customers. They suffer for lack of leadership, direction and accountability.
The solution is to train the CEO in certain core sales management routines. We often recommend our Sales Leaders’ Excellence and Influence Course, where we teach our Kahle Way® Sales Management System. Designed to allow a non- salesperson (branch manager, CEO, etc.) to lead a salesforce with minimal time and investment, in a way that doesn’t impinge on the CEO’s time.
3. Larger sales forces.
As the sales force grows, the problems become more complex. There are typically lots of initiatives that can make a difference, including: Revising the sales compensation plan, training the sales managers, instituting an on-going sales development program, creating a process to hire more effective salespeople, etc.
While these can have a significant impact, this post is about the Primary Sales Obstacle. And, that, in most B2B salesforces, means that the salespeople are not spending their time wisely. They spend too much time on prospects and customers that, frankly, are just not worth it. They have developed comfort zones of routine behaviors and customer relationships.
That brings me to the single biggest, most impactful initiative: Create and implement a system that ranks accounts and customers by their potential and direct the salespeople to spend more of their time on the high potential and less on the lower potential. If you can pull this off, you can expect a dramatic improvement in sales within 6 – 10 months.
Having said that, it is more difficult than it sounds, and there are lots of details that can trip you up. For example, most companies will, in a knee-jerk response, rank customer by who bought the most last year, and call them high potential. That’s an exercise in the irrelevant and will derail the initiative by investing your time in the wrong approach.
We have developed a system that can be implemented by any B2B seller to direct the salespeople to the highest potential accounts. Chapter Six in my book, “11 Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople” describes it from the salesperson’s point of view. I do a webinar from time to time in which I teach the system to sales leaders to implement for their sales forces.
Reply to info@davekahle.com to get on the mailing list for the next webinar.
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