One of the things we see all too often, particularly in telephone and door to door selling environments, is poorly designed sales incentive programs. In sales there is a old saying that you are about as good as your last month, so why is it that we see so many incentive programs structured around the quarterly achievement of sales targets? If you are looking for consistency of performance, we recommend that you structure your sales targets around daily and weekly goals. Why so?……

Well let’s say I‘m working in a door to door or telephone selling role and for some reason I simply have a bad week. I may have been emotionally a bit down one day, had a day off sick, or simply been a bit out of my normal sales rhythm. In a telephone selling situation, I might even have had a couple of days where the call volumes were down or where call quality was less than optimal from a conversion potential perspective. Now, all of a sudden, in a monthly target scenario, I’m 7-10 days into my month and it is looking pretty difficult to hit my target.

So my mindset and application drop and whilst I may push myself for another week or so, if at some stage the monthly target looks unachievable, the business is highly likely to lose revenue I would normally convert, for every remaining day of the month from the “give up” point. In other words, I will be cruising through to next month, or in any case, until the next bonus period begins. In this context, the importance of structuring incentives in the form of short term runs, to maximise sales engagement, is self evident.

Whilst we are on the topic, the nature of the incentives themselves is also a key to optimising sales engagement. Our research shows that relatively small amounts of money can be attractive incentives for a significant percentage of sales people; and adding accelerators rewarding the consistent performance of those who back up day to day and week by week can be additionally effective.

In addition, non monetary incentives can be equally or even more highly valued depending on the individual. Gold Class movie tickets for two, dinner for two, accommodation vouchers, iTunes gift cards, major event tickets and the like are broadly highly valued as alternatives to monetary rewards. Having your Team Leaders, Coaches and Managers structure and set these incentive programs six to twelve months in advance negates the week to week, month to month grind of coming up with next week’s initiative every  Friday afternoon.

In short, one of the great things about working in sales is that “every day is a new day and all bets are off”. No matter what happened yesterday, it is possible to start today refreshed, renewed and motivated to perform. Structuring short term incentives in a way which recognises this engenders engagement and optimises motivation.

Finally, we further encourage you to structure your incentives to recognise as many individuals as possible. Recognition systems which reward only the top one to three sales people with monotonous regularity act as demotivators for your all important solid and steady performers who deliver their personal target month in month out, but who fail to get recognised because they simply never appear in the top three.

We also implore you to think twice about how you use “public” leader boards and the like. Our surveying clearly shows that no-one enjoys being highlighted as a lowly performer. Put yourself in the position of the salesperson looking up at and / or walking past the leader board fifty times per day, to see your name at the bottom of the pile. Practices such as these motivate very few – but demotivate many. Self esteem and mindset can be very quickly eroded; but they are very very difficult to rebuild.

Smaller businesses have many of the same selling challenges as large corporations.

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Whenever an organisation has significant revenue growth objectives, identifying, developing and completing major opportunity wins is one of the most direct paths to success, or so you may think.

The reality is that the sales process and the skills required to tackle $50,000 – $150,000 deals are typically very different to those required to win $2 million to $10 million opportunities. This is one of the major factors we see inhibiting small to medium size enterprises making the transition to Top 500 companies; and similarly for privately owned companies delivering on revenue expectations in post takeover and or post IPO settings.

Let’s look at the 5 key reasons for the added degree of difficulty in successfully executing major opportunities:

1. Sales Cycle Length

The longer sales cycles associated with major opportunities require a different sales mindset to that of smaller more transactional selling. Our assessment and selection experience has shown that more than 67% of sales people have a psychological need for short term versus long term gratification; as opposed to the eagle major opportunity focused sales professionals we train and coach, who have little need for immediate gratification; and the patience and ability to consistently and systematically work through long term sales cycles of anywhere between 6 and 36 months.

2. Power and Sponsorship Dynamics

The need to understand and possessing a best practice process as well as the execution skills to work through the sponsorship and power dynamics that exist within major organisations and that are critical to major deal success is often underestimated. The best sales organisations posses specific models and a common language that facilitate this, supported by the capability to objectively assess and validate opportunity and key player  status at any juncture. Related to this fact, but more broadly across all business to business selling, the single major contributing to lost and / or stalled deals is a lack of attention to, understanding of or lack of access to genuine sponsors and power sponsors within individual sales opportunities.

3. Value Proposition and ROI Development

To put it simply, the larger the opportunity, the more significant the buyer investment and the more compelling the business case needs to be. In major opportunity selling, a value justification model needs to be utilised to document and present the projected benefits associated with your products and services after implementation. Successful value propositions and ROI models can only be achieved when the metrics of the analysis are derived from and owned by the buyer and where they create a compelling reason for the buyer to act. Exploring, developing and gaining commitment around these concepts and getting to the granularity required is a specific and well honed skilled possessed by eagle Major Account and Business Development Managers.

4. Diagnostic Complexity

The inherent additional complexity of major deals demands superior diagnostic consultative selling skills. The breadth and depth of organisational stakeholders varying from the power sponsor all the way down to end-users, means that major opportunity focused salespeople require a model as well as the skills to execute questioning at the strategic level, the causal level and the tactical or”drill-down” level.  These diagnostic skills enable the best major opportunity sellers to establish cause, effect and impact both across and down the organisational structure, which builds broad stakeholder engagement and buy-in, from which they use to build a business case which will often require investment budget contribution from typically a small number of key stakeholders, justified by quantified business benefits to the broader customer organisation.

5. Leveraging Sales Organisation Capability and Resources

It is never possible for a sales organisation to achieve any level of consistent and sustainable major opportunity success, without the support and contribution (and often the blessing) of a broad variety of internal cross-functional stakeholders. In fact, what successful key and major account sellers have to do is conduct what is to some extent a parallel internal sales process within their own organisation. They need to liaise, influence and co-ordinate with functions which may include product management, pricing, logistics, marketing and manufacturing amongst others. This requires consultative, commercial and negotiation skills of a high order.

Given the above, we can see it is unlikely and too much to expect your salespeople to all of a sudden develop and be able to exhibit and execute these skills, just because your organisation wants them to do bigger deals – and now!

Managing large scale opportunities also usually requires the selling organisation to invest in the adoption of a proven high end sales methodology that facilitates effective major opportunity sales execution. In these environments, we do see organisations attempting to use cobbled together sales systems which may be an amalgam of things used in the past. These only work if they are truly cohesive and importantly, if they provide a roadmap for dealing with major opportunities on an end to end (i.e. create through to implement) basis.

Finally, what are the typical attributes of these eagle major opportunity salespeople we are talking about?

Firstly they are usually self motivated and have a problem solving inclination. In this sense, they often share common attributes with successful professional services sector consultants.

Next, they are interested in how businesses work and they can make sense of how the various business functions connect and are interdependent. On this point, they are therefore capable of conversing comfortably with “C Level” executives and business unit managers; and can tailor their conversations to be relevant and engaging irrespective of  role function.

A level of analytical capability is a final common capability.  Top flight major sales practitioners are able to be self analytical and to objectively analyse their competitive position and probability of success at regular points throughout the sales cycle.  Furthermore, the very best are able to pragmatically disengage from low probability opportunities and / or to focus on alternative priority opportunities where other opportunities may be stalled beyond control at particular points in time; and to then successfully re-engage at an appropriately productive point in time.

In closing, what all of this means is that to successfully transition to a sales organisation capable of effectively winning and implementing large scale opportunities, there are sales methodology, sales process and sales skills requirements that need to be harnessed in tandem – and this is not something that can be orchestrated overnight; and in terms of the individual sales people you require to win big, it is unlikely they are the same salespeople you have managing your small to medium sized opportunities.

If you have a need or motivation to scale up to winning bigger, there will be a lead time of at least 12 months that you will need to allow for to get the pieces of the puzzle in place; and another 6 – 9  months for significant results to start to be realised. A best practice we recommend therefore, is to implement these pieces around real opportunities, which enables practical contextual learning; and in the majority of cases, this delivers an earlier big win to celebrate – and to drive additional momentum.

I am often asked by sales people and Sales Managers alike what my view is on activity management.

The question is asked by Sales Managers in the context of it being a constant battle to ensure that their sales people are doing enough of the right activities to put them in a position to deliver the sales results required. The discussion is usually around the number of prospecting phone calls, the number of first and second appointments per week and so on…….you know the story.

From a salesperson’s perspective the discussion is more around the Sales Manager’s continual micro-management of their activity and the weekly one on one “justification” meeting around both their activity and their pipeline / forecast that this sales management approach typically requires. Most sales people loathe this sales management approach, as do I, from both a sales person and Sales Manager’s perspective.

So, am I saying we should be ignoring activity management simply because it can be a constant, nagging and frustrating experience for both parties? Well certainly not – I simply recommend a different approach:

• Start by collecting activity and outcome results for your sales team as soon as possible. You will quite quickly identify benchmark standards which predict success in your business and selling environment, by sales role. Without this data, specific to each role in your business, you will be guessing forever.
• If you are new to your role or the business you are working in, go with your educated guesses in the interim; and within 3-6 months you will realistically be able to collect the data you require.
• Expect to see significant variations in the statistics by salespeople in similar roles. This is caused by variations in prospecting planning, execution skill levels and plain old salesperson “number fudging”.
• Identify 3-4 leading activity indicators that correlate with success in each role and set the numeric. Here you have addressed about 35% of the story; you have established “on the field” metrics, which is a start, but “how they play” when on the field is equally or more important, as is the “quality of opportunities” they engage in. The latter two areas need to be monitored by in field coaching and opportunity reviews respectively.
• Back on the activity front; make the weekly reporting of these leading activity indicators mandatory and as simple as possible. Mandatory means you establish a culture of accountability for this reporting; this means no reporting – no job. Hard, simple, effective, no exceptions. Sales Managers often tell me that they are happy to make exceptions for top / high / consistent performers in this regard – guess what, they have no objection and are happy to report because they like to know their numbers and typically have nothing to hide. Once this is an element of an accountability culture that you have established, it just happens. There is no discussion and those who don’t deliver are frowned upon by their peers.
• Compare, analyse and identify the correlation between the various levels of key activity and sales results over time. Quarterly data typically reveals the trends, patterns and relationships between activity and results.
• Where activity KPIs are not met on a consistent basis and sales results are not being achieved by the individual, commence high visibility discussions to help the individual identify the contributing skill, motivation, process or personal effectiveness factors; and train and coach the individual up to standard.
• Do not try to fix motivation issues – it is just too hard. Ultimately it is not your responsibility to motivate people to front up on time and do what you pay them to do, with enough frequency and proficiency.
• Where training, coaching and other organisational support does not positively impact activity levels, manage the individual out. Unless they are an “eagle”, they will not hit their targets if they are not doing the activity.
• Successful “eagle” performers with low activity to results ratios can provide great development pathway models for the remainder of the sales force.
• When inducting new sales staff, ensure that they have a clear market and segment focus; and the support tools to generate the required activity from the outset. Manage activity under performers out within 60 – 90 days on this basis alone.
• Break these guidelines only in very well considered circumstances. There is an old saying in sales that “if you show me the (activity) numbers I’ll tell you the story” and across our client base over the past 4 years, pareto applies and 80% of under performers are not making their activity numbers.

You may be asking how this helps when coming back to your weekly face to face meetings with your sales staff. Well, it’s pretty simple – making the activity numbers are a pre-requisite for obtaining a weekly cadence meeting with the Sales Manager for value adding coaching and discussion. This meeting will not touch on activity volumes in any way because the culture drives their delivery and as said before, doing the activity is a pre-requisite for coaching and further support.

Ultimately, if you simply establish expectations and sales organisation accountability you will get to really manage, coach and lead – and not play baby sitter and excuse receiver. The time in weekly meetings is now freed up to analyse and discuss opportunities, review the quality of pipeline, work with individuals on skill and process improvement development opportunities, set competitive and differentiating sales strategies and so on. The secret is for you now to get started on this path.

When our assessment and selection process fails us, it is difficult for us to admit we were wrong, particularly because we don’t look good amongst our peers when we make poor hiring decisions.

So we may encourage and protect; and maybe even leverage new and underperforming sales personnel into some easy opportunities, in the hope that something miraculous will happen and the right knowledge and skills will suddenly appear. The problem is, of course, in many cases – we are just delaying the inevitable.

As time rolls on, the salesperson in question sails by the probation date and often the recruiter retention date as well, and now it has cost us the recruitment fee and the opportunity cost is mounting. So, what should we be doing to protect ourselves and manage this important aspect of our responsibilities more effectively?

1. Conduct an objective assessment that requires candidates to validate their knowledge and skill base as part of the assessment process;
2. Design employment agreements to incorporate minimum six monthly probation periods and enabling an extension to be agreed with the employee where performance is inadequate;
3. Develop and implement a detailed role related induction program that defines a proven success pathway;
4. Set specific induction period KRAs and KPIs designed to measure progress and provide a gauge of success pathway alignment;
5. Consider information emanating from the assessment process that provides clues around individual candidate time to speed (recognise that even some of the high achievers may take longer to get to speed than the norm);
6. Invite and listen to observations and input that colleagues and peers can provide about new hires;
7. Provide specific and clear performance related feedback and invest the time to coach, mentor new sales personnel during the first 90 days of employment;

These 7 tips will not eradicate poor hiring decisions in the first instance, but they will help you to manage risk and to minimise lost time and opportunity.

Over the past 5-10 years the wealth management sector has experienced significant change.  Historically successful practices had one successful adviser (or rainmaker) and financial products were structured such that significant profit was achieved in the first year post the sale of the product. In the 1970’s through to the 1990’s there is little doubt that practitioners were more salespeople than advisers and that the focus was product sales. In today’s more sophisticated and highly regulated environment, practices realise profit from their activity much later, clients are more aware of their options, there are significant compliance impediments and overheads and clients are not afraid to change their provider if they are not receiving the investment returns and/or the service they expect.

These changes are dictating that industry players alter their client engagement process if they wish to remain successful in the medium to long-term.  In addition, the need for structured succession planning issues means that the next generation of practice principals will need a new set of Best Practice engagement and consultative dialogue skills if they are to fully develop their practice.

With business consolidation occurring and practices, on average, getting larger,  firms can no longer rely on one rainmaker; our experience shows that firms  require an extensive team of proficient advisers who are able to consistently help clients explore the full depth and scope of financial and wealth creation  issues that they face.

With the recent nab announcement indicating an increasing push towards a Fee for Service approach, the future for the industry is the client being able to place an explicit value on the advice being provided.

Competitive environment

Financial Services organisations are operating in an increasingly commoditised but highly results focused environment. The market is increasingly demanding and shareholders and investors require strong current results coupled with solid future growth prospects. Organisations that fail to deliver on both current results and future growth prospects increasingly find their share price discounted.

Accordingly, Financial Services organisations are increasing their focus on customer and client facing personnel to deliver the necessary short and medium term financial results demanded by markets. In this context, consultative and client – centric diagnostic skills are a fundamental driver of future business growth – and as importantly, client satisfaction and retention.

The Wealth Management industry, in particular, is now attracting personnel from a host of different professional and career backgrounds. In many cases, new Advisers do not naturally possess the necessary client interaction skills to consistently deliver the business and client outcomes their Firms are seeking. It is therefore hardly surprising that Adviser churn rates are substantial. The cost of this turnover is a significant industry burden when you consider not only the cost of accreditation, professional and compliance training – together with the opportunity cost when personnel are unsuccessful in an Adviser role.

This situation has been exacerbated by an (appropriate) but very high focus on technical and compliance training over the past 5 years. When one reviews the syllabus for industry entry and certification, or ongoing annual Professional Development, there is a dearth of quality, industry specific development training focusing on client engagement and client-centric dialogue and diagnosis skills.

Best Practice Client interaction skills

What separates the exceptional Adviser from the average is a set of observable, measurable, teachable and repeatable client interaction behaviours and skills. These competencies enable the best Advisers to go beyond compliance and engage the Client in a depth of dialogue that creates value for the client, because it helps the client more clearly recognise their own specific financial and wealth creation challenges and opportunities.

Importantly for the future, this enables the best Advisers to differentiate themselves from others by the quality of engagement and the depth and breadth of their understanding of the client’s real needs – and ultimately therefore, the quality of the advice they provide. Client’s served by these top echelon Advisers recognise the value the Adviser brings to their affairs, independent of any products and services that the Adviser may recommend.

The 2 major components of a Best Practice engagement model are a structured approach to client meetings; and an industry and role specific questioning and listening model.

Approach to Adviser training delivery and development

Training directed at adults in a Financial Services environment should be designed in a way that ensures cognitive learning is kept to a minimum in the classroom. Information positioning models, language, tools and techniques is best delivered as pre classroom work, via self paced on line learning, within built assessments.

Not only is the most effective way to transfer knowledge around the underlying practices and skills, it is also the most efficient from an opportunity cost for Advisers and the Firms they work for. Initial and regular skill practice and reinforcement classroom time should then be dedicated to providing opportunities to put the knowledge and skills into practice. These sessions are most effective when centred on relevant real world case studies and scenarios, where immediate, focused, personalised feedback and coaching can be provided.

Adviser Manager coaching and support skills

Principals and Managers of often have teams of Advisers that require proactive management and coaching support. The Australian industry does not currently place sufficient emphasis on this critical enabler of Adviser development. It is highly desirable that Principals and Managers adopt the concepts, language and Best Practice approach delivered by the Professional Development they commit their teams to. Regular observation and coaching of Advisers is the key to accelerating their ongoing skill development and ensuring compliance requirements are consistently met.

Senior Executives responsible for sales organisations in industry sectors where there are a limited number of players face significant challenges when market forces driven by new competition demand a new and distinctly different set of selling behaviours from the sales force. The significant regulatory barriers and capital investment requirements in certain industry sectors result in a limited number of players operating around a market share fulcrum. This usually means less genuine competition for major opportunities.

From a professional selling perspective, this environment means there is limited need and motivation for the sales force to “win big”; and the predominant focus becomes maintaining the status quo and therefore spending the majority of selling time on account management and maintenance activities. The predominant sales strategies and tactics tend to be protect, retain and capture organic account growth from existing customer accounts.

Accounts come up for renewal on a rolling 2 – 3 year cycle and the increasingly procurement led and managed process results in an incumbent versus only real competitor negotiation with the intent of driving total cost down and new efficiencies, but typically not intent upon delivering a change of supplier. Should these established suppliers not be driving their own ongoing business improvement programs, the ongoing discounting delivered by the procurement process in this non differentiated environment means ever increasing pressure on margins. Interestingly despite the limited likelihood of accounts shifting suppliers in this environment, sales organisations often evidence undisciplined negotiating behaviour resulting in over enthusiastic price concessions.

Sales salaries in these environments are low compared to more competitive industries and incentives form a small component of total remuneration or are non-existent. Sales personnel in these industries are less motivated by money and more motivated by job security, incentives such as travel discounts which are non performance based and/or their need for an “easy life”.

Over a generation, these sales forces become the preferred domain of non competitive relationship managers who do not need or really know how to competitively sell into large corporations. They focus on describing their products in terms of features and are not genuinely solution oriented. Sales planning revolves around preparing for the next account renewal and pre-determining the maximum discount or rebate to be provided, usually based on the latest comparable volume deal, rather than developing and selling a sophisticated value proposition.

At some point, the entry of new competitors in the industry sector, or difficult economic conditions will change the game. The new competitors often bring a low cost base and deep pockets to the marketplace and look to establish early beachheads in lower end corporate accounts and in the SME segment utilising low cost new technology distribution mechanisms. As the new competitors develop their revenue and customer base, they begin to cherry pick the most attractive major accounts. Given their cost base disadvantage and their inability to differentiate, the incumbents compete to retain accounts on price and margin pressures intensify.

The playing field is now doubly uneven because the new competitors hire well trained and experienced solution oriented and incentive driven salespeople, who find it relatively easy to outsell the cardigan and slipper brigade occupying the majority of sales roles in the sales teams of the incumbents. Recognising that this may be the case, the incumbents embark upon urgent initiatives to develop competitive selling skills within their sales organisations and start to use words like “solution” in their language and sales proposals. Unfortunately their legacy sales forces work on relationships and key contact familiarity, but not a value based business value approach. Equally their marketing departments are not ready to grasp new concepts based around positioning, communicating, delivering and demonstrating real value for their customers. As the competitive pressure ramps up, Sales Managers role up their sleeves and attempt to rescue their sales people by dropping larger than ever before discounts rebates and incentives on the table – and in so doing, they signal to their salespeople that this is the desired competitive response …… and so the discounting cycle becomes entrenched. This cycle typically lasts for 2-3 years and as margin and profit pressure increase, individual deal visibility is brought to the organisations most Senior Executives who begin to get involved in sales strategy and execution. Soon, no one knows who is doing the selling anymore!

The expensive new sales training programs are rolled out apace. Video-taping is used for the first time to “make sure those sales guys can really do what we want them to do”. The two days of sales training on the back of the annual sales conference go well on the basis of participant feedback – but what actually happens post the training is……is not much at all. Six months later nothing behaviour and results confirm that nothing has changed because:

• the sales people who were trained were just not capable of transitioning to the new world in any case;
• the sheep dip approach to introducing and developing new selling skills fails;
• And because sales management continues to entrench the old established unsophisticated and now inappropriate and unsuccessful sales behaviours at the coalface on a daily basis.

If one of the market players fails, the survivors breathe a sigh of relief and everything goes back to “normal”; market share rebalances and discounting gradually eases… after a lot of pain and inconvenience. As a side note, re-signing large customers in the next phase of renewals is difficult because of the benchmark discount levels the incumbents set last time around.

Now that there is time to reflect, management still finds it all too hard to recognise that the sales and marketing machine is really broken not only for now, but for the future. As a matter of course though, a percentage of the sales force retires on an annual basis which affords the opportunity to hire some “fresh new talent”. Unfortunately the selling environment, the sales culture, remuneration levels and lack of genuine incentivation??? attract exactly the same kind of reps you have now and have had for the past twenty years – and so the past continues to be perpetuated as the future. Meanwhile your non value oriented sales and marketing processes continue to enable procurement to commoditise your offering; and “the bigger the deal the bigger the discount” game rolls on.

Importantly, our observations and experience show that irrespective of the mix of direct or indirect channels being utilised to access markets, the situation described here largely applies; it is just that the degree of difficulty in executing value focused selling increases as the percentage of indirect channel revenue increases.

But what really needs to happen………….

1. You need to truly differentiate your product and service offering, led by marketing whose job it is to create a defensible commercial value proposition for each of the market segments you serve;
2. You need to accept that 80% of your sales team cannot be successfully transformed into the competitive, motivated and solution value oriented sales professional that you really need;
3. You need to develop the internal sales culture (which we define as “what you see and what you hear”), sales process and environment that provide the platform for a new and different sales organisation; and recognise that this will be a minimum 3-5 year journey;

This may appear difficult, but with the right sales platform in place, it is simply about getting started on the journey by strategically attracting, developing and inducting the sales management and sales people you really require, on a person by person basis and as attrition occurs over time. Most organisations we see facing this challenge already have substantial components of the required new world sales infrastructure (e.g. CRM, sales methodology, elements of sales and marketing alignment) in place in any case. This is precisely why within 2-3 years it is possible to substantially reinvigorate who sells for you and how they sell, without bloodletting, carnage, revolution or customer disruption.

Of course, it goes without saying that you will need a number of key people who have the skills, experience and courage to drive the change. The degree of success in transforming your sales organisation will be determined less by the quality of the commercial strategy and plan that you develop, but more by your commitment and capability to actually executing the strategy on a day by day, sales call by sales call, opportunity by opportunity basis.

One of the key challenges Sales Managers face is that of inducting and orienting new sales personnel in their roles with a view to them becoming sales productive as early as possible. All too often we see new sales personnel being allowed “grace” periods of four to six months and more, primarily because the sales organisation lacks a sound process for inducting and establishing new sales people on the path to productivity and success. Whilst induction programs for sales personnel exist in approximately 45 % of companies we have audited, they are less often followed in a disciplined manner and of the 45%, less than half possess what we would view as a comprehensive sales induction and orientation process.

As a relevant aside, the most common probation period we see incorporated in Australia Sales Consultant employment agreements is three months. At the same time, we observe that less than twenty per cent of new hires are successfully established in their new sales roles within a three month period and we often therefore ask clients on what basis a decision was made to take a new Sales Consultant off probation at the three month juncture, when they are not realistically established in the role and when they have often not at that stage  demonstrated the activity levels, the behaviour and the skills that will deliver success in their sales role.

A best practice sales induction program clearly prescribes the specific knowledge that needs to be acquired; the skills that must be demonstrated; and the activities that must be completed; within the first 120 days of employment, typically broken down into weekly and monthly blocks, with the sales person involved taking individual responsibility for progressing the program through to completion. Specific induction program content will vary depending on the sales role, but speaking broadly, we see three categories of required content, those being knowledge, skills and activities.

Key knowledge to be  assimilated in first 90 days

We will focus here on key areas of sales related knowledge acquisition rather than the detail of the host of HR department and routine employee administration related information that also needs to be acquired.

• Sales strategy and commercial business plan
• Channel strategy
• Customer segmentation and customer / client value propositions by segment
• Target Key Players in customer / client base
• Problems the company’s products and services solve and / or the opportunities that the company’s products and services create for customers / clients
• Sales methodology, sales process and supporting sales tools
• Customer database structure and utilisation (CRM)
• Allocated sales territory
• Pricing structure, guidelines and process
• Sales targets
• Key Results Areas; Key Performance Indicators; Activity Metrics
• Incentive structure
• Key internal sales department and cross functional relationships
• Key external and customer / client relationships

Sales skills to be observed and evaluated in first 90 days

Whilst we expect that a rigorous recruitment and selection process will have established the shortlisted candidates’ capability to fulfil the role, a key function of the induction process should be to evidence the required skills in practice and to identify any skill gaps that may require attention.

• Territory planning
• Opportunity planning
• Prospecting ( Creating interest)
• Pre-call planning
• Activity planning and organisation skills
• Opportunity development and management
• Account planning and development
• Consultative selling
• Demonstrating and delivering value
• Pipeline management and forecasting
• Negotiating
• Implementation
• Communication and presentation

Skills assessment and the recruitment process

It is perhaps useful to digress here for a moment to discuss precisely how skills can be effectively and practically assessed in your sales recruitment process. We think it is fair to say that all too many candidates are appointed to sales roles without adequate objective assessment of their sales capability. Whilst we could fill many paragraphs here discussing the merits of sales suitability and aptitude testing, which we do support, it is our view that Sales Managers need to utilise recruitment practices which require candidates to physically, practically and contextually demonstrate the sales behaviours and skills you require.

The sales capability assessment systems that we have designed follow an “a day in the role” format in which candidates attend company or off site premises to participate in a series of activities which enable their sales capability to be objectively assessed. Rather than describe the one day assessment process in detail, the agenda below will provide an insight into the a day in the role process:

8:30 Sign into workstation; access and review diary; accept appointments for today via email

8:45 Develop first draft of a Territory Plan based on the detailed information provided

9:30 Read opportunity case study scenario and prepare for a 10:30 sales call

10:30 – 10:45 Break

10:45 Conduct sales call with Sales Manager and one selected other playing prospect(s)

11:30 Post sales call discussion

11:45 Create and email self developed post sales call follow up note to prospect(s)

12:30 Lunch break

1:00   Sales target planning and / or deal related financial analysis activity

2:00 Informal coffee and discussion with 2 peer level sales team members (an opportunity for candidate to gain perspective on the company, the selling environment, sales management style, sales organisation culture and so on)

2:45 Sales forecasting activity

3:45 Break

4:15 Sales administration activity (e.g. CRM, sales process, sales documentation related)

5:00 Debrief and next steps with Sales Manager and / or HR

Our clients have found that ultimately, there is nothing like having the opportunity to see candidates in action across a variety of the required functions within their role, to enable them to make a very objective and realistic assessment of candidates.

Required activity and outputs within first 90 days

Whilst activity levels and output are often considered old-fashioned and even “unsophisticated” measures of sales performance, we strongly recommend that you continually monitor the activity of all in your sales force. Importantly, we have found the first 60 days in the role to be an accurate predictor of future activity. In short, if activity is underwhelming in the first 30 – 60 day “honeymoon” period, you have a problem. Your observations around activity should encompass both leading and lagging indicator measures as well as reviewing the quality of the outputs from key tasks and role functions. In the first 90 days, we recommend that you inspect the following, as a result of self reporting by the sales person involved. If you have a CRM system  that enables easy and effective data capture to enable easy reporting, well and good.

• Territory plan
• Opportunity plans
• Prospecting  calls and emails (leading indicator)
• Call plans (leading indicator)
• Account plans
• First meetings (leading indicator)
• Weekly customer / prospect meetings
• Pipeline growth (leading indicator)
• Sales (lagging indicator)

Whilst “sales” is a less important metric for the induction period, depending on your average sell cycle length, it can be all too easy to make excuses for new sales personnel early in their role.

The sole responsibility for the induction process should sit with the relevant Sales Manager who must allocate adequate time to not only drive and monitor induction and early performance, but to help fully orient new sales personnel and very importantly to establish a day to day coach, mentor and supporting relationship. Making an assessment of new salespersons’ “coachability” is another critical first 30-60 day function for the Sales Manager.

Finally, a worst practice we see is that of leaving new hires “to find their own feet”, which roughly translated usually means “I don’t have time”; “I couldn’t be bothered”; or “I’m just going to let them run and I hope they work out OK”.  Any experienced Sales Manager has a strong instinct (usually based on unstructured or even relatively random observation) about the likelihood of a new sales hire being successful or otherwise after 30-45 days of employment. Unfortunately, we may have all at times been prone to ignoring our instincts because it means admitting we made a poor hiring decision. A well designed induction and early monitoring and supporting approach will enable you to make highly objective decisions about new hires – and early in play.

We are yet to quantify what we think will be some telling statistics around the recruitment of sales personnel, but the majority of clients we work with acknowledge recruitment and induction as an area with scope for very significant future improvement. Our experience is telling us that anywhere up to 30 per cent of new sales personnel should not have been hired in the first place; and that as many as 80% of these “wrong hires” work for the organisation that hired them for at least 12 months before they are terminated on performance grounds, or before they resign on their own terms. The resulting costs to business’s are many and varied and  certainly very substantial. A best practice induction and orientation process will assist you to quickly validate your hiring decision; recognise capability gaps that you are prepared to invest time and resources to close; recognise when a poor hiring decision has been made, accept responsibility and take the appropriate action.

Despite the significant volume of solid research completed and the supporting articles published in magazines and journals including Harvard Business Review and Sales and Marketing Magazine as far back as the mid 1960s, sales organisations have managed to largely ignore or resist the proven need to take a more scientific approach to selling.

Many major organisations over that period have embraced “sales process” and “need for change” speak and accordingly invested primarily in one of four or five of the key proven research and evidence based methodologies that evidenced sustainable sales uplift when implemented effectively. So what typically happens is the sales organisation is hauled off the road and the training delivered. Unfortunately real engagement and implementation often fails to occur from thereon, for two key reasons:

1. There is no game plan outlining how the new methodology, skills and tools will be used day to day post the training;
2. Regional Sales Management for a variety of reasons fails to embrace the need for change and in essence instructs the sales team to ignore what they learned and keep doing what they have always done because “we know how to sell and it is all about relationships. We don’t need this fancy American sales training to tell us how to sell. Our relationships are what keep the dollars rolling in the door for this business year in, year out!”

Over the same forty year period, procurement processes have progressively developed and major account reviews and tender processes have been locked into rigorous processes that de-link and neutralise the value of established buyer-seller relationships and demand the need for selling organisations to demonstrate and deliver real and quantified business value (note that value this does not mean a discount). With the value of relationships now utilised in the buying process to maximise value delivery versus simply renew with an increased level of discount, the good old death knock phone call from the key customer relationship holder telling you what you need to do to win has all but disappeared.

So, the dinosaur generation Sales Managers say to us, “You guys just don’t get it; you just don’t understand how we build relationships and how valuable they are”. Unfortunately if that is what you are thinking, you are missing the point, we do understand the value of customer relationships, the point is, it is now (and has been for quite some time) all about the business value you can create from the customer relationships. In this context, we definitely see the relationships as key to success. As an aside, you would need to do some pretty good talking to convince us that customers have not been utilising  supplier relationships to extract what we have often assessed to be disproportionate and  undeserved deals from the Sales Managers ascribing to this relationship mantra for many years. So, to summarise, customer relationships are very important, but a means rather than an empirical predictor of success. After all, one of the fundamentals of procurement practice is to leverage as well as, to a greater or lesser extent, protect the buying organisations from established supplier relationships that under-deliver on total business value.

So what’s important from a sales process perspective in this new age of selling to and through the procurement department?

Firstly, identifying and entering opportunities early in the sales cycle is critical to maximising your chances of success. Getting to understand the issues, the organisation, the culture and the key people will be virtually impossible if you enter via an RFI or RFP process being managed by procurement. How often do you get the opportunity to engage in a meaningful way with the key customer stakeholders during an RFI or RFP process? Now we don’t want to be cynical, but on our calculations it is less than 20 per cent of the time; and we don’t rate the chance to do a one-way sixty minute “dog and pony show” style presentation to the key stakeholders as an opportunity to “meaning fully explore, engage and diagnose”.

Accordingly, we talk to Sales Mangers and Sales Directors about prospecting in terms of “looking for people looking” and “looking for people not looking”. The path of least resistance for the average salesperson is, of course, looking for people looking. We are not saying these “already looking” customers can’t be valuable and can’t be won; but if you arrive late in the process, a competitor has most likely created or at least framed up the needs that drive the purchase; as well as the key decision criteria around the decision (and to be utilised by procurement in their supplier assessment / suitability matrix). For the dinosaurs, those all important key customer relationships will have been leveraged by the high performing sales people to truly shape and frame the buyers needs around their product and service solution.

As an example of how this applies in reality, in our recent work with a major telecommunications provider, one of our tasks was to help them improve their opportunity selection and the effectiveness of their associated bid resource allocation. In reviewing the (on average) thirty five RFI/RFPs they received from non customers monthly, we guided the development of a process which assisted them to recognise which competitor supplier had most likely influenced the development of the purchase requirements; which the incumbent or influencing supplier had established to be biased around their own key points of difference and competitive strengths. This process enhanced our client’s win/loss ratio by in excess of 100 per cent and enabled them to pragmatically participate only in the “people already looking” opportunities which they assessed as realistically winnable for clearly identifiable reasons.  The exercise also focused them on improving their own capability to influence both existing and prospect customer needs around their own points of uniqueness and strength. In short, they became much less prone to participate in unsolicited beauty parades that they could not win.

The second selling capability we see that helps organisations move above and beyond relationship reliance is that of developing commercial propositions mirroring a business case development approach. Our long held observation is that being able to quantify business value and / or a Return on Investment is the most effective manner in which to sell to procurement. Well you may say, this is no surprise to me. Well of course it may not be news to you; but moving an organisation from a relationship based approach to the commercial business value focused approach we are recommending is a very big leap. Top end organisations are there and some have been for many years; but the majority of sales organisations we see are still unable to quantify the value they can deliver to customers by way of the specific capability, process improvement, efficiencies and so on that they bring. And no matter how sophisticated the procurement team might be, if you can’t convey the specific and inherent commercial value of your proposition, it is unrealistic to expect them to be able to do so.

So how do you address this value quantification challenge? The first place to start is right under your nose, with existing customers. Establishing a measurement process with existing and newly won customers not only enables you to demonstrate value delivery to existing customers, leading to value related customer satisfaction and enhanced retention and renewal rates; but facilitates your development of a library of real case studies that can be leveraged in new sales opportunities. Developing a business case with a quantifiable ROI based on measured value delivered to customers with similar needs can clearly differentiate you from your competitors; even competitors who have a superior solution, but who can’t demonstrate value or superior delivery. As we touched upon earlier, top tier organisations in their sector have developed strong capability to quantify value and therefore create a business case around their solution, but a surprisingly significant percentage of Top 250 ASX companies have developed only very limited capacity to do so.

If your organisation is one of those that has not yet developed this capability in a demonstrable way, devoting a small number of analyst and product management or development resources to a value identification project is small beer investment when viewed in the context of money literally give away in major opportunity negotiations as a substitute for the value you know you deliver, but you just can’t put a finger on. If you are an owner or Manager of a small to medium enterprise, a contracted business analyst resource working with you and one or two other key people and a customer over a six to eight week period can deliver the powerful value proposition you have now, but cannot effectively communicate to customers and prospects. Once you have utilised the value discovery process to quantify the value delivered by one of your priority solutions, you can readily repeat the process for other products and services.

Recognise that your customer will be an equal beneficiary in the process is important; customer representatives can more easily substantiate purchasing decisions and demonstrate the value delivered by their own work with you as a result of this exercise. Marketing departments are additional immediate beneficiaries of value identification. Marketing Managers will now be able to translate customer success as a result of purchasing from you and develop focused value propositions for future sales efforts. This makes the leap in moving from relationship reliance to value based selling significantly more tangible for the sales force, when armed with relevant customer reference stories and sample business cases and value propositions which can be used as templates and adapted according to the specifics of the opportunity they may be working on.

In closing, we recommend you ask yourself two critically important questions:

• Are your sales people looking for people who are looking, or entering prospect customer organisations early and creating the case for a value based switch to your solutions?
• Despite your organisation’s investment in product development and sales training, are you selling a “valueless” or value proposition?

The management and coaching of sales personnel is a labour intensive past time for Sales Managers who typically have a myriad of day to day areas of focus and just finding the time to do so can be challenging. The prevailing approach to coaching individual sales people is to regularly review performance against target and other Key Results Areas and Key Performance Indicators. Whilst this is a quite logical and seemingly reasonable approach to coaching and monitoring an individual’s selling performance, a coaching and management modus operandi based on macro level monitoring of monthly and annual revenue performance achievement delivers minimal real value to salespeople deeply motivated to develop and achieve.

From the salesperson’s perspective, the consistent questioning and challenging around your sales pipeline, is as a minimum tiresome and more often aggravating. The constant questions about when particular deals will close and what the ‘score’ will be at month end is hardly constructive and definitely not value creating from an individual salesperson’s perspective. After all, as a sales person, I’m already clear how my pipeline looks and where my deals are, so spending an hour a week continually poring over the same information often becomes more a demotivating than motivating process.

The self-evident problem with this kind of sales management behaviour is that, in our observation, it does not provide specific and deep enough individual sales opportunity analysis to be actionable and therefore genuinely productive. This style of sales management focuses on attempting to predict and often accelerate revenue generation, but without assisting the sales person with the who, what and how.

So let’s talk sales opportunities, which we expect your sales people will have organised in some form of forecast, sales funnel or sales pipeline. The first step to best practice selling is having pipeline steps or stages that help a salesperson clearly recognise where an opportunity has currently progressed to. If the opportunity is in the early stages, you may call these phases identify and create; the middle stages qualify and develop; and the latter stages negotiate, close and implement – for the purposes of this discussion.

Looking at an individual sales pipeline at this level, a Sales Manager can now obtain a perspective on the mix of early, mid and late cycle opportunities that exist. A prevalence of early cycle activities could, for example, indicate the salesperson is strong at the prospecting or creating phases, but not so good at qualifying and developing. So this would give us a sense of where we might best to assist this salesperson at a micro or detailed level, to better qualify and move opportunities through the various phases.

A common theme we see with sales pipelines is a prevalence of deals in the middle stages of the pipeline. This is often a symptom of one or other of a number of things, two examples being:

• Stalled opportunities where the salesperson does not understand why the deal has stalled and therefore what next selling actions would be most productive
• Pipeline “padding” where the sales person leaves a variety of unqualified or non-deals in the pipeline to create a more positive impression around the quality and size of the pipeline

Given we now have an approach to analysing the pipeline, weekly one-on-one discussions can now be focused on pro-active joint analysis of opportunities focused on delving deeply into each:

• Who are the key customer key players involved in the opportunity?
• Has a specific Pain been admitted – and by who
• What is the buyer doing? How is the buyer behaving right now?
• What are the customer’s decision criteria?

and so on….and on this basis the Sales Manager can discuss the best actions, options, tactics, who to call on next, why and what to do in that sales call.

Now we have a sales management and coaching process that focuses on genuinely assisting salespeople to analyse and action opportunities on a weekly basis and you are working together to co-operatively further develop the opportunities towards the desired outcome. Should the process result in disqualification of particular opportunities then well and good. The process of clearing the no outcome deals from the pipeline is nothing but productive in itself.

This best practice sales management and coaching process also enables the Sales Manager and the salesperson to discuss and agree what opportunities the Sales Manager may be best to get involved in – and precisely how the Sales Manager may help. All too often we see Sales Managers deciding to wade into particular opportunities and instructing the salesperson to set up a meeting in which the Sales Manager will participate. Without the due diligence of detailed opportunity analysis, Sales Managers find themselves involving themselves in sales calls which end up simply validating a non opportunity. This is hardly a good use of Sales Managers’ valuable time.

In this best practice environment, your regular meetings and interactions with each salesperson are focused on how sales  opportunities can be created, developed and converted. A weekly one on one will focus on:

• overall pipeline “shape”
• top five opportunities
• detailed opportunity analysis and coaching on one or two selected opportunities
• agreement around next actions in relation to the analysed opportunities

Sales Managers who adopt these disciplines will as a result be perceived as working side by side with their people – providing guidance and support; and not the unsophisticated “when will we get the order” pressure that is so often a demotivator for salespeople.

Every interaction with the team now becomes an opportunity for coaching and as a Sales Manager you develop a level of  visibility at both a pipeline and an opportunity level that you may well never have had before. With this visibility also comes a strong understanding of where each salesperson can most productively invest their time over coming days and weeks; and where their biggest skill development opportunities are. It also becomes possible to identify with a high level of certainty how each salesperson is tracking against target; and specifically what number and value of additional opportunities need to enter the funnel for individual sales targets to be achieved; and who is likely to make target and who is not.

The day’s fully facilitated agenda includes workshop sessions, discussion forums and best practice presentations by Senior Sales Managers, together with a networking dinner where you can develop new business relationships and exchange ideas in a relaxed setting.

Take the opportunity to get yourself out of the business for a day to gain fresh insights and new perspectives and learn what others are doing to face the specific challenges of 2010 and 2011.

Earn the opportunity to influence the day’s agenda by registering early.

2010 dates

Melbourne – Friday 28 May

Sydney – Wednesday 2 June

Melbourne – Friday 27 August

Sydney – Wednesday 1 September

Brisbane – Thursday 2 September

Today more than ever, a seller’s ability to execute key selling skills is critical to the success of their organizations.

Successful sellers can’t afford to blow an opportunity with the wrong message by delivering a confusing or overwhelming sales presentation.

SolutionSpeak™ gives sellers the ability to deliver solution-driven presentations that are focused on solving your prospective client’s business problem and alleviating their pain.

SolutionSpeak is a unique presentation methodology and training course designed specifically for salespeople who focus on selling high-value solutions. The course teaches sellers key elements of delivering high impact presentations. It also aligns with key principles of Solution Selling® so that presenters connect with the critical issues of buyers effectively. Other presentation programs may prepare you to speak in front of crowds, or help you gain confidence in being in the spotlight. Only SolutionSpeak prepares you to deliver solution-driven sales presentations that win deals.

“Following this process will take your closing ratio to the next level! Your clients will thank you for presenting with impact…speaking to their needs. Gain more wins, be more successful and stress less. If you only have time to attend one seminar this year, make it SolutionSpeak™!” — Pamela Johnson, Senior Account Executive

SolutionSpeak™ is a two-day workshop where participants learn and practice concepts, principles, and methods for developing and delivering a solution-driven sales presentation to the Right Person, at the Right Time, and with the Right Solution.

“Your salesperson is now the single largest factor (39%) in a customer’s decision.” No other factor – product, quality, or pricing – equals the impact of a salesperson. -HR Chally’s World Class Sales Research

The essential solution-driven methods presented in this course will help sellers immediately capture the attention of the buyer and compel them to take the next steps.  Along with the principles of buyer-alignment, the workshop will focus on foundational presentation elements, key communication practices and the components of a well-structured presentation.

Take the next step in building the success of your sales career.  Contact LevelFive for more information about SolutionSpeak.

The first question we are often asked is – “What have you got for us to look at?” We usually answer this with a couple of questions like, “So what are you looking to achieve?”; “What is the purpose of the training?” and the answer is “……to help our people sell better.” The conversation develops from there and at some point, when we ask what training they have engaged in previously we get the answer, “Oh, we are really big on training here and we’ve done most things around and we’re now looking for something that will take us to a new level.”This is when we get really concerned for those we are talking to.

Well you might be thinking, we are beyond that, when we do training we always do a training needs analysis. Fantastic. Now tell me how that needs analysis was carried out. A survey of the sales force? A survey of sales management? Interviews with the Sales Manager and selected sales personnel by the Learning and Development Manager?

These are, of course, all useful inputs to a training needs analysis, but how would we go about it? Armed with appropriate background on your sales plan and targets and the solutions you sell, we would get very practical.

• Let’s start with a look at your sales pipeline. What’s in there? What is the average age of opportunities in there? What percentage of opportunities are fully qualified? That is, what percentage are real opportunities?
• What steps in the sales process are your team best at?
• What steps in the sales process let you down most often?
• Where do your deals most regularly get stalled?
• How does “opportunity shape” match the ideal?

Armed with these insights, let’s get out in the field and see how you sell.

• Let’s look at how you sell early in the sales cycle, late in the sales cycle and mid cycle.
• Let’s look at how you sell in small, medium and large opportunities.
• Let’s look at how you sell a variety of your products and services.
• Let’s look at your top performers, your solid performers and your poor performers in action.
• .. And let’s do this with a set of specific skills and behaviours that we know are important when selling in your environment.

Now let’s say this takes us no more than 7-10 days, after which we would be in a position to provide some very detailed information on priority sales process and related skills.

Next you may ask us, “How should we do the training?”

For starters, please don’t position with us that you want to do two days of training and fit that into one and a half at your annual sales conference. A two day “sheep dip” alone won’t cut it and your annual sales conference is definitely not the time or place. Although it may be a great time and place for a launch and an introduction for what is to come.

Particularly if your needs are for skill development throughout the sales cycle, do you think it is possible to cover everything required in 2 days? Can people possible assimilate the breadth of knowledge and gain even a base level of proficiency in 2 days? We know the answer is no. So we recommend that you develop the skills over time and in a prioritised sequence.

Now think about how the priority skills you start with will be reinforced, coached and developed in the field on a day to day basis before you move on to developing the next priority skills.

Think about when you learned to drive a car. If your mum and dad had let you drive up and down the driveway 500 times before you hit the road like mine did, how may that have helped? You would know how to start the car, release the handbrake and put into gear.

You would know where your mirrors were and how to get them adjusted correctly. And you would know how hard to press the pedals to gently accelerate or stop? By now you know what I’m getting at. Skills are learned incrementally not all at once – and sales skills are no different. By breaking the sales process, methodology and components into pieces, people can learn over time and build capability incrementally.

So what is our message?

• Know specifically what you want your sales people to do; and what that actually looks like in action
• Don’t try to teach everything at once
• Conduct training in shorter sessions focusing on specific process, methodology and skill components a few at a time if at all possible
• Many methodologies are based on the same principles so moving from one to another is often pointless; and often times we believe simply an admission that the previous methodology was never really implemented
• Be ready and resourced to coach and reinforce the skills day to day in order to build competence
• Set measures to track and continually gauge progress

We meet way too many companies who have spent $50,000 – $500,000 on major sales training initiatives who have nothing to show for it.

From the salesperson’s perspective, the consistent questioning and challenging around your sales pipeline this approach to management produces, is as a minimum tiresome and more often aggravating. The constant questions about when particular deals will close and what the ‘score’ will be at month end is hardly constructive and definitely not value creating from an individual salesperson’s perspective. After all, as a sales person, I’m already clear how my pipeline looks and where my deals are, so spending an hour a week continually poring over the same information often becomes more a demotivating than motivating process.

The self-evident problem with this kind of sales management behaviour is that, in our observation, it does not provide specific and deep enough individual sales opportunity analysis to be actionable and therefore genuinely productive. This style of sales management focuses on attempting to predict and often accelerate revenue generation, but without assisting the sales person with the who, what and how.

So let’s talk sales opportunities, which we expect your sales people will have organised in some form of forecast, sales funnel or sales pipeline. The first step to best practice selling is having pipeline steps or stages that help a salesperson clearly recognise where an opportunity has currently progressed to. If the opportunity is in the early stages, you may call these phases identify and create; the middle stages qualify and develop; and the latter stages negotiate, close and implement – for the purposes of this discussion.

Looking at an individual sales pipeline at this level, a Sales Manager can now obtain a perspective on the mix of early, mid and late cycle opportunities that exist. A prevalence of early cycle activities could, for example, indicate the salesperson is strong at the prospecting or creating phases, but not so good at qualifying and developing. So this would give us a sense of where we might best to assist this salesperson at a micro or detailed level, to better qualify and move opportunities through the various phases.

A common theme we see with sales pipelines is a prevalence of deals in the middle stages of the pipeline. This is often a symptom of one or other of a number of things, two examples being:

• Stalled opportunities where the salesperson does not understand why the deal has stalled and therefore what next selling actions would be most productive
• Pipeline “padding” where the sales person leaves a variety of unqualified or non-deals in the pipeline to create a more positive impression around the quality and size of the pipeline

Given we now have an approach to analysing the pipeline, weekly one-on-one discussions can now be focused on pro-active joint analysis of opportunities focused on delving deeply into each:

• Who are the key customer key players involved in the opportunity?
• Has a specific Pain been admitted – and by who
• What is the buyer doing? -How is the buyer behaving right now?
• What are the customer’s decision criteria?

and so on….and on this basis the Sales Manager can discuss the best actions, options, tactics, who to call on next, why and what to do in that sales call.

Now we have a sales management and coaching process that focuses on genuinely assisting salespeople to analyse and action opportunities on a weekly basis and you are working together to co-operatively further develop the opportunities towards the desired outcome. Should the process result in disqualification of particular opportunities then well and good. The process of clearing the no outcome deals from the pipeline is nothing but productive in itself.

This best practice sales management and coaching process also enables the Sales Manager and the salesperson to discuss and agree what opportunities the Sales Manager may be best to get involved in – and precisely how the Sales Manager may help. All too often we see Sales Managers deciding to wade into particular opportunities and instructing the salesperson to set up a meeting in which the Sales Manager will participate. Without the due diligence of detailed opportunity analysis, Sales Managers find themselves involving themselves in sales calls which end up simply validating a non opportunity. This is hardly a good use of Sales Managers’ valuable time.

In this best practice environment, your regular meetings and interactions with each salesperson are focused on how sales opportunities can be created, developed and converted. A weekly one on one will focus on:

• overall pipeline “shape”
• top five opportunities
• detailed opportunity analysis and coaching on one or two selected opportunities
• agreement around next actions in relation to the analysed opportunities

Sales Managers who adopt these disciplines will as a result be perceived as working side by side with their people – providing guidance and support; and not the unsophisticated “when will we get the order” pressure that is so often a demotivator for salespeople.

Every interaction with the team now becomes an opportunity for coaching and as a Sales Manager you develop a level of visibility at both a pipeline and an opportunity level that you may well never have had before. With this visibility also comes a strong understanding of where each salesperson can most productively invest their time over coming days and weeks; and where their biggest skill development opportunities are. It also becomes possible to identify with a high level of certainty how each salesperson is tracking against target; and specifically what number and value of additional opportunities need to enter the funnel for individual sales targets to be achieved; and who is likely to make target and who is not.

As a relevant aside, the most common probation period we see incorporated in Australia Sales Consultant employment agreements is three months. At the same time, we observe that less than twenty per cent of new hires are successfully established in their new sales roles within a three month period and we often therefore ask clients on what basis a decision was made to take a new Sales Consultant off probation at the three month juncture, when they are not realistically established in the role and when they have often not at that stage demonstrated the activity levels, the behaviour and the skills that will deliver success in their sales role.

A best practice sales induction program clearly prescribes the specific knowledge that needs to be acquired; the skills that must be demonstrated; and the activities that must be completed; within the first 120 days of employment, typically broken down into weekly and monthly blocks, with the sales person involved taking individual responsibility for progressing the program through to completion. Specific induction program content will vary depending on the sales role, but speaking broadly, we see three categories of required content, those being knowledge, skills and activities.

Key knowledge to be assimilated in first 90 days

We will focus here on key areas of sales related knowledge acquisition rather than the detail of the host of HR department and routine employee administration related information that also needs to be acquired.

1. Sales strategy and commercial business plan
2. Channel strategy
3. Customer segmentation and customer / client value propositions by segment
4. Target Key Players in customer / client base
5. Problems the company’s products and services solve and / or the opportunities that the company’s products and services create for customers / clients
6. Sales methodology, sales process and supporting sales tools
7. Customer database structure and utilisation (CRM)
8. Allocated sales territory
9. Pricing structure, guidelines and process
10. Sales targets
11. Key Results Areas; Key Performance Indicators; Activity Metrics
12. Incentive structure
13. Key internal sales department and cross functional relationships
14. Key external and customer / client relationships

Sales skills to be observed and evaluated in first 90 days

Whilst we expect that a rigorous recruitment and selection process will have established the shortlisted candidates’ capability to fulfil the role, a key function of the induction process should be to evidence the required skills in practice and to identify any skill gaps that may require attention.

1. Territory planning
2. Opportunity planning
3. Prospecting ( Creating interest)
4. Pre-call planning
5. Activity planning and organisation skills
6. Opportunity development and management
7. Account planning and development
8. Consultative selling
9. Demonstrating and delivering value
10. Pipeline management and forecasting
11. Negotiating
12. Implementation
13. Communication and presentation

Required activity and outputs within first 90 days

Whilst activity levels and output are often considered old-fashioned and even “unsophisticated” measures of sales performance, we strongly recommend that you continually monitor the activity of all in your sales force. Importantly, we have found the first 60 days in the role to be an accurate predictor of future activity. In short, if activity is underwhelming in the first 30 – 60 day “honeymoon” period, you have a problem. Your observations around activity should encompass both leading and lagging indicator measures as well as reviewing the quality of the outputs from key tasks and role functions. In the first 90 days, we recommend that you inspect the following, as a result of self reporting by the sales person involved. If you have a CRM system that enables easy and effective data capture to enable easy reporting, well and good.

1. Territory plan
2. Opportunity plans
3. Prospecting calls and emails (leading indicator)
4. Call plans (leading indicator)
5. Account plans
6. First meetings (leading indicator)
7. Weekly customer / prospect meetings
8. Pipeline growth (leading indicator)
9. Sales (lagging indicator)

Whilst “sales” is a less important metric for the induction period, depending on your average sell cycle length, it can be all too easy to make excuses for new sales personnel early in their role.

The sole responsibility for the induction process should sit with the relevant Sales Manager who must allocate adequate time to not only drive and monitor induction and early performance, but to help fully orient new sales personnel and very importantly to establish a day to day coach, mentor and supporting relationship. Making an assessment of new salespersons’ “coachability” is another critical first 30-60 day function for the Sales Manager.

Finally, a worst practice we see is that of leaving new hires “to find their own feet”, which roughly translated usually means “I don’t have time”; “I couldn’t be bothered”; or “I’m just going to let them run and I hope they work out OK”. Any experienced Sales Manager has a strong instinct (usually based on unstructured or even relatively random observation) about the likelihood of a new sales hire being successful or otherwise after 30-45 days of employment. Unfortunately, we may have all at times been prone to ignoring our instincts because it means admitting we made a poor hiring decision. A well designed induction and early monitoring and supporting approach will enable you to make highly objective decisions about new hires – and early in play.

We are yet to quantify what we think will be some telling statistics around the recruitment of sales personnel, but the majority of clients we work with acknowledge recruitment and induction as an area with scope for very significant future improvement. Our experience is telling us that anywhere up to 30 per cent of new sales personnel should not have been hired in the first place; and that as many as 80% of these “wrong hires” work for the organisation that hired them for at least 12 months before they are terminated on performance grounds, or before they resign on their own terms. The resulting costs to business’s are many and varied and certainly very substantial. A best practice induction and orientation process will assist you to quickly validate your hiring decision; recognise capability gaps that you are prepared to invest time and resources to close; recognise when a poor hiring decision has been made, accept responsibility and take the appropriate action.

After some early success, some real magic happened for me in the form of an exceptional Sales Manager who took me under his wing in an IT sector Account Manager role. What that Sales Director recognised in me was more than my energy and passion for success; it was my ATC related disposition for analysing situations and framing up tactics and strategies to ensure that I was ready for any eventuality that my new boss observed. After all, in my work as an ATC Plan A was always being enacted, but Plan B and Plan C were never far from mind (or from being quickly enacted) as I observed, monitored and analysed individual situations as they unfolded.

What my superstar Sales Manager knew is that sales is not dissimilar to any other science; there are things that are fundamentally predictable, in “sales” case driven by “laws” of need and behaviour, both buyer and seller behaviour that is. So whilst I was now operating in a completely different and new professional environment, it was becoming really clear to me, as it was already patently clear to my Sales Manager, that success could be orchestrated by planning, anticipating, observing, utilising knowledge and executing utilising specific skills and selling tools at the right time. Now this didn’t of course always mean that a sale was going to be made, but it did mean I could recognise where a sale was more likely, why that was so and what the things I most needed to do were, based on my observations on my sales “radar screen” – importantly I could work out where I was completely wasting my time. This last thing quickly appeared to be something that even some of the most experienced old “sales dogs” just could not seem to do. (What this ended up meaning for me was more sales from less opportunities and thus a greater success rate, even in larger opportunities. Later, when I became a Sales Manager myself, I learned that a significant percentage of sales people don’t really have much idea at all about what they are doing – they simply call on people, tell them about their products and services and hope that they uncover a need.

So without making it all too complicated, it did appear to me that just as it was in ATC, there was a system and a process that I could follow, that needed to be supported by a set of skills, that pretty consistently predicted success. There were also a whole host of people who had written books about “their take” on the process, and the point here was that in reading twenty or thirty of these books over 5 or so of my early years in sales, the sales systems that they had all developed and that were described in their books and explained and demonstrated on their videotapes were largely variations on a theme that centred around consistent core “laws” or principles.

After the sales calls the Sales Manager and I made together, we would sit in the car and carefully analyse our notes detailing who said and did what in response to the buyers we called on – and what worked and what didn’t; and in a funny sort of way, every call became an opportunity to experiment, to have some fun and to try a variety of selling techniques – very much like my sessions in the simulator as an air traffic controller. This just gave me the chance to “practice” if you like in every sales call. How good is this I began to think, a well paid job, with no previous experience required, where you could practice at any chosen opportunity, with a boss who could help you analyse things and who could provide me with blisteringly clear observations on what I was doing well and what not – and therefore where and how I could improve – on a call by call basis. Oh, and by the way, there seemed to be virtually no limits on the amount of prospects I could find out there and the financial rewards were therefore virtually unlimited. At the same time, being out there in the commercial world, meeting and mixing with the leaders of business and learning about the myriads of industry sectors I was selling into, sure was way more fun than sitting in the tower or in a semi-darkened radar control centre with a bunch of grumpy and cynical air traffic controllers.

It wasn’t long before I was promoted higher and higher and soon I was reporting direct to the CEO of one of Australia’s icon companies, I was travelling to wide and wonderful places and had the opportunity to develop my own sales organisation, which I founded simply on the immutable laws and identified skills that together ensure sales is more science than art.

But management was more difficult. Competing priorities, politics, agendas and all too often, people who didn’t want to, or couldn’t see, that sales went way beyond “building relationships” getting in the way of developing best practice teams. To return to my air traffic control analogy, in ATC it took me three years to get my licence to operate in just the base role function. In sales, there were hundreds of people around, many working for major companies, who had never done the training, who didn’t understand the “laws” and who couldn’t demonstrate the skills – yet they had a “licence” to sell. This, to me, appeared remarkable. And unfortunately today, I still have occasions when I feel the same way.

What my three year ATC apprenticeship delivered to me, my employer and the aviation industry was the base level of competence on which to build advanced ATC skill and capability over time. Unfortunately, today’s organisational thinking around sales still fails to treat sales like the majority of other professional disciplines that are represented in their workforce. As a simple example, a base level of sales capability cannot, in the case of most organisations, even be described. Whilst role descriptions may exist (some may be competency based) and sales outcomes are invariably set out, what selling should look like in a variety of sales role functions is not clear.

I am writing this article whilst the annual Wimbledon tennis tournament is in progress in London – whether it be women’s, men’s, doubles or singles, most people would know what good tennis looks like. In air traffic control, good ATC looks like something specific from a skill and technique perspective. Professional selling is no different – it looks a certain way and can be repeated with practice. It may not be a life or death discipline like air traffic control; but the revenue and margin it does or does not produce for you is the lifeblood of your business. What if 80% of your sales force were “playing good tennis” 80% of the time? What difference would that make to your top and bottom line?

At first glance it is easy to put this down to external factors including market fluctuations and / or unpredictability, but why would one company’s sales drop 12% whilst its major competitor’s sales revenue has dropped close to 30%? We decided to take a closer look.

In a boom market, the volume of opportunity and a less rigorous approach to corporate buying keeps the playing field relatively level where competing companies offer limited differentiation. In such an environment, how sales people sell is less important and the key market players all get their share.

Significant changes in market share are primarily driven by combative pricing, vs sales people selling better. But what happens when the economic climate changes as quickly and markedly as has occurred globally over the past 12 months?

Our subsequent sales audit activity has clearly highlighted one common factor that explains these major disparities in sales revenue performance. That common factor is “Sales Process”. Without exception, we have observed that the organisations who are best weathering the financial storm possess a sales team who clearly understand the steps that their prospects and customers follow on the way to a purchase – and have a Sales Process that aligns.

These organisations’ sales people can describe the stages of the selling cycle in terms of what the buyer and seller are thinking, asking and doing within each stage; and this provides both a roadmap through the often complex purchasing process and a method of validating precisely where they are up to with each opportunity at any point in time.

The typical Sales Process being utilised by the winners has 5-7 stages starting at Plan and ending at Implement (the terminology may vary). Sales Management in these organisations uses the process to coach and support sales people on an opportunity by opportunity basis and a common language exists that enables discussion and analysis of sales opportunities across the business.

So how does having a Sales Process help these sales organisations achieve greater success?

In the current environment corporate buyers need stronger and more pressing need(s) to motivate them to a purchasing decision; business cases and Return On Investment have to be demonstrated typically in a stage of the Sales Process that these best practice sales organisations commonly call “Prove”; and purchasing decisions are being made higher within the buying organisation.

Importantly, the superior sellers execute specific targeted activities and use specific tools, contained within each stage of their Sales Process, to specifically address these issues; whilst the lesser sellers continue to sell like they always have, by instinct and without discipline and structure.

A final observation is that the organisations possessing a Sales Process make higher quality decisions about which sales opportunities that they can progress, which opportunities are stalled, when they should move an opportunity forward at any point in the cycle – and when to walk away from opportunities realistically going nowhere. We noted that this typically means a cleaner sales pipeline, on average 20% shorter sales cycles and superior allocation of expensive sales and sales support resources.

Let’s take a look at some segments of the Australian market and see what some of the critical current capabilities and skills are:

Entry Suburbs

In entry suburbs (first homebuyer markets), Government incentives and low interest rates are helping to drive strong demand. In any month an agent operating in these markets can meet myriad buyers and is likely to have a significant selection of stock to sell. So what are the very specific skills that will differentiate one agent from another in the eyes of a buyer or seller in these markets?

The standout individual agents in these areas exhibit strong but consultative qualification skills that enable them to identify those buyers who are truly motivated and in a position to buy, or who the agent can help get into a position to buy. These top agents also have the capability to relatively quickly build strong rapport with selected couples and / or individuals; and very importantly they exhibit behaviours and skills that communicate to the buyers that they will help and support them throughout the buying process. These skills are critical because at this end of the market there are approval processes around grants and finance that are fundamental to sales creation. Sellers in these areas, including representatives of large development companies, very quickly identify these agents as the ones who bring them deals that go ahead, as opposed to those agents who phone them continuously and just talk about or table offers that often sound promising but ultimately don’t turn into anything more.

The skills we have quickly referred to above are easily glossed over, but with a prevalence of less experienced agents working in these lower price range markets, we should anticipate that the quite complex sales skills set required may not be universally exhibited. If you do some mystery shopping we venture that you will find our proposition on this to be accurate. If you hold a franchise in one of these markets, there is an identifiable set of behaviours and skills that are observable, teachable, and repeatable that will drive outstanding performance compared to those companies focusing on more generic real estate selling skills.

Mid Market

From a selling perspective, clearance rates are strong and results are continuing to strengthen (in terms of price). These are “trader” markets where most buyers have an existing home to sell, or have already sold that property to fund their new purchase. The challenge in these markets is more around securing stock to sell than finding buyers and negotiating the outcome. In these areas, there is significant competition to secure new “listings” and the skills challenge is markedly different. As an individual agent competing with two to four other agents for the listing, how do you truly differentiate yourself from the competition, particularly those that may have a very similar selling approach and franchise position to yours?
Where is the differentiating value that you and your firm brings to the potential clients’ unique situation?

What are the clients’ key decision criteria? How do you establish what they are? How do you match your value proposition to their real needs?

Differentiating yourself is most often a complex exercise that needs to encompass both company based and personal based attributes, at the right time and subject to how your opinion of value has been received by the vendor.

The best agents are able to repeatedly secure good listings, at the right price and for a fair fee – in the light of vigorous competitive activity. Poor agents are consistently unable to secure listings in the right shape to actually deliver the optimal outcomes for buyers and sellers. In the mid-market territories, the techniques and skills that need to be focused upon are those that deliver a consistent volume of quality listings representing “good deal shape” for all.

High End Markets

Whilst this area of the market appears to be strengthening, it has been difficult going for agents over the past 12-18 months. Average days on market for properties in this segment have doubled and sales prices achieved have been inconsistent. The key driver of outcomes in the high-end market is seller motivation and accordingly recognising and understanding individual seller motivation is a key skill exhibited by the top ten per cent agents working in this segment. Seller motivation typically has a strong impact on a variety of factors which largely determine the “saleability” of a listing. For example, significantly over market listed prices typically indicate a lack of genuine motivation to sell; as often does a lack of a seller’s preparedness to commit to a marketing budget that will realistically provide an agent the opportunity to find that right buyer that exists for most properties. This has particularly been the case in recent times when the market has repeatedly only evidenced one buyer for each property in this segment – and even then only at a price below the sellers’ expectations and after on market period of as long as six or even nine months.

Key skills exhibited by the most successful agents in the high-end market enable them to manage vendor relationships over extended periods during which the seller may not receive any offers to purchase despite active marketing and substantial numbers of prospects having been introduced to the home. The best agents negate the tendency of sellers to “blame the agent” in these situations. The less skilled can lose the listing to a competitor after a four to six-month corporate and individual investment; and a second agent inherits an often more realistic and motivated vendor, who manages to secure a relatively quick sale.

On the buyer side, the “eagles” in the high end are more adept negotiators who recognise that there are a variety of tactics that need to be selectively employed in this segment exhibiting “patchy” demand. Price quoting to buyers is much more important than in other segments of the market, particularly where credible, qualified, cashed up buyers are looking to buy below market value. One of the very specific things we have noticed about the top ten per cent is that they consistently elicit fuller first offers than the other ninety per cent of practitioners in their segment.

This may sound unimportant, but in a market where properties are being secured by market savvy buyers (who fully understand the dynamics of the environment they are working with) on the basis of a one or two offer only negotiation, the figure at which the first offer is encouraged or “accepted” by an agent (and/or the price at which an offer is committed to contract for presentation to) is absolutely critical to the ultimate outcome.

The best in this segment also exhibit superior market knowledge which they utilise effectively to secure listings at more realistic values than their less skilled counterparts. They also utilise their superior market knowledge in the form of past comparable sales and competitive properties concurrently for sale to negotiate fuller sale prices for their clients.

How to develop or train the skills necessary to succeed in these conditions

Thinking about the three broad market segments referred to above, it is important to develop training case studies, role plays and scenarios to expand the very specific behaviours and skills that separate the average from the best.

Skill training and coaching efforts need to be targeted to various sales forces. The differential sales training needs we see in Australian real estate are driven by the predominating buyer types and average sales price that individual sales consultants work with. Whilst attending seminar style events offering generic ‘‘training” can be informative, they are often of limited value from a learning and skill development perspective because a) they try to cover too much ground in a short period, b) they often focus on the presenters (who are typically not professional trainers) demonstrating their own high level of listing and selling skill, and c)these seminars are not tailored to the specific needs of the individual and / or the particular strong and specific skill needs a particular real estate business will have at any time.

The message in all of this is simply that when it comes to sales training and development, in real estate as in most other industry sectors, the best people development and business outcomes stem from being very explicit about the behaviours and skills we are seeking to develop.

Below are the top 25 sales mistakes made by sales teams across Australia. No matter what your level of experience or training may be, chances are high that you or a team member have committed at least one or more of these errors.

1. Investing in sales training without having identified the specific skill and process issues that you need to address
2. Conducting sales training at your annual sales conference to save travel expense
3. Training a legacy sales team and expecting this will change the way they sell
4. Expecting your Sales Manager to coach and mentor the sales team without the specific requisite skills to do this
5. Pretending that farmers will hunt
6. Believing that serious attitude problems can be fixed
7. Over-rewarding average sales performers and under-rewarding top sales performers
8. Expecting all opportunities shown in your pipeline / forecast to be “real”
9. Believing that all top sales performers are best rewarded in monetary terms
10. Not extending the probation period when a new hire is not performing to expectations
11. Expecting deals to close because you are nagging the salesperson for the order
12. Not knowing your where you are annual sales revenue target will be found before the year begins
13. Developing your strategic sales plan around a number versus developing the number from the plan
14. Stripping your sales team by promoting your best sales people to sales management
15. Accepting that sales role applicants know how to sell rather than having a process which will require them demonstrate their knowledge and skill
16. Not recognising that many people are in sales because it can be an easy place to hide in your organisation
17. Re-engineering and ‘six sigma-ing” every process in your business except for sales
18. Abdicating sales development decisions to Human Resources or Learning and Development
19. Utilising lagging indicators like revenue as your key sales KPIs
20. Not providing adequate sales support to ensure the information you want finds its way into your CRM
21. Spending more time with your poor performers than you do with your superstars
22. Not knowing what best practice “sales” looks like in your industry sector
23. Persistent with poor performing new hires because you don’t want to admit you made a mistake
24. Changing your sales methodology because it didn’t work
25. Letting marketing launch new products without regard or reference to the way you want the selling done

In a recent client engagement — where we fashioned a telephone selling solution for a business-to-consumer financial services client — the resulting 36% increase in sales revenue had the Operations Manager – Customer Contact Centre, likening us to magicians. ”Unfortunately,” we said to Ms Contact Centre Manager, “we can’t stake a claim to that – all we have done is simply model a solution from the existing best practices exhibited by successful Customer Service Representatives working in the centre now”.

It’s a little like modern-day sporting teams taking videos of their weekly matches from a variety of angles, and conducting a comprehensive post-game analysis. We sat in with Customer Service Agents, listened to nearly 1000 recorded calls, and then identified the process, dialogue and call control elements that frequently appeared in each of the successful calls.

Our typical process also involves taking a close look at the top-five, the middle-five and the bottom-five-performing operators, and then eliminating the less successful elements while clearly identifying those that lead to successful call outcomes. Practices that extend or shorten call durations also emerge out of the process.

Now this might all seem complicated, but in practice it is typically straightforward, with the success-defining elements usually only three to five in number.

From there it is a matter of not “training” the best practice call handling process, but rather teaching, coaching, reinforcing, recognising and rewarding (TCRRI) it. Importantly, the TCRRI process needs to span a four to six-month period for the new techniques to become second nature and fully embedded across the team. Whether it is business-to-business, business-to-consumer via telephone or face-to-face, if you are looking for a success model you will likely find it amongst the variety of current sales practices being utilised by team members. The task is then to distil the key elements and have them more consistently and broadly adopted.

Just one note of caution. Simply asking your best operators to “describe what they do” won’t provide the detail and clarity you need, because most often they cannot describe specifically what they do.

This is why most of you are wasting your time making your best people Sales Managers.

For example: Take world number-one golfer Tiger Woods. Tiger can very clearly describe his golf swing. He has examined and studied thousands of hours of video footage of his swing. Salespeople, on the other hand rarely get the opportunity to see themselves in action, which makes it very difficult for them to describe what they do.

When they become a Sales Manager, they often find it both difficult and frustrating to teach what they do. So instead, they get their sales people to take them out on the most important sales calls; and they do the sales call for the rep.

In addition, teaching and doing are two separate disciplines. Many great athletes, performers (and sales people!) can often succeed at “doing”, but have neither the skills nor the abilities to be a successful teacher/trainer.

Modelling the “answer within” requires detailed observation and analysis but the rewards are substantial. Our experience with this approach shows that you will find in the order of 80% of what you need by studying what your successful people are doing right now. We find there is no need to ‘boil the ocean’ searching for answers when the majority of the solution is right under your nose.

(Image courtesy Rodolfo Clix)

If you are wondering how your sales process, systems and skills compare to the best our sales performance process will help, talk to Level Five about our best practice sales audit process.Within just 21 days and for a modest investment, you can obtain an expert independent assessment of your sales organisation’s current capabilities, areas for potential improvement and the opportunity to discuss, debate and prioritise short and medium term sales performance development initiatives in an independently facilitated workshop. Expect Level Five to interview sales people and Sales Managers, review your existing systems and processes, observe your sales personnel in action in the field and to provide an assessment of your organisation’s own unique sales culture.

Contact us at Level Five- help@levelfive.com.au or on 1800 308 010

Obtain a full year’s access to the internationally proven Solution Selling sales system for as little as $295.00 per salesperson, or choose the $495.00 option which provides each participant with 12 months unlimited Solution Selling coaching support.

Contact Level Five now for a free consultation and demonstration.