Last night I attended a Sales Leader Forum hosted by McKinsey & Co and Spencer Stuart. Though the official theme was “Driving Growth with Digital”, the discussion explored broader ground. Here are my key takeaways/professional reminders:
- Email marketing:
- Emails with a real sender rather than a generic address have much higher open rates (15% versus 2%).
- Keep email simple (no fancy HTML)
- Personalize emails using information garnered from social media
- Ensure marketing, sales, BI, and product collaborate closely, particularly on campaign and customer definition
- CRM
- Starting with out-of-the-box processes, configure don’t customize
- Keep fields to the absolute minimum
- Change: Gain bottoms-up buy-in via pilots and internal advisory councils
- Hiring/recruiting:
- Recruit sales ops people out of sales. [However, I’ll add you must carefully screen from process and analytical capabilities.]
- Build hiring profiles by stack ranking current (and past) salespeople and identifying characteristics and personality profiles of top performers. (Remember to abide by employment laws in doing so.)
- Top sales performers exhibit curiosity (as demonstrated by learning outside of work) and adaptability to change. Notably, PoliSci majors were overrepresented in the stars bucket.
- 60% of buying decision has been made before customers engage with providers
- Training:
- Invest “massively” in sales manager and salesperson training
- Test to ensure understanding (one speaker’s company even had a ‘3-strikes and you are out’ rule)
- Train on
- soft skills such as communication, time management & coaching
- hard skills like business acumen and analytics
- technical skills such as SFDC & Excel
- sales process/playbook knowledge