The Success Cadence by David Mattson, Tom Schodorf, Bart Fanelli
Part 1: Laying the Foundation
CHAPTER ONE: The Growth Paradox
- Moving into a sales culture means acknowledging, first and foremost to yourself, that no matter how great your product is, no matter how wonderful its design, no matter how far ahead of the curve you may believe it to be, your product is not great enough to sell itself.
- As a sales leader, you must understand that your product is actually salespeople who are both willing and able to do their job.
CHAPTER TWO Willing and Able
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CHAPTER THREE: The Success Trajectory
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CHAPTER FOUR The Scalable Sales Team
- The Devine Group has identified four primary
selling models
- Unique Value Sales
- Consultative Sales
- Account Sales
- Commodity Sales
CHAPTER FIVE The Success Cadence
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CHAPTER SIX The Challenge
- Identify and hold onto the people whose metrics clearly identify them as high-potential contributors.
- Make your organization is a destination employer where people are eager to build a career
CHAPTER SEVEN The Art and Skill of Momentum
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CHAPTER EIGHT Changing How You Lead
- Your job is to find and hold onto salespeople who are both willing and able. That’s what makes rapid growth possible.
- Compensation plans that are sales-friendly (and hence might at first appear CFO-unfriendly) are essential to establishing a culture where salespeople feel they can make money.
CHAPTER NINE Changing How You Recruit
- Screen or hire for a ”we-first” rather than ”me-first” outlook.
CHAPTER TEN Your Willing – and – Able Matrix
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CHAPTER ELEVEN A Deeper Dive on the Willing-and-Able Matrix
- Sales hires typically walk in the door with high willingness and low ability, relative to the key skills that are required for success in the position.
- Companies that don’t invest heavily in the proper skills training, tooling, process development, coaching, and overall culture will always attract B-level talent.
CHAPTER TWELVE Your Management Courage Moment
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN Your Ideal Sales Hire
- Before You Hire Someone, Ask: ”Is This Person Willing?”
- Desirable traits in new sales hires:
- Desire.
- Drive.
- Coachability.
- Possibility mindset.
- Company focus.
- Team focus.
- Creates and sustains relationships.
- Understands and executes a documentable sales process that includes forecasting accuracy.
- Effective communication, both internal and external.
- Negotiation, both internal and external.
- Effectively sets and defends Up-Front Contracts.
- Analytics focus.
- Customer and business acumen.
- The truly excellent [salespeople] raise their game by working as a team with other functions within their organization to build and prove extraordinary value to their buyers.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Your Ideal Sales Hire, Continued
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Art of Saying Goodbye
- It’s not realistic to expect continuous upper-right-quadrant [willing & able] performance, week in and week out. It is realistic to expect a continuous, predictable trajectory towards the upper-right quadrant of the willing-and-able matrix.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Turning Around Someone without a Success Trajectory
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Your Cultural Moment of Truth
- When sales leaders treat people on your sales team inconsistently, they may tell themselves that this inconsistency is a minor issue — but it isn’t.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Why You Say Goodbye
- The salesperson’s attitude toward their job and the other members of the team is always going to be connected to the formal compensation policies you implement, but it will also be connected to the priorities you set and defend.
CHAPTER NINETEEN ”Skate to Where the Puck Is Going”
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Part 2: The Calendar Matters
CHAPTER TWENTY Your Quarterly Cadence
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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Training and Reinforcement Calendar
- You want linearity in the expansion of the talent you are recruiting, hiring, training, and reinforcing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Summit Conference with the CEO
- The key questions that will come up during your
summit conference with the CEO will break down into five specific areas:
- Market questions
- Deliverable questions
- Budget questions
- Timing questions
- Decisions / commitment questions
- Market Questions
- “What typical problems do we solve with our product / service? For whom? And how, specifically, do we know for sure that we solve those problems?”
- “Specifically, what measurable outcomes do we deliver to our best clients / customers, such that, if a less expensive competitor came along, they would still choose to work with us?”
- “How, specifically, have we won our best customers in the past? How have we gotten them to stick around?”
- “How many of our best customers are willing to give us testimonials / case studies?”
- “How big is the market we are targeting?”
- “Who are the most important competitors in the market, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?”
- “Last but not least — how strong is our product / market fit?”
- Deliverable Questions (for Revenue Growth)
- “What is my revenue target this year as the sales leader?”
- “How does that revenue goal break down?”
- “How many additional salespeople will we be hiring, and when, in order to reach this target?”
- “What is the right compensation package?” Frequent changes to compensation plans, or even to bonus plans aligned to specific products, may cause unintended pauses in sales momentum.
- “How often will you and I be meeting to review my progress on the deliverables?”
- Budget Questions
- What is the annual operating budget for the sales department, and how does that break down by expense category and by quarter?”
- Timing Questions
- “What are the key events in our annual calendars going to be?”
- “When are the key revenue benchmarks going to fall?”
- Decisions / Commitment Questions
- Your company’s CEO / founder must back your play 100 % and must agree to continue to back your play over the course of the coming year when conflicts arise (which they will).
- Start every meeting by offering an overview of what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what you expect to see as a result.
- “Is there anything that would lead you to change your mind about committing to this plan for the year ahead?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Preparing for Virtual Training
- Virtual training typically requires 10 calendar days.
- Once virtual training is complete, the salespeople then gather with the entire team to meet with you at a central location of your choosing for the next phase, in-person reinforcement and certification.
- Recruitment should be a recurring, expected part of your role as a sales leader — not something you only think about when there is an empty seat to fill.
- Ultimately, onboarding is about giving you, the sales leader, the data that you need to decide whether it makes good business sense for you to retain a given sales hire.
- To avoid biased hiring decisions, you need a
clear, written set of hiring requirements that each candidate must fulfill in
order to be seriously considered for the job. These requirements should, at a
minimum, take the following SEARCH elements into account:
- Skills
- Experience
- Attitude
- Results
- Cognitive ability
- Habits
- Screen Out Entitlement Issues with the following question: Can you describe from your time in your current company [ or ”a company you worked for in the past”] a situation where you were pursuing an advancement, a particular territory, or a new role, and even though management knew who you were and what your performance record was, you had to put some effort into proving you were ready for the move? The entitled response will be something like this: Applicant: I had already earned that promotion [ or whatever it is ]. I had worked hard, and I deserved it. Really, it was a gimme.
- Because you are in constant search mode, you will want to use the personal networks of highly qualified sales candidates, as well the networks of your current sales team, to develop contacts with new prospective hires.
CHAPTER TWENTY – FOUR Virtual Training
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Reinforcement and Certification
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CHAPTER TWENTY – SIX Rollout and Ongoing 30 / 60 / 90 Coaching
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Talent Assessment Meetings
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Part 3: From Slow Growth to Rapid Growth
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT The 15 Pain Points of a Slow-Growth Culture
- Establish the proper ratios by means of an ongoing real-time conversation involving Sales, Operations, and Finance.
- Track and discuss leading indicators (activity that is known to result in real opportunities) as closely as you track lagging indicators (closed sales and sales rankings).
- If there is no mutually-agreed-upon next step in place with a buyer or influencer who can set an appointment to discuss doing business, consider the opportunity unqualified.
- If the discussion’s timeframe has exceeded your typical selling cycle, consider the opportunity unqualified.
- If the buyer does not acknowledge that there is a business problem that your organization can solve, consider the opportunity unqualified.
- If the buyer refuses to talk to you about the budget for solving the problem, consider the opportunity unqualified.
- If the buyer will not discuss the decision-making process in place for determining whether or not to buy, consider the opportunity unqualified.
- Salespeople who discount instinctively don’t believe the value of their own product / service — or are facing challenges in the market that they know the company doesn’t want to address.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE The Road from Here
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