Sales Management That Works by Frank V. Cespedes
1. INTRODUCTION NEW SALES REALITIES
- Buyers emphasized the importance of product demonstrations, sales presentations based on their situation, and salespeople who can do that while bringing knowledge from their work with other companies.
- About three of four sales respondents (73 percent) rated collaborating across departments (e.g., sales, service, operations, marketing) as critical or very important to sales success.
- Shopping has always been a social as well as an economic transaction
- It’s the fit of people, process, and pricing and partners that drives sales productivity.
PART ONE: PEOPLE
2. HIRING
- Research has not identified personality traits that consistently correlate with selling performance.
- Good hiring starts with knowing what you are hiring for in terms of key sales tasks.
- Some firms get product and service involved in interviewing sales candidates. Their input is illuminating because those people must deal with the orders that sales reps bring to their firms.
- Complement interviews with role plays, task assignments, and whenever possible, job trials and internship-type hiring scenarios.
- Think about how some inside sales models can standardize and automate lead generation and qualification versus situations where these activities vary across unique buying contexts and so require selling judgment that’s not easily routinized.
- In many firms, for instance, an untapped source of growth is reallocating sales territories so that more reps are placed in the areas or segments with the most potential.
3. TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
- Sales training should be a process, not an event.
- Three areas that require training in most sales forces:
- customer discovery interviews
- structuring and conducting sales conversations
- closing a sale.
- A useful tool for establishing context is what David Mattson of Sandler Training calls the “up-front contract,” which has the following elements:
- Purpose. Make sure that buyer and seller are on the same page about the purpose and desired outcomes of that call.
- Time. Confirm the time actually available for the call.
- Buyer’s agenda. Ask the buyer what topics they want to hear about and any questions they have that you want to make sure are answered.
- Seller’s agenda. Let the buyer know what you are going to ask.
- Outcome(s). Tell the buyer what you’d like to accomplish by the end of that call.
- The end of a sales call is typically the worst time to handle objections in an attempt to close the sale.
- Small incremental commitments lead to larger ones.
4. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND COACHING
- To diagnose and improve performance, you must place the data in context in order to understand how much is the person, the market, incentive systems, or other factors that you can control, alter, or mitigate. Then, you must link that diagnosis to behaviors relevant to that salesperson, which is what good sales coaching does.
- Closing issues also often have their root causes earlier in the selling cycle; [for example, a] rep might not have gotten beyond surface needs in their discovery calls [or] failure[d] to reach the right buying authority.
PART TWO: PROCESS
5. CONSTRUCTING AND CLARIFYING SALES MODELS
- The foundational elements and issues in a sales model are:
- Customer selection and qualification criteria.
- Clarity about the buyers and the buying process at target customers
- The go-to-market economics.
- A sales model needs clarity about how to “separate the suspects from the prospects” earlier rather than later.
- Know who buys your product (persona) and how they buy (journey).
6. MANAGING, MAINTAINING, AND RECONSTRUCTING SALES MODELS
- Firms often get their highest returns from conversion analytics when:
- optimizing activity assignments
- increasing selling time
- reallocating account assignments
- monitoring and managing the combination of online and personal selling now required in most sales models
- enabling better coordination between salespeople within and across organizations.
- Conversion data showed that investing more time and attention with historically lower-growth accounts indeed produced results
- No one has repealed the law of diminishing returns:
- You rarely generate three times current revenues and profits by doing three times whatever got you to your current state.
- “We treat our prospects like customers and, once they subscribe, we treat our customers like prospects: we keep them happy” – Patrick Taylor, founder of Oversight
- Buyers adopt parallel streams to explore, evaluate, and engage with content and salespeople,
- Focusing on specific days for sending content probably indicates unused capacity and a lack of cadence in your sales model.
- Nick Mehta provides a useful typology of possible CS roles:
- Firefighter CS. Typically found in early-stage companies, CS is the “one-stop shop” responsible for support, renewals, and other postsale activities.
- Sales-oriented CS. Typically found in companies with low levels of product complexity.
- Service-oriented CS. Found in companies with more product complexity.
- Integrated CSM. Here, sales focuses on new business, while the CS team works on both presale and postsale activities.
- Create “nuclear families where the pre-sale and postsale activity on the same account is managed by the same people in the same team and with the same manager.” – Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared
7. COMPENSATION AND INCENTIVES
- The researchers found that structured meetings, with a free lunch, between high-performing and lower-performing reps yielded larger and more persistent productivity gains than monetary incentives alone or conditions in which the reps had both meetings and incentives.
- Commonly accepted principles for pay mix tend to look at factors like the selling cycle (the shorter the cycle, the higher the variable pay), the ability to forecast sales volume in a market (the more difficulty in predicting sales volume, the higher the fixed pay), and the rep’s ability to control the factors that generate sales outcomes (the higher the level of control, the higher the variable pay component).
- The managerial issue in sales compensation is not whether reps will play games. The issue is establishing a win-win game for the rep and the selling company.
- [A] longer selling cycle [demands] a higher proportion of fixed salary to sustain rep motivation.
PART THREE: PRICING AND PARTNERS
8. PRICING AND CUSTOMER VALUE
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9. TESTING AND LINKING PRICE WITH YOUR SALES MODEL AND SELLING BEHAVIORS
- A 2018 study of SaaS companies found that pricing changes – increases either to the subscription price or to usage fees – accounted for nearly all of the growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for those SaaS firms that did grow.
10. BUILDING AND MANAGING A MULTICHANNEL APPROACH
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11. CONCLUSION WHAT SENIOR EXECUTIVES SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SALES
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