PART ONE THE TRANSPARENT SALES LEADER FRAME WORK
CHAPTER 1 TRANSPARENCY DEFINED
- Transparency sells better than perfection, retains better, upsells and cross-sells better, creates advocates better, and leads better.
- Expectation inflation is when we consistently under promise and overdeliver. As recipients of the expectation being set, we will subconsciously expect more than the expectation.
- In sales leadership, trust is built through expectation setting, embracing both the good and the bad.
CHAPTER 2 THE FIVE F’S FRAMEWORK.
- The Five F’S of Maximizing Revenue Capacity:
- FOCUS – You will make sure your team is working on the right opportunities at the right time through your efforts to hone the team’s focus.
- FIELD – You’ll lead the field each day with the right people in the right roles in the right places with the right tools and the right resources through your efforts to build it. x
- FUNDAMENTALS – You’ll lead the field each day with the right people in the right roles in the right places with the right tools and the right resources through your efforts to build it. Your team will consistently execute through your efforts to drive the fundamentals.
- FORECAST – You will predict the future through measuring the right KPIs and metrics engrossing your responsibility to forecast.
- FUN – And you will drive fun through the creation, management, and optimization of an environment where your team is intrinsically inspired, so they’ll show up, do their best, stay, and tell their friends.
CHAPTER 3 FOCUS
- At the rep level, the collection of times we are focused on the wrong opportunities at the wrong time adds up, and without even noticing, can have catastrophic consequences on your team’s performance, too.
- Firmly defining three categories of focus:
- Firmographics – Find a vertical you can really help and focus on it completely for a predetermined period of time.
- Demographics
- Prerequisites – Understand the soft or hard prerequisites an organization must have to make it worth pursuing
CHAPTER 4 FIELD
- A structured interview process includes four core elements:
- (1) question consistency
- (2) evaluation standardization
- (3) question sophistication
- (4) rapport building.
- Question 1: Tell me your story – what i’m looking for is storytelling ability.
- Question 2: Walk me through the last x years of your resume. Why did you take the jobs you did? Why did you leave?
- Question 3: If you were put in front of a room of 500 random people to give a talk, what subject would you know more about than anyone else in the room?
- Question 4: What’s your most significant career achievement?
- Question 5: From what you know about (our company) and this role, what excites you most about it?
- Question 6: (follow-on to the last question) What’s going to stretch you? Meaning, what do you think will be the greatest challenge you will face here?
- Question 7: In your career, who has been your favorite manager? Why?
- Question 8: Tell me about a deal you were responsible for that you’re particularly proud of? How did you develop it?
- Question 9: What is the value proposition of your current (or last) company? How would you describe what they do?
- Question 10a: What kinds of things do you do to improve your selling skills?
- Question 10b: What is the sales methodology / philosophy / approach that you most identify with and why?
- The decisions you make as a sales leader around what tools and technology to invest in must come from a customer-outcome perspective.
CHAPTER 5 FUNDAMENTALS
- Skills:
- Messaging
- Prospecting
- Discovery / Qualification:
- Presenting – Do our presentations lead to us, or do they lead with us? Do our presentations offer a collection of logic, or do they tell a story where the prospect / customer is the hero?
- Negotiating – Stop offering expiring discounts. They don’t motivate ; they decelerate and disintegrate.
- The concept of sales enablement will be present whether you have the function in your business or not.
- Sales enablement has three primary and essential responsibilities.
- Amalgamate – Name any function in a business. There’s probably a time when that department wants to enable the sales team. A great sales enablement function’s first and ongoing responsibility is to amalgamate those requests, vet them cross-functionally, and then prioritize.
- Orchestrate – Sales enablement determines the optimal path for delivery to produce the optimal outcome.
- Evaluate – To assess the effectiveness and success of delivering the priority.
- Four areas to train on:
- 1. Sales skills
- 2. Product knowledge
- 3. Business / industry acumen
- 4. General company policies, processes, and requirements
CHAPTER 6 FORECAST
- Here are the six typical out-of-the-box stages that come with your CRM system: Discovery (5%); Qualification (10%); Demonstration (25%); Presentation (50%); Proposal Sent (75%); Contract Sent (90%)
- Replace existing stage names with the correlating buyer behaviors that drive buyer decision-making progression?
- A buyer first decides “Why change?” then move on to the question of “Why you?” [and finally] “Why now?”
- TEMPT:
- Trigger: Does the buyer see that their status quo is no longer sustainable? Do we believe it to be the case?
- Engagement: An engaged buyer is evidenced in their willingness to put you on their calendar.
- Mobilizer: This concept comes from The Challenger Customer, 26 but are we attached to someone who is capable of mobilizing change within their organization?
- Plan: An engaged buyer is also willing to chart a path. Are they willing to take a journey with us, and discuss / collaborate on what that journey will look like?
- Transparency: Are they okay with what we don’t do? Have we addressed the elephant in the room? Will the truth sell it?
- Quality over quantity is often said but rarely practiced amongst sales leaders.
- Deal qualification seller development is an oft-overlooked skill but could arguably be one of the most important to maximize the revenue capacity of an individual rep.
- Empathically celebrating the losses for the effort and the lessons learned reinforces pipeline integrity and forecast accuracy.
- Give her the opportunity to relish in her effort and ask with no tone of ever casting blame,” If we were to start this opportunity all over again, what would we have done differently? What do we know now that we wish we knew then?”
- The goal of sales forecasting is to be in range. Teaching reps that wildly under-or overachieving a forecast is not good. Reward forecast accuracy and coach coach coach!
- Four primary numbers contribute to results:
- 1. Number of opportunities your team has to work on
- 2. The dollar value of each of those opportunities ($)
- 3. What percentage of those opportunities you win (%)
- 4. How long it takes for you to win the opportunities you win. These four core metrics are volume, size, win rate, and time.
CHAPTER 7 FUN
(no key highlights this chapter)
PART TWO THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE OF INTRINSIC INSPIRATION
- PRAISE
- Predictability: We do our best work when we can predict the future.
- Recognition
- Aim: Do your reps know what their work means to you? Do your reps know what their work means to your customers?
- Independence
- Security: We do our best work when we are a part of a team.
- Equitability
CHAPTER 8 PREDICTABILITY
(no key highlights this chapter)
CHAPTER 9 RECOGNITION
- On a weekly basis, leaders need to seek out opportunities to recognize the efforts of their team members.
- Recognition is a public calling-out of both the positive contributions, but as mentioned in an earlier chapter, a celebration of effort for even the losses.
- To drive an individual to want to improve, avoid the list. Begin with a single positive, then deliver just one constructive opportunity to improve. Then stop.
- Always remember to provide praise in public, critique in private.
CHAPTER 10 AIM
- Make it your aim to align the work of your team to the outcomes of your customer’s customers, and if it really matters, you’ll find their intrinsic inspiration for their job rise.
CHAPTER 11 INDEPENDENCE
- The best sales professionals are not afraid to make mistakes. However, even the best ones would prefer not to make those mistakes in public.
CHAPTER 12 SECURITY
- Salary is simply another term for what we might call a recoverable draw,
- Think beyond the individual, and create team stretch goals. They galvanize teams.
CHAPTER 13 EQUITABILITY
(no key highlights this chapter)
PART THREE MYTHS AND APPLICATIONS
CHAPTER 14 THE THREE MYTHS OF MOTIVATION
- You will not win if you are putting your focus on employee perks and swag.
CHAPTER 15 THE APPLICATION
- When the economy is booming, sales leaders have two core jobs to bring revenue in the door: recruit and report.
- When the economy is not booming, the job of sales leadership becomes five-fold, requiring a disciplined foundation.
- [The Five Fs can also be used for 1:1 agendas.]
AFTERWORD LESSONS LEARNED FROM” THE GREAT RESIGNATION
- Am I helping the team with predictability through transparency, consistently considering recognition through feedback and praise, helping them recognize their aim means more than just their numbers, giving the team independence via trust and space to succeed, building security by showing the team I / we have their back, and treating them equitably?
- Do your reps know what their work means to you … on a personal level?
- Do your reps know what their work means to the company?
- Do your reps know what their work means to your customers?
- Do your reps know what their work means to your customers’ customer?