Have you ever wondered why some sales teams work a lot and produce near zero results while others over deliver results with far lesser effort? Most of the under-performing sales teams are confused, disorganized or, at worst, utterly aimless. On top of this, they have no clue as to how to measure their progress.
You don’t need to be Steve Jobs to figure out that, unless sales teams have clearly articulated and agreed on the success metrics, their activities will rarely lead to meaningful results. Now, according to me, metrics is more than the year-end numbers that the sales team needs to clock in, the best companies measure leading indicators and not the lagging indicators.
To give you an example, At Platformax we don’t put a single revenue number for a sales manager, we break down the journey to a successful sale. As long he/she can replicate multiple journeys the sales number will happen, the month end sales number is an output only. We measure the input steps, and this leads to a predictable sales number.
We work with multiple clients and help them in accelerating their sales number, whenever we onboard a new customer, we look for these symptoms to figure out if there are headless chickens doing rounds in the company.
We are always active
Most of the teams believe that they have been hired to be busy, no that’s the fist stepping stone, you don’t hire people to come and sleep in your office (though I love to catch sleep in the office when I am in Japan).
The first reaction is to do a lot of work, and the lack of measurement systems doesn’t help them see through these activities and figure out that they are not translating into results. So the sales team may brag about the number of roadshows, cold calls and mailers sent and yet they may be unable to show a clear linkage between what they are doing and the final results that you expect them to achieve.
During one of our sales acceleration assignments, we found that a sales team member continued to make calls and sending emails during Chinese New Year to clients in Hong Kong. He made sure that he left a voice message too because most of went to voice mail.
He told us that customers in Asia prefer personal meetings and he has to travel to Hong Kong, as they don’t respond to phone calls. And the best part he had data to prove his point. His manager was logical and got convinced with the data and analysis. As a result, he got a 20k USD approval to travel to Hong Kong!
They lack direction
Lack of well-designed metrics squanders the team’s energy and most of them spray and pray for results to happen. Resources are always scarce, and they need to be allocated efficiently, the metrics help you in funnelling these resources to the most important activities that will lead to results. One of the first things that I do when we work to accelerate a client’s sales is to ask them “what are you working towards” if the jaw drops I know there are headless chickens around.
Inability to recover from failures
My passion is Archery, and I have competed at the national level in Slovenia. I must admit that I was very raw when I first started practising the game, my archery coach Samo Medved ( Samo Bear) had told me “If you fall, it’s not about why you fell, it is about how fast you can get to your feet again. After that see why you fell.”
Even the best sales team will have bad days and encounter failure, the presence of a scorecard in such situations helps the team see that they have steadily improved on the metrics and the failure is just a blip. Teams that do not have such guiding stars find it difficult to adapt to such a long terms perspective and may feel demotivated in such situations.
Using these simple principles, I hope that you will be able to guide your sales team to success. In case you are struggling with your sales numbers, please do write to us at Platformax and we will use our sales Jedi to help you in turning the tide. We have helped numerous clients in increasing their sales by using our proprietary tools and would love to help you too.
Leave A Comment