By Steve Jensen
Over the years I have witnessed the complexity of having to deliver rapid growth while having to deal with radical changes in the sales process, managing the performance of a new breed of technology-aided sales professionals, in a fiercely competitive market. To make matters worse, success is expected to happen in months. Who is shouldering this burden? The VP of Sales!
As can be expected everyone is looking for an elevator to success; hire more, hire cheaper, add more tools, send more emails, place more phone calls, have more meetings.
For years I’ve seen sales leaders go on stage to share their success story of how they hired more, send more, got more… more and more short cuts. Most of these successes have been short-lived ending up with the VP of sales being fired.
What can we learn from this?
Which teams always compete year after year in the finals across different sports? The same ones! The ones that take no short cuts. The ones who have in common that they follow the same approach:
1. Performance Driven Culture – and with that, I don’t mean just results-driven. I mean the culture of becoming the best each of you can be. One of the key elements is to embrace a culture of learning and development. Here is a formula to consider for today’s sales teams: 4+1>5, the results of 4 days of work + 1 day of learning & development exceeds the results of 5 days of work.
2. Process Driven – Recently the following thoughts were shared during a #SalesHacker event on the basics of attaining successful, and repeatable outcomes; Process.
“If Process is strong, Success is Inevitable. If Process is Weak, Success is Unsustainable.”
3. Pursue Excellence – Make your sales professionals the expert your customers expect them to be, and this won’t happen with just a 2-day SKO in January. Excellence is only achieved through repetition, every day, every week, every month.
“If your team is not working along a proven process, and it is not training to get better, you are paying a professional salary to amateurs.” @IndoJacco.
The key to achieving a successful outcome is not a simple fix of one thing; e.g. hire more people. The key to success is you got to understand the entire machine how it operates. At Winning By Design we build sales organizations along a basic outline; It all starts with building a performance-driven culture, executing against a proven and improving process, using tools as a force multiplier, enabled by real-time best practices, mastering key skills, and operating as part of a data-driven organization.
Modern sales leaders are not just responsible for the result of any given month, or quarter. Not even for just hiring a great team. Much like the VP of Engineering and VP of Finance they must be held accountable for building a scalable organization for years to come. But unlike any of their peers on the executive team, they never received training, coaching or even a Blueprint for this. Why not? Because there never has been a blueprint for building a scalable sales organization.
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Steve Jensen is the VP of Marketing at Xvoyant