The Street Savvy Sales Leader

Introduction

Why I Wrote This Book

My mission is to continuously raise the bar for the sales profession and improve sales organization productivity, and it is to that end that I wrote this book. On the one hand, the book provides a comprehensive guide to building, growing and enabling a best-in-class sales organization. On the other, it takes a close and earnest look at the challenges facing business-to-business sales organizations today and outlines the mission-critical shifts that organizations and their teams must make if they are to prosper and grow in our rapidly changing buying environment.

I began working fresh out of university as a project manager in the aerospace industry. It was, at least at first, fun. I learned a lot and was given a couple of promotions. But when the year ended, all we would get was a pat on the back, maybe a Christmas turkey and a 2 or 3 percent raise. There I was, always working overtime and putting in the extra effort, but when it came down to it, I didn’t get rewarded much more than the guy who didn’t really care and who just put in his time and left the office at five o’clock every day. I soon realized I wanted to work in a profession that rewarded hard work and success and that paid based on performance. So, I got into sales.

In the 25-plus years since then, I’ve been faced with many significant sales challenges, made my fair share of mistakes and experienced my share of failures, all of which has helped me to learn and grow. I’ve worked for some excellent role models as well as for people who gave me great examples of what not to do. It is this sales and sales leadership experience that I want to share with you.

When I look back on my career, it’s interesting to note that in each of the six organizations I worked with, sales training was constant and ongoing, whereas sales management and leadership training was almost nonexistent. It’s like you get promoted from a sales rep to a manager and you get a pat on the back, hopefully a raise and then it’s Go get ’em, kid.

That may be a bit of an exaggeration for some, but probably not by much. It was certainly my experience after being promoted from sales rep to sales manager. I received no real management or coaching training, even though I was relatively young (in my early 30s) and I was taking over a senior team that had many large customers with revenues in the millions. I was very thankful for the opportunity and didn’t think twice about training at the time; I just dug in and tried to be the best manager I could.

Thankfully, up to that point in my career, I had been blessed with great mentors, so I could emulate them and then put my own spin on how to do the job. I made many mistakes for sure, but I gained credibility from that team of veteran salespeople. In some cases, the reps were far more senior and more experienced than I was at the time. But lo and behold, I took a team that had been underperforming and, in less than two years, helped make it a top-performing team and earned an award as one of the top-performing managers in the country.

Here’s the thing: There is no university degree in sales or sales leadership in Canada, and yet it is one of the most vital functions of every single business-to-business company out there. Even in the United States it’s a relatively new phenomenon to have a sales program at the university level. I believe this is a huge missed opportunity. Sales leadership is accountable for the growth of your company, and yet there is such a lack of formal training to help reps to meet the challenges facing business-to-business sales organizations today, not to mention the mission-critical shifts many organizations and their teams must make if they are to prosper and grow in our rapidly changing buying environment.

It’s my hope that this book can help to fill that void by offering sales professionals, sales leaders and organizations a tool kit that can assist them in building high-performing sales teams from an end-to-end perspective. There was nothing like this when I first became a sales leader. Perhaps this book can help others more rapidly gain an overall understanding of the key elements required to build, grow and enable a high-performance sales team.

In Parts II and III, at the end of every chapter, I provide a list of questions for Sales leaders to ask themselves, as well as key takeaways and priority actions. These will function as an easy-to-use reference to help you quickly ascertain the most important relevant questions, issues or actions you need to consider in order to build a best-in-class sales team.

In addition to calling on my own experience in the writing of this book, I interviewed over one hundred sales professionals and sales leaders from across the country. These sales professionals range in age from their mid-2os to their 50s, and they come from more than 50 small, medium and large companies in diverse industries, such as high tech; telecommunications; wireless services and technologies; different types of software companies, including software as a service (SaaS); employment services; payment processing services; customer relationship management; financial services; environmental services; digital marketing services; media ad space and digital content; insurance services; trucking logistics; and hospitality.

These interviews were extremely enlightening for me and serve to offer you, the reader, some additional perspectives on the key themes in this book. One of the most revelatory findings is just how similar most salespeople are when it comes to: 1) what they expect from their sales leaders; 2) the type of culture in a sales organization that best helps them to thrive; 3) the current challenges and changes they face in the sales profession; and 4) the importance of a strong coaching relationship.

Another critical observation is that, in my interviews with sales professionals from many different business-to-business industries of different sizes, when it comes to sales management and sales leadership, coaching, culture, sales processes and the challenges they face in today’s market, the input I received from the various individuals was extremely consistent. What this means, essentially, is that the fundamental principles of selling are the same, regardless of the product or service you are selling. The secret sauce for achieving outstanding results is composed of how you apply those principles and the intensity with which you apply them—and that is something that will vary from industry to industry and company to company.

I titled this book The Street-Savvy Sales Leader because that’s what sales is all about—getting out on the street and pounding the pavement, talking to customers. It’s exactly how I started my sales career: selling, cold-calling and knocking on doors. And I still find that every time I talk to a customer, I learn something. Every single time—even after over 25 years of selling.

I am very proud to call myself a sales professional, and I’m grateful for what the sales profession has given me throughout my career. I am thankful for what it has offered me personally, what it has afforded me in terms of looking after my family and what I have learned and developed over the years. It truly is a rewarding profession.

My hope is that, even if only in a small way, this book can enlighten you about and enhance your knowledge of the sales profession. And, potentially in a substantial way, I hope it makes a difference to how the sales profession is viewed and that it will help with the building and sustaining of many highly productive best-in-class sales teams.

1

Challenges Facing the Sales Organization

How to meet growth targets is the most important issue facing business leaders today. If results don’t meet expectations, the consequences can be a change in direction, a downsizing or even the end of a company if sales revenues can’t sustain expenses. Unfortunately, though, not meeting growth targets is a common occurrence.

Ask yourself these questions:

Why are a significant number of our sales resources not meeting their quota or our expectations?

Why do we keep struggling to fill the top of the funnel?

Why are we having difficulty moving opportunities through the funnel to closing?

Why are we challenged to differentiate our value proposition?

Why is our sales rep turnover so high?

What have we implemented in an attempt to improve results?

What money have we spent to improve results? Is it money well spent?

Are you able to answer these questions clearly and confidently? Are you satisfied with the answers? If not, you’re not alone!

In fact, the truth is that not only are you not alone, you have lots of company. Indeed, most leaders are in the same boat, frustrated by poor results and unable to pinpoint the cause.

Without identifying a cause, what happens? A sales leader gets fired and a new one gets hired. Or the company brings in expensive resources to introduce a new sales process methodology, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or a new knowledge management tool, aka Sales 2.0, in an attempt to fix the problem. The company might modify the compensation plan or change the structure of the sales organization. Each of these scenarios may or may not help, but without an overall review and improvement of the entire sales continuum, the sales team will never be best-in-class.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every company faces different challenges that can be due to a variety of factors. For example:

type of industry

state of the industry (growth, plateau or decline)

geography, client size and complexity

life cycle of the product line

single product or service versus multiple products or services

existing culture and legacy of the organization and its systems and processes

levels of change and transformation experienced

tenure of the sales force

sales cycles

target market

type of buyer Sales is typically calling on (e.g., CEO, CIO, Marketing, Procurement, Engineering, Finance)

The Top-Three Challenges in Selling Today

While companies all face different challenges, there are three universal ones plaguing the sales industry today:

The buyer’s journey has changed dramatically. There are now more decision makers in every sales situation; the buyer is busier, more knowledgeable and more risk-averse; the buyer’s expectations of the sales profession are much higher; and the decision process is more complex. Thus, it is harder than ever to move a buyer to make a change.

It is tougher than ever before to differentiate your offering. Companies and salespeople are struggling to stand out and truly offer something of sincere value in every step of the sales process to their customers in a very crowded market.

Sales reps are facing increasingly complex and time-challenging demands. Companies want more data (typically through CRM platforms), reps need to be more knowledgeable about their product and more prepared for every sales interaction than they ever have and there is greater pressure on reps to provide consistently higher sales. The reps may not receive sufficient support, so they need to work harder to balance increased internal demands against winning more sales.

Buyers Have Power in Knowledge

Clients today are armed with more readily available information than they ever had access to in the past. This challenges reps to be relevant, as the client is well informed about organizations and their products or services. Like sales reps, clients do their research before a sales meeting. Clients’ internal purchasing processes are more rigorous than ever and, typically, more people are involved in the decision-making process.

In a typical firm with 100–500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions.

–Gartner Group

Increased risk aversion has led to this increase in stakeholders and to a more formalized and politicized purchasing process. At the same time, management has become much leaner, so the majority of your contacts are in a daily grind of trying to get more done with less and, therefore, they must be more careful with their time. This presents significant challenges for sales reps trying to get the attention of potential clients.

It would be natural to assume that the buying process would be shortened now that buyers have better access to information. In fact, the opposite has happened: the buying process is longer than it has ever been. No matter what many people say, buyers buy on their schedule, not yours, unless you can provide a compelling reason for them to change. There are certainly ways to reduce the sales cycle, and this book refers to many of them, but as a seller, your ability to influence the speed of the outcome is limited because buyers have decision-making processes that they have determined to be necessary.

In his book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink noted, "The balance has shifted. If you’re a buyer and you’ve got just as much information as the seller, along with the means to talk back, you’re no longer the only one who needs to be on notice. In a world of information parity, the new guiding principle is caveat venditor—seller beware."1

It has been suggested that because buyers have access to more information than ever before—and, as a result, are more informed than ever before—they don’t need salespeople anymore. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In 2017, ManpowerGroup reported that filling sales roles is the third-highest challenge for organizations, with hiring skilled trades and IT staff ranked first and second, respectively. The demand for good reps is outpacing the ability of the market to meet that demand.

Relationships are still relevant when making complex, high-cost and high-risk decisions. Interpersonal relationships help buyers make more informed decisions.

As David Hoffeld puts it in his book The Science of Selling, To be sure, in our technology-saturated world, potential customers are now forming initial impressions about a company, product or service from information they glean online. But this doesn’t negate the importance of salespeople. In fact, it makes them more essential than ever. Buyers rarely make purchases based solely on information provided over the internet, unless the product or service is a very low-priced, low-risk item. In any other situation, and especially for higher-priced, higher-risk purchases, potential customers need to interact with a salesperson to make an informed and confident decision.2

Salespeople Have Fewer Weapons to Differentiate Themselves

There are more competitors than ever before, resulting in a saturated market for most products and services. With much more commoditization, it’s even more difficult to differentiate your product, service or even company from those of your competitors.

If your product is the same and delivered with similar value at a similar price, how do you make it stand out? One of the very few ways this can be done is through the sales reps. For sales reps to stand out in this market, you must be more prepared for every situation than you have ever had to be before. You need to be more creative, and you must figure out ways to add more value and insight than your competitors.

One sales leader I interviewed put it this way: It used to be that you built a relationship and then you built value. Now, you have to build value or show value before you can even begin to think about a relationship. A very insightful comment. With customers essentially viewing everything as a commodity, and there being little difference between one company and another, how do you first get their attention to book a meeting with them, and then win the business on anything other than price?

Sales professionals need to bring creativity and uniqueness in order to stand out and prove they can bring value to the client very quickly. They must focus on the customer’s business and how they can help them solve problems and be more successful. This could be solving a customer service issue, a productivity issue or a cost issue, or it could be offering ideas that the customer has not thought of before. Obviously, to sell in this manner, sales reps need to have a very high level of knowledge and an in-depth understanding of their customer.

Sales Rep Overload

The pace of change within sales organizations is verging on insane, with everything from information overload to structures, people, technology, expectations and processes changing. So, not only is the pressure to perform greater than ever, particularly for new hires, but in most cases salespeople are expected to undertake additional internal tasks and adapt to change more than ever.

I have often seen sales organizations being asked to cut back on support when sales targets are not being met, but this simply causes a downward spiral of decreased sales productivity. More decreased sales productivity leads to more cuts, and the decreased results continue unabated.

CRM has changed the volume of data that needs to be captured. Leadership is asking for more and more information, which means sales reps have to enter more and more data. This is taking away precious selling time. It is also affecting sales management, as it puts the focus on numbers rather than on valuable one-on-one coaching and support for salespeople in the field.

Many salespeople are feeling the pressure to provide data for the sake of providing it, with little sense of what is really important: winning new business. More emphasis than ever on process, metrics and analytics is taking away the creative and intuitive part of selling.

On top of these data challenges, many sales organizations are being required to take on other non-sales activities, such as marketing or operational tasks. Companies are cutting back resources, and so some of these activities end up in the sales team’s lap. They are being inundated with time-sucking, non-selling tasks.

One company I worked with was cutting back resources in marketing on an ongoing basis. Every time someone who handled a client-support task was let go, either the activity didn’t get done or Sales had to pick up the slack—otherwise, they had a very unsatisfied client experience.

So, here we have the perfect storm: a more complex and challenging customer environment, where more time is essential to properly prepare for each customer interaction; a proliferation of products and competitors that makes differentiation more challenging; and increased expectations for both sales achievements and non-selling activities.

You absolutely cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Sales needs the time to focus on selling and, at the same time, the sales organization needs to close the gap between buyers’ expectations and the sales community’s skills and expertise.

Creating a Best-in-Class Sales Team

I have witnessed firsthand these increased challenges in the marketplace and in the customer mindset, yet I believe sales remains an exciting and rewarding career. Despite what others may suggest, sales is not dead (one out of every nine employees in the United States works in sales3), it is evolving. And we in the field must adapt.

In order to meet business growth objectives, you need to overcome today’s challenges. The only way to do that is to build a best-in-class sales team. By best-in-class, I mean a sales organization built on a solid foundation that’s composed of a winning, supportive and collaborative sales culture; caring leadership; an effective hiring process; a strong sales process with robust analytics; proven execution; a customer-driven philosophy; and a mindset of continuous improvement and learning.

Below are the 10 imperatives that I believe are critical for developing a sales organization that will help you win in the marketplace and meet your revenue goals.

A well-thought-out, customized hiring process to find the candidates with the most potential to succeed in your organization.

A defined onboarding program that will get your new hires firing on all cylinders as quickly as possible and keep them that way.

A finely tuned sales process and funnel management.

Appropriate key performance indicators, metrics and analytics to measure success.

Sales planning to ensure you are calling on the right targets and that your salespeople are focused.

Sales methodology to ensure consistency and effectiveness in the sales process.

Effective real-time coaching to help your salespeople be their best.

Compensation and reward and recognition programs that are aligned with what you need to achieve.

Change management, because change is here to stay.

A caring, high-performance culture where sales employees feel they are a part of something of value and where they can express themselves and collaborate freely in a team environment.

These imperatives will enable your sales leadership to create a best-in-class sales team, which will provide your organization with the best possible opportunity to win in the marketplace.

A Seat at the Table

In addition to creating a best-in-class sales team, I believe another key to success is ensuring that Sales leadership has a seat at the executive table. The presence of Sales at the executive table affords your company access to the voice of the customer and to market knowledge when it is needed, which is before critical decisions are made, not after. While some CEOs do have previous sales experience, it’s uncommon, so there is often a significant lack of understanding of what it takes to design, build, grow and manage sales teams. Including Sales at the table provides an opportunity to create the best sales organization possible.

A strong sales culture and strong Sales leadership are key to lasting improvements in results.

Mike Weinberg, author of Sales Management. Simplified, said it best: Organizations don’t change from the bottom by improving skills, techniques, and attitudes of their salespeople. To truly transform the results and health of an entire sales team, the leader and the culture must be transformed. The main challenge is typically how the sales team is being led, and more often than not, the underlying root-cause issues are cultural, flowing down from leadership at the top of the company.4

The most successful B2B companies have Sales leadership close to the top of the organization. These same organizations usually have strong sales cultures that exemplify superior performance.

Street-Savvy Summary

I have been a sales leader for over 20 years, and during that time I’ve learned through hands-on experience, research, trial and error and the insights of many mentors and peers that there is no silver bullet for the sales productivity improvement journey. But one thing is abundantly clear to me: there is a direct correlation between best-in-class sales teams and best-in-class sales leadership.

Without solid, caring, mindful, passionate, accountable and operationally oriented sales leadership, you will not achieve your goals.

I’m sure many organizations have sufficient resources to fully develop all areas of sales, but I have seen many that get the sales process, compensation and key performance indicators (KPIs) right, for example, and then miss other key ingredients for creating an environment of greatness, like culture and ongoing coaching.

Of course, organizations of different sizes have different budgets and resources with which to implement change, but in many areas you can make significant improvements.

Positive change leading to significant improvement does not necessarily require deep pockets.

I believe the sales profession is in a period of transition like no other; certainly, I’ve never witnessed anything similar in my 25-plus years of selling. We are less likely than ever before to get away with weak preparation; we simply won’t get a second chance. We are less likely to be able to rely solely on relationships; we need to be multi-dimensional. We are less likely to be able to rely solely on technical skills than ever before; while these skills remain important, business acumen is vital for today’s salesperson if they hope to be successful.

To be successful and improve results in this changing and complex environment, it is more important than ever to pay attention to the entire sales spectrum. The sales process needs to be well-thought-out and keep the customer decision-making process and buyer persona* in mind. There are new sales methodologies, skills development programs and process improvement programs that can help us, and I will touch on these later in the book, but it is critical to view the process as a whole.

This is a journey well worth taking. The results will be well worth the effort. Let’s begin with how a best-in-class sales team is shaped and how the sales organization can lead that team to stunning results.

*A persona is a composite sketch of a target market based on validated commonalities that actively informs content strategy to drive productive buyer engagement.5 –Marcia Riefer Johnston

2

What Is a Best-in-Class Sales Organization?

Laying the Foundation

Best-in-class sales organizations are built on a solid foundation of

a winning, caring sales culture;

strong supportive leadership;

the right hiring practices;

a strong sales process;

proven execution;

a customer-driven focus;

a continuous-improvement and learning mindset; and

an accountability discipline.

I like to further define best-in-class sales teams as teams that other companies in your industry look to aspire to. If you are taking market share in a very competitive industry or winning against your competitors more times than not, chances are you have a best-in-class sales team. There is nothing better than hearing people in the industry say, I don’t know how they do it, but they always seem to win. That’s where you want to be as a sales team.

To begin with, it is imperative that the organization is committed to meaningful engagement with the customer in terms of ensuring that the engagement is consistent and embodied in the culture, coaching and performance review process as well as in overall accountability. The sales force needs to deliver unique value to the customer, whether that value takes the form of a unique business perspective, valuable relationships that the sales rep can bring to the table, specific industry knowledge and expertise, unique and differentiated research, or a combination of the above. In his book SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham states, The building of perceived value is probably the single-most important selling skill.1

In order to foster a best-in-class sales team, it’s essential for leadership to be able to articulate a strategy for the sales organization that is consistent with the company’s vision and values. It is not up to Sales to define the strategy of the company. Sales acts on the strategy and a defined marketing plan, so Sales leadership and its teams know within reason what they need to do to execute on the plan of the company.

I understand that life is not perfect, so there can often be a challenge in defining exactly what the target is. The more detail and direction you can provide the sales force, the more productive it will be. This is a statement of fact. Successful sales teams are all about focus.

Mike