Is Your Sales Team a Winner or on the Way Out?

Is Your Sales Team a Winner or on the Way Out?
The 8 Principles of the Sales Teams that Customers have rated as World Class.


Think your sales team is in good shape because your customers rank them either good or very good? Think again. Nearly 80 percent of all supplier deserters rate their previous supplier as "good" to "very good," so the outlook for anything less than world-class excellence is not only disappointing but potentially career threatening. A 15-year study on world-class sales by The HR Chally Group determined that only 21 of 7,300 sales forces evaluated by 80,000 customer decision-makers were categorized as “world-class” by their customers. Benchmarking research within these same 21 "world-class" sales organizations, found that they all shared at least six of the following eight best practices:
1. Establishing a Customer-Driven Culture
This is a mandate for your entire company to sell “increased customer productivity” through improved revenue streams or reduced costs even for existing customers. The best customer-driven companies analyze their customers’ overall business needs and challenges and then reorganize their internal processes to better serve them, identifying critical processes, skills and new standards to support them. A key indicator of these customer-driven cultures is the high degree of information and strategy sharing taking place between the supplier and the customer. All the winners had customer advisory boards that sit in on strategic meetings while the company discusses future products and services and organisational plans.
With much customer support and sales available on the web, companies are freeing salespeople from mundane transactional duties to fulfill “business consultant” roles– where tools like flow charting of business processes and activity-based costing can help clients in their own jobs; so they can buy more products or services. Companies are finding new ways to add value, even to commodities, and focusing on additional services that can differentiate them from competitors. One interesting example is the company which signed a shared savings partnership with their customers where the client pays ”cost” for the actual products delivered but also pays a percentage of the cost savings.
2. Committing to Becoming an Expert on Their Customers’ Businesses through Market Segmentation
Different customers or customer groups require specialized added values not applicable to other markets. Only by specializing can salespeople acquire the understanding of the customer’s business that is necessary to add value. World-class sales forces segment themselves based on the best way to serve clients – for example by size (if that affects how your different customers go to market themselves), or by geographical location (if your service is ubiquitous across all customers but local presence is key or if legal or regulatory requirements vary geographically.) Other differentiation driving segmentation might include technology needs, complexity, speed, or other specialized service as well as the configuration of the products and/or services purchased.
But that’s just the first step. Most of us can identify at least one geographically segmented sales force that is less than world-class. The key to world-class service is that relevant decision-making authority needs to be as close to the customer point-of-contact as possible. For complex sales this may mean pricing capability. The sales team also needs to “work smarter” by optimizing internal information sharing and maximizing efforts in high-potential customer segments while avoiding effort for low potential segments.
3. Adapting to the Market Quickly
World-class organizations empower decision-making throughout their organizations in order to minimize response time. Because your internal systems are often unwittingly the cause of customer problems 20% to 25% of the time, your company needs to have remedial processes in place to fix the problems rapidly. Perhaps the best mechanism for process Total Quality Management (TQM) is open and frequent communication within the company and with customers and suppliers with the specific commitment to fix the problem within days, if not hours.
One world-class sales team in the study, for example, has bi-weekly telephone conferences with all appropriate levels(headquarters) to resolve any open issues and speed the process before opportunities are stolen by competitors or become more complex.
4. Investing in Strategic Information Technology
Sales force automation is typically a massive mis-investment, and seldom critical. The key for companies with world-class sales organisations is that they prioritize their IT spending to directly serve the customer first, salespeople second, and management reports third, only after the customer has received the best possible service. Most companies do just the opposite. Companies with world-class sales forces also promote the use of information technology to the customer and salespeople by focusing on its user friendliness.

5. Building Sophisticated Sales, Service and Technical Support Systems
There’s much infrastructure a company can create to support a sales force of “business consultants”. The companies with world-class sales teams create dedicated support personnel for sales and even 24-hour, toll-free technical support lines. The systems should reduce processing time and face-to-face time required for routine transactions. World-class sales teams have also made available as many electronic ordering options as possible and even assigned a quality specialist to sales.. Some support systems can be integrated with customers to the extent that competitors are locked out; consider one paper products company that gives customers the option of an off-site “storeroom” which they manage for them.
6. Soliciting Customer Feedback Often and Measuring Customer Satisfaction
World-class sales teams elicit customer feedback often and consistently, with intensity and breadth dependent on the importance of the customer. The only effective method is a live phone conversation with the customer, scheduled by appointment and conducted by an objective third party. The survey should have standard and specific questions about the transaction and the sales rep’s knowledge of the customer, among other things.
Many organisations with world-class sales teams involved their customers in evaluating which important questions to ask, and which issues should be tackled first. This method is one way to mitigate the 80% of product deserters who said their supplier was “good” or “very good”. Most importantly, any customer feedback system should have a “hot-line” for critical issues uncovered in a survey; most surveys that are in a strategic system have no mechanism for responding to dissatisfied customers and thus irrevocably damage the relationship.
7. Recruiting and Selecting Salespeople
Remember when customers were expected to break in new salespeople by showing them around and telling them what to do? Customers no longer have time, motivation or resource to do this, and neither do hiring managers. Organisations with world-class sales forces do not hire large numbers of raw recruits and instead are using a sophisticated, and statistically predictive hiring process to select either very high potential new candidates, or experienced salespeople with a proven track record who will complement their sales team’s success. These organizations recruit and select salespeople and sales managers using an objective, quantitative predictive assessment of sales potential first, personal drive and motivation second and lastly cultural fit. Unlike most companies, these organizations save the typical interviews until this very last stage, when objective procedures have already predetermined a successful fit with the company. In other words, they count on the science of selection to determine a candidate’s sales potential and the drive to succeed…and from this pool of high potential candidates they allow sales managers to have the final say of who of these pre-selected few will best fit with their sales plans

8. Investing in Training and Development
It’s no surprise that world-class sales organizations make their sales managers responsible for the successful training of sales reps, including one-on-one coaching, extensive training for new hires, and incorporating new training into processes and procedures. The challenge of keeping up with customers is far too critical to leave to external seminars and periodic sessions. In fact, in some organizations with world-class sales teams, a high percentage of sales managers run internal training sessions for the company. Gaining increasing importance is training on customers’ businesses; even spending time in the customer’s environment, such as a hospital theatre for healthcare companies, to see how the product or service should be supported. Finally, world-class sales teams do not just develop sales “entrepreneurs” but train sales teams that work closely together. Training is never treated as a off, or even a series of “events” but rather a process that is integrated with all the other parts of the company’s marketing and sales straegy.
When examining your own team, remember that even focusing on the first two practices alone has a significant impact on customer response – but don’t settle for the old version of “very good” or you may be out the door.


Is Your Sales Team a Winner or on the Way Out? - To learn more about this author, visit Peter Gilbert's Website.

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