Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Last few weeks I’ve been spending a lot of time with sales leaders talking about the year ahead. Now, traditionally this planning happens in either the January months, the January early February months, or towards the middle of the year, the June, July type of months. But for whatever reason, this year I’ve seen a number of teams either delay their planning or bring their planning forward whereby we start to look at what they’re going to do over the next 12 months. And something that’s come up consistently in my conversations with sales leaders has been about the key areas that they need to focus on over the next 12 months. It of course extends through to their team when you naturally think about where their focus is, but it has been more prominent this year than that. I’ve been having sales leaders start to talk to me about, okay, what are the areas that you think I should be focusing on?
So, for today I’ve put together a little top tips list of areas that I think sales leaders now and into the next 12 months would really benefit from turning their eye to. Now, I’d request that as you go through this podcast, I think there’ll be some value in there for any sales leader listening. I think there’ll be some value in there for any sales professional who is looking to grow in their careers, for anyone that’s listening there, or for any sales professional that’s looking to improve their relationships with their customers. I think there’s always something in how your leaders conduct themselves that will benefit customers because invariably leaders are there to not only create a great environment for the teams, but also for their customers.
So, I think there’ll be some little hidden pots of gold along this journey. But I’d really encourage you as you’re listening to this today. Not to try and say, yes, I’ve got all six and I’ve got them done, but look for areas of opportunity. Look for those little pivots that you might be able to take to test. You know what, I was focusing on that. But there’s another angle I can take on this, that if I do it each day across all of my direct reports, it’s going to have a multiplied echoed effect out in my marketing and improve our customer results and the revenue for the business and so forth. Right. I’d really encourage you to think about how you can take something small and snowball it into significant progress for your team. Because after all, and I stand by this, sales leaders have one of the toughest jobs across any organization. Not only because they are dealing with people who are professionally trained to influence. Right. Including their own managers and their own leaders, but also because they often move from being a great individual contributor into a leadership position without a lot of support. And I think that’s a really difficult ask of even talented people. So, for me, I work with a lot of sales leaders who typically haven’t had a lot of support and a lot of coaching along the journey. And that’s why I think there’s so many people in the market globally that look after sales coaching. Right. Unfortunately, not enough that look after sales leaders, but I think it really flows through from there just not being enough formal training provided by businesses in what’s a really difficult role.
So, I’m going to look at six key areas where I would be recommending sales leaders focus over the next 12 months. Some of those are going to be ones that you’re going to see each and every year. Others you’re going to see as ones I think that are quite topical for this year. And I’ll certainly go through that.
Okay. Number one for me is getting really clear on where you add value to your customers. This is something that people have spoken about for a long time, right. Why are we the company to deal with? But historically, what I see is businesses focusing on features and benefits. We have a great product that does this. We have a service that is faster than anyone else. We are cheaper than others. We offer money back guarantees. Right. We have a well-trained team. That’s all great. But what it doesn’t do is focus the lens on the customer to say, hey, here’s what we’re going to do that you otherwise can’t do for yourself. Here’s a service that we’re going to provide. Here’s a Financial service, an accounting service that we’re going to provide that you simply won’t be able to get done yourself. And we’re going to do it better than others because of blah, blah, blah, because we’re going to provide faster reporting, we’re going to provide more meaningful balance sheet items, but with that we’re going to provide advice, gets really clear on where you need to invest your spare cash so that you can grow more quickly than you were before. Right? That’s that value piece. The businesses that are really succeeding and the sales leaders that are getting really good results in their markets are actually looking at their features and benefits and then transferring them or elevating them into. Here’s what we do for you, Mr. And Mrs. Customer. Here’s the opportunities. We help you capitalise on all the risks that we mitigate. Right. In a way that you couldn’t do it yourself. So, for me, getting really, really clear on where you are, adding value to your customers is the first thing I’d be doing. This is difficult. I certainly won’t walk past that. Moving from features and benefits and saying, hey, we help you save money through to moving from features and benefits, hey, we help you save money through to. And this is what we’re going to help you do with that money, or this is what our product or service is going to allow you to do that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of or you wouldn’t have otherwise been to do. Right. Being able to take that step into real value creation, that is difficult. So, by all means, give me a call if you want to know more about it or get in touch with me. But that’s the first place I’d start. How are we changing lives, changing businesses, improving the landscape for our customers, really making a tangible difference. Get that right and you become instantly much harder to compete with. So that’s number one.
Number two, and this is something that happens every year and I would thoroughly, thoroughly recommend, if you haven’t done it already, that you are as a sales leader is sit down, set some goals, right? Yes, I have no doubt you’ve set a sales budget, but have you set the goals around that as to how you’re going to achieve that budget, be they behavioural or cultural based, be they certain initiatives, new products, new themes, new geographies? Right. Even new markets that you need to get into, are they new types of customers that you want to be chasing? Are they existing customers? Is there a big strategy behind increasing your existing customer spend from 100% to 108%? Right. What are the key strategies that you want to be enabling this year to hit that sales budget. My advice here is really clear. It’s keep them to three. For me, achieving more than three goals across the sales team in any one year or three chunky sales goals, right? Enabling a training program, I wouldn’t say that’s a goal, that’s simply a tactical play or a small act. But building the sales competency of your team so that every team member can talk through every product to an MPS score of 8, for example, that is a big goal. Right? And the training program would form one part of that. But for me, set those three goals before you do. So just make sure they’re going to line up with what the rest of the business wants to do. There’s no point setting off to go and do something even if you think it will change how the business works, right? But there’s just no point setting off to do something in a 12-month horizon that doesn’t have the support from the business. You’ll spend just too long, and my experience says you’ll spend just too long trying to convince the business of its merits, right. And then not have enough time to get it up and running before the next budgeting cycle comes through. And there’s invariably very difficult discussions around whether or not a new initiative has enough legs to continue begin to take place.
So, for me, build your goals, piggyback them off the business, set them at three, and get really, really clear on what the hell you actually have to do this year to hit your budget. The little asterisk here is please make sure you’re involving your sales team. I see lots of leaders build out their goals without their team. For me, the teams that are hitting their goals are generally having some skin in the game. So they’ve built those goals, they have accountability to making sure that they bring the goals to life. And senior level executives are aware that they’re all trying to progress those plans outside of a sense of purpose. For me, there’s not a lot more that holds people accountable than having others around you, particularly at a senior leadership level that you know are going to be monitoring your progress. Right? It often brings out a real sense of pride and, and want to achieve in people that you generally can’t get without their involvement in setting up those goals.
So, number one, get really clear on the value you’re providing your customers, right. What you’re doing that they can’t do for themselves and how you’re providing more value than others. Number two is build out your goals so you’ve got your targets, but actually get clear on what you’re going to do to get to those targets rather than relying on what you already do and simply improving it or something that the marketing team might generate for you or the new product team, for example.
Number three, my first run around people is I’d get really clear on the capabilities that you need within your team to hit your goals. Now, this is a really difficult exercise and the reason it’s difficult is because for me, I recommend you put aside the individual personalities and the individual capabilities that you have in your team and actually sit down and say, okay, if I was starting from scratch, if I was building a new team, if I was the Tasmanian team in Australia looking to launch their first, you know, their team in a few years’ time. It’s three years’ time, right. How would I be building that team? What’s my blank canvas? Build out those capabilities you need across lead generation and hunting skills, across key account management, across independent thinking, across cadence of activity, across skilled salespeople versus unskilled salespeople, across phone manner, across the ability to act around sales objections and closing strategies, and qualifying your customers. Right. i.e. classically trained people, the type of skills you need that might be outside of your industry. So, if you’re in the, you know, the technology game and you’re looking for people that may have skills in dealing with customers that are at the C suite level, right. They don’t necessarily need to know your tech suite, but they need to be C suite level experience. Right. Start to build out those skills, then have a look at the skills you’ve got in your team and layer them over each other. What you’re then going to see is where the gaps are and I’d be surprised if you had no gaps. It’s rare that we see teams that don’t. Right. Where gaps are small, you know, 10, 20% across the team. Normally you can simply cross train your teams or look at areas where you might be able to satisfy us and change your approach slightly. Right. But when you have smaller gaps across your teams, we look to fill those with existing capabilities through either a slight change in strategy, right. Or upskilling of your team or even outsourcing to get some support in. Right. There’s a few ways to do that. However, if you have significant gaps, and for me, significant gaps are that 30% or more mark, so more than about a third of your business, that’s where more serious decisions need to be made. Because if we don’t think we’ve got the capabilities within our team to hit our targets, then what we’re doing is throwing good money after bad. Right? We are continuing to invest in areas where we won’t necessarily see the results. So for me, that’s where this exercise gets difficult. Because we might need to make some hard decisions around our people within our team. Or we may even decide that as we have natural attrition, that we start to replace with certain types of skills. Right? There’s lots of ways we can approach this, but for me it’s get really clear on the capabilities you need in your team now. Layer them against what you have, and then decide what you’re going to do about it. So that’s the first three done. Get clear on the value you provide, set some goals and look at the capabilities you need versus the capabilities you have.
Next. For me, number four, it actually quite closely relates to understanding the capabilities of your team and that is to make sure you’ve got a program for development of your team members. Now that development, yes, it’s really important to have their own personal career development. I absolutely am on that page. But where I’m talking about here is make sure that now that you’ve identified the capabilities that you need within your team and the gaps that exist, start to build out that program that gets you to where you need to be.
For example, I’ve just worked with a team. What we recognised really clearly was that one of their gaps was in how they structured meetings with their customers. So, it was both their first meeting, their meet and greet. Right. The qualifying meeting and their presentations. Right. There was no structure to those. And as a result, we had seen there are about 12 in the team. A significant business, tens of millions of dollars closing in on $100 million. This business had each of their 12 sales team members operating slightly differently. And what ended up coming out of that was a significant delta in performance gaps. But more importantly, it was a lot of work for the leaders because they were managing everyone slightly differently, which means they had to do a lot more one to one work, right? Individual coaching and development rather than group coaching. So, for me is get that program sorted around the capability growth you need or the behavioural growth that you need. Right? Build it into your business, into your sales team and then start to execute. Right from there it gets a lot more straightforward. We can build out our plan, we can roll out a training program, we can include it in our weekly sales meetings, we can look at it through our one to ones, through our talent development, we can get our people and culture or our HR teams involved if we need to. Right. There’s lots of different ways we can roll it out. We can get senior leaders involved. But once we start to build a program as to how we’re going to make sure we have that right capability within our team, then we start to say, okay, great, well, we’re closing the gap on where we are now versus where we need to be. From a talent point of view, that was point number three. Right. We can start to be more confident we’re going to hit our strategies because to hit our strategies, which was point two, we need to have the capabilities within our team. Right. And based off that, right, we know we’re creating value for our customers because in essence, our strategies and our capabilities, they should follow through from where we’re really creating value for our customers. Right. Long term, sustainable competitive advantage. That’s the type of value we’re talking about. Right. So, there’s the first four done.
Number five is I would start to invest in systems that are going to increase the cadence of your team. Right. Increase the efficiency, the output and essentially how your team work to get them focused more on customer time. There’s some really cool things already out around AI, right? There’s meeting note takers, this automatic email draft creators. We have your chat, GPT, LLMs, right, which start to do your customer preparation for you. We have lots of tools that are already there when it comes to an AI and enablement focus. We have CRMs that are providing a lot of support around nurturing. Right. These all take a bit of time to set up, but traditionally, in fact, I’m going to go a bit harder here. Rarely have I ever seen a salesperson go and do this themselves. It’s also somewhat rare where I see a sales leader do it. It normally comes from other parts of the business. But for me as sales leaders, we cannot expect that our sales teams are going to adopt any form of efficiencies when it comes to systems and technology and processes. So, I think we need to do it for them. So, I’d be investing there and I’d also start to have a look in the next generation of how we’re improving our team performance. Right. The one I’ve spoken about the last few weeks is core coaching and training from an AI driven platforms. I think there’s a lot out there already. Jump back and have a look at episode 114 where I summarise a few of those. It was only a few weeks ago, right. But I’d really start to keep more than one eye. Right. One and a half eyes on how you are improving the effectiveness of your sales teams. Because not only do some of these tools help us do better, for example, preparation, but there are also others that make it faster at what we do.
Okay, so that’s five. Get clear on the value you provide, set your goals, work out what skills and capabilities you need in the business and compare to what you have. Go out and build the capabilities that you need to invest in systems and processes.
And last but not least, which most sales leaders do, but I’m going to take a slightly different angle here, is measure your progress. Right? And when I talk about measuring progress, my recommendation here is just to keep it as simple as you possibly can. Because for me, sales professionals generally don’t subscribe to big, heavy sales dashboards. Right? They’re really good if we keep our metrics at a baseline level and then dive deep from there. Example I give here is I work really heavily around looking at our energy, how hard we’re working, which is the number of new leads and new meetings. Right. We can measure something around that area. The second one is our strategy. Right. Are we bringing customers to the table to get quotes out there? So that’s our active pipeline size. And then the third one is the talent within the business to close these deals, to build relationships and to be able to bring our customers from a no through to a yes. Right. Once we start to look at those three metrics, it’s then that we can deep dive down and say, okay, well, we’re talking to enough customers, we’ve got a big enough pipeline, but our sales numbers are low. Right. They’re not quite where we need to be. And then we can deep dive and say, great, well, close rates are okay, but actually our average sale value is too low. So then we can dive a level deeper and say, actually, you know what, we’re pricing too low or our average deal size at the right margins, but it’s lower than expected because we’re not selling enough value with that product. Right. We’re selling the horse without the cart to go with it. Right. So, for me, where we can have three really clear metrics that allow us to deep dive and then look at average cycle time, look at time to contact, look at how long since customers have last been contacted. Right. All of those other pivotal reports, right. We do that through the canary in the mines diagnosis approach. Right. We look at our top line level to make sure everything’s working first, find out any areas of a lack of alignment with what we’re looking for and Then deep dive. And the reason above everything else that I suggest this is it keeps it simple, it’s consistent, and it’s really, really easy for everyone to follow. For me, metrics work really well when everyone’s really clear what we’re measuring against. And as soon as we get that right, we can then start to upskill and ascend some of those smaller metrics and financial levers that will make a difference to our business.
So, they’re the six things. Look, there’s an honourable mention to get out there and carry your bag yourself. For me, sales leaders who are meeting with customers are always the most impactful. But I’m gonna back in that the sales leaders who are listening to this podcast are pretty well attuned to self improvement and have no doubt that getting in front of customers is important. But certainly, if you’re not doing that right, that absolutely needs to happen.
So, let me recap on those. Number one is to get clear on the value you provide, right? Number two for really strong sales leadership in the next 12 months is get your strategies clear up to three piggy-back from the main business. Number three is looking at the capabilities you need, then layering them against what you have in the business. Number four moves into building the capability development that you need within your team to execute on those strategies that you have and the value to provide to customers. Number five is investing in systems and processes that allow teams to work faster. Essentially, throughput can increase. And the last but not the lease is metrics. Keep them simple, measure the progress you want to make so that it’s very, very easy for us to make course adjustments as needed.
Okay, so they’re the six things for today. Again, my request here is find the pockets or the buckets of gold in there so that you can either make tweaks to what you’re doing or if there’s one of those that you’re not doing at all. Right? Jump on it. Have a think about how that could impact your business. Take off from this podcast. If you’re driving just five minutes or even less, three minutes to have a think about what you could do. Write it in your phone when you’re not driving, right? If you’re sitting down, write a couple of notes down. And tomorrow, when you’re in the office, put some time in your diary to make sure that you actually get these things done right. There is nothing kills progress more than tomorrow. It gets in the way of today, so, so often. So, we need to make sure that we’re planning around that.
Okay, last but not least Road to Cairns, the Ironman that I’m doing. I tell you what, you’re going to be sick of hearing about it. We’re down to three weeks to go, so there’s only a couple more updates. But for me, man, has my volume driven up. It is cumulative, the impact it’s having on the body. But I’m up north, well north of 15 hours a week now, which I never ever thought I’d really be doing. Creates all sorts of pressure around my organization and time management, but certainly managing to do so. But the biggest thing that I’ve been learning is how to train my gut to take on lots of food. We’re talking like 100 grams of carbs an hour, which, what is that? The equivalent of a big thick jam toast, double pieces of bread with jam toast or banana and honey in the middle. Right. We’re talking about one of those every hour as I’m training and that’s quite a lot of food combined with water, combined with salt, combined with everything that goes through it. So liquid form. I’m taking this. I’m certainly training my gut on how to do it. I’m going to need it as we’re going through kind of 10 hours of exercise. My latest takeaway is that, well, you really can train your body to do wonderful things and I’m not there yet, but making great progress for me, you know, I’d always encourage people to never, ever think you can’t do something right. I’ve set a goal, whether or not I make it, who knows? But I never would have thought I’d do. I’d do an iron man. I’m pretty fit, but not over 10 hours. So, the body can do wonderful things. So, don’t ever be afraid to set yourself goals that are hard, harder than easy to achieve and one you might have to work towards.
Because sometimes when we are living in a world of possibility, we can be amazed by what we can achieve. That’s what I’m hoping for in the next few weeks. I’d encourage you to keep thinking about it yourselves. Get in touch if you’ve got any thoughts from this podcast. Otherwise, have a great week. Bye for now
E117 The 6 Things I'd Focus on as a Sales Leader this Year
