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. About a month ago we had a podcast interview with a man called Lasada Pippen. Lasada is very much a motivational speaker, works with teams around tapping into leadership growth and he’s doing some things that I would say are perhaps a little bit different to your standard leadership type of approach. And one of the things that Lasada did that really stuck with me and here we are a month later that I’m still thinking about it was he went through a quote of his and it was called Simplicity sails, complexity fails. Quite a simple one liner, just four words in it. Simplicity sails, complexity fails. But I really liked, well, I liked the simplicity about it, but, I liked that it got me thinking about just what simplicity looks like from a sales and particularly a sales leadership point of view when it comes to building out really high performing teams. And I thought, you know what, it’s about time that we did a podcast episode that focused exactly on how we can make our lives and the lives of those in our team as simple as possible. Because right now, globally, we are all being inundated with more information than we can possibly process. We have emails on overload, we have phones that ring non-stop, we have Slack channels, we have WhatsApp, we have communities, we have Confluence, Atlassian, all different types of task boards. Monday.com, we have CRMs, we have internal meetings. Right, I can go on and on and on, but the depth of data and engagement that we have in our professional lives has never been deeper. In fact, I think it was Jemimah, my Friends in Business co-host, that was talking to me around how much content we consume each day. And it’s about the average of a feature film times two. Well A two-hour feature film actually, I think is what she specifically said. So, we are actually absorbing and receiving two hours, right, a feature film every single day now. I’d love to go to the movies and sit down and just chill out and watch something fantastic. I don’t even know what’s out anymore so far. Am I out of touch? But for me that is a lot of content. We have a lot of data coming our way and our lives are simply not as simple as they once were.
So, for me, the next 20 minutes or so is going to be all about how do we simplify our professional lives to help those around us and also ourselves. And this is an episode where very much like most of the solar episodes I do, looking for small improvements that can help you little 1% benefits that we can do again and again and again that will in the end, at a cumulative level, really help us drive significant improvement into what we do.
So, I’m going to focus the framework around simplicity very much centring around the peak performance roadmap. Those who have worked with me know that we work around five really key levers. Strategy, sales process, behaviours and celebrations generally tend to roll them together now, metrics, and training and coaching. So, I’m going to go through each of those five lenses and just have a look how I’m seeing really high performing teams embrace simplicity to allow them to not only cut through the workload, but also keep their teams below their capacity line.
So, as we get into this, I want to revisit the terminology around capacity versus capability. So, capability for me is almost like the horsepower of an engine. It’s how much capability, how much have we learned, what skill we have to be able to execute tasks. And if we’re looking in our role as salespeople, how much capability do we have to be able to engage with customers to handle objections, to set up a deal for success, right. To process admin, to run CRMs, whatever it may be in our job, what’s our actual capability to be able to deliver on that?
Capacity is like the petrol tank in a car. Okay, yes, it could now be the kilowatt hour capacity for a battery engine, but it’s actually how much of that capability can we take advantage of before we run out, right, of any more petrol or electric charge or before we run out of steam as individuals. So, whilst we can have individuals who are infinitely capable, right. V8 engines or heavily torqued high performing wattage electric motors, right. We can have serious amounts of capability within a team. Everyone is going to have Capacity limits where no matter how high or what the ceiling of your capability is, you’re going to hit that capacity limit at some point. And this is for me, where simplicity can really, really come in strongly to help teams. Because I’ve seen plenty of highly capable people hit their capacity limits and not be able to operate at that fantastic, at that high performing level, right, for as long as they should be. They become overwhelmed, they become stressed out, they simply have too many low priority tasks to do that a lot of the high priority stuff gets forgotten.
So, the aim here of simplicity is that we are making sure that our very capable people are not hitting their capacities, right? But also, to be fair, that some of our perhaps less capable people can be allowed to rise by being able to focus on just what matters, the really simple things they need to get right. So I’d really like you to think as we go through today and use that V8 engine and petrol tank, if you like, as those ideas in your head around how we can be making sure we’re either getting the most out of the capability in our team and we do that by stopping them hitting their capacity levels, or how we can bring up capability in our team by giving them something really simple to focus on, really executable tasks. Just like we would do with new staff members who are coming in, right? Keep it nice and simple to allow them to build up a little bit at a time.
Okay, so that’s the background into today. Pen’s out, phone’s out, brain’s on whatever it may be, and hopefully there’s some really chunky pieces of information in here for you.
Okay, so first, when it comes to process, simplicity, what does simplicity look like? For me, a really simple and achievable sales strategy is very clear on a compact number of goals, generally three to five very clear goals that we need to achieve as a business. Sales growth, customer retention, new business, product launch, capability growth, geographic expansion, increasing the average sale value, breaking into new type of customer markets, whatever it may be, right? They’re really, really clear what we need to do as a team. Simplicity looks like goals that we don’t change across a 12 month or whatever our nominated period is, right? So, they’re very consistent, which means simplicity gets a chance to shine because we’re repeating them over and over again.
Simplicity and great strategy looks like having it embedded into everyday parts of what we do within our team. One to ones, deal reviews, leadership, team meetings, training, coaching, right? Those areas where we’re going to get the opportunity to reinforce our strategy again and Again and again. And for me, when we get our strategy right, our team can all recite it. Our team know the three goals, for example, that we’re focusing on. Our team can then line all of their actions up behind it. So, if one of our goals is to really drive lead generation over the next 12 months, right? And we’re continuously reinforcing that, then our team will be continuously reminded to ask for referrals, to go back to our database of existing customers who have bought with us, but not for a while. To go to our current customers and ask to increase their value of purchase. Find other opportunities to cross thread across organizations, to go back to our pipeline that didn’t go anywhere, right? Our age leads. And when we’re doing this again and again and focusing on a very simple approach to what we need to do to be successful in our team, simplicity reigns. If we look on the other side around where complexity tends to rear its ugly head, it’s when we’re doing things like chopping and changing our strategy a lot. Really difficult for sales teams to follow, particularly as you get higher and higher in your average sales price. Because typically as you get higher and higher in our every sales price, your deal cycle starts to lengthen out as well. So certainly, complexity looks like chopping and changing your strategy. Complexity looks like just too many things to remember, right? We’ve got three strategies with 18 micro strategies and weekly reporting that asks us to drill down into each of those 18 items to talk about progress, right? Simply the bandwidth across the team is not going to be strong enough for us to be able to do it. Complexity looks like goals that are just too hard to achieve. Things that no matter how hard we work, we won’t get there. So, they become just too difficult for us to really put our minds to. And we tend to focus on the things that are easier. Complexity when it comes to strategy is almost the opposite, right, of simplicity. It makes sense and a lot of the things we talk about today will be but from a strategic implementation point of view, the last piece I’ll say here around complexity is. Complexity comes when we don’t support strategy, right? Strategies can be really difficult to implement. When we say, here’s your goals, go get them, work it out yourself. What we’re then asking our teams to do is go and build something and actually focus on the building of it, right? Rather than the implementing. If we’re having our salespeople have to build out sales decks and having to build out presentation suites and having to build out all the different types of Metrics and pipelines and CRM systems and demo videos and everything else along those lines, then they’re not going to simply have time to be able to execute that strategy.
So, simplicity and strategy reigns. Short and simple goals, consistent, everyone’s behind them and we really push the activities of the business behind those three goals.
Okay, so that’s number one, that’s strategy. Number two is sales process. So, simplicity in a sales process, and this look, this may surprise people, is not around scripts. Simplicity for me in a sales process is around frameworks. And I generally like to see teams work off five steps in a sales process. I’ve seen as high as 11. But simplicity is short, sharp lead generation, meet and greet or needs analysis, presentation, follow up and closing and then onboarding or key account management, you might call that fifth step, right? Five short sharp steps and they’ve all got the frameworks and each step broken down so that the team can really clearly follow those. A great sales process, a simple process when simplicity sales is on one page so teams can have it with them and they know what they need to be talking to their customers about, it has clear steps around what they can do at each stage. So, it might be a multiple page document, but it’s simple because teams can look at the stage that they’re in, focus on exactly what they want to be communicating or how they want to work with their customer at that stage, drill down onto some of the key points that they need to be following. Even the key points of competitive advantage within your business, right? But then they get the opportunity to just go and do what they got to do. Simplicity in a sales process for me is also backed up by a business that supports each of those steps and allows their team to get out and sell. A simple sales process has a CRM that’s easy to use, that provides reminders and tasks for the team around when they should be doing something right so they don’t have to remember in their brain. And it’s supported by frameworks, which I said earlier, rather than scripts.
So, for me, the opposite of simplicity or the complexity in a sales process is when that process is stretched out, when we have huge numbers of steps within that process and administrative requirements and back of house work that the team need to follow right when it’s a script at every point, at this point, say this, at this point, do that, right? When teams don’t have any ability to bring in their natural personality, which quite obviously will come naturally, so there’s less cognitive load on them to be rolling out that process right? When we don’t allow our teams to bring forward what they’re good at and what their unique attributes that they can bring to a sales process are, that’s when complexity starts to reign in a sales process. I’ve seen many a great sales team have sales processes written down that just become so cumbersome for teams to follow, right? That they simply don’t do it and they freestyle. And that there, unfortunately, is where complexity goes to a whole new level when we have teams who are each doing their own things. So, a group of people following very little process, and then what we end up with is very little consistency in that sales process. As a leader, almost impossible to manage. If we have 10 team members all selling slightly differently, we need to manage them slightly differently. We need to respond to requests slightly differently. We end up having customers who end up with different promises and our bandwidth just disappears. Gone, right? So, complexity can really reign in a sales process when we don’t have everyone following the same thing. And what I like to say here is the majority of the team doing the majority of the same things the majority of the time. Now, that’s not scripting, but it’s following broad processes together, right? So, then they can start talking about what’s working, talking about what’s not working. Help each other when they learn new things, help each other with different, even mini scripts, right? I say scripts are not fantastic from a broad sales process point of view, but every now and then, little pockets of gold, little pockets of wisdom that can be scripted out don’t harm teams, right? But when we have everyone doing the same thing and everyone engaged together on a simple process, that’s when we start to see magic happen. It’s powerful. In deal reviews, when we’re working through our customer database and we know that everyone’s doing the same thing, we can share ideas and really grow together. That’s when we really allow capability to shine without leaders in particular hitting their capacity levels.
Okay? So, we’ve gone through strategy, we’ve gone through sales process. When we talk about simplicity, sailing. The third area that I want to look at is training and coaching. So simple training. Simple training is actually a program for me that is regimented. We know what’s happening with training, we know when it’s happening, we know the topics we’re going to cover, we know how long it’s going to be for. Rather than ad hoc training where we throw in nuggets of wisdom whenever we think we need to or we hear some reactions from the field, simple training is a program that’s set up once or twice a year. It’s built out in advance. We break down our topics. I got a great free resource around how you build out a training calendar. DM me if you’d like to see it, I can flick it across. It’s easy, right? But we talk about sales skills, we talk about administrative skills, and we talk about technical skills, right? We break down a calendar. A training calendar is something that’s very easy and manageable to roll out. And what we end up with here is constant upskilling of our team because we’re training each and every week or each and every fortnight versus the lumpiness of training when a lot of what we teach is forgotten because we’re not reinforcing it regularly with different types of topics.
So, for me, a simple training program is built out in advance. It’s set. We have topics that are also very clear well in advance of time so that we can engage the right people. It’s a shared load. A simple training program shares across team members. One of the most effective ways to learn is to teach. So, we share some of these great training opportunities with key members of our team, right? If we have a team member who is exceptional at setting up a deal to close and always seem to know what the customer needs, right? We get them running a session around asking great questions around needs analysis, right? If we have a team member that just knows how to effortlessly ask for the business, right? Then we get them to run a session around closing team members that are great on video or social selling. We get that to do on and so on. We bring in members from other departments that can help us do training. We bring in suppliers, we bring in other experts, right? Setting up a training program is very, very doable and does not take long. Same goes with coaching, right? Setting up coaching to really succeed in your team. And I’ll redefine training and coaching here. For those who are new to the podcast, Training is knowledge transfer, whereas coaching is knowledge enhancement, right? So, training actually teaches you how to be better at a skill. Coaching enhances the application of that skill. We can learn how to ride a bike. That’s the training. But the coaching is then how we ride the bike up and down curbs, on wet roads, right around corners, right up and down bumps. Coaching really enhances that knowledge that we’ve learned from training. And simple coaching looks like following a basic framework. I always recommend the Grow framework. Goals, reality options. Where are we at now? Go look it up. Very, very easy to find. But the Grow coaching model. For me, it’s simple, right? And it then allows us to have a real focus on how we structure our coaching conversations. Simple coaching is rolled out regularly with our teams in our one to ones when we’re out on the field, right? And we look for moments when we can coach because what we end up with then is teams who are very regularly being upskilled similar to the training approach, rather than lumpiness when things are forgotten.
So, complexity here in reverse very much looks like a lack of structure in a training and coaching program. And the reason this becomes complex is because we can’t actually measure what our team are learning. We don’t know where they’re really growing and upscaling unless we’re measuring and recording lots of calls. And at the end of the day, the inconsistency in training and coaching leads to a lack of engagement. A lack of engagement leads to poor performance, leads to turnover, leads to complexity. Now what I will say here and add to the training and coaching piece is that it is becoming easier and easier to find support in the training and coaching landscape. Whilst I believe strategically setting up how we train and how we coach is very much a human job. The implementation, the measurement, the tracking of this training and coaching, we don’t need humans to do anymore phone-based sales teams, phone-based service teams, website, web, chat-based teams, even video teams, right. That are having conversations on video platforms. We don’t need to be assessing and recording these calls anymore. There are tools out there that do it. I’m very open. I’ve invested into a brand called Icana I.C.A.N.A.AI Right. That’s the website as well. Icana does all of this for you. It measures your calls, it analyses exactly what you want it to analyse on. It provides coaching around the technical elements of what teams say and then also how they say it. Tone of voice. It does this with daily dropdown reports to salespeople, with summaries to leaders with simulators. Right. It’s a terrific tool and it’s not the only one out there. But the point I’m trying to make for any teams where we have video phone or web-based interaction, the text there right now for you to be able to roll out for your team and measure their performance far more impactfully. So, I’d really encourage you to go and check something like that out. Start with Icana, but go and look at what else takes your fancy. But certainly, there’s a real advantage here around simplicity when it comes to training and coaching.
Okay, moving right along the fourth one being metrics. Short, sharp and simple here. So, for me, simple metrics are keeping them limited. I work off three metrics, deals, closed pipeline size, meetings per month, and you can vary these between units and dollars and project different project types. Right? You can have a bit of fun, a bit of freestyle with it, but the simpler we keep metrics, the easier it is for our team to follow and keep engaged. Salespeople, in my experience, they’re generally not people who are embracing administration. They are in sales because they like talking to people and dealing with people and often the thrill of the hunt of new business as well. These are not people who are going to sit there and go through 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 metrics in a report. They simply don’t work that way.
So, for me, keeping your metrics nice and simple and then understanding what success looks like is where simplicity reigns. I have worked with sales teams, either as an individual or a leader, for 25 years and I’ve been a leader of sales teams. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I am closing in on 20 years as a sales leader. Never have I seen teams be more successful around metrics than when they keep them simple. Because complexity really starts to reign here when we have so many metrics that we simply can’t follow them. Our average customer spend, our average customer turn rate, our average customer lead time, Our average customer time spent in the meet and greet phase, number of days since last contacting our customers, customers who have responded to emails and those who haven’t, customers who ate custard for breakfast, customers who, whatever it may be, right? I do not know where the custard example just came from. I think it’s because we’ve been making lots of ice cream at home. But the point is really complex metrics, you just lose teams in them, right? So, by focusing on what’s important, we then get the team’s actions to be around what’s important, and that’s seeing people, that’s building a pipeline and that’s closing deals. We support that with a great strategy that’s going to keep them focused on certain areas, a process that makes sure they’re working through each of those areas consistently and training and coaching to upskill in those areas. So, for me, I really want to focus on the simplicity piece here and it’s getting your metrics to be nice and simple.
Last but not least, rituals, behaviours, celebrations. I’m only going to talk briefly here, but for me, what simplicity looks like is that the team know what are expected from them, right? So, they then end up embedding behaviours and rituals that work around that. Admin happens at certain times of the day. Sales meetings and sales conversations are done at the rest, right? We have a reduction in internal meetings, right? We have times set when we should be speaking and seeing customers. We get out of the way of our teams to allow them to have those rituals of seeing customers. Simplicity looks like we celebrate where we recognise progress and we celebrate wins. So, it’s not just about the wins, it’s also about recognising progress and we’re really consistent in what we’re celebrating so that teams get that stimulus, right, that recognition around the right things. And as leaders, we’re not out there trying to look for behaviours that we want to reward. We know exactly what we’re trying to reward. Complexity, on the other hand, looks very much like not having a system for how we celebrate, right? We just randomly pick something to celebrate because what often ends up happening is we forget to. And I know so many sales leaders, in fact, I barely know a sales leader who thinks they celebrate effectively and doesn’t want to celebrate with their team more. So, when we get this right, celebrations can really ramp and the engagement that comes from that is super significant. So, complexity in this piece, the last thing I’ll say around behaviours is complexity is that we don’t have any standards in the team, how long it takes to contact customers, how we turn up to work, right? The type of tire we wear when we’re in the office, when we’re not in the office, what we do when we work from home, do we, you know, do we work to hours, do we work to days, do we work to tasks, whatever it may be, right. We need to be really clear on what’s important to the teams and that’s then how we allow ourselves the chance to succeed.
Okay? So, thank you, Lasada, for the simplicity. Sales complexity fails quote. I love it. So today we’ve looked at how we can roll simplicity into your strategy, your sales process, your training and coaching program, your metrics, and last but not least, your behaviours, your rituals and your celebrations. So, lots of little pieces in there. I hope you can take an overall mindset to the question, how can I make life simpler for my team? Because a simpler life allows them to focus on the most impactful parts of their professional journey and get the best results for their teams.
Okay. Before we wind up today, health and fitness, I’m going to stay on this simplicity piece so for me, I have done all types of training, gym, cardio, crosses between nothing, combine it with fasting, combine it with different stimulants, legal stimulants, combine it with all different types of diets. And for me, what I’m sitting here as a 42, almost 43-year-old man is absolutely for me, simplicity works. When it comes to my health and fitness. Knowing the four or five key things that are abundantly most important to me and get the best out of my physical health and fitness journey is what allows me to be super, super consistent. And I know that for me they are training every day in the morning, right? If I can set my life up that I clear myself time to train in the mornings, even if I’ve got to get up at 4:30, right? Then more often than not I’m succeeding, eating the same breakfast. I do it seven days a week. It helps me start the day right, I know what I’m eating, I don’t have to think about it. And away I go. Sleep. I’m pretty consistent around going to bed at the same time, wherever I can. I try and get that. I know the amount of sleep I need, right? Seven and a half to eight hours and away I go. So, I set my life up to allow myself to do that. Right? Now I know that this is really simplifying because we all have different things in life, but for me those three and the fourth one is trying to avoid alcohol during the week. I have fun with it on the weekend, I have a drink, go out, do things that I want to do. But if I get those four things right, I know that in general I’m going to be running mostly in the right direction. So, my encouragement around that health and fitness piece is just have a think about how simplicity can work in your professional sense, but also roll that into your personal life and see if there’s anything you could be simplifying that might make life just that little bit easier. Or instead of driving 20 minutes to and from the gym every day, could you go and buy some basic equipment? And two days a week you do it from home. So, you end up getting two extra sessions in because you can’t afford the 40 minutes of travel, but you can afford 20 minutes, 25 minutes of a quick session at home, right? Start to think about how all of those things can really help you with your personal health and fitness. And then you know, you’ll be amazed by what comes from it.
Okay, that’s it for today. Simplicity sales complexity fails. Please keep living in a world of possibility. You’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. And we’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
How Complexity Will Stop You Hitting Your Sales Goals
