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What if you could isolate the one thing that would make your sales soar?  The challenge is in figuring out what that “silver bullet” actually is – if it even really exists.   The reality is that, for the most part, it is a combination of factors, including the efforts of both marketing and sales that can increase or depress revenue results.  By focusing on a group of factors, it is possible to improve results without having necessarily to reinvent the wheel or engage in expensive technology solutions in the name of change.

After working with a range of organizations in both B-to-B and B-to-C markets, I’ve boiled things down to seven common “sins” that can needlessly impede sales growth.   By identifying which one of these areas is similar to what is going on in your own company, you can build a simple but powerful road map for increased effectiveness.

Sin # 1 – The Chicken or the Egg? Sales or Marketing Focus

At the risk of being a little controversial – I have to say I’ve never understood why so many companies talk about “Sales & Marketing” as a discipline, rather than “Marketing & Sales.”  Often, conversationally and organizationally, the focus is on Sales first – with marketing placed in an enablement role.  The truth is that the process of finding a prospect and converting them to a customer starts with Demand Creation – and the majority of that activity begins with Marketing.  Marketing is setting the stage, targeting the most likely segments, honing the right message, and hopefully creating the right set of sales materials, in addition to customer collateral, to give Sales everything they need to take that prospect through the sales process.  Without this crucial orientation, it’s too easy to cut marketing when times get tough.  Sales people are pushed out the door to “sell harder,” but not given the marketing support to make that happen. Put the activities in their proper order.  Think about them in terms of an extended and repeatable progression and you will have gone a long way into aligning and integrating the efforts of both organizations. They are mutually interdependent – so alignment has nothing to do with having one department report to the other.

Sin # 2 – One Size Fits All Value Propositions

The amount of time, effort and money that companies spend on value proposition development leads one to believe that if the company nails it and gets their sales force to use it – the sales will tumble in.  Recently I spoke with a project manager who confided that her parent corporation had spent $250,000 on their latest version which was rolled out to all the member companies.  When was the last time you bought something that was “One Size” that actually fit?  A corporate value proposition is just that – a high level statement at a corporate level.  For it to work in the field, marketers and sales people need to customize it to fit each target market and type of prospect.  A tiered value proposition set is crucial to enabling sales people to speak directly to buyers’ challenges, values and needs.   A review of value propositions in your industry will also reveal another sin:  they tend to be about the company and product, and not the customer. When a prospect looks into the “mirror” of a value proposition and doesn’t see themselves, what happens next?  You guessed it – they are left to just compare you to your competitors and decide based on price and features, leaving value, the only true differentiator, out of the conversation.

Sin # 3 – The Charge to “Call Higher”

Over the past few years, sales people are being told to spend more time calling at senior levels.  This challenge often founders on the rocks of lack of access, lack of practice, and lack of focus.  The majority of sales people are simply not oriented to a senior executive’s point of view.   When times are good, it’s quite doable to sell to the middle management tier – it’s only when times get tougher that approvals get pushed upwards.  So lack of practice is one issue.  The other is the perennial gatekeeper.  Most folks quit after two strikes and revert to “who do I know that can take me in the back door?” This isn’t a bad strategy, but it’s not always an available one either.  The key is to identify what’s in it for the gatekeeper, be it an assistant, a middle manager, or a director, and to bargain with them for that value item in exchange for a meeting with the senior executive they are protecting.  Finally – the most common problem with calling higher is that many sales people are simply unprepared to converse at that level.  The kind of conversation that a rep will have with a mid-tier player is completely different than the strategic, business-value driven conversation that a senior executive wants to have.  Bottom line – speak in their language or you’ll be headed out the door.

Sin # 4 – Going out into the territory without a map

Armed with a sales quota that would make a horse choke, sales representatives often head out every year into their territories and spend the majority of their time trying to either identify “low hanging fruit” or ping ponging around their territory based on the leads marketing gives them.   Very few sales people have a clear plan and map of how they will penetrate their territory – including net new opportunities, installed base or renewal opportunities, and strategies for more consistent penetration across the territory.  Often you will find wide swaths of territory that simply have been untouched because there was not plan or strategy that identified where the quota was going to best come from.  Companies that enable their sales representatives to truly grow their territories give them the territory planning tools and process to make reasoned and educated plans that will insure consistent revenue growth.  Furthermore, many territories have a handful of customers that are really much more strategic and bigger than the rest.  Handling a major account is often quite different than handling the rest of the opportunities available in that territory. Large national or global accounts are territories unto themselves.  In order to reap the true profits available for these accounts, they need the focus of a Major Account Plan that clearly identifies the growth strategies and opportunities to penetrate deeper.

Sin # 5 – Suffering from “Premature Proposal”

What is the easiest way to make a sales person go away?  Ask them for a proposal!  Many of us run eagerly out the door, flushed with the excitement of telling our sales manager that we’ve “got one.”   It’s rare for a sales person to ask the following very important questions:  

• “Was it too easy to get this opportunity?” 
• “Do I know enough to actually write a very targeted, tailored proposal?” 
• “Do I know how many other companies are also writing proposals for this person?”
• Is it a real project, with a real name and an already funded budget?

Pushing back to ask more questions and to request more information is one of the easiest and smartest ways to find out if this is a true request or a “get lost, kid, you’re bothering me!”   Instead, field the response with a request for more information, another meeting, perhaps an interview or two with key stakeholders. Depending on the responses to these requests, it should be easy to find out if this is worth the time and resource investment.  It should net out the “real” proposal opportunities from the chaff that will sit in the sales pipeline for months.

Sin # 6 – Bait & Switch: Technology or Sales Process?

Any sales manager can tell you that there are as many ways to sell as there are numbers of sales reps in your organization.   What is the right way?  Often a sales manager will decide that “their way” is the most optimal.  Many of them have been promoted from the ranks because they were top flight sellers.  (See Sin # 7).  Therefore, they work on imposing their own method on the reps.  When that doesn’t work - instead of developing a consistent sales process, many companies simply revert to a CRM software tool, such as Seibel, or Salesforce.com or Goldmine.  The thought is that if everyone uses the same piece of software to track opportunities and sales, then by definition, everyone will adhere to the same process.  However, what a sales tool will not do is often the crux of the issue:

• What are the specific characteristics of a truly qualified prospect? How does the software support those characteristics? 
• Do the steps in the pipeline map to the actual way your customers buy?
• How accurate is the roll-up of the forecast if each salesperson has their own “method”? 
• How many “work-arounds” to the system are sales people engaging in?

 Sin # 7 – Return of the Body Snatchers: Cloning your Super Star

Seems like an obvious choice – who better to lead, manage and mentor your sales force than a star player?  Many companies feel like this “cloning” strategy will result in a team of stars – installing the “best practices” of their rainmakers throughout the sales teams.  The wake-up call comes when the newly minted sales manager spends more time in the field closing deals, than they do in managing or mentoring others.  The skills that made them a star are often in direct opposition to the skills a manager needs.  Coaching skills are not innate.  In the interest of coaching, sales managers will close a deal, thinking that the rep will “learn how it’s done” and then be able to repeat it later.  What happens instead, is that reps are trained to rely on their sales managers when the going gets tough – and revert to bringing in “the big gun” when a prospect doesn’t close.  For a transition like this to work, a sales manager fresh out of the field needs to be given the tools and methods to enable them to successfully lead their reps towards sales quota fulfillment.  Training that focuses on how to coach, how to evaluate, and how to manage process – including having a consistent sales process that a sales manager can enforce across the sales force, is key in taking a sales star and enabling him or her to be a sales leader.

Conclusion

So how many of these sins is your organization committing?  Typically there is usually one problem that is primary, with two or three others that also are in play.  Increasing marketing and sales effectiveness is about tuning all the key activities that make up the path to the customer.  By adjusting a few specific areas, the whole can be greatly improved.  What this implies is that it isn’t just a marketing challenge or just a sales challenge.  It needs to be a shared responsibility to get to an integrated and revenue generating state.

 - Lisa Dennis

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