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Secrets of High-Performing Executives

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 06:09:24 GMT

Concerns of a Company Executive

Can you count what return on investment your Sales department has made over the past decade? Are the returns consistent or episodic? Do gains happen only when you release a new product, new marketing campaign, or when your whole industry goes up, or is your salesforce steadily driving incremental growth all the time, as a result of having the right strategy, procedures and people?

A key question to ask yourself as a company executive is, "If you compare today with 10 years ago, how many of these old problems are still happening?":

Salespeople are assigned revenue targets, but don't achieve them.
Loyal customers defect to your competitors, and nobody saw it coming.
Sales opportunities don't close as forecast, or don't close at all.
Customer engagement is at low levels in silos, not with enough executives.
Results from a few top guns carry the rest of the sales team.
It takes too long for new sellers and managers to hit the ground running.
Too many salespeople are order-takers, not order-makers.

Maybe you're nodding your head in recognition? Maybe you're even thinking, "That's right! These were problems where I worked a decade ago, and they're still the same problems I see in Sales today. Why are they still happening?"

The good news is, these are all common concerns. Even better, they are solvable.

"Ultimately as the Sales Manager at any level, it’s your responsibility to see things as they really are, remove risk from the sales equation, and call attention to legacy practices or poor workflows that create risk for the enterprise. Sometimes you simply have to call out what’s not working, and deal with it instead of putting up with it."

Papering Over the Cracks

Why do these problems persist? Let's use an analogy.

Your managers are inside their office. People smell something is burning in the business. They can't agree what it is. Some say it smells like wood. Others say it smells like plastic. A few say it's coming from outside the building. Some report seeing smoke, others see nothing at all or waste time arguing that the business is fireproof. It's not always possible to see the cause of a fire from a single room. It's even harder to put a fire out from the inside the house. You need experts on the outside to identify the hot spots, direct the water and save the building.

The truth is, most attempts to improve the sales and marketing functions of a company fail because they are directed too low in the organization where people have limited vision, insufficient experience and restricted budget. The people in charge of change aren't always empowered with real authority, and they don't always stay in the role long enough to see it through. Add people's general reluctance to change, and the politics of protecting their own reputations.

It's not hard to see why sales improvement projects are launched and money gets spent on solutions that offer a veneer of short-term change, but fail to fundamentally fix underlying problems.

A key reason is the systems, rules, tools and metrics that run your salesforce have been cobbled together over time, by different people, in different years, and not assembled to a master blueprint.

In addition, most people who lead sales teams or the sales enablement and training roles may be former salespeople; so if everything they know about selling comes from working inside a flawed system, how do they bring new experience to the table?

The reverse is also true. If the person deciding how to improve your sales results has never personally carried a quota but instead has an academic or mathematical understanding of selling, how do they bring context and situational knowledge to the table?

Volatility and Unpredictability

Despite the rigor you apply elsewhere in the company, calculations turn elastic when it comes to the salesforce. Revenue can be far less than expected when salespeople highball their original forecast, then give away discounts at the finish line.

Income hits peaks & valleys when prospecting, nurturing and closing are not in balance, or when the pipeline is stacked unevenly. Since salespeople are targeted on the top line instead of the bottom line, the true cost of sale (and therefore your rate of return on the salesforce) is seldom known.

When close dates are pushed back (with a corresponding increase in the cost of sale), or when fees are reduced to beat a competitor (with a matching decrease in profit), sales managers rarely re-evaluate if pursuing the deal still makes sense, or if it makes better business sense for their salesperson to withdraw.

You try to make sense of the forecast by applying the law of averages in CRM or spreadsheets. But you still resort to manual weightings and revisions to massage the numbers. It’s not a precise science. But you wish it was.

As a result, Sales has the reputation of being a ‘dark art’. Sometimes this phrase is used by the very people tasked with leading the Sales function - and with good cause. Recent benchmarks of global sales performance reveal sobering statistics every CEO, COO and CFO should consider:

Three quarters of salespeople achieve less than 80% of their annual revenue target.

61% of opportunities in the sales pipeline end in a ‘lost sale’ or ‘no decision’.

The resource cost of pursuing a solution sale that takes 3 months to close is around $50,000—win or lose.

63% of salespeople don't move customers to the next step, or ask for the order.

73% of sales managers avoid giving any formal skills coaching to their team members.

Too many executives see sales effectiveness as a cost to be avoided, not as a mission-critical function.

Imagine how analysts & shareholders would react to such systems failures if they knew to look for them. We propose that greater transparency about value creation in the sales operation should be the next evolution on your corporate reporting agenda.

How We Help

The SalesLabs proposition is to serve as a fresh pair of eyes into your organization, and design a bespoke program of change and monitoring to lift your top line predictably, sustainably and measurably. This will provide:

An holistic picture of whether your sales process, procedures and tools are fit for purpose, or lagging behind.

Insight into which salespeople can actually sell your products and services, who can't, and what to do about it.

Clarity on which sales managers are tactical vs. strategic, adding value or creating risk, and what to do about it.

A roadmap of improvement options ranked by speed, risk, impact, and ease.

We can also roll up our sleeves and embed with your team to effect change from the inside.

Call to Action

Our 21st-century analytics, thought leadership and three decades of enterprise sales leadership experience will help you improve the design, measurement and scalability of your sales organization. Every engagement is bespoke and confidential. Since 1997 our approach has helped clients build better sales ecosystems, which have won more than $50bn in revenue upside as a direct result of our work with them.

We're the only sales training firm trusted by Edward Elgar Publishing to compile the new Encyclopedia of Sales and Sales Management, as the first step towards introducing a global set of standards and qualification for the sales profession. If you choose to engage us, your company will have instant access to the world's leading think-tank on professional selling.

Engage SalesLabs to audit your sales force over the next quarter. We will return to you a clear roadmap to steady, profitable and sustainable improvement. Our approach is unique. It's evidence-based. It works. And we guarantee it.

Secrets of Sales Enablement & Training

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 03:41:33 GMT

The Role of Sales Enablement & Training

You’re a professional educator with qualifications in adult learning, instructional design, or change management. Or you’re a successful salesperson/manager responsible for bringing others to peak performance. Whatever your situation, you know being in charge of your company’s sales & management development is a privilege and a challenge.

Sales enablement and training departments come in two sizes:

1. ' Mission Control ' - You’re adequately funded & resourced. The science of tuning the organization fascinates you. You perform deep training needs analysis, and subscribe to all the right magazines, conferences & analytics. You offer curricula for new hires through to experienced players, including on-the-job coaching. You’re measured on the ROI your training adds to the company’s balance sheet, and possess the capability to develop new solutions in-house or through a team of suppliers, including email automation for lead generation, CRM platforms, AI chatbots and online learning academies. Having set the bar high, your goals are ambitious: spot new trends, achieve efficiencies, and delight your internal customers.

2. ' Skunkworks ' - You fight for internal budget and have limited resources. Managers tell you what training they want, and you tick these boxes by putting out tenders to find capable vendors at low prices. You save money by writing & delivering your own courses—a YouTube download here, a borrowed powerpoint there. You’re a ‘jack of all trades’ measured on the variety of classes run, volume of people trained, and the scores they give on evaluation sheets. But managing the volume and variety of training stretches you thin, your budget doesn’t go far enough to keep everyone happy, and upper management sometimes complains they can't see clear proof that the investment leads to actual sales revenue.

"Neuroscientists, vocational psychologists & researchers—from Ebbinghaus (1885) to Rackham (1979), and The Royal Society’s studies (2011)—prove that typical sales training doesn’t stay in the brain long enough to get applied in the field. As a result, the ROI from most sales effectiveness investments is appalling."

How We Help

If you’re in charge of 'Mission Control' (a large company's sales enablement department) or a 'Skunkworks' (a smaller-sized training team) you'll look for different levels of support from a sales effectiveness partner. SalesLabs scales to suit: from the simple provision of sales aides & workshops, to fully outsourcing your sales academies and coaching.

Our Principals have run training departments in start-ups, SMEs and global companies. In doing so, we’ve learned that not all sales training has the same impact. In fact, here are some statistics you need to know:

56% of ‘sage on a stage’ training is forgotten in 60 minutes.

87% of any training is lost within 30 days (unless reinforced with refreshers).

Theory is best learned today by video & reading assignments.

Skills can only be retained through practice, feedback & coaching.

Neuroscientists, vocational psychologists & researchers—from Ebbinghaus (1885) to Rackham (1979), and The Royal Society’s studies (2011)—prove that typical sales training doesn’t stay in the brain long enough to get applied in the field. As a result, the ROI from most sales effectiveness investments is appalling.

It’s not a question of the content in the training materials. It’s that the learning architecture (classrooms, trainers, slides, e-learning, videos, animations) is wrong for how adults learn and retain information.

Here’s a summary of two key points you need to understand as a professional sales enablement and training manager:

1. Neuroplasticity

The human brain functions on ‘use it or lose it’ rules. It’s a principle called neuroplasticity, and explains why the permanent muscle-memory you hope to create for sales & management skills in training workshops and e-learning is always so elusive.

Think of the training you or your suppliers have run in the past year. Whether the topic is sales induction or complex account management, did it focus on the ‘what’ more than the ‘how’? Did it put a lecturer in the room to teach & entertain the troops, and end up drowning them in slideware?

Unless skills training includes plenty of practice & reinforcement, the memory cells used to store that information get tagged by the brain as non-essential, and are written over with new data within a few hours.

This is why pre-learning, plenty of practice, and then spaced refreshers are so important for the retention of information and skills.

Most training ignores this. We decided to look into it further.

2. Alpha-Gamma

Working with neuroscientists we learned the brain is an electrical system with 5 power modes, measured in hertz. It powers up or down based on the stimulus it receives, and assigns more or less memory cells according to the hertz being used.

This voltage is labelled Delta (deep sleep), Theta (dreaming), Alpha (concentration & learning), Beta (awake & alert), and Gamma (fight or flight; super-focused).

New knowledge about products, sales processes or management techniques is best delivered when the brain is in the Alpha wavelength. Books, videos, eLearning & quizzes that require interaction work best.

New skills can only be created when the brain is in the Gamma state. Placing people in simulations to try new techniques, make mistakes, receive feedback, and try again until they succeed works best for this.

Sales & management training needs to be carefully designed to stimulate these Alpha + Gamma modes. When it does, the retention of knowledge & skills is 900% higher than the Beta or Theta states created by traditional instructor-led, online or blended learning.

SalesLabs took on the challenge to re-engineer our entire sales & management training portfolio around what we now call the The Alpha-Gamma Learning Standard (AGLS). Since doing so, client feedback has been off the charts as they’ve achieved record sales growth (minimum 72% / maximum 1126% CAGR in emerging markets, and minimum 47% / maximum 368% CAGR in mature markets).

Call to Action

Our sales & management learning model and skills improvement methods are tried and tested, academically validated and commercially proven. They represent an exciting 21st century advancement that achieves permanent uplift in skills, knowledge and overall competence for any role.

Our reputation has positioned us as the only sales training firm experienced and independent enough to be trusted by Edward Elgar Publishing to compile the new Encyclopedia of Sales and Sales Management, due for publication in 2025.

If you’re a serious practitioner of sales & management enablement and training, you’ll want to harness this. You can do so in several ways:

SalesLabs can audit your current training delivery model, advise how to tune it, certify your training team on how to deliver new material using the Alpha-Gamma model, and track the ROI with you.

SalesLabs can work with your existing training suppliers, help lift their training to the Alpha-Gamma model, then give you an implementation playbook to extract the most value from their offerings.

SalesLabs can build you an integrated end-to-end curriculum based on analysis of your company’s needs, and either a) run it as an outsourced academy, b) deploy it through our seasoned consultants, or c) certify your own trainers for internal delivery.

Our approach is unique. It's evidence-based. It works. And we guarantee it.

Don't you want to know more?

Secrets of High-Performing Sales Managers

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 05:43:52 GMT

The Role of a VP Sales, Sales Director or Manager

As a VP Sales, Sales Director or Sales Manager, you lead teams of salespeople, other sales managers and team leaders in the pursuit of new business, plus retention and growth in existing accounts.

Every week you’re part evangelist, part politician. Let’s not forget ambassador, banker, therapist, strategist, accountant and janitor. Your sales team is a blend of remote, virtual or multichannel sellers who close deals online, by phone, through indirect channels, with partners, or in named accounts/territories/industries.

These different go-to-market models require your staff to master skills and processes unique to each role. As their leader, you need to be fluent in them all as targets go up, competition gets fiercer, and complexity increases.

Every General Needs Great Captains

Sales Directors tell us these challenges are a constant. But one thing is always a variable: the capabilities of the Sales Managers and Salespeople working under your direction. You rely on them. Their success means your success. Their effectiveness is the fulcrum through which you try to leverage best practices and grow your business.

However, while you hand-picked some since you became the Manager, you inherited others. It’s fair to say not all are as savvy, hard-working or loyal as you’d like them to be. Results are patchy. And it’s not surprising when you look at the statistics.

76% of today’s Sales Managers used to be Salespeople. But being a top seller doesn’t automatically equip a person to recruit, structure, coach, lead or compensate a sales team. In fact:

Less than 19% are tested for leadership, responsibility & accountability before being offered a Sales Manager role.

Less than 6% receive a handover from the outgoing manager.

Less than 11% are trained for the new job—despite a sales manager role being 72% different to a selling role.

So what becomes of most Sales Managers?

44% become “super reps” who never let go of selling, parachute in to the big deals, and put out endless fires (many of which they create). Reps working for these managers average 43% of quota.

35% become “spreadsheet jockeys” who command & control from behind a desk, out of touch with their people. Reps working for these managers average 67% of quota.

21% become “catalysts” who manage the metrics, lead the people, and follow a process. They’re in control, and inspire results. Reps working for these managers achieve a minimum 107% of quota.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

As a consequence, some teams hit target while others come nowhere near. This volatility would be headline news in other mission-critical functions. Imagine a surgeon, accountant, or pilot who failed half the time! So why is the standard of acceptance different in the salesforce?

In Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale The Emperor's New Clothes , two rogues convince a vain leader they can dress him in beautiful clothes, visible only to those fit for their high positions. But there are no robes or silks; the emperor is walking around naked. The hoax works because of the townspeople’s complicity in keeping up appearances. It takes a child's innocence to call out as false the illusion everyone else was pretending to see.

Ultimately as the Sales Director/VP Sales, it’s your responsibility to see things as they really are, remove risk from the sales equation, and call attention to legacy practices or poor workflows that create risk for the enterprise. Sometimes you simply have to call out what’s not working, and deal with it instead of putting up with it.

How We Help

SalesLabs is the world leader in sales transformation. As an offshoot from consulting giant Ernst & Young, our proprietary research provides insights to scale a successful enterprise.

Our ideas are published by McGraw-Hill as bestselling sales books. Our award-winning training courses are modern and fresh, used by sales professionals in more than 50 countries to out-think and out-sell their competitors. Our clients have achieved more than $50bn in measurable uplift as a result of our training, deal reviews, and presentation drills. We're the only sales training firm experienced and independent enough to be trusted by Edward Elgar Publishing to compile the new Encyclopedia of Sales and Sales Management, due for publication in 2025.

But our most meaningful contribution to Sales Managers/Directors/VP Sales is the work we do turning them, their direct reports and management peers into more effective strategists, skills coaches and process leaders. Sometimes that begins by privately coaching sales managers on how to sell today. Usually the market has evolved since those now in top manager jobs carried their first quota, and the things that worked in their own sales career may not still be the things that work today. Having the wisdom and humility to stay on top is this is key to maintaining credibility and true effectiveness.

Call to Action

If all your Sales Managers and Salespeople operated like your top 20% do, would your company reduce its risk and lift revenue? Of course it would. We propose to be your partner in driving that change. It's something we do very well.

Areas we tune and improve include:

Identification of revenue growth roadblocks.
Redesign of the end-to-end sales process.
Redesign of your sales funnel metrics.
Sizing your optimal team headcount.
Sales recruitment & onboarding.
Building a culture of accountability.
Coaching on sales accompaniments.
Sales opportunity reality checks.
Spotting forecasting errors early.
Talent retention and targeted motivation.
Key account coaching.
Sales opportunity coaching.
Selling to executives coaching.
Running better sales meetings.

Our approach is unique. It's evidence-based. It works. And we guarantee it.

Don't you want to know more?

Secrets of High-Performing Salespeople

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:14:27 GMT

The Role of a B2B Salesperson

As a business-to-business Salesperson you hunt new business in a territory, or you’re in charge of retaining & growing key accounts. Sometimes you sell product to purchasers and their influencers who already know what they want and are ready to buy. At other times you create demand by selling different stakeholders on a solution you've identified as relevant for their business needs.

You’re always under pressure from tight timeframes, tough competitors, competition for internal resources, and a sales target that goes up every year. You operate in an environment where competence is judged by not only achieving your sales targets but also by how accurate your forecast is, and the extent to which you profitably sell benefits instead of discounting to win.

You also need to master all the selling skills and techniques needed for different stages of the sales cycle, and an increasingly VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous). You must network across accounts and grow them each year. Your targets never go down. Training workshops take you away from your territory, and filling out online CRM screens still feels like administration, not automation, and only further reduces your available selling time. You may even wonder if AI is going to enhance your abilities or replace your job.

On top of this you also get pulled into management reviews to explain your approach in lead generation and prospecting, the status of large deals in the pipeline, forecast reviews and key account plans, and take sales advice from people who don't know your customers as well as you do, or whose practical sales experience was long ago in a different age.

Let's face it, in the era of virtual teaming, remote working, social media and high stakes deal-making, a career in sales demands a matrix of attributes. It's a complex job. Today you must be a strategist, tactician, accountant, industry guru, product expert, researcher, evangelist, futurist, graphic designer, presenter, thought leader, networker, lobbyist, coder, entertainer, news reporter, video influencer, negotiator and closer. It's a great career, but it's not for the feint-hearted!

"Competition is fierce. Some join forces against you to bundle products & services. Niche players undercut you on price. Sometimes your customer’s own departments bid against yo u. Some quarters are up, others are down. If only you could consistently win. "

Snakes and Ladders

Maybe you first learned the sales craft by watching others sell. You’ve taken ideas from books, audocassettes, videotapes, DVDs, online videos, and formal training. You've tested what works and what doesn't, and refined your approach over time. The market is always changing, so you try to stay sharp.

But customers are fickle. They surprise you with tenders that give your competitors an advantage. They spread budget you expected would be spent with you across multiple suppliers instead. Promised sales can evaporate after you’ve forecast them. As the economy gets tougher, executive buyers are getting more involved in routine decisions, and are more difficult to please.

Competition is fierce. Some rivals join forces against you to bundle products & services. Niche players undercut you on price. Sometimes your customer’s own departments compete against you. The post-pandemic world requires adaptation, and you must always be looking for new ways to help customers commit when they're more risk-averse than ever.

And with just 220 selling days in your calendar each year, time is precious, yet you may feel too much of it is spent on unnecessary meetings and administration. Sometimes it feels like a game of snakes & ladders; some quarters are up, others are down.

How We Help

SalesLabs helps you sell more. We’re one of the few firms that invests in regularly conducting fresh research on how executives buy and how top sellers succeed.

We distill our research into bestselling books with our publishing partner McGraw-Hill, then develop these concepts into training & work aides that make selling easier because they actually work.

We're the only sales training firm experienced and independent enough to be trusted by Edward Elgar Publishing to compile the new Encyclopedia of Sales and Sales Management, due for publication in 2025.

We all know death-by-powerpoint training puts you to sleep. Too many courses teach ‘what’ to do, without helping you practice ‘how’. So we’ve worked with neuroscientists and learning experts to completely redesign how sales training is delivered.

Our approach is interactive, dynamic, and treats you like an adult. It focuses on simplicity, situations and simulation.

In fact, sales professionals in more than 50 countries have closed $50 billion in new sales after learning to sell the SalesLabs way.

Call to Action

There are some simple things you can do to lift results right away.

Find out why our sales books Selling to the C-Suite and Target Opportunity Selling became sales classics. Whether you’re new to sales or a seasoned veteran, you’ll find fresh ideas you can implement on the deals in your pipeline.

See why our training is winning global awards. Look for public seminars near you, take an online course, or ask your training department to talk with us about tailored in-house programs or 1:1 coaching.

Look for sales tips and ideas in the videos, audios or thought leadership tools available on this site.

Our approach is unique. It's evidence-based. And it works.

Are you ready to take your earning power up a notch?