In today’s article, we are going to look at four ways some sales organisations unconsciously set themselves up to fail. The topic is inspired by conversations I’ve had with some business owners, my personal experience as well as frustrations of other consultants I work with.
Here are the four (4) ways to fail as a sales organisations:
No sales strategy
A sales strategy translates the business strategy at the level of the individual customer. The questions to be answered include - what’s the customer’s buying behaviour?, what is the value we are bringing to them?, who are we going to target and why?, what sort of relationship is required?, and how are we going to do that? In other words, a sales organisation’s sales strategies must align with the responses to the questions above.
However a study conducted by SBI, a Sales and Marketing Consulting firm in the USA has found that 91 per cent of sales organisations have misaligned strategies. According to the study, most were focusing on tactics and not strategies, hence no consistency in achieving corporate target. The consequences of a sales organisation with No or Mis-aligned sales strategies is therefore failure.
No sales process
Some sales organisations fail because they haven’t developed and deployed a successful sales process. A sales process is a tactics to execute the sales strategy and built on two important areas – the way the buyer wants to buy and the way the corporate strategy is built. As discussed in one of my previous articles – The Tombstone Prospecting and Selling: Lessons from a Tombstone Salesperson (https://mawuliocloo.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/the-tombstone-prospecting-selling-system-lessons-from-a-tombstone-salesperson/ ), a successful sales process must be built around the buying process. Tombstone sellers whose sales cycle is 12 months have succeeded in deploying a sales process which makes their sales predictable and consistent.
Ineffective sales skills training
Some sales organisations consider sales training as a cost rather than an investment and are therefore very reluctant to do so. They believe the sales skills acquired by candidates from the University education, or from other companies is adequate enough. On the other hand, there are sales organisations who invest some money into some sales skills training; however they find to their disappointment that the training was ineffective. From my personal experience, many sales skills training programs are ineffective for some of the following reason:
• It is not aligned to both sales strategy and process of the sales organisation
• It is not competency based and too generic in content
• Lack of post-training reinforcement of skills
• Lack of internal approach to coaching
• The training is delivered by a generalist trainer and not a specialist sales trainer with experience.
The last point is particularly of concern to me, and I personally believe there’s something fundamentally wrong about that. Just think about it – doctors get trained by specialist doctors with years of experience; lawyers get trained by specialist lawyers with knowledge and experience; accountants get trained by professional accountant. What about Sales professionals?
No commitment of adequate resources
A sales organisation sets up itself to fail when it fails to commit adequate resources to the enablement of its sales force. Resources may include vehicles or travel and transport allowances for field salespeople, computers and telephony for both insidesales and field salespeople, sales force automation and CRM solutions. For instance there’s absolutely no need to invest in three cars for 12 field salespeople who then have to pool that car to do their work. I would rather recruit ONLY 3 salespeople, assign those vehicles, provide a very aggressive target and juicy compensation plan, and hold each of them account to results. In other words sales organisations should not spread their little resources thinly on several salespeople, but rather focus it on a few salespeople for maximum impact. It is only then will sales organisations see a real increase in productivity.
Conclusion
In conclusion, sales organisations should audit their sales effectiveness on a regular basis to identify whether their sales strategy is well aligned, ensure that their sales process is aligned to their buyer’s process, review their sales skills training initiatives to ensure effectiveness, and finally to work out the workload of their sales force in order to allocate the right resources.
Happy Selling Week.