7 reasons why your sales team is not a sales force
One of the main complaints from companies is that their sales team is not selling. To fix that, you need to ask a clarifying question, “Do we have a Sales Team or a Sales Force?” Sales teams wait for sales to happen. Sales Forces generate sales. There is a fundamental difference between these two sales ideologies, and it will affect the overall predictability of your business revenue.
Think about it for a moment. If you’re waiting for a customer to call and make a sale, it’s impossible to predict when and how much. Sure, companies look at last year’s numbers and use them as an indicator of what should be coming or what is commonly known as the run rate, but what if it isn’t? We see this over and over and when those numbers don’t come up, there’s a lot of pain out there. You need a force of sales professionals that crush the market with productive activity that generates income. If you’re salivating and wondering how to make this happen, you first need to understand why your sales team is not a sales force. Through a great deal of experience, we have discovered that these are the top 7 reasons why the Force is not with you:
- Culture: This is the most important and is almost always ignored. A culture of responsibility, hard work and results will transform an organization. If everyone arrives at 9:00, they spend the first 45 minutes checking email, sharpening pencils, taking 30-minute coffee breaks, having 2-hour lunches, spending the afternoon checking Facebook and email, and leaving at 4. :00, there is not much time to sell. This is common in organizations, and instead creating a culture of selling from the receptionist to the CEO, through sales, operations, finance, human resources, is more powerful than anything else you can do. Create a culture of selling and the culture will sell!
- Set clear and achievable goals and don’t touch them: If you don’t know where the target is, you can’t hit it. Goals and commission dictate behavior, so if you’re wondering why your sales people aren’t selling, you can first ask if you’re motivating the right behavior. Clear and concise objectives that are motivated by properly structured commissions will generate results. The goals can be challenging, however they must be achievable on planet Earth. For a seller, there is nothing worse than achieving an unrealistic goal. He will make them stop before they start. What’s worse than that is moving a target after it has been locked on. Hobbyist organizations set the goals and then penalize the sales force for hitting the goals by moving them higher in the year. This will demotivate the entire team and you will see sales go down the drain. A total culture killer!
- Structure: There are so many ways to structure a Sales Force and when you do it right, it’s magical. If you get the right people in the right job, they will shine. Don’t let your hunters waste their time farming and don’t hunt a farmer who doesn’t have the DNA to hunt. This is just scratching the surface, but getting the right people in the right place is a priority from day one. Also, once you’ve established this structure, it’s fine to modify it, but don’t change it too often. We experienced a major multi-million dollar company that decided to restructure the sales force not once, not twice, not three, but four times in an 18-month period. Do you think someone was concentrating on selling? Set the structure and run with it! Adjust but don’t touch.
- rewards: From a used car lot to Fortune 500 companies, there will always be companies that destroy the motivation of their sales force by having an ambiguous commission plan or constantly adjusting the plan to the disadvantage of the salesperson. These sales professionals are selling to make money. Final point. When you play with it, you play with your results. Make the commission schedule clear and concise. Remember, this is going to dictate the behavior of the salespeople, so if you want your sales to skyrocket, motivate them with good commissions based on a plan that is fair, challenging, and easy to understand that tells them how they are going to be paid.
- People and Training: Sometimes you can’t turn coal into a diamond no matter how much pressure and heat you apply. It’s not that someone has to be born to sell, but if they don’t have the inherent skill set and don’t want to work hard, they won’t perform. Selling is not easy and that is why good commission structures reward the sales professional handsomely for selling. It usually takes a lot of hard work and a willingness to learn new skills, but training is also needed. If your salespeople don’t have enough training to understand how to prospect, propose, and close through a disciplined sales cycle, then they will either fail or be partially successful. If you find that your sales are lagging and you’ve tackled the other steps on this list, then training is your priority!
- Results and Forecasts: This is an all-time favorite because it’s so easy to fix. Companies that don’t track their opportunities on a platform that makes it easy for Sales to know they’re not hitting their targets are setting themselves up for failure. This is no different than using a map. If you don’t know where you are, where you need to go, how far you’ve come, and how to get there, how will you ever get to your destination? Sales are no different. Get the right tools, and at this point there are so many cheap options available to do this, like Salesforce.com, Zoho, and Insightly, that you have no excuse. Do it!
- administrative nightmare: This one is easy to see but the most difficult to fix. If your salespeople spend all of their time on paperwork before or after a sale, there isn’t much time to sell. We witnessed this in organizations in both the US and Canada and in some organizations it was so bad that the entire sales force was afraid to make a sale due to the overwhelming amount of work that would follow. Vendors are there to sell. Eliminate the administrative burden and make them sell! Remember, selling is a profession and good salespeople are professionals. You wouldn’t ask a doctor to fix your toilet, so don’t ask sellers to do anything other than sell.
These are the 7 Steps that will surely help turn your sales team into a sales force. Take a look at your organization and see if you’ve addressed all the steps. If so, and you’re still not getting anywhere, there will be several articles going over each of these steps in the coming weeks to help you further. If after that your team is still not a force, feel free to give us a call and our team will see if we can help you.
