I’m Walter Crosby and I work with growth-minded, business owners & CEOs who have the desire & commitment to build a performance-based sales culture. The journey is challenging, the results are transformative and produce revenue growth with margin integrity.
The Problem: As CEO, you are responsible for moving the needle. You rely on your sales leaders to deliver on projections.
According to Gong the average tenure of a Vice President of Sales in the US has dropped from 26 months to 19 months. Let that sink in.
You rely on sales forecasts and sales data from sales leaders whose performance is terrible, and getting worse. More importantly, your sales leaders may not have the skills necessary to create wins. They may have been top performing salespeople, but without the skills necessary to lead and create accountability, they struggle, and ultimately fail.
It is not just sales leaders, over 50% of the salespeople in the market are not who you want in your sales organization. Recent data from Helix’s partner Objective Management Group shows that the bottom 50% of salespeople are as weak as the bottom 5% of salespeople. In other words, they all suck once you get past the top 20% of salespeople. You can read the data for yourself here.
One of the reasons Vice President of Sales’ tenure has fallen 7 months is they typically treat the symptoms of their poor performing sales team instead of solving the underlying problems.
Think of it in medical terms.
You have a pain in your right knee. You visit a doctor. He or she does not immediately schedule you for knee surgery. Instead, they use their years of education, training and experience to ask you lots of questions and run tests. After the analysis, they conclude the underlying cause of your knee pain is not your knee, but instead a weakness in your hip.
If the doctor just listened to your complaint of knee pain, without asking questions or running the right tests, they probably would have just treated your symptom (knee pain) with surgery or pain killers. But your knee pain would never go away because the underlying cause was never identified or treated.
Compounding the problem, sales leaders are often promoted for the wrong reasons. They were top performing salespeople, and were therefore promoted into leadership. Unlike doctors, sales leaders don’t go to 8 to 12 years of sales leadership school. They probably did not have a mentor, nor invested in themselves to get the development they needed. So, it really isn’t their fault that they don’t have the skills to be successful in the role.
I identify the underlying cause
To move the needle, and maintain margin integrity you need answers to 4 critical questions about your sales organization. Answers that your Vice President of Sales is not answering, and probably not considering. I can answer these questions with facts.
Here they are:
- Can your sales team be more effective?
- How much more effective can they be?
- What will it take to accomplish that?
- How long will it take?
The answers to these questions are rarely what you want to hear, but they allow you to avoid wasting time and resources trying to solve symptoms versus fixing the underlying problem.
The result is an opportunity presented in 2 elements:
- Estimated increase in sales
- Timeline for your growth
We don’t use an MRI for our analysis. Our method is much less invasive, less costly and a whole lot more comfortable. Instead, we use several sources of data and information we gather from your sales team [45-minute on-line questionnaire].
Armed with the right data, you will be equipped to make the best decisions for your business that address your sales team’s underlying problems.
Going back to the medical metaphor; if the CEO is the doctor, then I’m the specialist or the lab tech. I analyze the patient’s results to help the doctor establish the right course of action to solve the patient’s underlying problem once and for all.
It Is Not Their Fault!
Sales leaders are not trained, mentored, or coached to build sales organizations. Everyone assumes that high-performing salespeople can step into a management or leadership role. I offer the voice of experience that this is NOT true. After a decade of high performance in pure sales roles, I was asked to manage a sales team, an international team. I had no idea what I was doing!
That was 15 years ago. I had to go learn a new skill set. Baptism by fire! This is the reason I founded Helix Sales Development…to give sales leaders a fighting chance!
My rocket fuel comes from coaching committed individuals to excel beyond what they thought was possible. I hold advanced degrees from the school of hard-won wisdom, as well as the University of Michigan. Sales is one of my passions. The other is cigars. Check out my Sales and Cigars podcast.
What is the Fee Structure?
Better question, what does it cost, if you do nothing? Since you have gotten this far, I’ll share with you the fee structure.
$2,500 + $450 per salesperson, sales manager, and sales leader + 2 hours of your time to review the analysis.
It takes 2 to 3 weeks for me to assemble the data in a consumable format.
What do you get for that?
I’ll answer 4 critical questions below for you and provide data to back each up.
- Can your sales team be more effective?
- How much more effective can they be?
- What will it take to accomplish that?
- How long will it take?
I will deliver this information to you virtually. You will also receive all of the raw data. This analysis will provide you with the underlying cause of your sales team performance issues, and how much more in the way of revenue you can expect to earn by solving them.
Armed with this information, you can make the informed and data driven decisions to grow revenue.
Should you want assistance solving these performance issues and realizing that lost revenue, I can provide an optional solution to drive your team to achieve the opportunity we present. This solution is NOT a playbook that you execute alone. It is a customized development package that provides solutions to your sales team’s specific strengths and weaknesses.
Conservatively, my clients see a 29-37% increase in revenue
after an 18-to-24-month engagement.
Are you ready to build a successful sales culture
for the long-term?
Reach out to me to schedule a business conversation to determine if we can help.
Walter Crosby
Helix Sales Development
313-550-9950
[email protected]
Helix Sales Development
313-550-9950
[email protected]