What type of sales engine is driving your company?

 

You want a big V8 engine with 707 horsepower and 650 ft-lbs of torque where all of the reps are driving revenue, and meeting quota. 

Your team cannot be a 4 cylinder, 130 horsepower engine when your competitors have the big V8 with a supercharger.  That isn’t a way to compete short term or long term.  

It is easy to understand your sales engine with an evaluation, but it is not obvious just by looking at it.  I will get into that in a moment. 

 

Let’s consider the economic environment that your sales team is operating within first.

 

The Training Industry’s recent article explained that “training is futile unless employees are engaged and invested.” Gallup explains that “U.S. employee engagement took another step backward during the second quarter of 2022 … The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is now 1.8 to 1, the lowest in almost a decade.” So, what actions can you take as a learning and development (L&D) leader to better support your employees and drive results for your company? All at a time when we’re asked to do more with less?

What does this mean for the sales organization?  

You must get them engaged before you do any development work.  To do this, you have to understand your sales team’s strengths, weaknesses, attitudes, motivation, and sales competencies. To engage the team, you have to speak to them where they are.  So, throwing dollars at sales training BEFORE you understand the sales team is irresponsible.

One simple example is knowing how they are motivated.  Is it money?  The trend we are seeing is more intrinsically motivated sales reps. Sure they want to get paid, but they also need to know they have a path forward and are part of something bigger than themselves, and they need to believe in it. 

The sales team is your company’s engine.  If you are going to invest in anything in 2023, it must be your sales team. When this investment is done well, you solve the engagement issue described above, and you improve the economic engine – and the gap with your competitors.  

But – and this is important – it is a terrible idea to spend money on sales training without evaluating your sales organization first.  You must understand the real issues.  Sure, there are the skill gaps contributing to the sales problems, but what are the other issues contributing to under performance?  Every rep is different.  Do you know why they have gaps in their mindset, and where their sales skills gaps are?

 

 

Here is a simple way to relate to the understanding the sales force issue, and the reason most sales training does not deliver an ROI:

 

You do not go to the pharmacist to get the prescription without the diagnosis from a doctor who has asked some questions, ran some tests, and poked around a bit. 

 

Our healthcare system is not efficient, but it is irresponsible to send a prescription without a diagnosis. 

With a recent sales team evaluation, the Leadership team learned why their sales team was losing market share to a competitor who had identical products but higher prices. The client believed the sales team had strong product knowledge and solid relationships within their accounts, but the reps were squandering opportunities. 

Some of the issues we uncovered:

• The reps were not hunting for new business. 
• They were ineffective at reaching the decision makers and more comfortable speaking to purchasing departments. 
• The reps’ win rates had dropped because they did not qualify prospects well.
• Revenue forecasts were off because the sales pipeline was full of deals that would never close.
• The sales team was being outsold because the sales team could not sell value.

 

The leadership team was not happy about the information, but they understood their sales team’s issues. Now they could go about engaging them in the areas that would help the reps earn and achieve their goals, help the client’s customers, and allow the client to reach their short and long term growth objectives. 

Before you do anything else – get your team evaluated. Email me to get the process started. 

Here is the good news: getting the answers you need is much, much easier than dealing with a doctor.  It might just save the company’s life. 

I want to thank you for subscribing and reading the blog.  The entire team at Helix Sales Development is working hard to deliver value to as many entrepreneurs as we can.  We do not and cannot work with everyone who reaches out, but we are building offerings to give you access to great tools.  

Which reminds me.  If you want to address mistake #5, here is access to some data and a monthly subscription to the tool we use to predict sales success.  Go poke around. Hiring better salespeople and discerning who should be on your team has never been more important, and we have multiple programs to help.