Personal Freedom vs Following the Script

We have entered a new and amazing time in the modern sales organization where we have access to amazing tools and better ways to find the right person than ever before. Salespeople know more about their prospects before they even make a call, and they can incorporate more publicly available information in their pitch to make the talk track as relevant as possible.

The question is are we using the information correctly and are these new tools helping us to actually close more deals. There is no doubt that these tools make appointment setting easier, but can they actual track a salesperson’s execution of an optimized sales process?

Over the last two months I have been sitting through demos from many of the leading SAAS providers and startups in a variety of industries. The staggering lack of consistency in the sales process from salesperson to salesperson is the reason we are not seeing hockey stick type growth UNLESS we add more people. We are now using machines and outsourced talent to add more leads into the top of the funnel, but our bucket still has huge holes that only grow larger with each person hired.

What if a process existed that allowed your current people to close more deals and fix the holes?

Guess what? It does, and there are many sales processes that if implemented correctly and consistently would make a dramatic difference in revenue. However, many companies I come across preach a hands-off approach and prefer to let people “use their own style” and “figure it out”. This is crazy. Why let people fail and not implement best practices? Why not instead look for consistency in how the individual sells compared to best practices and hold the individual accountable to HOW they sell as much as the data they enter into salesforce?

Picture your accountant or CFO ignoring excel, and instead using Word because she prefers it. Or imagine what would happen if you your operations team went rouge and tweaked a few things here or there. Sales is the only part of the business where we let the “gut” run so rampant, and it needs to stop. Salespeople need structure and guidance no matter how seasoned they are, and if you truly want a rock star sales organization you need to have uniformity in delivering best practices.

Here are my top reasons why this has happened:

1. The CRM first mentality of founders and VCs (with no sales experience) coupled with the negative view of sales in the startup community

CRMs are for tracking and reporting activities, not good or bad performance at the individual activity level. They are a tool designed to optimize the entire machine rather than individual performance. Because of the lack of uniformity in the sales process, the variance from salesperson to salesperson in terms of skill/performance is very high, and therefore the macro-view tells you very little about the skill or quality of activities from person to person. It is easy to smooth out charts with volume, but the story is less than complete.

When I talk to many VPs of Sales and CEOs, the lowest performers are great at tracking activity and checking all the boxes. It’s easy to use a CRM but selling is the hard part because people are involved, not machines. VCs though look for the business to provide high-level metrics that do not give real insight into the actual health of the business. Is 100% growth good if your conversion ratio from proposal to deal is 15%? That tells a real story of the effectiveness of the sales organization. There is not enough focus on the why vs. the what.

This comes down to the fact that sales is the black dot in many organizations on the idealistic white sheet that is product development. We look to control it with machines that track extremely basic numbers from which we make ridiculous assumptions on individual performance and organizational health.

The fix: We have to focus on building the “sales process machine” as much as building the “sales ops machine.” Leaders and investors with little sales experience must do a better job of understanding the why and fundamentals of sales so they can accurately track and understand the growth engine. Activity tracking and measuring is far from an accurate assessment of front-line performance.

2. Sales leaders are more unqualified and CRMs have made them lazier than ever: Both executives and front-line leaders

Sales leaders are promoted from the field with 2-3 years of sales experience and 0 leadership experience. Then there are 3 people led by an under-qualified leader with no training on how to lead a sales team, and the salespeople are expected to just emulate the leader. This perpetuates the issue of not implementing a sales process, as the new sales leader cannot accurately articulate why they are successful and then cannot train people accordingly on a process. They just fall back on giving tips and basic trouble shooting.

As you hire more salespeople, the system breaks, so you bring in outside talent. These are supposed to be saviors who can resurrect the current situation and set you straight. They know the right things to say and definitely understand the sales ops machine that needs to be set up. Hallelujah!

Today is the golden age of the sales executive actually having her act together in terms of reporting. We can show charts, graphs, and other macro-level reporting that shows off nice trends of the business. It’s only when the graph begins to flatten that the VP becomes truly accountable.

What is missing from most of these charts? Reasons why we lost deals instead of won. This has been left off the report so the VC or executive team praises the sales leader for continuing to show growth that may be due solely to having more people reaching out or upswings in the market as a whole.

Because the leadership team has no idea of what a good sales process looks like, they struggle to hold the leader accountable for implementing a replicable system to close clients instead of tracking client progression. We ignore the losses due to poor processes and focus on the progression, learning little on the way.

The fix: Train leaders and promote people who will make great leaders rather than those who are top performers. Everyone knows this, but we throw it out the window as soon as our top people complain. Teach salespeople how to be well-rounded and not just closers if they want to be leaders. Then make sure that you hold leaders accountable to more than Salesforce reports showing performance against a forecasted baseline. Understand the factors that lead to replicable sales, and when an executive states they let their people work independently as a best practice – run.

Sales can be boiled down to ones and zeros but make sure that you are paying attention to the right data and not just what a CRM spits out. Because of the variability from salesperson to salesperson, team to team, and division to division, you must understand what makes great salespeople great and then drive that behavior throughout the organization. People should adapt situationally, but they should also be given a distinct path to follow in a majority of circumstances. We should constantly be tracking, monitoring and driving the best talk tracks and processes into each salesperson individually to truly achieve an optimized sales funnel.