Cincom Expert Access Blog

When a recent CSO Insights survey reveals that 44% of sales reps fail to make quota and nearly a third of sales organizations fail to achieve their sales plan, there's a big question that falls in the CEO's office. 

What the hell is going wrong here?

The fingers begin pointing.

"IT's" ... A Bunch of Them 

It's our SFA system. It's our training. It's our sales leads. It's our website. It's our products. It's our pre-sales quality. It's our lack of brand identification. It's our competition. Plenty of places to point at. We're working hard but ...

A favorite one points directly back to the sales organization. It's our sales managers. It's our sales reps. It's our compensation system. It's our inability to get a contract signed. It's our ... the fingers point north, south, east and west.

We all know the answer is that most likely, it's all of the above. This points back to the CEO's corner ... the proverbial response is "the buck stops here."

As a business consultant that has worked with hundreds of large and small companies, mostly from the marketing end, I have had the advantage of peering inside a lot or organizations. They're all looking for the silver bullet. Let's get more sales with this new silver bullet. I have come to see that there is a silver bullet -- sort of.

It is to become customer obsessed.

When we deliver a perfect customer experience, our customers reward us with repeat business and when we are really good we get rewarded with advocacy ... with customer cheerleaders.

But I say "sort of" because customer obsession for delivering a perfect customer experience is a thousand little components that must come together to produce the silver bullet. Another way of saying that is to admit there is no silver bullet. There is only hard work. And the reason 30-40% of sales organizations fail is that they are not willing to work hard enough.

Sure we can bring in a new CRM system.

HOW TO DO WRONG - Easier and Faster 

That will make it easier to do things (but it also makes it easier to do wrong things faster).  We can invest in sales training. In fact, we must invest in this training. But too many companies train on their products instead of on their customer issues and needs. There is a truthism: Sales reps get delegated to people at prospect companies who talk like the rep talks ... if you are going to sell to a senior level manager, you need to be trained on how to conduct this conversation.

We can invest in brand awareness so the prospect knows your name when the rep makes the call. Too often, though, the rep is not making the call.

Is that a marketing dude pointing the finger at the sales department? Maybe. I hope I am not seen that way because I absolutely believe that marketing's main customer is the sales department. Our job is to give them the right products, the powerful brand name, the steady stream of sales leads and to work daily as close with the sales reps as is possible. We're one team doing different parts of the process to attract and close more sales deals.

Forget the iPhone ... How About the Old Bold Cold Call Phone? 

But I hear a lot of professional sales managers who would confirm that sales reps do not make enough calls. Dan Barrett, a 30-year, highly successful sales person and sales manager, laments we just don't make enough calls. His sales support process has worked for hundreds of clients over ten years. His secret? "We pick up the phone and make the appointments for sales reps who see the phone as weighing about ten tons." Is picking up the phone and making more calls a silver bullet? No, it's just part of a total program -- albeit, one that cannot be left to chance. Just one more example of what some managers would see as a silver bullet -- the one tactical action that will cure things when sales stink. So far, we're not short of tactical things we can do when sales stinks.

But here's why I say it points to the CEO's office -- a successful sales and marketing organizationt is about culture, an insistence on information transparency so the entire marketing-to-sales, prospect-to-pipeline process is visible to all managers in the company.

Visibility eliminates hiding.

A culture that allows or enables hiding is a culture in trouble ... if I can pull a quote from the Christian Bible: "For everyone who does evil deeds hates the light and does not come to the light so that their deeds will not be exposed." But exposure is what helps us get better every day and this is the way that transparency must be looked at ... it is not a punishment but instead is a critical component for discovering process issues and fixing them. Sales and marketing are two points on the same continuum. They must stop fighting with one another and start collaborating together -- and jointly taking the risk for succeeding or failing.

There must be a CEO business plan designed to show the vision and mission and the path to success.

The path must include every single individual in the company.

Everyone must know how they contribute to the sales success and customer success of the organization and then be measured and held accountable for achieving their part of the total story.

When this culture thing is fixed, then we can begin looking at the tactical plans and the supporting infrastructure: selling fundamentals must be sharpened, the market must be well understood, the customer value promise must be differentiated and consistently delivered. Roll up all this into one organizational fixation on sales obsession that is achieved by customer obsession and you will finally step back and see your silver bullet.

END:

Posted by Dale Wolf on November 08, 2007 in Marketing Managemen

Thanks Dale!