What is Execution?

Top 20 best sales practices

This article talks about the twenty mission critical practices being used by the best sales forces world over. The survey is based on a book “Make winning a habit”. The survey focused on 37 best practices in 20 major categories. The outcome was the following

Linking solutions to pain: This was rated as the highest in importance (93%). Some 54.7% of respondents said that they needed “some” or “significant” improvements in this area. This indicates that there is still a generation of salespeople who don’t have the skills to effectively “Discover, Link and Present” 30 years after the advent of consultative selling.

It also means that there are still salespeople out there dashing to the demo or "telling" when they have not done effective discovery. This may also indicate a

new generation of salespeople needing those skills, a lack of metrics and training adoption in the field resulting in poor coaching and reinforcement, or a process that is just too complicated.

Creating strong sales culture: This best practice ranked second in importance with 40.6% of respondents admitting that they need improvement. This indicates a difficulty in selling inside the organization, possibly resulting from either a lack of power and respect of the sales force or a lack of customer/sales focus as a company value from the CEO level. Some corporate cultures don't see sales as a source of shareholder value to leverage; as a result, they treat sales people as non strategic.

Selling to executives: Almost half of respondents (49.8%) stated that they need improvement in "Getting to high-level executives and having meaningful business conversations." This indicates that companies have moved to selling strategic solutions instead of products and reps are unable to sell to higher levels or companies have not created solutions that are important to strategic buyers.

Creating competitive Differentiation: Creating competitive differentiation was the fourth most important practice with 45.4% of respondents saying that they needed some or significant improvement. This could be from a lack of sales skill or a lack of product differentiation in the first place. The only way to differentiate, when there is no other way, is by relationships.

Including character in interviewing: Since trust is essential to relationships, it is not surprising that character ranks high in importance. However, only 29.7% of respondents stated that they need improvement in this important area. Considering the number of sales terminations that are the result of character issues, flaws in trustworthiness must be emerging after the interviews (when it is most expensive). It's hard to build trust if the messenger isn't trustworthy.

Implementing a Formal skills, opportunity and account management training program: Implementing this type of training program was important, but 43.2% of companies said they needed improvement. The biggest expense any company has is lost sales, but it never hits the books.

Conducting needs assessment before presenting: is related to the first most Important practice, "Linking solutions to customer pains." If discovery is not part of the defined process, it's hard to link into the customer pains. Instead, the customers will do it themselves and often get it wrong, or not do it at all, resulting in a stalled sale.

Political strategy: Nearly 47% of respondents said that they needed improvement in “Understanding political power and allocating time to win the votes that matter.” With multiple buyers working in committees, the skills of Discover, Link, and Present are not enough. You need a strategy to win each key vote (or live without it) or you will spend too much time with people with low power and miss the votes that matter.

Strategic Value Propositions: At number nine in importance, too many value propositions focus on ROI alone, which will not drive action. Without an emotional pain or gain for a politically powerful sponsor, the ROI will sit on the CFO's desk along with a dozen others.

Including support personnel: The fact that more than 50% of companies need improvement to “Ensure that support personnel consider themselves part of the sales team” shows that either sales is not focused on repeat business or differentiation of service or service does not see themselves as a role player for add-on business. In reality, they are the gateway for repeat business.

Implementing a contact management system: This is the starting point for most companies in sales effectiveness and is basically a minimum requirement.

The idea is to get the little black books out of the salespeople's heads and into the corporate database. Approximately half of respondents said they do this well. The other half said they still need help - after millions of dollars have been spent.

Implementing skills training: Some 34.1% of respondents said they needed help in this area, indicated by a large investment in foundational skills development over the past few years. Consultative selling is a fundamental skill set needed for all salespeople. By itself, however, it does not address competition, politics, or strategy and should not be seen as a complete methodology for complex sales.

 Opportunity Management Tools: Over 44% said that they needed improvement in “implementing a widely adopted opportunity management tool,” while 76.4% said that it was "very important" or "mission critical." You can win without a strategy - it's called luck.

Imbed your sales process into your CRM system: Both salespeople and IT professionals loathe having to get out of the CRM system and into another system to manage opportunities and forecast. Yet most CRM systems simply have a line item forecast grid and do not go deeply enough into competition, politics, stakeholder analysis and strategy. Therefore, a third-party plug-in for the CRM system is usually required to address these strategic areas.

Implement tools to distribute and update effective messaging: Some 76% of respondents said that this was “mission critical” or “important,” yet almost 60% said they needed help in this area. Assessing messaging effectiveness, responding to competitive messages and traps, and staying up to date on the latest industry requirements needs a dedicated resource and a knowledge management system to keep messages fresh for the field sales force. This would save salespeople vast amounts of time emailing and calling.

Knowing when to qualify out: There is a fine line between quitting and qualifying out. Having a dispassionate, pre-agreed qualification process for further investment of resources can go a long way into taking the emotion out of picking the right battles. The time saved can be spent getting ahead in the deals that you do choose to engage.

Management deal coaching: Almost 75% of respondents said that deal coaching was either “mission critical" or "very important" and yet 57.4% said they needed some or significant improvement. This confirms that sales managers are either “too busy to win” or at least too busy selling themselves to coach their reps. (Or perhaps they don't know how or don't think it's an important part of their job.)

Performance reviews based on Sales Methodology: Over 60% said that their sales methodology was not part of their performance review process, while 73.2%

said that it was “important” or “critical.” This is why the annual HR performance review is considered nonproductive by many sales managers. Performance coaching should be based on sales best practices, which should be based on how your buyers buy and how your competitors compete.

Implementing a defined account management process: The first step in account management is to segment your accounts based on their potential. Some you want to maintain, some you want to grow, and some you want to partner with. And each investment segment requires a different account management process or you will invest your time and resources in the wrong accounts or under-invest in your high potential accounts.

Strategy reviews: Over two-thirds of respondents said that strategy reviews were "very important" or "mission critical," yet over half said that they needed improvement. Not taking the time to collectively plan results in selling to the wrong people, selling to the wrong accounts, and not controlling the competition, which results in losses and wasted time. When this happens, we don't have time to strategize the next deal. Salespeople often have “happy ears” and need help with assumptions, blind spots and creative strategies. A coached deal has a much better chance of closing than one that is not.