A respected plastic surgeon doing his own admin; a professional football player ironing his own kit; a pilot walking the cabin serving refreshments. None of them is using their time efficiently. If you’re a sales leader, before you judge, remember people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
I’ve built a career helping sales leaders improve sales team performance. When organizations want to improve sales results, time and again they turn to one of two things: sales training or a restructure of the sales team. The problem is that neither helps salespeople to be more productive.
The Surgeon
A conference on the latest advancements in plastic surgery will give the surgeon some new techniques, and he can charge more for these procedures. Yet overall, his financial gains will be minimal compared to those of his peers who have the right admin support in place, since he is still spending less time in theater than they are. My point being, before you invest in sales training to make your sales team more effective, first consider how to make them more efficient.
Previously, we worked with a client who approached us for sales training. A look around their business showed that the sales team was actually performing pretty well, but the vast majority of new customers were having trouble with payments and account activation. This meant the salespeople were preoccupied with internal bottlenecks rather than landing more business. By improving account activation and billing processes, the company improved its sales performance. Even without a change to their sales approach, the sales team’s productivity was greater and its results better simply because they had more time to do their job.
The Football Player
When the coach’s star players reach the first team, their time is too valuable to the organization to be spent on support tasks. Instead, maximizing the amount of time players spend practicing, perfecting and playing is key to the team’s success.
The same is true in sales. At my company, we have a time productivity calculator and, using three simple data points, show organizations how many sales productivity hours they could gain and how much this would be worth to the business if each salesperson was enabled to focus on core sales activities. We find that, on average, 50% of a salesperson’s time is spent on non-core sales activities, effectively halving the amount of potential revenue they could bring in to their business.
It’s a sobering reminder of the value your sales team could be delivering to the business if they weren’t kept off the field of play by work that could be simplified, automated or done my somebody else. It’s also often the justification sales leaders and sales enablement leaders need to get wider organizational buy-in for sales process changes.
The Pilot
Her manager has identified and communicated to her what she should be doing in her role. However, her bonus is based on overall customer satisfaction levels, and so the pilot is keen to ensure drinks are served and passengers are happy.
To ensure your team carries out the behaviors you’ve identified as essential to their role, micro-environmental factors must be addressed. This includes everything from incentives, support tools and the right material to do the job. With the right processes in place and the right tools and support to do their job, employees, whether salespeople or pilots, become incredibly efficient and effective in their role and laser-focused on what they need to deliver because the tools and environment support them. Again, performance and relevant productivity improve without spending a cent on sales training.
The Effectiveness Multiplier
The law of averages says that giving salespeople — even average ones — more time to sell will increase their chances of winning more business. Giving them the right environment to perform (incentives, managerial support, tools and so on) will help them move sales performance a notch or two further. Add to that the ability to support them to gain the right skills and knowledge to perform in their role, and you add the performance multiplier: salespeople who are better at their job than they were before, with more time to do their job and with the tools in place to augment that performance. Productivity levels soar, as do result, since people are focusing on the right activities and have the right skills and attributes to achieve the goals they’ve set.
Rocket Science
Building a high-performing sales team takes patience, tenacity and skill to unravel the complexities that have been built into most sales organizations. It takes experience to determine the right path to support your business strategy. It takes commitment from cross-functional teams to support sales leaders to make the changes they need to build better-performing sales teams. Sales enablement isn’t rocket science, but with the right implementation, sales teams really can soar.
