The art and science of sales leadership is clearly complicated, but the fundamental goals of sales leadership - at least from my observations of complex B2B sales environments - seem to be remarkably consistent:
If any of these goals are important to you, I hope the following experiences might prove relevant to your situation:
Every sales leader wants to be confident that their sales organisation is going to consistently achieve their sales targets - and yet the end-of-month or end-of-quarter is a stressful time in most sales environments.
It’s worth reflecting on the most common causes:
Every sales leader worries about an over-dependency, quarter-after-quarter, on a handful of top sales performers and wants to narrow the gap between their best sales people and the rest.
This also has a small number of common causes:
Every sales leader wants to ensure that they hire the right new sales people and make them productive quickly, and to avoid getting into a desperately unproductive hire-fail-and-fire cycle.
Unsurprisingly, there are a handful of common causes here as well:
These goals - consistently achieving revenue targets, progressively bridging the performance gap, and recruiting and onboarding the best sales talent are close-to-universal objectives for most sales organisations.
But it’s also true that many sales leaders (and their Chief Executives) find themselves frustrated by their inability to reliably achieve these goals. And it should be obvious that the challenges that are holding them back are equally common.
There is, in my experience, an often-untapped opportunity to do better - and working harder clearly isn’t going to be enough to move the dial. Now, more than ever, sales organisations need to work smarter, to encourage winning behaviours and to eliminate bad practices.
But in complex B2B sales, we’re not going to achieve our goals through the application of canned scripts or rigid processes. We can only make progress through the application of flexible frameworks that make the collective wisdom of our top performers accessible to all.
This doesn’t have to be an expensive, complicated or time-consuming exercise. You can start simple and grow. Here are half-a-dozen things I suggest you focus on first:
There are, of course, many more initiatives you could and should be taking to give you the best possible chance of achieving your goals, but these represent a pretty good start.
If you’ve got any additional experiences, I’d welcome your comments below. And if you’d like to discuss how you can achieve the above goals in your organisation, please drop me a line or book a call .
Bob Apollo is the CEO at Inflexion-Point, the UK-based B2B sales and marketing performance improvement specialists. Inflexion-Point helps B2B organisations to design and implement highly effective customer acquisition systems based on a combination of the winning habits of their top sales performers and the latest industry best practices.
Inflexion-Point are the designers of the Outcome-Centric Selling Edition - a pre-configured Membrain version with sales process, methodology, and enablement embedded. This Edition will help your salespeople to make your way of selling into a competitive advantage.
Find out more about Bob Apollo on LinkedIn
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