When salespeople are promoted to sales manager, they are typically given one simple instruction: Make sure your reps make their numbers. What they aren’t told is how to go about doing that. And we mean literally, how to do it. What types of interactions should they have with their reps? Should they hold sales pipeline review meetings or territory planning meetings? Or how about meetings to review progress with major accounts? Or all of the above?

Should those meetings be weekly or monthly? Should they be conducted as a group or as individual conversations? And what should be the agenda for each type of meeting? What are the inputs and outputs of the interactions? Literally, what … Read the rest

Her question was actually quite insightful.  There is no textbook definition for coaching, and there’s certainly no consensus as to what the term means.  We all know that coaching is distinct from training, and most would accept that it’s done interpersonally at the individual level.  That’s about where the agreement ends.  Well, since she asked, we’ll take this opportunity to share our view of the term ‘coaching.’  Our perspective is that it’s all a matter of… ahem… perspective.   Let’s examine what coaching means to three different stakeholders in the organization – the VP of sales, the frontline manager, and the sales rep.

Most vice presidents of sales we work with say that they expect their front-line managers to be coaching their sellers.  If we press them for more detail on their expectation, they respond with some … Read the rest

This is the final installment in a four-part series on sales metrics and their value in managing a sales force.

In Search of Organizational Alignment

One of the biggest problems we see in many sales forces is a lack of direct linkages between corporate goals, sales strategies, and sales force behaviors. The three are frequently allowed to operate independently with the tacit (and often faulty) assumption that they are all in alignment and working toward a common end. In fact, this absence of ‘organizational alignment’ is a commonly cited as a top concern of senior executives.

We believe that the key to aligning an organization from top to bottom is to align the metrics that each level uses to measure success. Few would disagree with this somewhat obvious statement, but we have seen many companies struggle mightily to get it right. Recent research that we conducted into how leading companies measure and manage their sales forces gives us some fresh insights into how to tackle the challenge of organizational alignment through the use of an integrated set of metrics.

The Vehicle for Alignment: Metrics

As we explained in preceding articles, … Read the rest

Every sales force has certain outcomes that they are trying to achieve – for instance, retaining more customers, cross-selling products, or improving salesperson skills. In our research we categorized these outcomes and their associated metrics as ‘Sales Objectives.’

Recall that these are goals toward which selling effort is directed. As the outcomes of sales processes, they cannot be managed with the same degree of control as the processes themselves. Objectives can be managed only indirectly by managing salesperson activities at the process level.

For example, a Sales Objective might be to increase your number of new accounts, which could be achieved by putting greater effort into cold calling or by visiting more prospects. You cannot direct a salesperson to have more new accounts, but you can set an Objective and manage the upstream activities. Again, … Read the rest

This is the second installment in a four-part series. In the first article, our research revealed that there are three types of sales force metrics –measures of Sales Activities, Sales Objectives, and Business Results. We now explore Sales Processes.

In our study, we found that all of the Sales Activities fell into one of 5 sales processes. The term ‘sales process’ can mean many different things. While most managers would say that they have some form of sales process in place, the nature of that process might range from planning sales calls, to collecting information on active opportunities, to completing major account plans.

The sales function is, in fact, a collection of distinct selling processes that work to accomplish unique objectives. However, you do not need to have all of the processes in your sales force –only those that are relevant to the way you want your salespeople to sell. In our study of the metrics that are used to measure and manage leading sales forces, we sought to answer two key questions about sales processes:

1. 1. How many distinct sales processes are there?
… Read the rest

Note: This is the first installment in a four-part series

Over the past decade or more, information systems have vastly improved the measurement and reporting capabilities within the sales function. However, this increased access to data has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in control over sales performance. Why is it that more sales data has not necessarily resulted in better sales management?

We believe it is because much of the data being collected today is not very useful in actually managing salespeople. Despite being awash in numbers, executives lack a framework that they can use to consistently pinpoint problems and proactively manage change. If sales leaders had an interconnected system of meaningful performance metrics like their finance or operations peers, they could enjoy the same level of control and manageability as these other business functions.

To understand the current state of affairs, we examined a collection of 174 sales metrics provided by 17 different organizations in a 2008 survey by the University Sales Education Foundation. This research into the metrics that leading companies use to manage their sales forces was highly insightful, and it revealed a straight-forward framework … Read the rest

In the late 19th century, John H. Patterson of the National Cash Register Company (now NCR) created sales territories, quotas, incentives, training, processes, and all the other sales management tools that we still use today. For the next 100 years, there was little if any innovation in sales management. Sales managers plodded along doing all the things Patterson taught us to do. Until the end of the 20th century… When CRM was born.

In the 1990’s, sales management was given the gift of CRM and all of the robust reporting capabilities that came along with it. But given the massive investment that companies have made in CRM over the last two decades, we aren’t so sure that it’s improved sales management’s effectiveness to a commensurate degree. Indeed, sales managers are still learning what to do with all that data they now have at their fingertips.

To understand how sales forces are in fact using that data, Vantage Point Performance conducted a ground-breaking research study into the metrics that leading sales forces are using to measure and manage their sellers. Interestingly, we discovered that all of the thousands of sales … Read the rest

Creator of Value

The role of a salesperson has always been fundamentally the same – to create value for customers. The nature of that value has changed over time, from a distribution channel in the 1800’s, to a source of information in the 1900’s, to a problem-solver in the 2000’s. And no matter where the profession of selling goes from 2010, a salesperson ‘s role will always be to provide some unique value to their customer, else the buyer will go to a catalog, retail store, or web site to transact at a lower cost.

Communicator of Value?

It was therefore no surprise in our study of world-class sales forces to find that their salespeople were creating a tremendous amount of value for their customers. What did strike us, though, was the sales forces’ diligence in communicating value to their customers. No, they were not communicating the value of their products and services to their customers – that task has been largely overtaken by the Internet. These world-class salespeople were extremely adept at communicating their own value as a seller.

Lest you think that these were sales forces … Read the rest

A Perishable Good

For many sales organizations, training their salespeople is one of the largest investments they make in performance improvement. From the onboarding of new hires to annual training events for the rank and file, billions of dollars are spent each year in the U.S. alone to improve the skills of our salespeople.

Unfortunately, sales training is also one of the most perishable investments a company can make. Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that between 60% – 90% of the skills imparted to a salesperson during a training event are lost within 30 days if the learning is not immediately and consistently reinforced. Given that grim forecast, you would think that companies would make certain that quality reinforcement is taking place, but at least two factors conspire against the stickiness of most sales training.

Too Much, Too Soon

First, the sheer volume of content that is included in many training programs is overwhelming to salespeople. It is expensive to take a sales force out of the field, so sales leaders are motivated to jam all of the years’ learning into a single, large event. In order to ‘make the most’ of … Read the rest

Best Practices in Managing a Sales Force:
Avoid Epic IT Implementations

Everything, Including the Kitchen Sink

In today’s computer-enabled workforce, information technology has become as integral to a world-class sales effort as are great products and superior salespeople. Customer relationship management, sales force automation, Internet sites, communication platforms, and other applications are now the mission-critical infrastructure that links buyers to sellers and sellers to their mother ship.

However, we have all seen the sobering data on the low percentage of companies that actually consider their IT implementations to have been a success. Even worse, most of us have personally endured the pain of an ambitious, large-scale system implementation that was extremely disruptive to our business, yet yielded little tangible benefit. These classic everything-including-the-kitchen-sink IT projects always bring the promise of a better tomorrow, but they also gave birth to the cynical refrain that “The only system you’ll ever love is the one you just replaced.”

In our study of world-class sales forces, we were therefore particularly interested to see how leading organizations developed technology to enable their salespeople. Surprisingly, we found that 75% of the companies we studied had no large, household-name software packages deployed in their sales forces.