When I ask sales leaders to talk about problems they’re experiencing with their sales, they all seem to have different ideas about what’s in the way of higher performance. For some, it’s poor forecasting. For others, it’s low win rates. Many invest in training only to be disappointed when it's quickly forgotten.
In most cases, when I ask how they are approaching these problems, I hear about a host of point solutions that they’re applying. Perhaps they’re hiring a sales trainer for a few days, or purchasing new software.
In a few cases, the sales leadership has chosen a strategic approach, and is reviewing how they approach their market and manage their teams.
Overall, however, the usual approach to sales problems is to address symptoms. Point solutions are purchased to enable coaches to listen in on recorded calls. Tools to organize org charts are added. Point solutions to automate email delivery. Point solutions to measure engagement with content, and to automate appointment-making.
This creates a culture of chasing after the latest thing, and stacking “solutions” on top of solutions in search of the perfect “tech stack,” together with the hope that that automation and AI will magically solve underlying problems.
Walter Crosby, of Helix Sales Development, says his company accomplished this goal last year with a pivot.
“The pivot allowed Helix to solve the real problem, not the symptoms,” he says. “The real problem was salespeople flew by the seat of the pants, and sales managers did not have a framework to talk about opportunities.”
A pivot sounds on the surface like a big, risky change. But it turns out that, in most cases, pivoting to solve root issues instead of symptoms is actually fairly straightforward.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s the same drum we beat every week here at Membrain:
Process.
“Implementing a staged, milestone-centric sales process/methodology solved the underlying problem,” says Crosby.
“We started with sales process and the integration of Membrain, and our business has not stopped growing.”
“We start with the sales process because it is the context for everything else we do,” says Crosby. “It’s the language we use to speak to our clients, sales managers, and salespeople. It allows us to ask questions around opportunities like ‘Where are we at in the sales process?’ ‘Should we be here, or over there?’ ‘What did we miss?’”
Many of the problems in sales organizations stem from the assumption that salespeople ought to just know what to do, and that, knowing what to do, they’ll do it. But human nature tells us otherwise. Even rock star salespeople don’t always know the next best step, and middle-performers certainly don’t always know. And even when they know - it’s human nature to take shortcuts, even when we know they won’t give us the best result.
A well-planned and executed sales process addresses this underlying issue. It captures the best practices of your top performers, and lays out a framework for all performers to follow. Matched with an appropriate methodology and an enablement platform like Membrain, the process becomes part of every salesperson’s daily workflow, guiding them step by step, flexibly through each opportunity.
Once a sales process is in place, Membrain provides the insights and data to track what’s effective and what’s not, so you can make adjustments. Then those process changes can be rolled out across your sales team instantly, updating their workflows to reflect the change. You can include training videos and other content to help them understand and correctly apply the changes.
And you can build in the ability to access and utilize coaching effectively.
“We also put emphasis on coaching,” says Crosby. “So the sales process is part of 80% of coaching calls (the other 20% is often mindset). Even the skills coaching and development is tied to the sales process. The sales process is like a thread of DNA that runs through everything. Sales process is the rocket fuel sales managers use to coach their team.”
We love hearing how much an effective and well-executed sales process improves effectiveness for our client sales teams. We’ve baked process into everything we do, and we provide a lot of support via our partners to help companies establish the processes that work for them.
To get a taste of what a great sales process can do, check out our sales process tool, which is our most-accessed resource to help you take a visual approach to the sales process. The web-based process designer will create a process file that you can download and fire up in a Membrain trial with a single click - to make your “way of selling” come to life in daily operations.
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn
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