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The High-Performance Sales Wheel
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High performing sales organizations are constantly analyzing each of the sales performance categories on this “Sales Performance Wheel” to evaluate where their sales organization “Achilles Heels” are to address them.
For instance, looking at the chart below built from our research, recruiting top talent is the top challenge for half of all companies today both large and small. And yet when sales organizations do get top talent in the recruiting process, they can lose that talent due to poor sales leader interviewing skills. Or lose that talent once they are hired due to a poor onboarding program, poor succession planning, or ineffective sales training.
The big questions in this and the other areas of our sales performance wheel are; how do you know if these are problem areas for your sales team? If they are, what does its negative impact cost you? How do you fix the problem and finally, once you fix the problem, how do you sustain the improvement?
SALES LEADER TIME MANAGEMENT
As a sales leader, we know from our own experience of being sales leaders on every level in multiple industries and interfacing with top sales leaders today. Your primary focuses should be enhancing top to top relationships with your key customers, lead customer strategic planning initiatives with senior management, your lead team and key customers, meet or exceed your KPI’s, and improve the performance of your sales team year over year.
How do you functionally spend YOUR time?
THE COST OF SALES TRAINING, SALES CONSULTING AND SALES COACHING SESSIONS
With the cost of quality sales training ranging from $500 – $5,000 per participant, the cost of a sales consulting intervention averaging $8,000 per situation and the cost of a “Coach the Coach” intervention ranging from $200 – $500 getting a ROI and sustainability on your investment is critically important.
There are some absolutely great sales training, sales enablement, sales consulting, and sales coaching firms out there. How do you know which one is the best for your sales teams, current market situation, varied learning styles, company alignment, customer alignment and engagement and more?
What about measuring how those improved skills, enhanced the quality of sales activities and consistently exceeding KPI’s. As important is, how is your sales team going to sustain and build on these enhancements?
Most importantly, are you looking at all of this information in relation to the boxes on the High-Performance Sales Wheel?
WHY SALES PERFORMANCE INTERVENTIONS GENERALLY LACK SUSTAINABILITY
Sales performance interventions generally lack sustainability because of the following reasons.
Lack of a Clearly Defined Performance Gap Analysis – Most sales performance interventions happen based on the lack of result over some period of time versus a deeper look at the core causal factors for the lack of performance in a particular sales performance area. In order to build a solid foundation to solve a sales performance issue, you need to discover empirical evidence and hard data to truly understand what you are attempting to fix.
Clearly Defined Intervention Deliverables – Once you have clearly defined the issue you are trying to solve, then you must design what the intervention should accomplish beginning with the results you desire.
Below are a few of the questions that should be answered using the categories from our performance wheel.
Talent Management – What are the core competencies that drive the actions toward achieving the desired performance results (KPI’s), which the sales organizations want to achieve?
Sales Structure – How should our sales organization be structured to gain and sustain a competitive advantage over our competition strategically and tactically?
Selling Technique – What are the optimal sales skills philosophy that fit best to optimally engage with our customers (Spin Selling, Strategic Selling, Action Selling, Value Based Selling)?
Clearly Defined Human, Process, Systems, and Data Upgrades – Once you have successfully addressed your targeted challenge, your plan will be to upgrade the human (e.g. ongoing coaching, mentoring, etc.), processes e.g. (sales process), systems (e.g. sales enablement tools), data (e.g. reporting data points) to support the continuous improvement of the benefits the intervention achieved? This is probably the most overlooked area in sustaining sales performance improvements.
ROI/ROTI Sales Performance Milestones – What are the dates and deliverables for skills, activity, and results improvements over time? What amount of time is going to be spent by the individuals on your sales team and other stakeholders to achieve your desired results?
We assist sales organizations in answering these questions and more for each one of the categories on the “High-Performance Sales Wheel.”