When Hiring, Focus on Motivation More Than Specific Experience
Companies looking to hire the perfect candidate for the role have been selling into the particular segment and selling the exact type of offering that the hiring company is targeting. This is an illusion. A “Financial Services” salesperson who sells to banks may know little to nothing about selling to Wealth Management or Insurance. The world we live in has so much data that professionals are becoming more and more specialized. The knowledge the seller had in selling to tech companies 10 years ago is irrelevant to the tech industry today. The biggest illusion is a seller that has the coveted “Rolodex,” the magical key that opens doors to the senior executives at the largest companies. The seller will boast about their tight relationship, promising immediate access to power if just granted the job. This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – It doesn’t exist.
What can you do? Hire sellers that are curious, get excited about learning new things, and solve problems. They’ll pick up the industry knowledge in a few days or weeks, and their versatility will deliver more value to your ever-changing sales strategy.
Learn to Identify Great Sales Skills.
Once and for all: drinking & telling jokes is not a sales skill! This misconception is as nonsensical as saying glasses, and a bad sense of fashion indicate a scientist’s skill. Professional sellers follow proven methods of qualifying leads and progressing complex deals. It takes years to fine-tune one’s ability to get the answers you need from a reluctant customer without blowing up the deal.
What can you do? Learn about sales methods such as MEDDPICC, and take sales training to understand what good sales discovery looks like. Hire a consultant to help you hire or assess your current team.
If You’re Not Happy With the Sales Results, First Check How You Manage Sellers
“My salespeople behave like clerks, sitting and waiting to take orders instead of chasing and closing deals.” When I hear sales leaders say that, I ask them to walk me through their sales processes. More often than not, I find that the sellers are responding to how they’re managed. If a seller is pushed aside by the sales engineers during customer calls and gets no chance to lead a proper qualification conversation then no one should be surprised when the deal doesn’t close. If the Sales VP never has time to manage the seller’s pipe generation and only meets with a seller when there’s a deal about to close, then don’t be surprised if you have no pipeline.
What can you do? Resist the temptation to hyper-focus on closing deals to the detriment of everything else. Yes, closing deals is the most fun part of sales, but it is not the only part or even the most important part. Your sellers need to know that you see the grueling work they do day in and day out to generate pipeline and progress deals, even if most of this effort doesn’t transform into revenue.
The Sales Compensation Plan Is How You Steer Your Sales Engine
More than any other profession, salespeople focus on their metrics & compensation plans. If your compensation plan pays a seller to make calls as much as it pays to close deals, guess what? You just got yourself an enthusiastic call center rep who’ll make hundreds of calls, completely ignoring the relevance of the prospect or potential of a deal. If you only praise the sellers that closed the biggest deals, you’ll find that no seller is willing to work with your smaller customers. What’s the point? They will work just as hard, bring just as much in revenue, and yet get no acknowledgment for their achievement and contribution.
What can you do? First of all, decide what results you want to achieve, then break it into the actions the sellers need to take, then build a performance management system that gives each element the appropriate weight, and lastly, follow your own rules! If a small $2,000 deal with a new company is more important than a large $50,000 add-on deal with a long-time customer, then celebrate that new small deal appropriately!
To wrap it all up, running a successful sales organization is a very complex job. As CEO or sales leader, you need to understand sales methodologies and processes so you can hire the right people, manage them properly, and compensate them in alignment with your goals.
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Tsahala David is a former lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Force, an M.I.T. graduate, and an enterprise sales veteran at IBM and Salesforce. With her extensive experience in sales and business, Tsahala is well-equipped to help software companies build their sales organization and achieve success. By following Tsahala’s advice, companies can avoid costly mistakes and deliver success.
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