Strategy 4 Balance near-term growth with building longterm capabilities 中

Tools and technology are great but you need a star team to make them zing. Talent is at the heart of sales growth. Companies that focus on their people are far more likely to deliver sustained sales growth.

● Tactic 11 Manage team performance

Every sales team has high performers and less productive members. Leading sales organizations get to know the causes of those variations and address them. To do something comparable, the three keys are:

■ Coach rookies into rainmakers — Coaching lies at the heart of every leading sales organization. Companies which aspire to grow must see coaching move from being viewed as nice-to-have to a core component. Develop a structured coaching program. Many companies have found weekly one-on-one coaching sessions supplemented by daily 15-minute checkin calls works best. Having coaches go on actual sales calls and giving feedback is also useful.

■ Insist on regular reporting — Having the sales team report on their results regularly sets the tempo for the entire sales organization. If sales reps have to report every week rather than once a month, there is a greater incentive to perform. This is also an opportunity to address obstacles and pick up on problems quickly and efficiently before they become major issues. Get used to having everyone reporting using both leading and lagging indicators week-in and week-out.

■ Use non-financial incentives intelligently – There‘s always more to motivating salespeople than just money alone. People are motivated in all kinds of different ways. It‘s not at all unusual for sales reps to be more motivated by peer approval and by public recognition than by sales bonuses. Figure out what stokes the competitive fires of your sales team and make it possible for them to get more of what they want.

Key Thoughts

“Recognition awards can be costly and elaborate—induction into the President’s Club and a trip to an expensive resort, or an upgrade of the company car. Or they can be quite simple: a call from the CEO for winning a big account or a one-on-one meeting with a top manager during a field visit. Performance management is a critical component of sales management. But while many companies focus relentlessly on short-term performance, leading sales organizations take a longterm view.”

— Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark

● Tactic 12 Build sales DNA

Key Thoughts

“The ingredients that make a high-functioning sales organization—the most effective management behaviors and the required employee capabilities and mindsets—can be introduced, enhanced, and modified. As a result, you can create the organizational DNA that makes successful selling second nature. Why does this matter? Less than a third of change programs and transformation efforts reach their performance targets. A staggering 70 percent of these failures are due to the organization’s inability to adopt required new behavior quickly and completely, not because the initiatives were substandard. Having the DNA in place—the right people with the right capabilities, motivation, and attitude—gives the organization the ability to align, execute, and renew faster than the competition. This is not just an important part of sustaining excellence; it’s a precondition.”

— Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark.

To lift your sales team’s performance by building sales DNA:

■ Create a longterm culture — Great sales organizations make longterm performance improvements their main aim, not just hitting short-term targets. They do this by integrating capacity-building into daily, weekly and monthly routines so the organization’s focus never slips. To move forward, you have to be continuously improving how you sell. Learn new techniques and then reinforce them until they stick.

■ Make middle managers stars — If you genuinely aspire to transform your sales organization, your most important resources will be your line managers. Managers interact with sales reps daily, provide coaching and act as role models for the change you’re seeking. Give your managers a starring role in the upgrade of your sales team. Help your managers lead from the front and everything else will then fall more naturally into place.

■ Bring together your A-team — Successful sales leaders don’t just improve the capabilities of their existing team. They also work to draft in even better people as they go along. You need to do something similar. By all means try and recruit high caliber people but provide everyone with training to get better at selling. As people leave through natural attrition, try and replace them with strong producers. Provide a great career path for those who want to move up with your organization. Create mentor programs and stretch programs for your entire sales team. Find ways you can overinvest in high performers and manage out the bottom 10 percent every year. Create a culture that you’re building the highest quality team you possibly can and performers are welcome.

Key Thoughts

“Continuous improvement has become second nature in most operational functions. It’s time to bring the same mindset to sales.”

— Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark