Your Sales Management Guru

It’s a wrap, but everything must continue to move forward with increased levels of urgency. In many situations, cash flow is tighter, pipelines have been impacted and sales cycles have grown longer. That’s the reality.

But as sales leaders and executives we need to take this week to reflect on the first half: What went better than expected? What things didn’t work? …

Actions that need to be taken this week:

1. Hold a two-hour sales meeting with your entire team:
   1. Brainstorm on what needs to happened to have a successful 2009
   2. Each salesperson must report on their first half achievements and what personal commitments (sales, personal and professional) they are making for the second half
   3. Ask each of them how they will help the entire company to be successful.
2. Next make sure your six-month marketing calendar is completed with the necessary levels of activities to generate pipeline values.
3. Complete your next 90-day sales training plan.

Then write out your personal vision and commitment statement for the next six months. This paragraph should describe your objectives and goals, and add a personal sentence or two that describes what you will commit to from a leadership position.

Also …. reread all my past blogs for other ideas that will propel your sales organization.

One More Note: Something new is available in July to help you position your organization for growth — Acumen’s Leadership Summit, a gathering of executives and sales leaders. The Leadership Summit takes place July 14-15 at Davidson Village Inn in Davidson, North Carolina. For details, send me an e-mail or call 800-792-8346.

Ken Thoreson is managing director of the Acumen Management Group Ltd., a North American consulting organization focused on improving sales management functions within growing and transitional organizations internationally. Ken also motivates organizations with enlightening keynotes

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Based upon the many comments I received on the last blog, I wanted to offer an additional idea to improve your sales management process. With summer time vacations and economic conditions affecting current budgets, strategic sales managers must ensure today that they have adequate pipeline values for July/August/September.

We have discussed in past articles and blogs the need to create a sales and marketing dashboard in order for you to always know the actual values, but what I am recommending is a thorough house cleaning or scrubbing of your sales team’s pipeline.

Effective summertime sales management requires you to evaluate each opportunity honestly using tough qualifying and strategy questions.

Action Plan: Depending upon your organization, do the following:

1. Hold a strategy meeting with the president of your organization, one salesperson and you, the sales manager.
2. Look at every opportunity. Everyone must ask/answer tough questions. We use 12 Magic Questions when doing this; if you want them, send me an e-mail.
3. Determine the win/loss ratio by salesperson.
4. If the dollar values or number of opportunities by month are below required levels, create a sales activity game and marketing campaigns. The results must be managed week to week (See this RCP article on sales games).

“Inspect what you expect” needs to be your motto now to ensure everyone enjoys the rest of the summer.

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It takes leadership and vision.

Building your business requires both leadership and management and the first step in that journey is understanding the difference between the two. Leadership is the ability to make things happen by encouraging and channeling others’ contributions, addressing important issues and acting as a catalyst for change and continuous improvement. Management is the skill of attaining predefined objectives with others’ cooperation and effort.

The best partner companies, like other successful organizations, are led by individuals who have clear vision — and the ability to establish specific objectives for working toward their organizational goals. Executives at partner companies that have leveled off, stalled or are struggling to break even may lack both vision and objectives.

An executive vision should address the following questions:

• What does your organization look like now? What will it look like in three years in terms of revenues, number of employees and specialty areas?
• How do you define success? What will the company’s net worth be in three years? What are its profit goals?
• How do you want to be known by your clients, your competitors, the business community — and by your vendors?
• What’s your ultimate goal? Do you have an exit strategy that calls for acquiring other companies or being acquired yourself? Or do you want to build a long-term corporate organization?

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Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high…

It’s early June, so I thought it would be good to help sales managers with some additional insights as we head to summer time, when sales can be a challenge. I recently posted a question in a forum on LinkedIn at Top Sales Experts International: What are the top three challenges that sales management faces? While time management was extremely popular as a response, responder Craig Klein came up with a real good answer:

“I’d have to say that #1 is motivation. Maintaining a positive attitude is crucial to selling effectively in any economy. Having a glass half-full approach during tough times can be magnetic to customers who are facing bad news all around them.”

I would add to Craig’s comment that sales management must work to maintain sales team motivation as well. Schedule fun events, tagged to customer onsite visitations. During every interaction, successful sales leaders must focus on being positive.

Here are two others that he offered up:

#2: Managing revenue expectations. If you’re chasing quotas that were set last summer, you’re probably having a very tough year. Sales management needs to be able to set executive expectations based on the real world today and then align sales expectations accordingly.

Right on again, we have been creating more dashboards/scorecards for sales/marketing organizations than ever before. We like to use: 1) salesperson forecast accuracy %, win/loss rate % by salesperson and pipeline to quota ratios. See my column, “How Do You Measure Sales Success?”

#3: Maintaining price. Competitors will be low balling, sales staff will want to “get aggressive” to meet their quota. Staying in value selling mode is going to be very difficult.

Craig stated it well — your action plan for summer is actually to “tune-up” your sales training programs with increased levels of role play. This means increasing intensity during a seasonal time where “things” begin to slip.

In summary, reflect, evaluate and test new programs during the summer and make the process interesting for your sales team, for your prospects and yourself. One last comment: Focus on weekly results, not monthly results, and always probe your sales team on “when is the prospect leaving for their summer vacation?” Many quotas are missed as a result of not knowing that question. Check out my blog soon for a great value brought to you by Acumen and Top Sales Experts International, called Choices!

For more insights visit our Web site or send me an e-mail.

Ken Thoreson is managing director of the Acumen Management Group Ltd., a North American consulting organization focused on improving sales management functions within growing and transitional organizations internationally. Ken also motivates organizations with enlightening keynotes

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