Sales

Let’s say you are ready to migrate to a team-based selling model. Now you have to decide about changes in your staff. What adjustments will you make?

The primary goal is to have your field salespeople making four calls a day, twenty calls a week. If you currently have ten salespeople making two calls a week, you don’t need to keep all ten of them making sales calls, you just need two. And since you will pick the two best salespeople to do the selling, they will be very good at the task. And since that is their only task, like heart surgeons who only do one type of surgery day in and day out, they will get better and better.

That leaves eight people who will no longer be selling. What will they do? To answer that question, let’s look at Justin Roff-Marsh’s description of the other tasks in the sales department.

1. Sales coordinators assume ownership of sales opportunities and plan activities (appointments) into salespeople’s calendars. (A sales coordinator works with a salesperson as does a personal assistant with a senior executive.)
2. Technical experts (project leaders) assume responsibility for solution design and the generation of proposals. Project leaders also manage the relationship between customers and operations during delivery.
3. Customer service representatives assume responsibility for the ongoing management of accounts — including the procurement of repeat purchases.
4. A promotional coordinator interfaces with marketing to ensure that sufficient opportunities are generated to enable the sales coordinator to maintain the salesperson at 100% utilization.

Now that we know which positions need to be filled, how many should be transitioned to each role? Once again, here is Roff Marsh:

In most organizations we convert most of the existing salespeople into project leaders. Typically, the new project leader role is the role most similar to salespeople’s existing job profile. Furthermore, converting salespeople to project leaders tends to improve customer service and minimize the risk of losing valuable team members.

In the chart below you can see the specifics.

 

 

In addition to the sales process engineering changes that Levitt Safety made (see the Levitt Safety case study), they also implemented three tactical practices that directly improved the productivity of their inside salespeople.

Direct sales supervision

Levitt has learned that a manager for an inside sales group must provide lots of hands-on supervision. Instead of sitting in an office, their sales supervisor sits with the inside sales reps. The supervisor sees everything that’s happening, gives direct feedback, and y-jacks into their calls.

We ended up bringing in a manager with experience managing inside sales and rather than sticking him in an office where the previous manager had been, he’s in the pit with the rest of the inside sales group. So he’s hearing everything that’s going on, he’s seeing everything that’s going on, and he’s available for quick chats. What he actually does is once or twice a month he will spend an entire day with the rep in the same way that a traditional sales manager will go out and make field sales calls for an entire day with a rep. But instead of going out on calls, our new manager sits down at the desk with the inside sales rep and spends the entire day with them. He watches them, coaches them, mostly listening and then at the end of the day provides feedback on what he’s seen.

Role-playing

Levitt also uses role-playing to train and coach their inside sales reps. When you have to make decisions and act quickly, you don’t have time to think about how to perform. You need to respond quickly and know what to do.

John Buelow of the Shapiro Negotiations Institute explains that the use of role-play in training has three benefits:

• It builds confidence through the simulated experience with many different situations.
• It develops listening skills because participants must not only listen to the words, they also have to pay attention to body language and other non-verbal cues.
• It fosters creative problem-solving as salespeople encounter novel and difficult situations.

Although Levitt Safety has used role-playing to train their salespeople, they admit they are still learning. In particular, they have realized that it’s better to first have a trained actor or consultant demonstrate the role, then let the salespeople try it.

Role-playing is now something we’ve implemented as a standard part of when we do sales training. We’re less then perfect at it, to be honest. I believe role playing is important to internalize the learning. I’m also starting to realize is that it you don’t want the blind leading the blind. Initially we would do a segment in the sales training session, then we would invite a couple of people in the audience to role-play based on what they learned. Unfortunately, often it was pretty poor, although they would get a nice ovation at the end of it. What I try to do now is that at the end, have the person who is actually doing the training do the role play first so they can actually see how the training translates into a sales call by a person who actually knows what they are talking about. Then after that you can invite the audience to take part.

In addition to hiring consultants and actors, Buelow recommends that companies use actual locations, record the role play so salespeople can see themselves, and imitate real work scenarios.

Protected calling time

Without some protected time for calling, inside sales reps are vulnerable to a constant stream of interruptions from people and electronic messages. These interruptions make it difficult to get into the zone of deep work that’s required to make multiple calls to customers. Levitt instituted two protected times per day for their inside sales reps, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

We bought big foam hand-things that inside sales reps put up to ward other internal people away from our sales team. We wanted them to have an hour and a half of pure calling time to just bang out a whole bunch of calls. Otherwise there is so much that can distract an inside sales person in terms of responding to email, responding to internal messages, responding to people who walk over to their desk. We wanted them to get into the zone and get focused. That seems to have worked well for them to have both a morning and an afternoon calling time.

Sales process engineering takes time and experimentation. While you are working on the long project of shifting sales from craftwork to teamwork, you can implement these three tactics right now and see immediate results.

Many articles are written each year about the importance of sales training. Most of them assume that problems in sales can be fixed if salespeople are better trained.

Yet it is worth asking these two questions:

• What problem do we address with sales training?
• Is training sufficient to solve it?

Usually advocates of sales training identify sales productivity as the main problem. If salespeople were more highly trained, they could sell more revenue to more customers in a shorter amount of time.

But wait, is lack of selling skill the primary cause of low sales productivity? And how productive should salespeople be anyway?

Let’s answer the last question first. The best predictor of sales productivity is the number of meaningful sales conversations that a salesperson conducts each day with customers. The guidance from Justin Roff-Marsh suggests that field salespeople should be able to conduct four meaningful selling conversations per day and that inside salespeople should be able to conduct thirty.

Yet most salespeople do not come close to meeting this number. Why? Are they not competent at their work? Are they not motivated enough?

No, these are hard-working professionals. The problem is not competence or motivation, it is in how their work is structured.

Look at the activities of most salespeople. They include prospecting, selling, solution design, account administration, and customer service. It’s simply not possible for a field salesperson to do all those activities and conduct four meaningful, on-site, selling conversations per day. And the same goes for an inside salesperson whose goal is to conduct thirty conversations per day.

So let’s say that we changed the structure of the salesperson’s work. What would that look like? Another team would be responsible for identifying, nurturing, and producing enough sales opportunities for each salesperson. Other (less expensive) people would be given the tasks of customer service, account administration and solution design.

If these changes are made, salespeople can focus their time on meaningful selling conversations. With plenty of opportunities to pursue and without the distractions of other non-selling tasks, your salespeople may have no trouble meeting their goals.

If they are having trouble, you now know it has to do with their selling. You can identify where people are struggling and if more training is warranted, you can make that investment.

A story:

Our company makes specialized pipe fittings. When our company first started, everybody worked at the main site down in the industrial district. Even the salespeople worked there behind a counter. Customers would stop by to pick up parts they needed. They could get answers to questions about problem situations and learn about new kinds of fittings. As we started to grow, some of the salespeople would go out to job sites and talk to customers there. They learned a lot about how customers use our product and what they needed from us.

Gradually more and more of the salespeople spent most of their time away from the corporate office. Some of them even relocated to distant cities so they could serve those customers better. They became a kind of independent business-person because they did everything—they found new customers, educated them, took orders, and answered service questions. Sometimes they even helped design new solutions that required engineering to get involved.

Sales Used an Outside-In Business Model, Everyone Else Worked Inside-Out

In some ways it was like we had two companies. One of them operated from the inside-out, the other from the outside-in. What do I mean by that? Let me explain.

Take the accounting department. In the early days we had a bookkeeper who tracked all the accounting activity—payables, receivables, payroll, and cost-accounting. Over time as we expanded we added people who each specialized in one of these areas. With the division of labor each person became very good at their specialty. We developed a well-defined process for completing the accounting work each month. Each person understood how their work was scheduled to complete their tasks on time. When necessary we would go outside the company for additional specific services like taxes and financing. It’s an inside-out model.

Sales on the other hand operated from the outside-in. We would add salespeople in different regions and each of them essentially had the same job because they each did everything in their territory—prospecting, selling, servicing, and administration. On complicated or unusual situations they would reach into the corporate office to get help on a specific solution design or approval for special discounting.

Of course, sales was the only department that operated this way. Everybody else—production, new product engineering, legal, human resources—operated with an inside-out model.

I think the salespeople liked it. They were all independent types who enjoyed working on their own and running their own small business. Of course, they often made our lives a little too exciting with their requests for product changes, for special discounting, and with the rush of orders they sent us at the end of every month.

The World Changed and So We Changed Too

More recently though, sales has started to change in our company. Two external forces caused this change. One was that more and more customers needed engineering changes for their specific situation. These requests caused both engineering and sales to get bogged down in the solution design and prevented them from completing their other work.

The second change was communication. It just became less and less necessary for the salesperson to visit the customer site. In fact, customers actively worked to prevent salespeople from visiting because it took too much of their time.

To respond to these external shifts, we have begun to make some changes.

First, we added customer service people at corporate to handle all the routine transactions, mainly generating quotes, entering orders and responding to customer issues.

Next we added some inside salespeople. These salespeople do nothing than conduct meaningful selling conversations with customers via phone, email or text. It was surprising how many customers actually preferred talking to the inside sales reps. The calls were faster and they could easily add an engineering specialist to the call if they needed it.

By this time we stopped hiring new field salespeople because so much of the work was being done by customer service and inside sales at corporate.

Some Surprising Benefits from Our Changes

Something else happened that surprised us. It became easier to hire young people out of college. In they past these potential recruits were turned off by the freewheeling sales culture and by the need to work remotely. They wanted to work with other people. Once we we started talking to them about our customer service and inside sales groups, they became a lot more interested.

We began to learn that sometimes inside sales would run up against a technical roadblock with the customer. In these situations we would send a technical field specialist out to the customer to solve the problem. Their purpose was not to conduct critical selling conversations, those were left to the inside salesperson.

More and more of our customer interactions were being conducted by customer service and inside sales. However, we still had some large customers that needed a field salesperson to visit their site. So we have continued to employ field salespeople, but we made one crucial change.

Instead of structuring the work of the salesperson so that they planned and scheduled their meetings, we assigned a business development coordinator at corporate to schedule these calls. The customers loved it because they didn’t have to play phone tag with the salesperson to schedule the onsite meetings. And although the salespeople resisted at first, they began to prefer this approach also because the business development coordinator acted as a kind of executive assistant for the salespeople. The salespeople were relieved from all the scheduling and could focus on their selling activities.

Full Circle: Sales Is Now an Inside-Out Organization

Now we’ve come full circle. Like the other departments in the company, the sales group has adopted an inside-out model. The core transactions are conducted by the internal teams in customers service, inside sales, and by the business development coordinator. We go outside corporate (though still within the company) when we need the services of a field specialist or a field salesperson (business development manager).

We’ve reduced the number of salespeople. Customers are happier and so is the staff. We are meeting our forecasts. And most important, because people are working at corporate in teams, we are seeing many opportunities to improve the process we use to find, win and keep our customers.