CRO Insights
This year we welcomed J. Allen as our guest speaker. He is the founding partner of Masters Alliance Consultancy LLC. For the past thirty years, he has helped over one hundred organizations in 20 industries, in 13 countries gain a competitive market advantage through a unique understanding of a business’s customers, markets, and competitors.
Here is what he had to say after the meeting:
For sales leaders the world has changed almost overnight with the Covid-19 pandemic. Let’s get together for a FREE and virtual happy hour to talk among ourselves on topics that deal with how we are handling our new reality.
During this time of change, CRO RoundTable is hosing a weekly virtual happy hour for sales leaders where we can meet, think positive, plan and perhaps come away with an idea or two. CRO RoundTable will facilitate and bring a short topic to start conversation.
Please join us on Wednesdays from 4:30pm to 5:30pm Central time.
Overheard at the Twin Cities’ East RoundTable this morning - Salespeople are the quarterback of the team. That is a longstanding cliche, but it works on many levels. The conversation revolved around the fact that many sales today are turning into team sales involving many people from your company. If that is the model, why do salespeople get a commission while other team members do not?
If you are a CRO, you know the rationale behind this question. The cliche answer is that the salesperson has to be the quarterback of the deal. You can’t let every team member in the deal have a shot at throwing the football. Obviously, many of those team members are not aware of the complexity of the position.
Your salespeople should be well-trained at handling a sales process. From prospecting to presenting, they have to be able to move the offense down the field efficiently. That is no small ability. The salesperson’s role in a team-based sale is to be on the point for the entire process. They should be handling the questions, involving the right team member to answer, and then continuing the qualifying process after the question is resolved. This skill is not present in most people - that is the reason your salespeople are compensated the way they are.
If you need help designing a proper sales compensation plan, we can help.
First off, your salespeople need to be hitting their quota, if not exceeding it. Your responsibility is to lead the team. This article provides some excellent suggestions in keeping your team on track.
For instance:
Step #2: Understand how your offerings fit into the competitive landscape.
Positioning changes when the market changes. When your competitive environment changes, create a new strategy and give your team the knowledge it needs to address the strategy with customers. Ask yourself the following questions:
-Where do you fit in the competitive landscape?
-Does your offering present a practical solution to customers?
-Are you the future?
-Are you a socially conscious choice?
-Are you the customer-service leader?
The competitive landscape changes, morphs, realigns at amazing speeds today. Legacy approaches with rigid structure are untenable in most competitive spaces today (unless you are a dominant market leader, I suppose). Take the time to reassess your place in your space and share your assessment with your team.
One more excerpt:
Step #7: Create individual sales plans and coach to them.
Sales coaching is necessary to keep salespeople on track and provide support to overcome common selling challenges.
Every salesperson needs a plan to hit revenue goals. Help them create a plan for finding new opportunities, growing existing accounts, leveraging referrals, and moving things through the funnel. Coaching can help them achieve success.
Stay involved. Coaching is one of the foundations of successful CRO’s. You must know how each salesperson is performing in the field - prospecting, qualifying, closing. CRO’s are a force multiplier - as you share your expertise, your team will expand that knowledge into closed deals. Your understanding of each salesperson’s sales strengths will lead into the crucial aspect of your Bankable Forecast.
Go for “no.” Sales forecasts are neutered by comatose deals welded to the forecast at a rolling, never closing, 90 days out. These ghost opportunities clutter your forecast with inaccurately inflated revenue. These opportunities must be rapidly qualified to a decision, or more likely purged from your forecast.
Salespeople have been known to inflate their forecasts as a buffer to being placed onto performance improvement plans. Many CRO’s have paused, when considering firing an under-performing salesperson, due to that salesperson’s large forecast. The assumption is that the low performer may just pull one of the deals in, but we won’t close any of them if I exit the low-performing salesperson. Those eventualities rarely occur. You are in a far stronger position if you keep your forecast bankable.
As you can see, your consistent involvement with each member of your sales team will provide you with the opportunity to monitor the accuracy of each salesperson’s forecast. The transition to a Bankable Forecast begins with weeding out the comatose deals and starting your sales team down the path of going for no.
Working with our RoundTable companies over the years, we realized many companies were still using some variant of the traditional planning cycle where sales first defined the top line number so the internal games to secure the largest department budget possible spontaneously commenced. When the projected bottom line was not acceptable, everyone was tasked for more contribution - sales had to increase the top line and other departments had to reduce spending.
Fast forward to today’s world of non-stop global disruption, the real challenge has become projecting & growing the top line number. Buyer profiles and decision behaviors are changing, overall customer experience (CX) is driving more vendor selections and everything is viewed as a commodity. When we host biz plan reviews with our member companies, we start with a plan profile from the market view. Every business is the convergence of 3P’s – People, Process and Product.
People Process Product
Talent Levels Accountability Customer Experience (CX)
Skills Culture Differentiating Value
The real goal is to move the 3P’s from an inside-out focus to an outside-in planning process by defining what the market wants / needs in all 3 categories for the business to be successful. Every business has a “gap” between the fixed structure of the business and the dynamic structure of the market. The more successful businesses use an outside-in planning process to reduce that gap.
Let’s define role awareness:
The ability of a person to be aware of their role in the world or within a given environment. This is the ability to understand the expectations placed on a position and to clearly see how those expectations are to be met.
You can see where this is going regarding our two teams. The high-performing team had a clear understanding of their roles, specifically their role’s expectations. The company that was not performing at a high level was struggling to define the roles through expectations, responsibilities, and accountability.
Roles matter when it comes to revenue. Closing profitable, new business is difficult on its own. Achieving this goal with a confused, or muddled, role increases the difficulty exponentially. So as a CRO, how do you handle role clarity on your sales team?
Define the roles. I know this sounds basic, but how did you get to this confusion in the first place? At some level the roles were not clearly defined. You can redefine the roles at any point, even if you have been with the company for years. Always start here.
Define the variables. My experience is that roles balloon due to variables that amass over time. Someone has to deal with the critical ones and eventually those variables are absorbed into the role. This role creep eventually strains the person’s time. They have many critical tasks to complete without a proper allotment of time to complete them. Anticipate as many variables as possible. Revisit the variables frequently as new ones may have arrived.
Revisit the roles. Teams grow, responsibilities grow, expectations grow. If you are not revisiting each individual’s role during annual reviews, you are missing an easy opportunity to stay in front of the variables. Don’t let your revenue stars get bogged down in non-revenue responsibilities. These responsibilities may be important, but always look for alternative ways to handle them. Keep your revenue-generating roles as clean as possible.
Role awareness is often overlooked by leadership, but never by the people in the roles. The salespeople dealing with unclear role responsibilities may choose to avoid discussing it with you. Some (many?) salespeople view it as a weakness of inefficiency. Don’t let this happen. Stay tuned in to your team and each individual’s role awareness.
Today’s job market is quite tight and strong candidates are in demand. You have to prepare for multiple offers going to your top candidates. If you have identified them as strong, it is most likely that another company (or more) has done the same. However, there is a qualifying principle from selling that works effectively when extending job offers.
Here is the principle - you can prequalify your candidate (or prospect in selling) before extending the offer (or proposal in selling). It is a free move which means you should take it.
Here is an example from Chief Revenue Officer:
Assuming we meet and extend an offer that includes these provisions…and satisfy your questions regarding the offer, what happens at the end of our discussion?
It is a simple, appropriate question. Here is more from the book:
You want to hear a response that clearly speaks to accepting the offer. If that is not forthcoming, this may not be your candidate for two reasons:
Salespeople who can’t make a decision usually can’t get prospects to make decisions either.
If the candidate is thinking about taking your offer and going shopping, this is where you’ll discover it, and you can now prevent that from happening.
Again, it is a free move and one that will be most enlightening to your qualifying of the candidate’s interest. The second move is to solidify the candidate’s commitment to your offer. If they are strong, their current employer may not want to lose them. This fact means that you should place the thought of a counter offer in their mind.
An example:
When you give your notice to your current employer, how do you expect them to respond? When they attempt to make a counter offer to you, what do you anticipate your response will be?
Think of this as training…you are training your future salesperson to anticipate the employer’s response and to be prepared to dismiss it. If the candidate is sold on your opportunity, they will follow through with a rejection of the counter offer.
One secondary benefit is that you are setting the expectation that their current employer will provide a counter offer. If the candidate is a bit shaky or unsure, they will steel their resolve to leave when an expected counter offer does not materialize.
These are free moves with tremendous returns. Use them whenever possible and contact us for more moves you may be missing.
This characteristic is becoming the defining factor for great leaders today. Beyond “handling interpersonal relationships judiciously,” what exactly is it?
This post from Addicted2Success breaks down emotional intelligence into 5 key components. As a leader, it is important to know these components and to develop your skills to support them.
Here is a condensed summary of the 5 components from the article:
1. Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to acknowledge in real-time your own emotions and passions and the effect those have on others. You know the impact your emotions have on your behavior and that they can be contagious. This means that an emotionally intelligent leader will keep a positive and inspiring tone to their emotions to motivate their team and keep a calm office.
2. Self-Regulation
Understanding your emotions and their effect is one thing, but a truly important aspect of emotional intelligence is self-regulation, the ability to channel or refocus potentially negative emotions into constructive action. For example, fear doesn’t lead to a failure to act but inspires a leader to tackle the thing they fear.
3. Internal Motivation
A key component of emotional intelligence is self-motivation. This means that a person does not need external validation or factors such as money or status to drive their work. A self-motivated person will have naturally high standards, optimism, and passion towards achieving their purpose. This, in turn, motivates individuals working under such a leader.
4. Empathy
Empathetic leaders can relate to what other people are going through and can adapt their approach accordingly. Empathy in a leader means they listen to their team, both what they are saying verbally but also non-verbal cues such as tone and body language. This is critical for a good leader, as it creates an inclusive team with engaged and loyal members.
5. Social Skills
Social skills can include building rapport, team building, and networking. Social skills are important for dealing with awkward situations, conflict resolution, and motivating and praising team members.
How do you stack up? The evolution in leadership over the past 30 years has been remarkable. The days of military drill sergeants are gone. Now it is up to CRO’s to use a broad level of emotional intelligence to drive their sales team to success. If you are looking for help in these areas, from building your own skill set to understanding your team’s emotional intelligence, we can help.
Or are you still unsure of what this year will hold? No matter what your sales cycle time is, you can (and should) have a “bankable forecast.” What we are talking about is forecast accuracy. Do you trust your current forecast? Many of the CRO’s we talk to do not trust what their sales team report on the forecast. Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. If your forecast is unreliable today, you are missing one important piece - accountability.
Accountability in the forecast comes down to using a system for determining how qualified a prospect truly is. Our system incorporates four elements from our 5 M’s Process. Salespeople in our system have to identify, through the prospect’s words, their Motivation, Money, Methodology and Market for our solution. We call these items the Four Aces. Once your salesperson has the Four Aces qualified, you have a qualified prospect worthy of a projected closing date on the forecast.
Here are the Four Aces defined:
Motivation - your Differentiating Value (DV) has traction in the prospect’s world motivating them to learn more about your solution
Money - delivering a strong DV to the emotional decision maker with compelling consequences will lessen (eliminate) their objection to your cost
Methodology - understanding how the prospect’s company makes decisions, including their methodology, priorities, and the relative weight of those priorities
Market - there is competition in almost every deal so your salespeople need to know how well your DV fits with the prospect’s objectives and if their is another solution that is a potentially better fit
Incorporating the Four Aces into your forecasting process will instantly bring accountability into the sales team. A fully-forecasted deal has to have these criteria qualified through the prospect’s words (not the salesperson’s speculation). We’ve seen this transformation first hand - it does not take long. There is still time to impact your 2019 revenue by implementing a bankable forecast today.
As a CRO, you are responsible for building your sales team for success. Obviously, there are many variables that drive your roster decisions, but you will need to put together your strongest starting lineup. Here is a baseball lineup based on your team’s sales positions.
1 - Marketing Rep
Hopefully marketing falls under your purview. Marketing sets the table just like a leadoff hitter. You need productivity here to drive your run/revenue production. Bunt singles, walks, etc., we just need good leads to be put in play for the rest of the lineup.
2 - Prospector
The 2 spot belongs to your prospectors - the salespeople who make contact and advance your leads. We can’t have strikeouts here; we need this player to build momentum for the team and pipeline. The prospector should have some revenue/run production so and occasional RBI/closed deal is helpful.
3 - Business Development Manager
You must have your best hitter/closer in the 3 hole. This salesperson closes deals while maintaining your best closing percentage (batting average). They understand selling and successfully beat your toughest competition (pitchers). They aren’t necessarily home run hitters, but they produce RBIs (closed deals) and help set the pace for the rest of your lineup.
4 - Hunter
Your hunters are in the cleanup spot as they swing for the fences. Flashy, strong and competitive, these salespeople close the big deals with big accounts. Yes, they will strike out at times, but they never get cheated at the plate. They get the big deal and then get ready to swing on the next big deal.
5 - Farmer
Your hunters don’t always drive in all the runs which is why you need the farmers in the 5 position. Farmers have some pop in their bats. They can hit some homers on occasion, but it is typically with an existing account. They help improve your revenue by driving in deals the hunters may have missed. Though not as flashy as hunters, farmers can drive in a lot of runs/revenue for your team…they are not to be overlooked.
6 - Channel Manager
At this point in the lineup we need some slap singles and some speed. Channel managers work through their distributors, representatives, value-added resellers, etc. Channel managers aren’t necessarily driving in runs, but they can respond quickly to their channel to assist in closing deals. They keep your company’s solutions at the top of the mind of their channel to drive revenue over time.
7 - Account Manager
This is a defensive specialist whom we hope can provide a hit or two on occasion. Their primary role is to improve customer retention. Putting the ball in play is constructive in the 7 spot. Keeping our customers happy while looking for referrals, or other revenue opportunities, is their focus.
8 - Customer Service
Yes, this position should report to the CRO. We are not looking for run, or revenue, production this low in the batting order. We simply need them to fix problems at our customer’s end. The goal is not to hit into double plays and not to lose customers. Note: a strong customer service person can preserve endangered revenue…do not underestimate the value of this role.
9 - Evangelist
The 9 spot is your second leadoff hitter. They can start a middle inning rally that leads to many runs and more revenue. Similarly, they can cover a lot of ground in the sales world talking about your Differentiating Value and, dare I say it, your solution’s features and benefits. They will spark revenue production, sometimes when you least expect it.
The CRO is the manager and the one responsible for consistent production from these positions. Many teams do not have all of these hitters simply due to size or structure. However, as you build your team for revenue/run production, think of the hitters you need today to be successful. Your lineup will build out as success drives your lineup’s expansion.
If you need help in building your lineup, we can help!
