Bankable Forecasts Start with "No"

By now you are underway with your 2020 sales forecast and hopefully your sales team is starting off strong. As all CRO’s know, the forecast is the scorecard for your revenue success for the year. Your forecast should anticipate your team’s success as they close deals throughout the year. If you reach December and your revenue is light for the year, you have failed to build a Bankable Forecast. What can you do today to ensure December is a celebration of your team’s success in 2020?

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.

Roles Lead to Revenue

We have recently worked with a couple of disparate sales teams with different sales performance results. The teams were in different markets but were comprised of roughly the same number of salespeople. The higher-performing team had one clear distinction - role awareness.

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?

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

3 Tips for Coaching Millennials

There is a vast digital divide between Baby Boomers/Gen X sales leaders and Millennial salespeople. We hear stories about this divide frequently in our RoundTables. So how can you be more effective in handling your younger sales team?

Selling Power offers up an excellent article with 3 suggestions for you to improve your coaching with your sales team. Coaching is a critical piece of any CRO’s responsibilities. The generation gap creates a “digital divide” to use the author’s excellent phrase.

Here is a quick summary of the 3 tips:

Tip #1: Use structure and guidelines.
Many millennials grew up in an environment where their day was carefully plotted and scheduled, with many after-school activities, sports, etc. Their educational system emphasized standardized test scores, resulting in teaching to exams – a process that necessitated instruction in a specific structure and format.

For a considerable portion of millennial sales reps, hearing the phrase “figure it out” can be alarming. When your formative years had a built-in structure and clear guidelines, you might naturally find the open waters of uncertainty and vagueness disturbing.

When coaching sales reps of this generation, use structure and guidelines – both in the sales coaching session itself and the skills and accounts being coached to.

Tip #2: Make technology your friend.
To paraphrase Bane from the recent Batman film franchise, millennials were born in technology, molded by it. This extends into the generation’s daily life, where a large portion will look up how to do something via YouTube instructional videos, for example.

You, too, can use technology to your coaching advantage with millennials. 

Tip #3: Give consistent and frequent feedback.
It’s inaccurate to say millennials have poorer interpersonal communications than previous generations. Rather, the form of communication has changed. Rather than face-to-face, much conversing takes place via text, social media platforms, and other forms of digital communication.

In fact, there’s even more communication in the digital, global society than we’ve ever had before – it’s just that less of it occurs face-to-face. Given this increased, real-time discussion, particularly against the background noted in our first point, your millennial sales reps will expect consistent, frequent feedback on their performance.

In regards to the second tip, we use a tool that greatly increases your coaching effectiveness. The software is SkillFitness and it is a mobile, video-based skills mastery platform that transforms how teams perform at a higher level to deliver business outcomes. The software, which runs as an app on your phone, is the perfect bridge between the sales leader and his or her younger sales team.

Sales as a Guide, Not an Educator

The sales world has changed dramatically over the past decade as salespeople are no longer educators.

Granted, education is still a component of the qualifying system. However, salespeople are now a guide in the process. Clearly, the availability of information on the web has created a highly-educated prospect.

The clearest key is this transformation shows up at the beginning of the selling process. Prospects now approach companies with a certain level of understanding regarding your solutions. They have probably researched your company through other sites, scoured your website, and even talked to some of your customers…all before they make first contact with your sales team.

This transformation fundamentally changes the relationship between the salesperson and the prospect. Adjustments must be made. Perhaps your sales team needs to take an evangelical approach by spreading the good news of your solution in the market. Or maybe you have to switch to a relationship-based sale with a sales team focused on interpersonal skills. Qualifying will always be the backbone of successful selling, but the methodology will change.

The success of your team will rely upon their ability to adjust, if they haven’t already. Some categorical shifts to consider:

Old - Sales is an educator
New - Sales is a guide

Old - Prospect profile is information-gathering
New - Prospect profile is solution-savvy (from your competitors too)

Old - Prospecting is general introduction
New - Prospecting is specifically focused

Old - Qualifying focus is Pain and Money
New - Qualifying focus is Want and Need

To be clear, any successful qualifying system will require uncovering the prospect’s perceived pain and their budget to remove that pain. However, the initial qualifying pass will need to start by sorting out the nice-to-have vs. need-to-have solution for a partially-educated prospect who approaches with the beginnings of a self-determined solution.

Coaching for Qualifying

As a CRO, you have many responsibilities, but one not to overlook is a concerted effort to coach your team. CRO’s are force multipliers - your ability to impart wisdom to your team will make your team more successful. The best ROI for your coaching time with your salespeople is qualifying.

Qualifying is the backbone of all successful selling. There are 5 stages of our Critical Qualifying Questions (CQQ’s) that we espouse in our selling system. However, no matter what selling system you use, your team must be strong qualifiers to succeed. The responsibility for growing that qualifying ability falls on you.

Selling Power has a quick-read, archived article that describes some fundamental questions your team should be asking of any prospect. The author compares qualifying prospects to investigative journalism. From the article (emphasis mine):

In many respects, qualifying prospects is like investigative journalism. The reporter (or, in this case, the salesperson) has to find out the facts of the story, based on who, what, when, where, why, and how. That means coming up with answers to the following questions:

• Does the customer actually have a need for our products or services?

• Can the customer afford to buy what we’re selling?

• Is my primary contact the person who has the ability to make a buying decision, or is this person just gathering information? If not, who does have the authority to purchase?

All qualifying starts with a need so the author is on target. The CQQ’s from our Revenue as a System include Message, Motivation, Money, Methodology, and Market. When you are coaching your team, always keep the qualifying topic at the forefront.

Chicago Briefing - June 27

Learn about the RoundTable at our upcoming briefing on June 27.

Does your business have more upside than current performance exhibits?
Are you locked-in on the rapidly changing sales world?
Who is your go-to person for sales leadership questions?

The RoundTable provides answers to these questions and so much more.  You can learn about the RoundTable at one of our upcoming briefings in Wheaton, IL.  We will be hosting a 1 hour briefing on Wednesday, June 27th at the Arrowhead Golf Club.  If you would like to attend, please register today.

2 Key Traits for Managing Millennials

This list could be much, much longer in dealing with this generation. However, let's focus on two traits that we are seeing consistently in successful leaders of Millennials.

1. Empathy - a quick, paraphrased definition from Merriam-Webster:  the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another without having those things fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Now to be clear, empathy has always been a valuable leadership trait through the generations.  Leadership is associated with power which allows leaders to operate, potentially, with a heavy hand.  They need not worry about reading their direct reports.  The leader provides the direction and expects the reports to execute it.

Empathy is a critical component of emotional intelligence.  The ability to read the nonverbal cues of people provides access to the largest channel of communication.  7% of communication is verbal (i.e. words) while 93% of communication is nonverbal (e.g. tone, body position, inflection, posture, etc.).  Nonverbal communication is the universal language and if the leader can read it effectively, he or she has an advantage in leading Millennials.

2. Patience - This trait appears to be more uncommon by the day.  Millennials have matured in a microwave world.  Data, entertainment, communication has always been at their fingertips primarily through their cell phone.  Patience has not been a common point in their collective lives.

The ingrained lack of patience means the leader of this impatient generation needs...patience.  Saint Augustine famously stated, "Patience is the companion of wisdom." How true.  The Millennial generation often pushes for expediency in their careers to the point where they leave companies after short tenures.  They believe they have acquired all of the skills they can from that company and their path to the CEO suite is unclear.

The modern-day leader has to maintain a steady hand with the Millennials.  The leader must manage the Millennials expectations and provide a growth path focused on skill development.  The key is to coach them to take measured steps forward.  Patience will provide progress.

Keep this in mind, by the year 2020, Millennials will make up approximately 75% of the workforce.  Their generation requires an evolving leadership style better suited to the Millennial mindset.  Two traits, empathy and patience, will be in growing demand each year.  The leaders with the ability to adapt will successfully harness the energy of this new generation.

An Introduction to RoundTable Chicago

An introduction from Thomas Herman, Managing Director - Chicago, CRO Executive RoundTable

CRO Rule #10 - Use Interviews as Simulations

CRO Success Rule #10:
Candidate interviews need to be a simulation of the sale you expect them to conduct.

We have arrived at our final CRO Success rule and it is an important one.  Bad sales hiring happens for many reasons, but there are “free moves” you can use to enhance your hiring success.  One of them is the interview.  Too often we see hiring managers who simply want to have a discussion about a candidate’s resume along with telling them about the position, the company, the benefit plan, etc.   Bad move.

The better approach is to mirror your typical sale in the initial interview.  Sales interviews do not need to be comfortable, easy-going discussions.  Instead, match the parameters of your typical sale.  Have multiple people in the interview if they will have to sell to a group.  Be somewhat short and curt with them if your prospects are typically in a hurry and not eager to talk to a salesperson.  Interrupt the candidate, drill down on their answers, ask for deeper clarification…all of these moves are free.  You would be wise to incorporate them into your hiring process so you can see the candidates in action.