Don’t panic, Sales Excellence can help you!

Have you ever had the feeling that something should be improved but you do not know exactly what, how and when? The feeling that the situation is maybe not so bad, but there are also signs that it is far from optimal. Then, one day, you could look at the toilet paper and find there is just a little shred left. Don’t panic and welcome to the club!

Doing nothing could be a dangerous choice. Yes, doing nothing is a choice like doing something and it comes with consequences. But how do I know in regard to my sales activities and strategies that my toilet paper is running out?

Let’s make a pulse check, think about these 6 questions:

1. Are your sales teams constantly under pressure to lower prices?
2. Are your relevant customers excited about the interaction with your company?
3. Do you have enough opportunities to achieve your sales targets?
4. Are your sales teams overloaded while your profitability is not increasing?
5. Are your sales teams protecting your profits and pushing for new launches?
6. Are you facing challenges to sell your product benefits?

If any of these questions are making you uncomfortable, probably it is the right time to further analyze your capacity to explore your sales potential. We will do it together here and see how you can leverage your sales performance through sales excellence methodology. And you will do it before you run out of toilet paper.

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Did you know?

Not only uncountable research papers from Harvard Business Review, and the biggest consulting companies have proven that sales excellence is the most effective way to boost sales performance, but top companies in major industries have also been investing in sales excellence over the last 20 years. With these investments, they have been benefitting from significant returns and are more resilient to crises.

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You probably have asked yourself, if a methodology alone is enough to implement sales optimization. The answer to this question can also be found here, see 4 key success factors to implement sales excellence in your company at the end of this article.

Let’s see now how you can improve your 6 sales excellence capacities: maximize profits, delight your customers, focus on winning deals, focus on the most promising customers, align your sales teams with your strategy and focus on the value for the customer.

6 sales excellence capacities:

1.  Are your sales teams constantly under pressure to lower prices?

Let’s check your capacity to maximize your profits

• If there is a significant number of discounts given without a clear reason, you should consider reviewing or implementing a pricing approval process, so that the discounts are managed better according to your strategic targets.
• If your discounts are given without compensation by providing fewer services or benefits, you should review or implement a discount policy compensation methodology. Analyzing your costs to serve, you will probably be surprised how much profit you lose there.
• If your pricing is not considering the customer value, you should review or implement a system that rewards your customers for the value that they bring to your company. The normal outcome is that you maximize the profit of your most valuable customers and yours too.

You can stop profit leakage and leverage your turnover and profit by implementing pricing analytics and discipline.

2. Are your relevant customers excited about the interaction with your company?

Let’s check your capacity to delight your customers

• If your important customers are unhappy with your response time, you should consider reviewing or implementing the CRM task prioritization. It will help to concentrate your company’s efforts where you have the best chance to win.
• If the customer information is unstructured and scattered in many different systems, you should consider reviewing or implementing the 360° view of your customer in CRM. It will save a significant amount of your sales force’s time and will help them to have a clearer view of their customers.
• If the sales teams are not timely aware of relevant customer interactions with other areas of your company, you should consider reviewing or implementing a task and deadline management system in CRM, in which all areas interacting with the customer should manage their tasks. Keep in mind that, in general and especially without such a task management system, keeping track of what is happening with their costumers is a huge time-consuming work for the sales teams.

You can improve your customer experience and leverage your turnover and profit by aligning your team to support your customers via CRM.

3.  Do you have enough opportunities to achieve your sales targets?

Let’s check your capacity to forecast your sales and focus on winning deals

• If your sales forecast is not reliable enough, you do not measure the buying probability of your opportunities or the sales teams lack a clear guidance on which deals to focus, you should consider reviewing or implementing sales funnel management. It will bring you not only more predictability but also a higher sales win rate. Sales funnel allows you to calculate the probability that a customer will buy from you and how successful each salesperson has been at converting the intention to buy into actual sales. With this methodology you can also run analyses per opportunity, product, or segment, among many others. You can check, for example, in the middle of the year if the open opportunities are enough to finish the season on target, and take proactive action, if necessary.

You can bring more predictability and a higher sales win rate to leverage your turnover and profit by implementing sales funnel.

4.  Are your sales teams overloaded while your profitability is not increasing?

Let’s check your capacity to focus on the most promising customers

• If you do not have a clear view of your most promising and reliable customers, foggy rules on how the sales teams should invest their time and budget or territories with different potential but same cost to serve, you should consider reviewing or implementing customer segmentation. A better understanding of the most profitable segments of customers which really value your solutions will reduce your cost to serve, the number of customers and at the same time increase your turnover and profit.

Applying customer segmentation methodologies, you can differentiate your customer approach and allocate your resources where you can best leverage your sales performance.

5.  Are your sales teams protecting your profits and pushing for new launches?

Let’s check your capacity to align your sales teams with your strategy

• If you have a high frequency of significant discounts, you should consider reviewing the targets of your incentive system, so that the sales employees become partially accountable for and highly aware of the impact of their discounts on the overall profitability.
• If your sales teams have low commitment to selling the new generation of products, you should also consider reviewing the targets of your incentive system. It is crucial here that one factor of the target system focuses on the newly launched products. Do not underestimate how hard it is to sell new products, this motivation will bring the right awareness to the sales teams and drive them to the right direction.
• If there is a high deviation on performance among your sales employees, you should consider reviewing your incentive rules. Incentive rules should be few, fair and objective. This improvement will not only help the employees to clearly understand what they have to do to be successful, but also will help you to understand why some of them are underperforming.

You can align your sales force incentives with your company goals to motivate your sales employees and leverage your turnover and profit via a fair and focused sales incentive system.

6.  Are you facing challenges to sell your product benefits?

Let’s check your capacity to focus on the value for the customer

• If your sales teams are not aligned to present the unique value of your products and are not adjusting their pitches to the customer situation, you should consider using selling stories methodology, so that you align and structure the sales approach and support them to put the value for the customer at the center of the negotiation.
• If your sales teams are facing challenges in regard to addressing the customer objections, mainly for newly launched products, you should consider reviewing or implementing a short and simplified objections database, so that the sales force knows what to answer before hitting the first customer. You will be impressed by how this simple approach helps to achieve peak sales faster.

You can put the value for the customer at the center of the negotiation by adapting your sales pitch to the customer situation via selling stories methodology.

If you have seen possibilities for improvement in more than 2 capacities, you have to focus on 1 or 2 of them to start. Which of the 6 capacities can yield results faster and with less financial investments? Find this answer and you have found your first step to leverage your performance in a pragmatic and sustainable way.

Do not forget about the 4 key success factors to implement sales excellence. Without them you either will not be successful or will take a much longer time to harvest the results.

4 key success factors:

1. Be realistic

Sales excellence actions are fairly independent of the strategy and culture

Most successful companies use the findings during the implementation of the sales excellence projects to make their strategy more realistic and fit it better to their culture. Anyway, have you often seen strategies which are much more than a document of intention?

2. Start small

Big and overwhelming projects could have a strong negative impact

Those projects delay the overall objective. Starting with a small project, but with significant impact, is better for the employees’ learning curve and acceptance. Change management is a key success factor! The first seeds for a more agile organization start here.

3. Put your employees in the lead

The change cannot come from consultants

The employees have to lead the change and be able to manage it after implementation. Consultants may lead the initial steps to speed up the process and the continuous development of the employees on the project team, but the handover to the employees is really crucial! The sooner the better!

4. Be aware of the fear

Sales excellence scares the employees and the management

It is seen internally as “audit” plus “unnecessary change”, not mentioning that it will probably be a new company area to compete for the already very tight head count budget. An initial educational step is key to bring all employees, including several members of top management, to the level of understanding its benefits. It is also crucial to communicate clearly that the findings during the assessment would not become a “blame game”. The main message is, “What was done before was right, but now, it is not completely adapted to the new challenges.” 

The implementation of sales excellence capacities is less complicated than it looks and it brings exceptional results! To start your journey, you just need the right methodology and be aware of the key success factors. Let’s start this trip!

Contact KRAEMER to get your SEI (Sales Excellence Index) and discover how your company performs on the 6 capacities to leverage your sales performance.