The World Class Sales Cultures Framework has 6 key elements to help you understand your performance. We looked at number one, Sales Operations Strategy here, and now we move onto our second element, Systems. What sales systems are in place and how do they contribute to success.
Below, we outline the three elements we look at to assess your systems and what a low performing organisation might look like, and how to define a high performing sales culture:
1. Sales Process and Methodology - which do you follow and how integrated is it across the whole organisation?
In low performing organisations, their sales process will be defined traditionally and won't represent the buying process. It might follow standard CRM segmentation rather than the steps your business requires. We find that salespeople don’t have defined questioning strategies, information requirements and shared methodologies that help qualify and progress deals.
In high performing organisations there is a universally understood sales process that takes a prospect through a controlled set of steps that the organisation know will lead to an increased win probability, which, in turn, is represented across their CRM. All salespeople have well developed questioning strategies and shared methodologies and common sales languages to effectively develop and progress opportunities and lead to shared learning and improvement across their organisations.
2. Playbooks - what defined action plans do all salespeople have access to and understand?
In organisations that haven't considered this, they will have a process but not the documented sales and sales management playbooks that are crucial to their deployment.
In those high performing organisations that are fully utilising playbooks, they find these can help them benchmark high performance whilst simultaneously explaining and supporting the enablement of the sales team. Their playbooks give everyone a clear understanding of what good looks like and their management playbooks give a blueprint for leading a team.
3. Sales Enablement - What steps have been taken to support enablement?
We find that low performing organisations rely on a basic CRM and often won't use modern sales productivity tools. Within these organisations there typically won't be a sales enablement owner within the business, beyond the sales leader by default, and there are no initiatives within the business to improve sales effectiveness and no commitment to improvement.
Those that have committed to sales enablement will have an internal owner and its adoption is important to the leadership team. Productivity tools are available, customised and used when required, and a culture of learning permeates the sales teams.
If you want access to the full World Class Sales Cultures Framework then head here to download it, and set up a one to one call with a member of the team to help you go through and implement it.
We have already looked at our introduction to the framework and section one, Sales Operations Strategy, in previous posts. Section three will look at Sales Leadership in more detail and help you understand the important part you can play in creating a World Class Sales Culture in your organisation.
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