Creating Consistent High Performance in your Organisation

As a sales leader, you have to supervise, coach, mentor and train your people.

If we are able to have everyone doing the right thing every time, rather than their own thing, we can bring everyone up to the same level. We can create a systematic, repeatable and predictable process and methodology that offers huge value to our business.

So what are the supervisory things we can do as managers so that we can create an environment where people are doing the best thing, rather than doing their own thing? What can we observe that proves it?

In my monthly sales leadership session, we talked about this topic and created a list that we can track.

As you read through this list, score how you think your organisation is performing against them, and what improving each might mean to your team and performance.

Sales process mapped (gated) - Do you have a gated process embedded in your CRM? By ‘gated’ I mean a series of steps that we need to progress an opportunity through to move them successfully to the next step. By implementing this (such as we have done with HubSpot)  you can clearly view how team members progress their deals and where they might struggle.

Playbooks or talk tracks - These are the pre-defined ways of doing things that we have implemented that allow us to have a team that all sounds and acts the same. There is typically an investment in technology to roll these out, but once we have we can then start to see how our people are using them and how they sound in comparison.

Having a culture of practice - whether we call it practice, rehearsal or role-play, having a culture that pushes people to practice and hone their approach drives consistency and high performance.

Structure of QBRs/Deal/Account Reviews to reinforce expectations - these need to be consistently delivered to every member of the team to help everyone report in the same way and speak the same language.

CRM that Matches Process - Having a CRM that closely follows the stages of your sales process keeps everyone aligned and stops team members from trying to follow their own process.

Leaders and Supporting Cast know what good looks like - A leader can easily de-rail a deal or opportunity by parachuting in and giving adverse advice to the process you are trying to instil. By having everyone know what good looks like, everyone can work in the same direction.

Pre-call planning and Post call debrief - Proper preparation in sales dramatically improves results. Likewise, a systematic approach to reflecting on the success of a sales engagement help improve forecast accuracy and team performance. Have a look at our pre-call plan here. 

Ride-alongs + Call listening - we can closely observe our team members by either listening back to their calls or by going on sales calls with them. This is one of the best ways to understand which areas are a priority for coaching and training.

The forecasting process supports the sales process - this in turn will be represented in the CRM, but having the forecasting, gated sales process and CRM link we get the most accurate view of our data possible.

Competency testing - the regularity of this will differ between businesses but having your salespeople present or run meetings with leadership to test how their competencies are progressing.

Which one, if you put your attention on it, would drive a big shift in team performance?

If you don’t know where to start, get in touch with us to see how we can help.