Our World Class Sales Cultures Framework helps leaders assess their sales culture and outlines the areas of focus to help make their organisation world class.
In the fourth part of our Framework, we look at Data and Behaviours.
The data that an organisation has on its people and the structured plan for their behaviours contribute to success and consistency.
Marginal Gain
The sales data available to an organisation help it determine where marginal gains are going to be most achievable, so in high performing organisations the leaders and salespeople embrace this data, to help them understand how they can replicate high performance time and time again.
They are able to identify conversion ratios at each gated step of their sales process and consistently review these to maximise close rates. This gives a sense of trust and security to any Win/Loss analysis that can help drive improvements.
In organisations that have not harnessed the power of their marginal gains, we see that the data available on the sales process cant be broken down clearly by each step, and each sales rep. This typically means the organisation won’t have a clear idea of individual strengths and weaknesses across the sales process.
Goal Driven Behaviour
A motivated sales force outperforms an unmotivated sales force every time, and high performing organisations have tuned into this. The leaders understand the personal motivations of each of their people. By doing this, they are able to reverse engineer these goals to sales performance and the subsequent behaviours required to deliver the best performance.
This behavioural plan then can form the basis of the ongoing coaching programme between the managers and the salesperson.
In lower performing organisations we find salespeople are targeted with KPI measures only which is more of a lagging indicator than leading.
In most cases, there won’t be a link between the salesperson’s personal goals and ambitions through to their behaviours and activities to motivate them. In turn, the sales manager won’t know the motivators and be able to coach toward them.
Accountability & Performance Management
Creating accountability within a sales team is a mandatory part of creating a world class sales culture. High performing organisations will have clear performance expectations which are communicated regularly. The consequences of missing any performance targets are also defined and understood so any poor performance can be dealt with easily and quickly.
In these companies, with a high level of accountability, the sales management process is designed to create transparency of performance for all team members, with metrics and rankings published.
In organisations that have not yet created a culture of accountability, we find performance management expectations are either not well defined, or not well communicated. In turn, any consequences of poor performance are equally undefined, which makes them hard to enforce.
Organisations committed to creating a World Class Sales Culture will find their organisations perform at a much higher level once they have mastered the data and behaviours required to predict and support success.
You can find our previous parts on Sales Operations Strategy, Systems and Sales Leadership within our blog, and you can download our entire World Class Sales Culture framework here.
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