In order to achieve peak sales fitness, business and sales leaders and their sales teams need to adopt a Systems approach to sales operational excellence.
Sales operations are complex variable systems with many moving parts—they do not follow a straight line; smart companies get this. They recognise that oversimplification is their enemy when it comes to developing and deploying effective sales strategies and functioning sales operations and teams.
However, in a world of soundbites, instant information, and the constant pressure to come up with solutions to someone’s problems, easy answers have the greatest appeal, even though these are usually far removed from the best answers.
Opting for the simple answer, like a 2 day sales training course, to fix a systemic sales issue usually makes matters far worse.
So, to help you find out if there are any other issues that need attention, here are a few questions to conduct a preliminary assessment of your own sales system:
Sales Strategy
- Has your business or sales strategy stopped delivering the returns it once did?
- Is your sales team reacting to market challenges and changes by discounting prices?
- Are your salespeople reactive or lacking focus, and missing new market opportunities?
- Are your brand equity and value proposition losing currency with clients and markets?
- Do your salespeople and leaders struggle to articulate the value their clients can get?
If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these 5 questions you will likely need to review and assess your:
- Sales Strategy and its effectiveness
- Sales Market Segmentation Plan
- Sales Operations Framework
- Sales Messaging
- Value Propositions
- Go-to-market Action Plans
Sales Process
- Do your salespeople have an ad hoc /reactive sales approach with no consistent sales process?
- Are other internal teams unaware of what your sales team is trying to achieve with customers?
- Do your new sales recruits take too long to get up to speed and earn?
- Are you missing the picture of what GOOD sales performance looks like and how to recruit for it?
- Are your sales managers managing from behind a desk rather than leading in the field?
If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these 5 questions you will likely need to:
- Look at your Sales Processes and Sales Leadership Framework
- Check your sales team structure
- Review your job descriptions and ideal candidate profiles
- Review your minimum standards of sales excellence and KPIs
Salespeople
- Is your sales productivity stagnating and sales results dropping despite training initiatives?
- Are your salespeople finding selling harder and, making more excuses than sales?
- Are your salespeople talking product features & benefits instead of business issues & solutions?
- Are your sales managers behaving as ‘super salespeople’ instead of leading and coaching?
- Is your sales team struggling to meet sales targets despite KPIs and lots of ‘sales effort’?
If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these 5 questions you will likely need to:
- Review and assess your sales training and content approach and its relevance
- Think about creating a perpetual learning environment
- Step up your sales coaching activities
- Look at your current sales culture
These are just some of the many questions that can reveal where in your sales system you need to take action to be able to sell better now and in the long term.
Understand, accounting for and continually working on the interconnectedness of your sales system is key to future success.
Word of advice: Don’t be fooled by short term fixes that promise amazing results overnight, they are, unfortunately likely to be all ‘smoke and mirrors’.
*What is Systems Thinking?
Systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. The systems thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements. Systems thinking can be used in any area of research and has been applied to the study of medical, environmental, political, economic, human resources, and educational systems, among many others.
According to systems thinking, system behaviour results from the effects of reinforcing and balancing processes. A reinforcing process leads to the increase of some system component. If reinforcement is unchecked by a balancing process, it eventually leads to collapse. A balancing process is one that tends to maintain equilibrium in a particular system.
Systems thinking originated in 1956, when Professor Jay Forrester founded the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Author: Sue Barrett, www.salesessentials.com