What is a Sales System?
A Sales System is an open system that exists within the environment of an organisation that interacts with its markets, customers, competitors, and society. It consists of a collection or combination of an interdependent group of items and people regularly interacting with each other to form a complex or unified whole.
A Sales System, like Marketing, is the interface between our business and our markets and customers.
We all have some sort of sales system in our businesses, whether it was built by design or emerged by default. The important question is ‘How well is your system working?’
When Sales Systems don’t work
Imagine a sales system – a sales super highway or interface- with no rules, not guidelines, no direction, no clear strategy, and every salesperson doing their own thing with their own resources and devices trying to get somewhere.
The result is chaos and turbulence. And lots and lots of noise and distress.
What we have found is that too many businesses have created a one way traffic sales operation – that is pushing their sales team out to find and win more and more sales, while almost detaching them for the rest of the business. There are no feedback loops, lack of understanding of the market and their customers within large parts of the business, a lack of consistency and synergies.
Many executives and sales leaders tend to focus primarily on results – doing the numbers and aiming for short term targets – quarterly results are all that seem to matter and nothing is ever truly connected to the rest of the business – so sales remains ‘that team over there’.
If the sales teams attempt to capture any information from the field with any one or more of the thousands of sales pipeline and forecasting apps and CRMs out there, they soon become overwhelmed and the business ends up with poor or faulty data and poor execution.
Under the pressure of sub-par results managers or L&D then throw training at their sales teams to fix their ever mounting sales issues.
So it’s not surprising that sales apps and training have become the quick fix diet pills of the sales excellence world.
What’s wrong with this situation?
It’s just piling more stuff and activity on more stuff and activity adding to the chaos and not achieving much. It’s treating the symptoms -poor sales performance- and nor the cause.
A designed Sales System leads to better results
We need to take a step back and design a better way to navigate our sales journey and sell better with less stress and chaos.
The selling profession can transform lives and careers, and Sales Systems lead organisations toward thriving communities, viable economies, and healthy environments.
So why leave sales to chance?