Taking Your Sales from Good to Great

Dear Dr. Barnett:
I just finished reading Jim Collin’s Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (HarperCollins, 2001). He has some great things to say that impact sales performance, particularly about getting the “right people on the bus.” What would you say distinguishes good sales organizations from great ones?

Collin’s research is a must-read for anyone tasked with improving productivity. My own discoveries about sales effectiveness are summed up in my Ten Principles (see below). But of those ten key components of sales productivity, I believe the differentiator between good and great is encapsulated in Principle #4.

Map the sales process and rigorously recruit to it, train to it, and manage to it.
Salespeople and managers whose goal is excellence can not only identify the steps in making a sale, they also know how to leverage that sales process to support every aspect of selling. Peak performing sales teams use the sales process to guide hiring, focus training, empower coaching, and manage customer relationships. The importance of identifying and leveraging the specific behaviors that transform a contact into a customer cannot be overstated. The sales process is the missing link between sales greatness and sales mediocrity.

What is Your Sales Process?

Here’s a simple experiment you can try on yourself. Before reading further, get a piece of paper and write down the specific steps required to sell your product or service. What comes first, second, third? Think of it as a road map for reaching a deal.

Let’s see how you did. First, how many of the steps you identified in your sales process are measurable, objective behaviors rather than subjective mental states? For example, “Build trust and respect” is a worthy objective, but it’s completely immeasurable. How do you know if you’ve accomplished this step or not? Words like “analyze,” “explore,” “strategize,” and “create” are subjective and worthless for anything other than thinking about selling, not actually selling.

Second, where did you start your sales process? Most of the slick, pre-packaged purveyors of sales effectiveness assume selling starts with reps being good communicators with their clients. But where did those customers come from? Many gurus do not include contact initiation or prospecting in their sales steps. “Planning a call” is a popular stop on the map. Call planning is a critical behavior for account managers or territory reps with fixed customer lists, but how are new customers identified?

Thirdly, what did you leave out? Sales organizations invariably resist change or authentic self-examination by claiming their sales process is unique, unlike any other. Of course there are many ways to sell. But just as everything is made of common chemical elements, every sales process can be fissioned into basic atomic properties that may have different names and receive different emphases, but these objective behaviors can be found in every sales process.

You may use different names for these behaviors. For example, “call planning” could be a combination of “discovering needs” and “using product/service features to meet customer needs.” My research reveals that the most overlooked steps in the sales process are “setting sales goals” and “prospecting.” Sometimes companies assume they have set sales goals when they communicate production quotas to their reps. However, the salesperson has to take ownership of those targets and transform result goals into the measurable, daily activities that make up the sales process.

You need to know what’s in your blind spot. Chances are the step or steps in the sales process you tend to ignore or fail to notice are very likely the activities keeping you and your sales team from making the leap from good to great.