If you are a sales leader or a sales manager, the most important initiative is, was, and always will be sales effectiveness. Your role isn’t easy. It is more difficult than other roles because of the natural variability in sales.
For the last decade, sales leaders and sales managers put their faith in technology to ensure success. When that failed, many began to increase the coverage in their pipeline to reach their sales goals, requiring their teams to have way more deals than they could ever close. This, too, has failed to produce the necessary results.
There is only one sure way to reach your goals, targets, and sales objectives: winning deals. No matter how aggressive or how attainable the goal, you need to win. There is no shortcut or substitute, and there are six major challenges to building sales effectiveness and increasing your team’s win rate.
Challenge 1: Believing Your Team Is Effective Enough
When you hire a salesperson, you are likely to hire someone with a background in sales, so, you expect them to know how to win deals. During the hiring process, you ask them about the deals they won, but this isn’t proof that they are effective enough to secure the clients you need.
Now, imagine believing every sales rep on your sales team is effective enough. If this were true, you wouldn’t require each salesperson to have 300 percent coverage in your pipeline. That is a failing strategy because it means you expect your team to lose twice as many deals as they will win.
Challenge 2: You Trained Your Team
In a sales kickoff meeting, the sales organization will train their sales force. You may even have a full day of trainings you run your teams through on a particular sales topic. Then, that’s it until next year. Sadly, this approach to B2B sales training doesn’t work. The only reason to train a sales force is to improve their sales effectiveness. If there is no follow up with sales managers to ensure the sales force uses what they learned in the field, they won’t gain the competency.
Two train your team in the 12 skills they need, annual training would take 12 years to get them up to speed. You need better results now, not more than a decade from now.
Challenge 3: You Haven’t Adjusted to Modern Sales
Many sales teams are still using approaches that are outdated, some nearly 60 years old, meaning they are from a time with black-and-white televisions. In the third decade of the 21st century, it is folly to believe that nothing has changed in B2B buying and B2B selling. The reason you don’t have a black-and-white television is that the technology has improved. Back in the 1950s, a black-and-white television may have been on your wishlist, but no one wants one today. The technology is obsolete and undesirable.
Like technology, sales methodologies have improved. Buyers also demand different things from sellers. In our recent conversations, at least five large companies have suggested it is easy to get a first meeting but they can’t book a second one. This is a sign they haven’t made the shift to modern sales.
Challenge 4: You Are Not Developing Latent Potential
Some sales managers believe a salesperson is only going to ever be as good as they are now. Others believe that each person on their team has enough latent potential that they can increase their sales effectiveness when a leader invests in them.
You may have had a salesperson walk across the street, where they are soon sitting close to the top of the stack ranking. Something changed for this salesperson, most likely it was someone helping them to improve their ability to win big deals.
Challenge 5: You Don’t Have Time
This is incorrect. All you have is time. The longer it takes for a sales force to become more effective, the longer their organization will go without the results they need. With as little as 25 minutes a week and two weeks of practice in the field, you can train your sales force with a modern sales approach.
Your sales force is already selling, so you are not taking them out of the field for longer than 25 minutes a week. You and your sales managers can ensure the behavior change, reducing the time you take to improve your team’s effectiveness.
Challenge 6: Sales Effectiveness Is Hard
This is catchall. Sales effectiveness is more difficult than buying a new technology for your sales stack. It’s also more difficult than demanding more coverage in your pipeline. But the implications of failing to increase your team’s sales effectiveness—and your goals—are even harder to face.
Even though it takes effort to build a highly effective sales force, it is the only strategy that you can rely on to improve your sales force and their sales results. But improving sales effectiveness is worth the effort of training, developing, and coaching your team. It’s even worth the trouble of removing your legacy sales approach and replacing it with a modern sales methodology.
The Challenges of Building Sales Effectiveness in B2B Sales
The biggest challenge of building sales effectiveness is changing your beliefs. To track your progress, the KPI you should monitor is your win rate. Individual and team win rates tell you what you need to know about your team’s effectiveness, and also measure individual effectiveness.
It doesn’t matter if you believe your team is effective. If they are not producing the sales results you need, you need to increase their effectiveness and win rates. It will take more than just a single training at your yearly national sales meeting. You must pursue their latent potential, even if it’s difficult. The sooner you improve sales effectiveness, the sooner you will achieve better results.
As more people in sales realize that the technology has failed to live up to its promise and it helps sales forces succeed, proactive sales leaders and sales managers are looking elsewhere for answers that will help them succeed. Improving your effectiveness is the best and fastest way to build a high-performing sales force.
While pipeline coverage may still be necessary, this strategy has also continually failed sales managers. To generate net new revenue and growth, you must win the deals in your pipeline. Lost deals don’t generate revenue, no matter if you have 300 percent coverage or 800 percent.
Leaving this article, you should start planning to invest your time and energy to increase your team’s sales effectiveness. If you need help, go here.
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