Many times sales management does a stack ranking of their sales teams.  I myself have been involved in these quarterly exercises.  It’s always interesting because most of the time it’s the top performers who are stacked on top.  What gets interesting is the line-up below them.  Is the new rep who shows lots of promise ahead of the more seasoned rep who doesn’t close as much rated higher – not a good sign for the seasoned rep’s longevity.

What’s even more interesting is when asked why someone is rated higher than another is his/her manager’s response to the question.  He does more cold calling, or she has a better sales process, his sales pipeline is higher or she is better at lead generation.  Most of the answers are very subjective without a lot of cognizant data to support the opinion.

We at Jesubi for the past couple of years have discussed how our CRM solution helps sales reps be more productive.  Our clients have seen upwards of 200% more productivity as measured by total sales activity.  You can check out a quick video on our Total Activities report which is one way a rep can be compared to his or her peer group.  What’s been interesting is when clients get in and start utilizing Jesubi they like the productivity gains, but they love the visibility that reports like our Total Conversations report provide management.  The ability to know how every conversation is going is utopian for most sales management.  It is just very difficult to capture.

Most owners of companies want their sales teams to sell more, the hard part is understanding where to focus those efforts.  By enabling more visibility to sales management and the right kind of visibility, businesses should be able to do the right things to help their sales reps handle objections better, forecast more accurately and ultimately sell more.

As the owner of the sales pipeline it’s important to recognize that you can’t increase the pipeline dramatically by ownly focusing on the pipeline it’s everything sales does before an account enters the pipeline that will drive the increase.

Many times sales management does a stack ranking of their sales teams.  I myself have been involved in these quarterly exercises.  It’s always interesting because most of the time it’s the top performers who are stacked on top.  What gets interesting is the line-up below them.  Is the new rep who shows lots of promise ahead of the more seasoned rep who doesn’t close as much rated higher – not a good sign for the seasoned rep’s longevity.

What’s even more interesting is when asked why someone is rated higher than another is his/her manager’s response to the question.  He does more cold calling, or she has a better sales process, his sales pipeline is higher or she is better at lead generation.  Most of the answers are very subjective without a lot of cognizant data to support the opinion.

We at Jesubi for the past couple of years have discussed how our CRM solution helps sales reps be more productive.  Our clients have seen upwards of 200% more productivity as measured by total sales activity.  You can check out a quick video on our Total Activities report which is one way a rep can be compared to his or her peer group.  What’s been interesting is when clients get in and start utilizing Jesubi they like the productivity gains, but they love the visibility that reports like our Total Conversations report provide management.  The ability to know how every conversation is going is utopian for most sales management.  It is just very difficult to capture.

Most owners of companies want their sales teams to sell more, the hard part is understanding where to focus those efforts.  By enabling more visibility to sales management and the right kind of visibility, businesses should be able to do the right things to help their sales reps handle objections better, forecast more accurately and ultimately sell more.

As the owner of the sales pipeline it’s important to recognize that you can’t increase the pipeline dramatically by ownly focusing on the pipeline it’s everything sales does before an account enters the pipeline that will drive the increase.

We continually hear about forming partnerships, being partners with our clients and being in win-win situations.  What does all of this mean and how can we become true partners in order to increase our footprint, have higher client retention rates and equally as important….gain referrals from our clients?

In order to understand what makes a company-to-company relationship a partnership vs. a vendor-client relationship, you need to ask yourself a few simple questions.

• Do I offer services and products to my clients that are really in their best interest?

• Do I spend a significant % of my time understanding my client’s goals and objectives in order to help them meet those objectives?  Even if it means selling them less in the immediate future?

• Am I regularly putting myself in a consultative role with my clients so they can count on me for strategic guidance?

Those questions are just the tip of the iceberg.  Being in the CRM world and always striving to offer my clients more than just software, it is CRITICAL to be a consultant and a partner to my clients.

I, along with the rest of my team, am always striving to provide our clients with more.  More than just software that helps give them added efficiencies in their prospecting efforts, we go above simply offering them some of the most empirical data on their prospecting campaigns.  We take it to the next level in every interaction to ensure that they understand HOW to use our software and enable them and their sales teams to truly be more effective and efficient.  We identify trends in their prospecting efforts to assist in their future outbound campaigns to ensure they are utilizing the Jesubi application to its greatest ability.  That is what makes companies partners vs. vendors.  It’s doing the right thing and it’s keeping our client’s best interest in mind at all times.

Who are you to your clients and who do you want to be?

Amazingly, with all the technology available to track sales performance, a majority of executives report to manage their organizations with an ad-hoc sales process.  In the Sales Management 2.0 eBook, Jim Dickie of CSO Insights surveyed over 3,000 companies to find that “when asked to describe the sales methodology in place, 52.9% reported random or informal processes.  That is a huge problem for sales managers.”  In the same study, one-third of companies overviewed reported tracking the sales pipeline using spreadsheets, another 45% use the capabilities of their CRM system.

A couple major issues jump out from this information.  First, spreadsheets or CRM as a sales pipeline management system will only provide lagging indicators.  Both platforms require significant data input, data manipulation, then data verification.  Analysis occurs post-facto, and not in an automated or real-time fashion.  Secondly, the ad-hoc nature of traditional CRM does not lend itself to real-time or real world analysis of the sales pipeline.  By ad-hoc, I’m referring enterprise CRM allowing the user to originate, disposition and generate pipeline activities in a random or informal method.  How a user contacts a prospect, when they contact the prospect, how often they contact, and the methods for dispositioning sales prospecting activities and information is completely up to the individual user.  Hard to instill a strong culture of pipeline and prospect development with an ad-hoc process & CRM platform.

This is what we at Jesubi refer to as “systematic selling”. We believe that science can be applied to many aspects of selling and organizations that manage a culture of accountability can receive significant results in their pipeline development.  Jesubi customers are seeing 50-300% productivity gains for outbound activities in their pipeline development process.  Managers receive detailed, granular reports on activities, conversation results and their prospecting velocity – measuring the intricacies of the sales process for pipeline development activities to levels never before seen in traditional CRM tools.

By having this substantial level of detail, sales processes for pipeline development can be monitored and managed real-time by sales and marketing managers and contributors.  In the same Sales Management 2.0 eBook, Kevin Joyce of Miranda Technologies recommends “continually optimizing the process requires a very high degree of sales and marketing alignment, which is missing from too many companies”.  A sales tracking system built on a systematic selling platform can provide this heightened level of accountability, integration and alignment.

Perhaps if companies diminished the ad-hoc nature of their sales process and adopted systematic selling methodologies, their pipeline development process would scale to new heights as well.

So it’s the beginning of the second month, of the first quarter of the new year!  How do we capture the motivation and excitement that most of us, including our sales teams, have to make this an even stronger year than last?

We all begin the year with high hopes of generating and closing the best sales, of far exceeding the goals we have set for ourselves and for our company.  How do we keep our team motivated moving forward?

Some of these things may seem obvious but the key is in the execution:

1.  Set clearly defined goals and expectations for the group and the individual

In the Jesubi sales application we use, tracking those goals and expectations is simple.  Once the goals are set and follow up meeting are scheduled, the software does the rest of the work by measuring things like:  number of calls taken to schedule an appointment, number of  appointments, Opportunities and forecasts.  There is nothing better than being able to go back to my team with a clear path of how they were able to achieve success and then celebrate that success.  If they were not able to reach their goals, Jesubi gives me the power of analytics to understand what they were doing and how they might do things differently in order to reach a more positive outcome. Again, keeping the sales rep motivated by providing data that matters.

2.  Share success stories with the team

Sharing wins and successes with your team helps motivate others to reach those same outcomes.  Most sales people are inherently competitive and are driven by their peers.  They want to be #1 so by sharing someone else’s success, it gets their competitive juices flowing.  On the same point, if it is their success story that you’re sharing, they are proud and want to stay in that #1 position which will motivate them to have repeat behavior.

3.  Keeping your team happy!

I was recently reading an article in Smart Money magazine entitled “Upbeat Workers, Upbeat Investors.”  The article peaked my interest because I have always believed it is not only important to be successful at work, but to also be happy at work.  According to the article, “A National Bureau of Economics Research paper issued in September reported that “dispositional optimists” experience significantly better job outcomes than pessimists with similar skills.”

When you are gearing up for your next sales or town hall meeting, think about what you can do to make it more FUN for your team.  Remember, one of the easiest ways you can keep your team motivated is to keep them happy and enjoying what they do every day!

I had conversations with two VP’s of Sales recently.  Both were in a very competitive industry with 100′s of suppliers competing for marketshare with their customers.  Both currently use Salesforce.com for opportunity management.

In the course of these discussions we got on the subject of cold calling and what percentage of time a rep should be responsible for hunting in his or her own territory.  In the first conversation, the VP of Sales said “I never want my sales team prospecting.  It is marketing’s job to do lead generation for my team.  If they don’t have enough to call on it’s marketing’s fault.”  How many marketers out there have heard this before?  The questioning look I got from him said I didn’t get it.  He looked at me and said “why would I want my most expensive sales resource making cold calls.”  I replied with “what happens when they don’t have enough opportunities to work on” and once again his reply was “that’s marketing’s problem.”

Two hours later I met with the second VP of Sales and when we got on the same conversation about sales prospecting and cold calling by sales reps his thoughts were at the opposite end of the spectrum.  He said “sure I’d love for my team to only be working on opportunities but if that were the case then I don’t have enough sales reps.  I’d like to see them with a 50/50 balance.  50% of their time prospecting for new opportunities and 50% of their time closing the opportunities that they’ve got in their pipeline.”  He went on to say that he had practiced persistency in his own prospecting efforts when he carried a bag.  He’s now led several high growth tech companies to wildly successful outcomes with that same process.  He deployed Jesubi specifically for the ability to implement this process and to enable his sales team, so when hunting they now will do it several times more efficiently and productively than can be done with any other CRM tool.

The most interesting fact in the above conversations is while these two VP’s of Sales are competing in the same space with similar offerings and competing primarily on cost advantages, one of the companies is growing at an exponential vector.  I’ll let you figure out which one.