CEOs and senior sales leaders aiming to effectively steer their sales teams through the challenges of 2024 and unlock maximum growth potential require a thoughtful and comprehensive approach. In this article, I’ll explore methods to troubleshoot and audit your sales force, offering you the best chance of achieving that growth.
It’s important to acknowledge upfront that not all these recommendations will be applicable to everyone, and there might be some overlap in a few categories. Given the multitude of moving parts and performance levers in a sales organization, this is normal and expected. Consider the following recommendations as an audit checklist of sorts. As you go through the article, make notes about the ones that apply to your situation, deprioritize others if you believe they are already addressed (GEFN – good enough for now), or simply do not apply to your circumstances.
Conduct a Comprehensive Sales Force Audit
Start with Buyer and Customer Acumen
One of the largest and most surprising gaps that I consistently see is in buyer and customer acumen. Often, executives confuse experience with understanding. We think we know everything about our customers, yet it’s mostly anecdotal without analysis or documentation.
To begin this diagnostic audit, prioritize a thorough evaluation of your buyer and customer acumen. For me, buyer acumen includes:
Roles & Goals: Document the roles and goals for your most common buyers.
Buyer Personas: Develop comprehensive buyer personas or buyer profiles, including their COIN-OP, meaning the Challenges they face, the Opportunities they can capitalize on, the Impacts of those challenges or opportunities, the Needs their situation creates, their desired Outcomes, and the Priorities of those needs and outcomes.
Metrics: How are they measured in their company? What are the “metrics that matter most” to them, and how do they and their leaders define success in their role?
Budgets: What are their typical budgets, their span of control, and their purchasing authority?
Buying Process: What is their typical buyer’s journey? Who do they interact with internally during it? What are the most common decision criteria? How do your buyers make their decisions? Map the stages, objectives, tasks and exit criteria.
Company Size: If it applies, in what size company or verticals do they typically work? (If this matters, it will help further define your Ideal Customer Profile or ICP.)
Other Pressures: What other risks, pressures, preferences or internal politics might influence your buyers?
Personal Factors: What emotional or other personal factors or personal needs might be in play?
Value Creation: How do they define “value?” Is it Business Value (financial and operational metrics), Aspirational Value (aligned with mission, vision, values or critical issues such as DEI or sustainability), Experiential Value (improvement of process or experience, such as employee, candidate and customer experience), and/or personal value (something that matters to them as an individual, such as reducing risk, looking good, increasing political capital, a sense of accomplishment, etc.), or a mix?
Map the Customer Journey / Buying Process
Next, map the entire customer journey, including the above buying process (again with stages, objectives, tasks and exit criteria). This will pinpoint critical touchpoints and unveil opportunities for engagement. Align your sales process and methodology with the various stages of this journey, ensuring your interactions are both relevant and valuable. Rework your sales model, as needed, and teach your sellers how to identify where buyers are in their lifecycle and how to adapt their approach appropriately.
Remain Responsive to Market Dynamics
In the ever-evolving marketplace, staying attuned to industry trends and market shifts is critical. Audit now (and regularly) to adapt your sales strategy to align with current market demands. Look for opportunities to distinguish your brand, create differentiation, and take market share.
Infuse Buyer- and Customer-Centricity into Everything You Do
Enhance your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy by seamlessly integrating buyer- and customer-centric principles at every turn. Understanding your customer is paramount so you can tailor your approach to directly address their needs. Actively gather and incorporate customer feedback into the evaluation, ensuring continuous refinement of your sales model, processes, and methodology. Consider initiating a customer advisory board to further enhance your understanding and responsiveness to customer perspectives.
Align Your Buyer Engagement Content
Empower your sales team to function as trusted advisors by delivering educational content that provides tangible value to your customers. Develop content specifically targeting common challenges to establish a genuine connection with your audience. Ensure that your content addresses the exit criteria in the buying process stages for your typical personas. This ensures that your buyer engagement content answers the questions that buyers have at each stage of their buyer’s journey.
Connect Buyer Acumen Back to Strategy
If, during your Buyer Acumen analysis, you find that significant changes are required, you may need to take a step back to ensure strategic alignment or address other things.
I’ve shared this chart here before, and the crux is that you must start with strategy, then create GTM tactical plans, then develop the talent and build systems to execute the plan to achieve the strategy. If your Buyer Acumen work highlights gaps or misalignments, you may need to step back to address those, before moving forward.
Conduct a Situation Assessment on Your Sales Force
With the foundation of Buyer Acumen in place, and ensuring your strategies, tactics, and execution plans are aligned with that foundation, conducting a Situation Assessment of our sales force is the next step I’d recommend – and I’d recommend this for everyone. I simply don’t know how you’d plan to manage a sales force effectively without doing this.
Using the same COIN-OP model you did with your buyers, and putting it into the above Situation Assessment framework, allows you to take a sound diagnostic look at your sales force. What is the Current State (with Challenges, Opportunities and the Impacts if not addressed) and the Desired Future State (with the desired Outcomes and the Priority of those Outcomes).
When you conduct the Gap Analysis, you determine what it will take to move from Point A to Point B. When you do the Impact Analysis, you can see what the gain will be, to create a compelling business case. If you dollarize this, you can compare it to the cost of any solutions required to close the gap and forecast your return on investment (ROI).
This is a sound approach often used by consultants and is how the best and brightest sales enablement and sales operations leaders tie their work for the year or quarter to leadership’s strategic objectives and prioritize and execute action plans to deliver the desired outcomes. Planning for another year without doing this is like playing darts blindfolded. My friend and distribution industry expert Mike Marks of Indian River Consulting Group is fond of saying that it’s not rocket science, it’s just work. Do the work.
Evaluate and Align Sales Process
Scrutinize Each Stage and Support It
Delve into the details of each stage of your sales process. Ensure it’s aligned to your customer lifecycle and especially the buying process. Aim for optimal efficiency and seamless transitions, identifying areas for improvement. Evaluate the integration of technology, including CRM and automation tools, to ensure that you are supporting your sellers in using your preferred methodology in their workflow.
Align Your Sales Methodology
Evaluate the effectiveness of your selected sales methodology in navigating the team through various stages. Ensure your training programs align with both the established sales process and methodology, empowering your team with the requisite skills for effective implementation. Get everyone speaking the same language. Until you do this, you will never believe the power that a shorthand and common language can bring to your sales force. Conversations improve, selling improves, coaching improves – it’s so simple, but it’s like greasing a bearing. It runs smoother.
Ensure Value-Based Selling
Elevate your sales approaches by emphasizing the value drivers that matter to your buyers. Clearly articulate how your products or services solve their specific challenges and deliver the outcomes they want. Make connections between features and benefits that resonate deeply with the customer’s goals and objectives.
And then, stop pitching! Never mention the product until you understand the problem your buyer wants to solve.
Our customers who have made this behavioral shift report outstanding results. And interestingly, they bemoan the fact that when their suppliers try to support them on joint calls with buyers, they must hold the supplier reps back from product-pitching or jumping too quickly into solution talk before they understand the root-cause problem and the outcomes the buyers want to achieve. (Patience remains a superpower of selling.)
While it’s gratifying to hear success stories from clients who have embraced this approach and are now selling more effectively, the challenge remains widespread across various B2B industrial sectors. Some of our clients are now sharing their newfound insights with their suppliers to aid them in overcoming similar challenges (and frankly, to avoid these supplier sellers from derailing their opportunities).
Enhance Active Listening Skills
B2B buying research repeatedly reports that modern buyers do not feel understood by sellers and don’t believe sellers truly comprehend their business or issues. Invest in honing the active listening skills of your sales team. This not only fosters stronger relationships but also encourages the gathering of detailed information about the customer’s situation (their COIN-OP, from above), needs, and their value drivers.
We teach the ACC model, which is Acknowledge (with empathy, from the buyer’s perspective), Clarify (“peel the onion” to truly understand root causes), and Confirm (summarize what you believe you heard to ensure you got it right). There are other elements of active listening, such as verbal acknowledgments and body language, but ACC is a wonderful model to demonstrate your caring and to help make your buyer feel understood (one of the deepest-seated human needs).
Encourage Adaptive Selling
Empower your sales team to tailor their approach based on the unique characteristics of each customer.
- What are their Problems, Impacts, Desired Outcomes and Priorities?
- What are their Value Drivers?
- Where are they in their Customer Lifecycle?
- What is the individual buying process exit criteria for each decision-maker in each stage of the buying process?
Adaptive selling is an advanced skill, and it can be difficult to scale across a sales force, but it is teachable and learnable, especially with ongoing coaching.
Adapting may occasionally be necessary organizationally, as well as with individual sellers. As mentioned earlier, paying attention to market changes will allow you to swiftly recognize and respond to changes in customer behavior or market dynamics. Proactive and adaptive win over reactive and inflexible, almost every time.
Personalize Your Sales Outreach
Building on the concept of adaptive thinking mentioned earlier, particularly in the context of new business development, integrate personalized sales outreach strategies. Customize your communication to each prospect, considering their preferences, behaviors and past interactions. Utilize data-driven insights to shape messaging and offers that resonate on a highly personal level. This requires pre-call research and sales call planning, but the improved results and higher conversions are worth the effort.
Integrate Feedback from All Stakeholders
Actively seek and incorporate customer feedback into your sales model, processes and methodology. Use this invaluable input to refine sales approaches, address challenges and opportunities, and reduce friction to enhance the overall customer experience.
Ensure that both the sales process and methodology are responsive to customer feedback. An agile and iterative approach guarantees that your strategies resonate with customer expectations and decision-making processes.
Establish feedback loops within the sales team to encourage open communication and provide constructive feedback. Regularly review and act upon feedback to drive continuous improvements.
As mentioned previously, consider customer advisory boards, as well as win-loss analysis, NPS and CSAT surveys. Expand that to include an internal sales advisory board, and a cross-functional group of leaders, all to provide feedback on how to continually improve.
Ensure that customer feedback is disseminated to all relevant groups to safeguard against internal, self-centered perspectives negatively impacting or superseding the customer experience and what buyers and customers deem most crucial. This practice guarantees a holistic understanding within your organization – including internal perspectives but prioritizing the alignment of internal viewpoints with the needs and perceptions of your customers.
Work to Build Long-Term Relationships & Trust (AIR)
Unless you sell one product and move on (very uncommon in most sub-verticals within distribution), transition your focus from one-time transactions to the cultivation of long-term relationships. Implement post-sale engagement strategies to stay connected with customers and solidify their trust in your brand. Nurture relationships to continuously grow Awareness, Interest and Relationship (AIR).
Embrace Omnichannel Engagement
Recognize that customers engage through various channels. Ensure a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints, integrating data from different channels to create a unified view of the customer and a well-connected experience. Consider telephone, email, chat, SMS (text), social media, virtual meetings/events, in-person meetings/events, and more. And make it easy for customers to do business with you the way they want.
Leverage Technology to Support Workflow
Ensure the seamless integration of your technology stack, supporting both the sales process and methodology effectively. Investigate cutting-edge technologies, including AI-driven sales tools, that align with your chosen sales methodology to elevate decision-making and streamline efficiency. Integrate job aids, worksheets, checklists, pop-up reminders, algorithms and any other tools to embed your established best practices into your workflow, making them an integral part of “the way we do things around here.”
Optimize Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
This includes, of course, optimizing your CRM system for efficiency. Ensure it captures and tracks relevant customer data, and provide comprehensive training to your team to foster adoption and effective utilization. Far too often, CRM is used as a management tool only. Be sure to explain and demonstrate to your sellers how it can support their efforts, too, and make them more effective and efficient.
Promote Data-Driven Decision-Making
Extend your use of data analytics to garner insights into the performance of both the sales process and methodology. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aligned with the goals of both components and employ data-driven strategies for ongoing enhancement. Develop robust reporting mechanisms that assist managers in diagnosing how they can optimally train, coach and develop their teams to achieve higher levels of performance. This data-driven approach ensures a continuous cycle of improvement within your sales organization.
Focus on Ongoing Talent Development
Nurture ongoing talent development by aligning training programs with both the sales process and methodology. Foster a culture of learning and continuous improvement, equipping the sales team with the latest sales techniques and product knowledge. This commitment to ongoing education empowers your sales team to stay at the forefront of industry trends and customer expectations.
Review & Align Compensation and Incentive Programs
Evaluate the effectiveness of your incentive programs to ensure they adequately motivate and reward sales representatives. Consider introducing new incentives or adjusting existing ones based on performance metrics. While incentive programs may not always meet management’s expectations, they undeniably influence the behavior of your sellers. Strive to align incentives with the behaviors that will deliver the desired outcomes, ensuring a more effective and targeted approach.
Foster Sales Team Collaboration
Encourage collaboration among team members. Facilitate the sharing of successful strategies and best practices, utilizing collaborative tools to streamline communication and ensure a cohesive team approach.
Master Pipeline Management & Forecasting
Regularly review and update your sales pipeline, identifying and addressing potential roadblocks. Prioritize high-value leads and opportunities to maximize revenue potential.
Plan for Scalability
Develop strategies that are scalable as your business grows. Consider how your sales processes will adapt to increased demands and plan for expansion by investing in technologies and processes that can scale seamlessly.
The road to a thriving sales force in 2024 requires a meticulous and adaptive strategy. By auditing these comprehensive steps, you’re not just troubleshooting existing challenges; you’re proactively laying the groundwork for sustained success. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, adapt to market nuances, and cultivate a buyer- and customer-centric mindset within your sales force (and company). The results will set you apart from your competition.
Here’s to a year of robust growth and unparalleled success! If you have questions or need support, you know where to find me.
Mike Kunkle is a recognized expert on sales enablement, sales effectiveness, and sales transformation. He’s spent over 29 years helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class enablement strategies and proven-effective sales transformation systems. In doing that, he’s delivered impressive results for both employers and clients. Mike is the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC and works as the Vice President of Sales Effectiveness Services for SPARXiQ, where he designs sales training, delivers workshops, and helps clients improve sales results through a variety of sales effectiveness services. Mike collaborated with Doug Wyatt to develop SPARXiQ’s Modern Sales Foundations™ curriculum and has authored SPARXiQ’s Sales Coaching Excellence™ course, a book on The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, and collaborated with Felix Krueger to develop The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience.