Sales Leadership Strategy & Planning

Leading Sales Teams Through A Recessions

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Leading Sales Teams Through a Recession

Nobody wants to use the “R” word, but whatever you call it, selling is tough right now. I’ve had the good fortune of speaking with dozens of leaders and managers about what they’re doing right now with their teams to protect their bases and keep building pipeline in case a recession does officially happen.

READ: Top Pipeline-Building and Recession Selling Tips

Here’s an idea I love that I hope you will steal when leading sales teams through a recession: 

Turn down lead qualification criteria immediately. 

As deals slow down, you’ll need more in the funnel to close the gap. If you’re using a standard BANT or MEDICC qualification criteria, work with the team to decide what is worth taking anyway. If your sales team isn’t busy creating proposals and demonstrating your solution, the simple answer is to get more leads. They could literally be sitting in the “reject” pile of your BDR/SDR or marketing team right now!

What should you accept? I’d start with budget. 

Many buyers aren’t spending as freely right now, so if your lead qualification criteria require a ready budget, you’re rejecting most buyers. 

I get it, you need leads ready and able to buy to close more deals, but if they’re not as available right now, are you willing to build future pipeline for when times change? 

Can you and your team work harder to convince buyers you’re worth assigning a budget? 

READ: Changing Sales Incentives During A Recession

Along these same lines, are you willing to build future pipeline for opportunities with longer timelines? 

If we’ve moved on the B (budget) and T (timeline), what about Authority and Need? Truth is, now more than ever you need to show this is something prospects need over want. So check the value props being touted by your lead generation team. Can you switch something that feels like a “nice to have” to something that seems more like a “Can’t live without it, especially in today’s economy?”

For example, I sell training. People often come to us because they’re growing (nope, many in RIF mode now). Others find us because they know they need better onboarding and upskilling to attract and retain talent (nice to have, less important if not hiring). 

READ: Why You Need Special Recession Payment Terms

How about this one?

During today’s economic times, the sellers are separated from the order takers. You can’t afford NOT to make sure your team have the very sharpest skills to close more deals. Protect your revenue by teaching your team how to push deals through when there’s economic uncertainty. (BTW, click here to email us and learn more about our training! 😉)

Finally, let’s talk about Authority or Champion. I think you’ve got to have it. Every deal in tough economies will be approved by your economic decision maker (e.g. CFO), and nothing is getting there without a champion explaining the urgent need for it right now.

Boom! BANT just became NC (Need and Champion).

Next step: go sit with the teams to help draft the right questions and gates for this. Just because you know what a good “need” looks like, doesn’t mean the person training your BDR team or writing the marketing copy can translate what you’re looking for into criteria and sales questions/marketing form fills.

Good luck out there!

READ: 5 Tips for Reps to Keep Selling During a Recession

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sales team development plan

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How to Create A Sales Team Development Plan and Budget

Professional development opportunities are a major factor in the decision to change jobs. That’s according to numerous research papers, including our recent Sales Team Retention survey. So if you want to improve employee satisfaction and stave off attrition, then a sales team development plan must be a top priority. 

By giving your reps a roadmap to build their skills and advance their careers, you give them a compelling reason to stay in your organization. Read on for actionable tips to build the perfect development plan for your sales team. 

Why is sales team development critical?

Sales team development is more important than ever. Ambition found that 98% of sales reps would stay with a company forever if they were given ongoing development opportunities. 

What’s more, companies that invest in sales team development put themselves at a significant competitive advantage by retaining talent. Losing a salesperson costs an average of $115,000. 

Your sales team is only as good as the people on that team. By investing in their development, both as individuals and as a group, you can improve their ability to meet quotas and move the needle. 

How to build a sales team development plan

Sales development doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a lot of intentional strategy and effort and requires a commitment of resources from the organization. 

As such, it’s important to have a clear plan to get you from Point A to Point B. A cohesive development plan includes role definitions, resources, expectations, and timelines. Here are some steps you can take to develop your own. 

1. Establish a sales development budget

On average, 1–3% of the total annual budget should be earmarked for development. Small to medium businesses are spending more than $77,000 annually on outsourced sales training and development. Large companies spend more than five times as much. 

If you under or over-spend on sales development, that will create bigger problems down the road. Over-spending without generating results will cause you to lose buy-in among executive stakeholders. Under-spending is unlikely to generate positive results. 

By understanding your needs, you can set a realistic budget that suits your goals and needs and, more importantly, moves the needle in the right direction. 

Download our Sales Training Budget Guide to help you determine how much to budget for development.

2. Reallocate unused resources

There’s no point in spending money on tools and resources that no one uses. A great way to invest in development without increasing costs is to look for resources that you aren’t using. Rather than waste those dollars, use them to grow and improve your team. 

3. Identify high-impact opportunities 

Most companies have limited budgets. This is especially true in today’s economic climate. 

The key to an effective sales team development plan is knowing where to spend the most time and money. After all, you want your limited resources to go where they’ll have the greatest impact. 

This is where having high-quality managers makes all the difference. When you support your managers and empower them to make decisions around resource allocation, they can effectively support your sales reps at every stage of onboarding and production. 

Effective managers understand the best delivery methods for training and development. Live in-person and virtual training sessions are both great options for team training. For companies that are local, live training sessions are refreshing in today’s remote-heavy work environment. Getting reps face-to-face for in-person training is worth the cost of the return. For remote companies or spread-out teams, virtual sessions are a great alternative to in-person meetings. For best results avoid pre-recorded training videos. When participants are able to meet in person or join a live virtual session, they feel more engaged and collaborative, which promotes learning. 

4. Prioritize your tools and tech stack

Not all tools and technologies are created equal. For example, many sales teams have a digital resource library—a big expense content bank that no one uses. It’s important, then, to look at your current resources and decide which are actually empowering your team to do their jobs better.

Instead of thinking of technologies by their product class (e.g. “asset management platform”) think of them based on the problems they solve for your organization (e.g. storehouse of information to educate our reps). 

When you break out the mold, you may find other more creative solutions to the problem (e.g. interactive, live training sessions vs. pre-recorded talking-head videos). 

5. Make use of free resources

While it’s important to invest resources in sales development, there’s a wide range of free courses, webinars, and training available online. In an interactive group setting, these resources can be a valuable tool—and they don’t require additional buy-in from budget holders!

However, it’s not enough to simply throw these free resources at a rep without any context or structure. Prepare discussion questions and exercises to test skills during webinars and presentations. 

When reps take part in live discussions and practice the skills they’re learning, they’re more likely to retain and apply them when they hit the floor. 

6. Think outside the classroom 

Training and lecturing are two different things. Lecturing is telling someone how to do something, while training is actually showing them. 

Take new hires out of the classroom so they can see skills being put to use in real-life scenarios and how to put them into action themselves. 

7. Focus on moving the needle

Hiring and training salespeople is an investment. To get the best return on that investment, you can’t treat it as a one-and-done. Skill retention requires applied learning and repetition. 

Don’t waste your investment by neglecting follow-up sessions, coaching, and feedback. Good coaching builds on the skills learned in training and helps reps understand where they are and where they need to be. 

8. Leverage gamification

Gamifying information is an easy way to improve retention and increase problem-solving. New hires who are challenged to solve problems and demonstrate skills outside of the pressure of the sales floor feel safer trying new things. Contests, competitions, and similar tactics help reps use skills in dynamic ways.

Who needs a sales development plan?

You may be wondering: do you even need a sales development plan?

The answer is YES if you want to:

  • Meet quota consistently
  • Retain your team over the long haul
  • Improve morale 
  • Grow and scale your business

Regardless of size, every sales department needs certain skills and information to be successful. A comprehensive sales development plan lays the foundation for your team to build and adopt these skills. 

Reach out to learn more about our customizable virtual sales training programs and get the best out of people. 

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maximize sales training investment

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5 Tips to Maximize Your Sales Training Investment

After you’ve hired a sales training vendor, there are a series of questions you need to answer in order to ensure you’re getting the most out of your sales training investment, like:

  • How do I maximize sales training ROI?
  • How do I measure training success?
  • How do I get results FAST?

Having been both the vendor and the buyer in this equation, I definitely have some insight to share. I’ve made mistakes as the Training Director hiring a sales/sales leadership training vendor, and I’ve had clients do some really smart (and less than smart) things. 

Although I could write about this topic forever, I’ve narrowed it down to my top 5 tips to maximize your sales training investment.

1. Customize the Customization. Then customize that. Twenty years ago, I paid a vendor $15,000 extra to customize the training for my company. I spent countless hours sending them examples, marketing data, and websites. I forwarded redacted emails and unpublished case studies. I just KNEW they would get the “real feel” for how special our snowflake was. The result?

The vendor added one half-page sheet to the back of the workbook with two custom role plays. TWO! The pages weren’t even numbered with the rest of the workbook. Total afterthought! Literally, nothing else was custom.

Ready for the vendor flipside? Six years ago we up-leveled all our workbooks for Factor 8. This meant I couldn’t build custom workbooks from scratch anymore for clients (the downside of totally custom is a less professional look – even a few errors). Now each of our course workbooks of about 10 pages has around 15 sections in bold red font that our Advisors tailor prior to delivery. It might be the customer’s language, an industry example, a customer voice example, specific sales objections, etc. During the live interactions, our coaches play their sales calls, coach actual delivery, and will give custom samples/scripts of every skill. That’s customization!

Tip: Get an actual list of what is tailored to your organization, its format, and when/how it is delivered. 

2. Require Manager Involvement. Note: I didn’t say attendance. You need attendance AND involvement! Back when I was delivering training in an enablement organization, we were afraid to invite all the sales managers to our training. They were so busy and important (and let’s be honest, a little rude). As I gained more confidence, I would meet with them 1:1 after the training with tips on what we trained and what to look for. As I got busier, I would schedule a 15-minute meeting so I could do this all at once. When I was put in charge, I required them to come AND met with them for 30 minutes afterward.

Guess what? They still couldn’t coach the skills. Sure, they attended the training, but they didn’t participate. They didn’t come and play to win as if they, too, would be graded on their adaption of the skills. They half-listened, did some email, smiled and nodded, and stole the stage as often as possible to give sage advice.

Vendor Flipside: At Factor 8, we meet with managers before the training, require attendance at the training, train the managers on how to coach the skills after the training, give managers 3+ tools to make it easy to support and coach the training, then do a follow-up meeting with the managers on how skills went, AND certify the managers to certify the reps on the skills. It may seem like overkill, but trust me, it works.

Your ROI will be cut in half if your managers aren’t underlying the importance of using the new skills and coaching their execution. Go overboard making sure they are trained, incentivized, and supported by your vendor to do this! 

3. Measure Your Heart Out! If you aren’t crystal clear on the results, KPIs, and metrics that should be impacted by the training, then you’re not ready to outsource sales training. (Really, a vendor just said that!) In fact, ask the vendor what numbers they expect to move with this engagement (and don’t hire them if they don’t know!) At some point, you’ll have to show your sales training ROI, so define during the interview stage what success looks like and then go get a 3-6 month baseline on these metrics. As a training manager, I was nervous early in my career to do this. It only took one sales leader saying, “You are not solely responsible for the 35% uptick in XYZ…!” for me to start backing down and measuring success anecdotally or with smile sheets. As I grew in my career, all I did was add two words: “contribute to.” If we measure pre and post, we can all SHARE the credit! 

Vendor Flipside: I love a case study. Number one reason I don’t have one on every client? They don’t provide us with their reporting. The leader pulls the trigger on the contract and then sales managers or the enablement team are left to execute and the ask never bubbles to the top. In fact, I’d love to take contracts based on the up-side (we get paid when you improve) and have offered it many times in the past, but the baseline metrics and results weren’t available from the client.

4. Get Leadership Involved (more than they are). How do I know they aren’t very involved? I’ve had about 3 clients out of 300 who were. As a training leader, I had about none. Why is this critical? Because your attendees determine how important the training is based on what the leader says, does, and spends money on. Even if you have to write the script for the VP to kick off the meeting and send over the questions they need to ask in their 1:1 meeting afterward, take the time and do it. Otherwise, you may be the flavor of the month. 

Vendor Flipside: They’re my favorite three clients ever. And when they ask for anything extra, they get it. I’ve helped them get jobs 10 years later, spoken free at their conferences, and featured them on our blogs. When a leader lends their time, voice, and stature to training, it will literally change the organization’s culture. Help convince them they’ll get more ROI by being involved. Make it easier on them with cheat sheets and reminders. These clients get double their money’s worth.

5. Focus on Long Term. Ever met with an internal client who wants you to train 5 things in 20 minutes? Me too. Try every single sales leader ever. Here’s why: Most people don’t know the difference between telling and training. That’s why their people don’t change their behavior after being told. Folks, if you want people to change what they’re doing, the training will take 5x longer than you want it to AND the support “tail” for the training will be months, maybe even years. Don’t make training an event – studies show they’ll remember about 30% of what is taught. The best leaders get this fact:

Training isn’t something you did, it’s something you do.

Vendor Flipside: Events are fun. They’re low risk and high reward. We often would have better selling days during training than normal days (live calling during training). Lots of energy, buzz, and results. But if that’s all your vendor is doing, reconsider. What about keeping skills alive? Pulling the buzz forward? Seeing skills move from the classroom to the sales floor? 15 years ago we offered a 1-day post-training follow-up. Then 90 days virtual. Now we do one-year contracts. It’s the right thing to do and the right way to do it. Doesn’t fit the SKO? Hire a speaker instead.

If you’re evaluating sales training, we’re here to help. Fill out the form or email info@factor8.com and let us know how we can help.

Want more information on how to maximize your sales training investment?

Contact us today to request information on our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).


2020-The-Decade-Of-Sales

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Welcome to The Decade of Sales

Welcome friends to a new decade! One we so humbly term, The Decade of Sales

Funny that this calendar turn has happened a bit under the radar. I mean, remember the turn from 1999 to 2000 and the point where we all realized that it was actually no big deal? Living near the west coast made it even funnier for me. I mean why would my world explode when clearly the east coast and central time zones survived just fine.

And although no one is labeling this new decade as one to fear or really any big deal, I think that it is. In fact, if you’re a sales leader this is an even bigger deal than Y2K. Why? Because this is OUR decade.

A quick review of the last decade.

In the past ten years, most of the major advancements we’ve seen in sales have come from our customers, from marketing, and from technology. Think about it:

The customer journey. We’ve heard this ad-nauseum by now but it was big and it was real. Customers don’t need salespeople for the first 70+ percent of their buying journey. It’s made our inbound calls more critical and put more pressure on our sales reps and our product demos.

Mar-com. Marketing tooled up you guys. If we agree that the last decade’s biggest shift was with our customers, I think our marketing departments took fast action and finished the decade neck and neck with the customer. They found ways to measure and track our customer’s journey well before they touched our sales departments.

Tools & Tech. Holy cow ya’ll. The average rep now has between seven and eight tools at their fingertips. When we started the decade a CRM and maybe a dialer were the only real requirements, and now we have the cadence tools, the conversation intelligence tools, the data tools, the website or customer scoring and nurturing tools from marketing, dashboard add-ons and gamification as nearly standard. Doubtful this was big? Consider the terms “Tech Stack” and “Sales Enablement” weren’t even terms in 2009.

The outcome? Sales leadership, marketing leadership, and our customers expect more from our sales departments. Now ask yourself this important question:

How has your rep and manager development grown to accommodate this in the past 10 years?

If we’ve been tracking, I would expect to see:

  1. Onboarding training programs lengthening
  2. Tools training improving
  3. Customer, business, and industry acumen skills standard in all onboarding
  4. Sales skills training becoming regular line item vs. one-off events
  5. Structured annual Manager development 
  6. Better customer experience in demos
  7. Higher show rates for scheduled secondary meetings/demos
  8. A better customer rating of sales

The first time I presented the statistic on what percent of customers trust salespeople was somewhere in mid 2018. Since then, I’ve redone my slides about three times as the statistic has dropped to an embarrassing three percent.

Take heart, we’re still 1.5 points above politicians, but be clear we’re at the bottom folks. Customers don’t see us as trusted advisors. We’ve lost important ground here.

And while we’ve been in this invisible battle against progress, our hiring pools have shrunk and our roles have specialized. Ten years ago we had reps. Some teams had hunters and farmers. Now we have a complex system of BDR/SDR’s handing off to AE’s who move the account to Account Managers or Customer Success (don’t even get me started on how SaaS and VC have changed our game!). Pile this specialization on the heap of “We expect more from our sales teams” while leaders like you are doing so with less and less experienced reps.

Ten years ago, the average lifespan of an inside sales rep was above two years. The latest statistic from The Bridge Group shows us at about 1.5 years today. Unemployment is at an all-time low and we’re in a war for talent with higher attrition rates.

Sadly, this means we have less time to cram more skills into a less-experienced and soon to leave new hire. This tells me why as an industry we’ve added a lot of sales process and a lot of sales scripts to the mix. Yes, the more we can standardize, the less we have to teach. Brilliant!

Until our teams talk to our customers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our customer experience and trust is plummeting alongside our rep tenure. People don’t like the over-processed and over-scripted sales experience. Not customers. Not reps.

What will the next decade look like?

So now that I’ve painted such a gloomy picture, what do we do about it? I humbly propose that we look at the next ten years as our opportunity. Hell, not just our opportunity, but our time. Our chance. Our TURN. Our decade. The decade we take BACK the sales process and the customer experience and the rep experience and teach us all to love sales again.

How? By turning to the last frontier we have as sales leaders. The human frontier. 

I’ve heard this called re-humanizing sales from my friends at BombBomb and I love it. My friends at Ambition talk about it as the heart (think of the CRM as the brain, the cadence tool as the muscle, and the rep engagement tools as the heart).

If we approach this decade as one where we work with our people – our front line brand new hire BDR all the way to our senior leadership team on their development and engagement, customer engagement will follow. 

I call for fewer scripts and more sales training!

I call for more certification programs and career paths to keep reps onboard longer!

I call for more customer-focused messaging and QA forms!

I call for custom and shorter demos!

I call for more rep coaching sessions and manager/rep engagement!

We’ll know we are on the right track when we see our teams start to reduce turnover. When we have a consistent annual budget line-item for development. When we partner more closely with our training and enablement departments. When we teach skills before adding tools. When we convert more inbound leads, have longer BDR calls and higher demo show rates, when our trust percentage climbs back into the double digits, and finally, when we hear more new hires talk about their decision to get into sales on purpose. 

Sales is the best damn profession out there.

How many times have you talked about sales careers with someone who started their story with, “Well, I really wound up in sales on accident…”? I’d say upward of 80%. Leaders, that’s not OK. We have one of the most rewarding, flexible and highest-paid professions out there. I want my kids to seek out a sales degree and get excited about their futures in sales! I want that for every new hire each of us make this year, and next, and the next.

We have a big hill to climb. And it’s our job to lead from the front. Get loud. Get proud. (Yeah, it’s sounding a bit like coming out of the closet here, but isn’t that really what we’re doing!?) Let’s shout about our profession from the rooftops and encourage our comrades to do the same. Our future selves will thank us for the help we’re lending toward improved recruiting and attrition. Let’s draw more people to sales and keep them longer by making it the best damn profession out there. 

Check it out everyone, the mantra for the decade:

 “I’M IN SALES!”

I invite all of my fellow sales professionals to join this movement. It’s our time now.

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mgmt_strategy

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Expert Advice for Annual Sales Management Strategy Planning

I had the great pleasure of appearing with an all-star cast of Inside Sales experts giving advice to Inside Sales leaders for 2018 sales management strategy planning.  Check out the video hosted by Ambition and featuring Jared Houghton, Trish Bertuzzi, Steve Richard, and myself.  Tips to find:

  1. Account Based Revenue / Marketing Strategies
  2. Cohesive People Strategies
  3. Interviewing / Hiring Tips
  4. Onboarding and Ramp Reduction Tips
  5. Everybody Doesn’t Get a Trophy
  6. Developing Managers
  7. Leaders as Sellers Too!
  8. And more!

Check it out here and share with a friend.

Also: 8 Signs That Your Rep Onboarding Program Is Broken

Highlights: 10 Key Takeaways from Our Experts

1. Start With Where: What Channels Should Drive Revenue?

2. War For Talent: Recognize the Need for New Hire Training.

3. Stop Selling Pens: Make Candidates Reach a Gatekeeper.

4. Use Call Recordings: Let New Hires Hear Voice of the Customer.

5. Network Hiring: Use LinkedIn Connections As Candidate References.

6. Selling is Driving: You Don’t Learn By Riding Shotgun.

7. Be Human: Personalize Your Communication.

8. Measuring Reps: Focus on Activity::Outcome Ratio.

9. Create Snipers: Balance Research and Calls.

10. Focus Coaching: Prioritize B-Players + New Hires.

 

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Building Your Sales Management Strategy

For many years in corporate America I felt a little bit in the dark. As a Sales Leader of about $30M, I had a number to hit but I didn’t have a great resource for new ideas on how to hit it. As a Training Leader with a team of 20 I had a vision for building a department and offering new services, but so often I wondered if I was doing it the hard way. Were my goals realistic? Were we best in class?

When we get entrenched in our teams, our goals, our fires and our corporate dramas (c’mon, we all know they’re there!) we aren’t always able to get “outside of it” all and develop strategy.

As I build my own business today (10 people and $2M revenue) I find myself in the same seat. I’m so head’s down that it’s hard to think “up” and “out” and I often wonder if I’m on the right track. Oh, and I forget to make time for that track of strategy and planning – sound familiar?

As a consultant for the past ten years, something I consistently hear from clients is the value they get from an outsider perspective. We don’t know the “way it’s always been done” at their company and we slay elephants in rooms and sacred cows in departments like there’s a shortage of meat at the local grocery store. What they appreciate even more is hearing stories of how multiple other companies are doing things. With one resource they can ask a question and hear real-life stories about new trends people are trying, mistakes most people make, what works and what doesn’t.

I’d KILL for that right now as an entrepreneur.

Here’s the good news. On December 13th, as a sales leader there is a HUGE opportunity to do this with not just one consultant but four.

And not just any consultants, but leaders in the inside sales industry that have been around the BLOCK! Steve Richard with ExecVision has run sales teams AND implemented sales training and enablement tools at hundreds of companies! Trish Bertuzzi from The Bridge Group literally wrote the book on sales development and has a deep client base she’s been helping for over 20 years. Jared Houghton and Ambition have built one of the coolest new tools I’ve seen on the market and he regularly rolls up his sleeves with sales teams to build process, set goals, and drive results. I round out number four and I bring ten years of client insights benchmarking inside sales best practices and listening to thousands of sales calls every year when implementing hands-on rep and manager training.

THIS is a killer opportunity to gain insight! And it’s not a pitchy BS webinar, it’s a town hall. Submit a question and get four (hell, at least three and a half) of the top minds in sales answering for you. The webinar is happening on December 13th at 11:00 am ET. Here’s where to register.

These are three of my favorite people in the industry. Don’t miss this session!

Sign up here (and yes, you’ll get the replay so even if you don’t get your questions answered, you can see if other have the same ones and learn from them – and feel better about having that question in the first place, right?)