Empower your procurement team with sales performance management for Procurement

How to create outlook signature

good afternoon everyone my name is Tom De Santis and I'm very appreciative that your carving time out of a busy day to join us here today because I imagine a lot of you are focusing on things that we're talking about here today which is how do we make wise investments to get better productivity out of our sales teams we heard a lot about that this morning and I got to be honest with you when I speak with sales leaders and sales enablement executives around the world a common theme tends to emerge which is just put simply we're not getting what we expected a lot of these of these investments we could be talking about developing and rolling out a new process or methodology and your CRM system new skills that we're training our sales forces on and the results aren't are not just matching are not matching our expectations or if they are they might be isolated right we're not seeing across our sales organization now at the same time as we talk with our clients about this and companies out there what we also here is that their sales management team isn't helping them to achieve their goals it's not because they're not talented people they are it's it's not because they're not working hard enough because let me tell you if they definitely are but it's rather because they're not able to focus on the right things the things that can help us to actually execute our strategy well what if I told you that the key to unlocking all the investments that we're making in our salespeople in our sales force and truly creating a sales first organization was by simplifying your sales manager's job making it easier for them to execute the strategy that you're looking them to execute and by the end of my presentation you'll not only understand how specifically you can simplify your sales managers jobs but also share with you an example from one of our clients that you can take back into your organization after this presentations that sound good all right awesome great that's all I got so just a couple of housekeeping things number one is um I definitely hope to have time for questions at the end and I'll and I'll try my hardest to be able to make that happen I know we're starting a little bit late so let me just say this we were supposed to end at 3:15 I will commit myself to ending no later than 325 and that will leave you a good half hour in between this session the next section does that does that sound fair okay great thanks just want to get that up front all right well let's start our story here off with a with a pretty innovative sales leader someone that I hold in I regard and he was interested like we all are and getting better productivity from his Salesforce and he did some fairly innovative things in order to do that so if you can see her at this list I'm not going to read them all to you but you know he assigned territories he trained up his salespeople he created an incentive structure and then finally he ran sales contests now if you take the long title of my slide here you might be asking yourself well Tom you know what's so innovative about this right and actually you'd be right asking yourself that question because in fact the Sales Leader who developed these tools was someone who actually lived well he lived over a hundred years ago this is John Henry Patterson a brilliant business person among his most notable achievements is that he was the founder and owner of National Cash Register which is now called NCR and at the time these were fairly progressive practices that boost productivity but now of course they're just common sense to all of us right either running a sales organization or working in sales ops and sales enablement but do me a favor take it take a look at this list and what has changed in the last hundred years not much right I mean you might say well hold on Town CRM and new technologies and sure I'll definitely grant that for you but as you look across this list we are relying upon the same tools that we have traditionally relied upon for the last hundred years to drive productivity out of our sales force so just despite all of his brilliance and all of his forethought should we be asking ourselves a different question here did John Henry Patterson actually forget anything and in order to answer that question we have to take a look at what's actually happening within our sales organization because the theme that I hear very consistently as I talk with sales leaders and sales ops and sales enablement the theme that I keep hearing is changed right and it's a big part of the event here at the Salvos summit we all know the change is happening and it's happening quite rapidly isn't it in sales a matter of fact you can well make the argument that no other function has had as much change in the last 10 years as had sales it's it's been just an extraordinary ride now why is that happened well the place the start of course is with our customers we all know that customers have completely changed the way that they're buying from us especially in the b2b space and so what we do is we do a tremendous amount of research to try and figure out how our customers are buying to us so we can get and stay head of our competitors to make sure that we're maintaining and growing our business with our accounts now once we have that level of understanding what's our next step the next step is our salespeople right so if we know how we want our customers to buy from us the next step then is to invest in our salespeople to sell in that new and different way so we spend a lot of time and energy and certainly amount of a tremendous amount of financial resources to get this right we train them we create tools for them new methodologies and so on and if we're really on our game we embed all this into our CRM system so that it's as easy to use as possible on the front line and yet still despite all of this focus all this attention all this time I still hear that frustration that despite all of this investment were not seeing the results that we had anticipated or in the worst case we're not seeing any change at all in fact you heard a little bit of this and Marx talked very early on today 80% of sales training knowledge lost within 30 days and that's just that's just really painful to hear since it's bad for us and bad for our salespeople now why is this happening well remember the question that I asked on my previous slide as we have marched down this path to change the way that our salespeople are selling and we forgot something or in our case have we forgot someone and I would say the answer that question is absolutely yes the group of people that we've forgotten about is our frontline sales managers now you might think wait a second Tom we've invested in our sales managers we've reaped them training for our sales managers but think about this was it training for your sales managers to be better managers or was it to help you to get your managers to reinforce the things that you want your salespeople to be doing most of the management level training that we tend to see out there falls into a category that we tend to call rep Plus right so we developed a new sales methodology we roll it out and we keep our managers for an extra half day so they know how to coach that methodology or we roll out a new CRM system when we keep our managers for an extra day so they know how to navigate and get to the right data point but this doesn't actually help the manager to be a better manager and so if you look across the screen from right to left you see a tremendous amount of change happening with our customers we're expecting a tremendous amount of change with our salespeople but over on the left what exactly are we expecting of our sales managers and how has that expectation changed today from what we've asked them to do for the past 10 or 20 years and then here's the critical question it's so much of change that so much change is happening on the front line are our managers helping to drive the change that we're looking to see happen with our salespeople now to bring us to life we've actually filmed a meeting between a salesperson and a sales manager at one of our clients to actually kind of bring to life what we see happening here so let's take a look at that it lasts about a minute and then we'll discuss it hi Jane I ran some sales reports this morning that I'd like to discuss with you it looks like you made a lot of sales calls last week suspiciously it was the exact number you are required to make yes I spent Friday afternoon making up pretense sales calls to put into CRM so those numbers would look good awesome however it looks like your sales pipeline is too small and you're going to miss your revenue target for the quarter I really need you to make your quota this should be kind of honest Bob but if I knew what I needed to do to make my quota I would already be doing it rather than just telling me to make my quota perhaps you could coach me so I become a better salesperson I'd love to coach you Jane but I'm Way too busy tracking your sales calls and telling you to make your quota so please make more sales calls grow your pipeline and above all make your quota okay awesome thanks Jane so my I won't ask for a show of hands but it sounds like some people here are familiar with that to have a conversation with the sales manager but all kidding aside for a moment think about this question how many conversations like that happened in your sales organization this month or perhaps a trickier question what if Jane was one of your high performing salespeople how long do you think that she'd last in your company before leaving perhaps to a competitor because that's the problem that's really in view for us here today we're expecting a lot of change with our salespeople we're investing quite a bit in our salespeople to facilitate that change and yet the people who are the most powerful driver of that change we're leaving behind so why is this happening why do we see sales managers reverting to this type of behavior focus on your quota gene hit your quota Jane well when we looked at it it really came down to two things the first is that frankly we just haven't changed our expectation of our sales managers right so sales management has traditionally been all about outcomes because back in the day when we're just selling products you made your quota by doing as many sales calls as possible right and as long as it as many sales calls I hit my number and managers are out there flogging their salespeople to go out there and make sales calls of course we all know that those days are far gone and so at the bottom of the page what we have to do is we get our hat we have to get our managers focused on something else right but we really haven't thought this through off the video clip that I just showed you wouldn't have resonated so well with this group and we're going to dive very deeply here on exactly what we need to get our sales managers focused on but before I do this is the first reason why we see sales managers struggling with this change let's talk about the second big reason why we see sales managers struggling with this change and the reason is is that the sales management job is just an incredibly hectic job so for anyone who has either been a sales manager in their life or perhaps if stole a sales manager today you know exactly what I'm talking about here today sales management sales managers are probably the most time oppressed individual in any sales organization and if you think about their day to day job it's not hard to understand why in fact sales managers face three common pressures every single day they spend on the job the first is as well they face pressure from us right well we're constantly asking sales managers for reports and forecasts and analysis I mean as some companies that we talk to the amount of time that managers take on reporting and analytics is just downright scary I honestly don't know how they do their jobs but that's not all they're not only posted facing pressure from us they're facing pressure from their teams as well sales reps are constantly asking for their managers time right I got a big meeting boss come along with me or here's what the polls on these your help with boss or even in some cases you know helping me with an internal issue that I feel I don't have the power to handle by myself so we see managers getting dragged down into a lot of activities by their salespeople but then there's a third pressure as well that we don't often talk about those are some managers themselves is pressure from within well they're sometimes our own worst enemies here right especially if we've promoted our sales managers who are better salespeople they kind of feel this need to do the salespersons jobs for them particularly at the sales call is involved they kind of just fall into this classic management trap of doing their reps jobs for them so suffice to say just to sum up this page here sales managers operate in an incredibly hectic environment now at this point in the story it would be very easy for us to blame our sales managers I mean isn't this what we hired them to do to figure that all out well I don't think that's entirely fair because if you think about what I've talked about for the last few slides sales is train changing tremendously we haven't been very clear with our managers about what we expect of them beyond hitting quota and they're barely able to keep their heads above water and so instead what I think we need to do is us here in this room leaders in our sales organization sales ops and sales enablement we have to ask ourselves this question what do we need to be doing here what do we need to be doing to support and enable our sales managers to be more productive in this more complex environment and if I had to sum up my whole presentation in fact what we strive to do here advantage point with our clients I had to sum it all up with one word it would be to simplify and I just I just love this quote this is a tribute to Leonardo da Vinci here because it perfectly captures the challenge that each of us here in this room face when we run or support a beauty be sales organization because all too often when it comes to improvement trying to get more productivity from our sales team what we try to do is do what what's the knee-jerk reaction more stuff right so another tool another screen whatever instead what I would suggest especially for our sales managers is to simplify their jobs not add but take away from your managers all of the distractions that are getting in their way from focusing truly on the things that matter the most in driving productivity in their teams well how do we do that what's the way to unlock this before I show you that I will share that with you let me just give you a quick overview on who we are here advantage point in case you haven't heard of us before vantage point is the leading training development firm focused on sales management and we base all of our work on a tremendous amount of research you can actually see an example of our research here on the right-hand portion of the screen cracking the sales management code which is our book if you're interested in it stop by our booth we're holding a raffle drop your business card in a bowl and will raffle that off at the end third the bullet point the third bullet point think this is important to mention as well where sales methodology neutral our rolodex of clients really bears this out our clients use every imaginable type of sales methodology out there some don't even have assessment sales methodology but our approach works on top of anything that you're working with within your own organization and then finally the fourth bullet there if repetitively our goal our aim is to simplify sales manager's job for greater impact make it harder for your managers to manage to make it easier so they can truly have that impact that we're looking for and just to summarize the type of feedback that we do receive when we do work with our clients oftentimes we're training their sales managers and this piece of feedback is actually fairly typical from what we hear from sales managers that go through our training this person said look it's not like I have less to do but now I have time to do it why because we've removed everything else that doesn't matter and got that person focused on the things that do so we're not making your manager's job any less busy we're just getting them more impact by focusing on the right things so how do we do this how do we simplify our sales manager's job make it easier for them to execute and get the impact that we're looking for them to drive well we're going to share with you how to do this we have to go back to our research so when we started out if our goal is to simple fire sales manager's job we had to start with one question and that question was well what do companies ask their sales managers to do in the first place so we asked that question of a very broad range of companies and through a research what we found is that there were over 300 different things that you can ask your sales managers to focus on this is just this is just a summary of the areas that we thought were that we found I gotta be honest with you this was a perfect daunting list when we got this back right and we're a little bit a little bit afraid because we didn't want to go to our clients and say okay here's 300 things you can get your managers to do you pick yeah I don't think that would work at all and we would have gotten off the ground for sure so what we had to do is we had to try to figure out how we could filter this down there's something that's usable and valuable for a frontline sales manager operating in a very time oppressed environment so how do we do that well we took a look at each of these 300 things and we asked ourselves one simple question and this is absolutely critical if you remember nothing else from my presentation remember this question tweet this out if you're on Twitter can your sales managers manage this it's a simple question but it's incredibly powerful so we asked ourselves for each of these 300 different things that we saw we could possibly give to a sales manager to manage can they actually manage it and in some cases the answer was absolutely so things like call volume and a cow plan creation that a number of these are things that are directly in control of a sales manager these are the things that a manager can manage but instantly enough the opposite was also true there are some things that a manager actually could not manage things like revenue and quota attainment now think about it can a manager actually manage revenue no right I imagine I'm a salesperson my manager comes in my office system says all right Tom you know what I need from you next week I need more revenue sure thing boss I wish it were that easy right we'd all hit our goals these types of things happen only after series of many many many many many other things happen right so despite our focus on an attention on these areas these things are actually completely outside of the ability for Sales Manager to manage so some were yes some were no and then some were well maybe so things like customer retention can a manager control customer retention I mean may I mean if customer retention is important to me maybe I tell my salespeople to go out there and visit customers more frequently but I can throw the kitchen sink at a client and they can still lead me right so these are things that a manager can influence but still doesn't have direct control over now we saw a pattern begin to emerge and this led to our first aha moment as we're going through this research because what we found is by asking this very simple question can a manager manage this we were able to take these 300 different pieces of data of information and put them into three different categories the first is business results so these are the outcomes that are incredibly important to the business but outside the control of sales management the next are sales objectives these are areas that could be influenced by a sales manager but still directly outside of their control and then the third are sales activities now these are things that are in the direct control of the sales manager and because of that they can be proactively managed by a sales manager so now we knew that we were onto something and we started to get interested because we saw this pattern meeting into the merge but when we saw what happened next we got really excited because not only do we find that these three categories exist we also found that there are linkages across these different categories as well let me show you to what it what I mean so let's start again at the top so remember these are business results these are the outcomes that are critical to the business revenue market share whatever well if you identify a business result that you are interested in achieving the next step is to identify the sales objectives that lead to that business result and once you've done that you can identify the specific activities that link to those objectives and then here's the key get your managers to focus on those activities who are lent lessly and if you look at the title of the slide here when it comes to simplifying your sales manager's job this is step one identify the activities that you need your managers to focus on and get them to focus on them relentlessly and in many cases this is what we help our clients do based upon the business results the business results that they want to achieve what are the activities that we can get managers to focus on that ultimately lead to those results so perhaps do a little bit abstract here let me show you just a couple of examples so let's say you run a sales organization it's the central United States territory that you manage and you caught wind that the competitor is coming in and and making a pretty aggressive push in your market place right so you know that a business result that you want to achieve is to hold revenue study right you don't want any customer defection well what would be a good objective to make sure that we're retaining that revenue well it's probably customer retention right that's going to be a key for us to make sure that we're keeping our revenue study and what are some activities that I can ask my salespeople to invest in order to make sure that we're retaining our customers well I think the cow painting is a good idea right we got to get a little bit more proactive with our counts make sure we know what's going on there who are the right stakeholders and so on and so forth so I'm gonna ask my sales people to create one account plan per month and we'll review them quarterly so that's an example of the linkages that we're seeing here or let's say the opposite is a case let's say that you want to build market share so you have market share as your as your key outcome here well the way to do that is to cross-sell better into your existing accounts and an activity to get your sales people to focus on is make sure they're not calling the account that's already has all of our products that they're calling on accounts that are under penetrated so I'm gonna ask my salespeople to focus on four calls a week and two under penetrated accounts and we'll review those monthly now why does this matter sounds interesting right you see linkages between these three categories but why didn't why am I getting so excited about this why does this actually matter well it matters because if you do this right if you identify the right 1 2 3 activities what have you for your sales managers everything else disappears now think about this environment compared to the environment that we started with managers completely overwhelmed not given much direction and struggling to focus on anything without along let alone the right things and here just working through this and narrowing down of the 300 possible things a Sales Manager can focus on here is the one thing that sales managers need to get right you have not only major managers jobs easier you've empowered them to achieve the results you want them to achieve you not only have major managers jobs easier you have empowered them to achieve the results that you want them to achieve now remember this was just a first step alright identifying the right activities is one thing and it's an incredibly valuable exercise to go through them but if this is the how now we have to fixity this is the what now we have to focus on the how we have to help our managers to execute this back in the field so the next step step number two is to establish a cadence of meetings between manager and salesperson to review progress against each of these activities so should it be once a month should it be twice a month should it be once a week should it be an hour long a half-hour long should have you over the phone to the bee-lieve it doesn't matter come up with a specific cadence of meetings for your managers and salespeople to meet to review progress against these activities and then the final step step three is to formalize that conversation don't ask a manager to figure it out for him or herself create an agenda for that meeting how should a manager and salesperson prepare for that meeting what should the agenda be for that meeting what are the outcomes of that meeting and next steps now you might be thinking to yourself man that is really detailed do I really have to do that for Brighton for my sales managers and the answer is unequivocally yes because for all the reasons that I shared with you is not going to happen by itself and managers find this type of support and help incredibly informative incredibly powerful because they now know how not to be reactive to their teams but to be proactive with their teams focusing on the right thing all right so at this point you might be wondering how this actually works we talked about research let's talk about application how does this actually work in the real world so let me share a story with you with one of our clients here this is a story from a very well-known global fortune 50 company and before we started working with them they were just incredibly frustrated we worked with their sales leadership and sales ops and sales enablement teams and at the point we started working with them they had invested an incredible amount with their frontline sales people trying to get themselves to sell better more productivity out of their sales teams and the reason they were so frustrated is that they invested so much into their salespeople and revenues were still flat as you might imagine that the pressure was on on this team right you know the CFO was definitely interested on getting some return for that investment so we started to work with them and we took them through that model results objectives activities and they very well knew the results that they were looking to achieve right I mean the CEO CEO and the CFO made it very clear to this team that the result that they were looking for was a growth in revenues in their case a 20% growth in revenues but they frankly had no idea how to execute that beyond focusing on that top-line yield I have you hit your quota Jane you know they'd beyond that top line they really knew nothing and so working with them and talking with a handful of their sales managers we quickly found out that the clear subjective to help them to achieve that result was by improving close rates frankly their closure rates were terrible they had huge pipelines a lot of business in the pipeline but not much was making it to the end so you know what's happening in this company right you know revenues are flat the pressures on so what is it what do you managers asked our salespeople to do in that case yeah go out and find more deals stuffed your pipelines the bigger your pipeline the more opportunity to win deals right of course we know that not to be the case never fact the highest performing sales manager in the sales organization and a pipeline knows 25% smaller than his peers so that led us to the understanding that qualification is the activity that we need managers to spend and focus on with salespeople that gave us the power to share a cross their management team the activity that they need to focus on with their sales or their salespeople so that's the activity focus on qualifying opportunities in your reps pipeline so now the next question is well how much time does that take and here's here's the beauty of this it wasn't that much time in fact it was an hour per month so every month a manager spent an hour of time with his salesperson reviewing his pipeline qualifying whether or not those opportunities make sense to pursue or they should bail and now was it so what was the results what does an hour buy them well this is just extraordinary here that this wasn't marginal returns I mean this was a significant return they went from a close rate of 25% which is just appalling especially for this organization with held its held in high regard and they more than doubled that in 18 months that's the power of management focus you might say to yourself that's pretty simple Tom an hour of time qualifying deals pretty simple why weren't they doing it already but that's the whole point their organization was there our sales managers in their organization were completely overwhelmed and something that one sales manager was doing really well yielding the great results just wasn't shared across the broader community and I love this quote this is actually from one of the managers who participated in the training this is the most practical train that he had been through and when we asked him why that was it was because we made his job easier as the result of our training we weren't asking him to do something new something more we were asking to do something new we weren't asking to do something more we were asking him to do with less and focus on the things that truly matter so let's remember where we started here we started with sales managers traditionally being focused on the outcomes right have you hit your quota Jayne and so we need to ask ourselves or what do we need to tell our managers to focus on moving forward if we're expecting change with our salespeople what do we get our managers to focus on moving forward what I would say is the key to getting all this right is to get your managers focused on rep decision making are they focusing on the right activities with the right customers at the right time and are you empowering your managers salespeople so our task here if we're serious about getting the returns and the investments that we're making in our salespeople and we're serious about truly creating a sales first company what I would say is keep doing with your do what you're doing with your frontline salespeople they need to be trained and you need to get the right systems they need to get the right information not disputing any event but make sure that the people that can help you to drive that change in fact the people who are in the best position to drive that change are not left behind and that you're bringing them along for the ride so to summarize my presentation and I'll just pause you see if there's any questions here in this room four key things simplify your sales manager's job don't add takeaway the way to do that of course is to build the right path results objectives and activities focus your managers on those activities relentlessly and then formalize and reinforce a management rhythm before I turn over the podium just one key thing here if you're interested in more information don't feel like you have to write this down in your chair you should have a little takeaway that has this information here they're interested any more information my slides the cartoon if you're interested in that information about some of our upcoming public workshops how to get in contact with us of course we'll be at the booth and my colleagues Denise and Lisa if you just wouldn't mind raising your hand we'll be they answer your questions we're at booth 1 and then also on the other side is just a quick summary of our research as well but on behalf of us all here at vantage point I really appreciate your time and I look forward to hopefully a couple questions