[00:00:00]
Bram Lagrou: How is it that the same sales professional with one sales manager does extremely well and with another completely flops? This is exactly what I've seen happening in some organizations where sales management sometimes helps and supports their people and in other organizations, those people are basically left on their own.
And obviously you can expect that the results are according Welcome back everybody to yet another episode of the Commercial Leader Podcast. my name is Bram Lagrou. Like I said, the problem here is that some organizations and many of them are basically expecting their salespeople to perform well.
While the sales managers just keep looking at the stats but they're not really helping the team perform, and it's [00:01:00] almost strangely enough, like an elite soccer or AFL team. Just imagine that an A FL team would. Go to the finals without any practice, rehearse and drill prior. Let a whole year go by without doing the hard yards. You don't win the finals unless you came prepared and you did the work. You did the hard yards, the practice, rehearse, and drill. And so the challenge is if a sales manager or a sales enablement process isn't in place to do the same for sales professionals, especially in high stakes environments where multiple decision makers are having their influence, where lead times can be quite lengthy and where tendering processes are quite onerous, You gotta put their hard yards in order to bank the dollars and get the outcome. And so today, let's unpack best practices that we see many of the organizations out there [00:02:00] do that are succeeding at the top level and where sadly enough, many organizations still play the random game.
The random game, where they just hope for things to go well, but where they're not really creating success by design. Let's look at how to create success by design so that we are not left to luck.
First things first is the cadence architecture, which is the six building blocks of elite sales teams. What we see, and we have worked with organizations in 25 countries to date. What we see is that weekly, 30 minute team huddles are. Indispensable. They have to be part of it.
Now what do you do in those 30 minutes team huddles? You gather the team, you share what's working. You fine tune the messaging, and you do objection handling in real time. So basically, you're helping the team to [00:03:00] work on the deals that they currently have on their desk, and you help them to work through it, practice, rehearse, and drill.
In other words, you keep the skills sharp and the culture alive between deeper sessions, because ultimately these weekly, 30 minute team huddles for salespeople particularly, are the heartbeat of a high performance sales culture, which is short focused and as, like I said, non-negotiable. The second core thing then is the monthly deep workshop.
Now, typically those monthly workshops will be two to three hour sessions. To develop a specific skill or a theme. It could be, for example, working on better qualifying questions, so that the salespeople discover more information that is important for them to take back for quoting and proposal purposes, and where they are asking prospects questions that nobody else has asked, where they learning more and deeper insights that will help them to [00:04:00] present value in a way that is a no-brainer to the client and prospect.
And so again, these sorts of things, they need more time and they're monthly. And so topics could rotate around discovery questions or proposal delivery, or handling price objections or account growth strategies with existing clients. So all of this is part of monthly deep dive workshops. Now, those workshops, they build capability progressively one theme at a time, month by month.
So basically what you're doing is you're layering. Stacking skills on skills and not just scratching from the surface. You keep going deeper and deeper to build more muscle. Cellular memory is done by just doing it repeatedly all the time. This takes us now to the third one.
This is now a quarterly bootcamp, and that could be everything from a half day to a full day intensive. And the idea is to reset the scoreboard, review data and run live role plays and [00:05:00] drilling. This is also where you would introduce new material and you would treat it like a preseason training in sports.
The team arrives to compete, not just to attend. So it's very practical. There's lots of role playing happening to put the rubber to the road, get people to practice, rehearse, and drill, and fine tune. And get instant feedback in a safe environment. Now, it also prevents skill drift and re-energizes the whole team.
The point of it is any person is only as good as the last thing they learned, and you cannot expect them to learn on their own. So you gotta give them the right environment to perform at the highest levels possible. The next one then is an annual conference and awards night. This is your flagship event.
This is something that you put some money and time and effort into. This is where you celebrate the wins, where you recognize top performers publicly and you set the vision. Now in real estate, for [00:06:00] example, this is done all the time. You go to financial planning environments. they do these things all the time.
Any of the top performing manufacturers that I know, they do these things religiously because it's not just the money that drives high performance as an incentive. It's the recognition that they are being awarded and they have done best from everyone. So these annual conference and awards nights, they create a shared identity and a competitive culture for the team.
The awards night isn't a vanity exercise. It builds culture and it makes people proud to be part of something worth winning. It pushes people's boundaries. And it makes people to compete. It's almost like the internal Olympics. Everybody wants to go for gold. But here's the point. In the absence of such nights, everybody just does the [00:07:00] bare minimum because they're not really being stimulated to reach for the stars.
And so these annual conferences and awards are a crucial aspect of your building blocks. And then the fifth one is the incentive trips, high performance incentives tied to behavior and outcome. So I remember back in the days when I was a sales rep. That we knew exactly what metrics to hit in order to be invited on an all expenses trip paid, and we could bring our partner.
I remember funny story, how when we arrived and checked into the specially designed welcome desk, that not only were we giving a goodie bag and there were some gifts put up on our beds, but we also received an envelope with my name on it. And as I opened up the envelope, there was just a handful of cash ready for us to spend on anything we wanted.
And I tell you, this might look quite superficial, [00:08:00] but it just stuck to my mind because not only did we have a great time, I could have my partner along with me, we bonded and we brought people from say, 70 different countries all together in one place on an all expenses paid exclusive trip. A trip of a lifetime, something that we wouldn't have done on our own.
And I can tell you once you've experienced that one time, you wanted to keep going back for more. You wanted to reach your next targets because you wanted to be part of the next trip and collect the badges year after year for as long as those things took place. So use these incentive trips strategically to push the top tier while inspiring the middle to reach for more. And by the way, if you're, for example, a manufacturer working with dealers or retailers and distributors and the likes, by the way, franchisors equally, for you guys, these incentive trips would not just necessarily be about your own [00:09:00] sales team, it could even be your own customers and give them the opportunity of incentive trips.
Like I said, the organization I used to work for a Fortune 500 manufacturer, they would do this with their own sales teams and their best customers. They would bring 300 people from all around the world together in exclusive exotic resorts. Now, the best programs are visible, they're aspirational, and they're tied to the right metrics, not just revenue.
Now, last but not least, is the one-on-one coaching cycles once again. You cannot just rely on the once every six months performance reviews and the likes. This is ongoing, so you need your regular one-on-one conversations between a manager and a sales rep to review calls, to practice scenarios, work on individual development plans.
And at times also to just invest TLC in the person, because the chances are that if you have great salespeople [00:10:00] is that many of which will be People. That means they want to feel a certain way, they want to be valued, recognized, and special, and listened to, and they might have the ups and downs of life that sometimes influence their performance. So having a sales manager who's also a human-like person dealing with them and lifting their spirits, just sometimes listening to them, sometimes just also having talking, not shop and just personal life. Knowing when to bring it back to the business.
Having that sort of flexibility as a sales enabler is also important, and that's why your one-to-one times are also very important to factor in. The manager can be seen as a head coach, not just a pipeline monitor. This is where individual excellence is built, one conversation at a time. So the idea now is, that success is done by design, not luck.
Elite [00:11:00] organizations, they don't leave sales performance to chance. They build it brick by brick, layer to layer week by week. And the six elements that we just went through were the weekly huddle, which is a non-negotiable. The monthly workshop, which is two to three hours. The quarterly bootcamp, which is half a day to a full day, the annual conference, which would be typically a day to two days, the incentive trips, which could be say four days or so, and then the one-on-one coaching, which is done on a regular basis too.
These are some success metrics that you can check if you already have them installed in your business. If you haven't. Even if you do have them, how can you do 'em better? Because having the building blocks doesn't mean that you have a great building erected with those blocks yet.
So the question is, how can you do things better, smarter, faster, easier, and more seamlessly and effectively?
So far we looked at some of these building blocks. All of us, we've heard of the idea of the "set and forget it". There's been certain ads, certain characters [00:12:00] on television that have used these expressions time and time again. So setting and forgetting, we get it. But here's the challenge with that.
If your organization becomes like a set and forget organization, too often I've seen sales organizations hire great people because they attracted them with a great ad, great promise, great values, company mission, you name it. Maybe also some interesting perks, company car, good bonuses.
Everything looked good initially on paper. And then here's what happened. They've been handed over a laptop, a mobile phone, a fuel card, and after a short introduction about what the company is like, what the systems look like, what CRM to use. Boom, go off and sell our stuff. This is basically the set and forget attitude of some companies out there.
So they basically get dumped into a product or a service. And because they have a track record of [00:13:00] selling, they're now expected to go and perform and left to their own devices. I see that great organizations in contrast do differently. They do the onboarding and they have a structured 90 day plan for the salesperson coming into the organization.
To be set up for success in advance, and so that 90 day would have clear milestones. It will touch on product knowledge, it will touch on messaging, the ideal client profile, the call shadowing also. So basically the manager coming in, and sometimes being on the road with the new person or sitting next to them while they're making the calls.
It could also be a reviewed for solo pitch before they go fully independent. The idea is that step by step the salesperson is groomed into the new organization, the new product, the new service, and the new way of doing things. The next thing then is feedback. [00:14:00] Too often I see that organizations, especially the set and forget ones, go with so far it's all good.
if I don't have any news to share, I'm not gonna say anything. And they wait for the six month mark where obviously the performance review is up for grabs and whether the person will stay or not, and only then they give the personal crucial feedback to perform better in the role or to warn them that they're not doing so well.
my point is always, if you've waited as a sales manager to give valuable feedback for somebody to course correct till the last minute, that probably was not a great idea. So in contrast, the feedback that great sales managers and sales enablers do is one where it's a rolling rhythm.
it's almost like the feedback is done all the time. They don't wait for an official moment. [00:15:00] That needs to be documented for HR for that moment to come. They more proactive and they give the course correction all the time. Because you and I know that analogy of airplane pilots: if they would have to wait until the time when they're supposed to land for the air traffic control center to let 'em know that they're slightly off track they might have ended up in a completely different country. Whilst if they kept course correcting, almost minute after minute, that would make the plane be a lot more targeted and land at the time expected in the place they were supposed to be in.
That's the same with sales teams, great sales enablers they give the course correction all the time. It could be one conversation at a time, one proposal at a time, one pitch at a time. One call at a time doesn't matter. The idea is that the sales manager builds capability in their [00:16:00] people, even though their people might be already quite experienced in the field.
So a rolling rhythm of brief call debriefs, weekly wins and losses shared with the team. short one-to-ones where managers coach on technique and wording, not just chasing numbers because that's the easy bit. Too often I've seen sales managers think that it is their job to crack the whip on people and just keep talking about the results and thinking that's enough.
That's a lame game. As a sales manager, you're not being there to strengthen. You're just being there to crack the whip on your salespeople, which definitely doesn't build any goodwill nor capability. Let's then go to the third one. Skills development. What does that look like? Often I see that organizations that are not particularly serious in terms of building capability is that they see training as a cost rather than an investment.
How would you ever expect your team [00:17:00] to perform? If they're not constantly being inspired with new ways to do things better, faster, and stay at the front line at the cutting edge. The best organizations, of course, they see that skills development is something ongoing and it's a line item.
It's budgeted for. They have the money and they invest that money every year, every month, every quarter. it's not a waste of money. so it's predictable, it's recurring, and it's tied to commercial outcomes. And by the way. Good training, you can measure the impact. In sales
It's easy because if your lead times shorten from say a year for lengthy enterprise software type things, or two years, and you get it down to nine months or eight months, every time when you gain that is money saved. More money made. If your conversions go up from say, 35% [00:18:00] to 45% on average, or from 45 to 60 or 65%, you made more money as a result of the investment you made.
So if you invest this and you make this, you should do this every time on autopilot. It just makes sense. It's good business practice to keep doing things that help you to grow and prosper. The skills are built progressively, therefore, and we're talking about communication, objection handling, negotiating and account growth.
All of these things are strategic investments. It's leverage. So skills development is the third item there. The fourth one is playbooks too often. Again, and I can say this because I've worked in 25 countries on the ground with small, all the way to very large enterprises.
those organizations that are setting and forgetting it is that they basically say, just go and do your thing. Do your thing. It's basically [00:19:00] saying wing it. Just wing it. It gives people an excuse in advance to say today I didn't feel like, making my calls.
Or, see how I go with this. This is a winging approach. This is not elite. If there's no shared language, no common methodology, no sales playbook, every rep sells differently, and results will vary widely. And there's no way to diagnose why, because you haven't invested in the right structure, the right system, the right methodology.
Because if you did, this is now where we are moving to the elite sales organizations, then you start seeing that everybody keeps growing. It's almost like when last year a world record was set in, say, competitive running this year, somebody topped it up yet again, and that is what sales organizations the good [00:20:00] ones tend to do.
They build a clearer methodology that everyone speaks. They have a shared playbook for discovery, proposals, objections, closing, influencing, and so on and so forth. As a result of that, whenever somebody new is coming into the organization, new reps, they ramp much faster. They get up to speed more quickly with the rest of the team, and managers can coach to a common standard that is a lot higher than equal organizations elsewhere.
So the point of it is you do things that help you to move forward, and playbooks is part of that. There is a formula for success, and here's the thing, whatever might have worked last year might not work exactly the same again this year, which means those sales scripts have to keep evolving. And if, for example, your organization has been investing in sales training, from, I don't know, [00:21:00] things that I studied, for example, Brian Tracy.
That's eighties, nineties, and early two thousands. That is not going to help you in this day and age. Nothing bad to be said about it, but it means then that the world has moved on, new technologies have come to market. We're now dealing with this whole AI thing, for example, and. clients being a lot more educated, clients that have gotten burned along the way with high pressure sales techniques of the past.
And if you know that people keep evolving and trends keep evolving and technology keeps evolving, shouldn't your playbooks re reflect that too? And shouldn't your people be equipped with the latest and greatest rather than the old stuff? You get the gist. Next point. Now, number five is recognition.
The only recognition in a, say, average organization is a commission check. And it's really interesting. I sometimes find this very [00:22:00] puzzling that when we all have heard of things like Maslow how people are motivated, and we know all these groundbreaking research from leading universities, when these things come up.
With indicators that money incentives are not the main drivers for most people. Then why do organizations keep thinking, to give salespeople a base and then incentivize them with commissions for results achieved if that is not the main motivator? The reason why I wanna share this is that I've seen organizations where the commissions were very generous.
Sometimes even the bonus was decent, and yet for some reason or another, great salespeople that performed great elsewhere were not performing in that particular organization, and that is really because other things were missing. If, for example, salespeople don't feel that they're in a right [00:23:00] environment where they feel good, guess what?
That in itself will demoralize their ability. So even though they can perform well, they won't because the environment isn't there. So recognition is one of those things where great sales organizations, they build visible recognition. They do shout outs in team huddles, like in Slack or Yammer or whatever you might be using.
They have a portal where people are being recognized in front of their peers. They have leaderboards, they gamify their sales incentives. So they do a little bit of a fun run with it. they might, for example, also do a quick sort of, gift voucher or, a giveaway for an item that, do you need another coffee machine or another tv?
No, you don't. But people don't do it for the item. They do it for the recognition that goes along with it, and then the item is just a nice extra. Then there's [00:24:00] also, of course, the annual awards that we spoke about earlier. Every salesperson wants to be applauded for exceptional results, and that might be because they were the best closer.
They drummed up the most business. They closed the largest amount of deals, they did the highest profits, but they also might've been excellent as a consultant to their clients. As a trainer to their clients as a value adding resource or as the best team player. Incentives and awards can be handed out for embodying the company's ethos, the spirit, or for being an innovator and finding new ways to market the product or the service.
It could be for a raft of things. The idea is that it rewards excellence in multiple areas that are relevant for the sales professionals out there. So it's not just rewarding revenue. It's also celebrating effort and [00:25:00] behavior. So for example, back in my days when I was a sales rep, I once achieved the Pioneer Award for groundbreaking results in developing a new market that we knew very little about and gathering a lot of insights that was very helpful for head office.
That was one award. Another award I got was for training excellence at a multinational level. So again, if the clients got trained and they were selling our product better, after my training than before they did. Obviously when people start to talk and the results go to show, then that also could come back to us.
So there's a lot of things here that we can do to show recognition. Next one up is the manager's role. Too often I've seen sales managers have a hands-off approach and only look at the outcomes and then give feedback on the outcomes to the team. But seriously, you should know better. This is just not really a very [00:26:00] helpful person.
This is a person that is basically like an accountant looking at numbers, staring themselves blind on it and analyzing Going with knowledge but not really training the muscle that will help to improve the numbers on the board. So the manager's role is one to actually develop people, not just to manage the pipeline.
So I want you guys, the manager, to be seen as a head coach. The head coach, organizes the resources. Keeps the team focused on what matters and here and there, challenges the team, but also brings in the right support frameworks for that team to excel. The manager is also the one that needs to read the team very well and play on the personalities and the emotional needs, drivers and wants of the team.
they need to know when to ask more of the team. Sometimes also they gotta put back into the team. And they gotta make sure that they have that good [00:27:00] cop, bad cop attitude because only that way people stretch themselves like they would do with a good PT in a gym.
This is your job. You're paid to stretch your team, your members, and not just by cracking the whip and looking at the results. It's actually by building what makes the results move up. So it's building the muscle, doing the reps together with 'em. It's making them go for more, making them do more than what they thought they were able to do.
It's this sort of work day in, day out that moves the dial. Next one then is mindset and culture. In too many organizations out there, sales and selling is treated as transactional. I remember when I once worked in an organization, which was the second organization that I went into work for, as an employee, how the culture was so dark in contrast with the first [00:28:00] one.
The first one was one which thought if we as a manufacturer want to be successful, we will only be as successful as our clients selling our products or reselling our products. When they are. So they saw themselves as we gotta invest in our clients and help them sell better, and as they sell better, we sell better.
This was a very partnership driven model. Then I walked into this second organization, which again, it looked great from the job bad, from everything I saw, they were ramping up and growing fast. It looked good from the outset, and then I went in. Then it was basically the idea of what I call "the far west". The far west, which means we do business with everyone.
We just wanna sell anything to anyone. We wanna sell ice to Eskimos. That was really not necessarily the outspoken language, but it was basically what was expected. They just [00:29:00] wanted to move volume and they didn't care really how to get there. And if it meant that you would. Sell stuff on people's shelves that they never would be able to do anything with.
That was okay, as long as the numbers on the short term were there. It was very short term thinking, and it's no surprise that organization collapsed because they were not a partnership driven model. It was transactional instead of long term. So anyway, mindset and culture.
Great organizations, they treat selling as a professional discipline. it's like law, medicine or engineering. There's a success formula and therefore they keep instilling this one. There's pride in craft, there's investment in growth. It's typically a culture that attracts and retains high performers.
This organization, the first one that I went into 16 years after I left, many of my peers from back then [00:30:00] are still there today. And this is a world class organization, an organization that is number one in the entire industry. The second closest competitor, as I learned recently, has actually even now halved their volume because they couldn't keep up with the partnership model of this organization.
Mindset and culture, even though they appear as vague qualities, they are not. If people, great people keep performing better and better, and they stay longer than they do anywhere else, you're saving on recruitment costs. You're saving on training and development to get people up to speed, and you get a lot more performance out of the same people.
So if right now you have a higher churn rate than you would like. Probably the mindset and culture of your organization and some of the other items might be missing compared to what you could [00:31:00] get instead. Last item that I wanted to share here with you is performance data. In average organizations, you will see that activity metrics are tracked, so they look at calls made, demos booked, but conversion rates, average deal size and skill gaps are never analyzed.
if you don't nearly know what's working and what's not working, you're not really going to start developing and investing in people to fill the gaps to lift performance. So they measure the wrong things, is really my point. Great organizations, in contrast, their performance data is about leading and lagging indicators.
Both of them are tracked so they see what's happening on a day-to-day basis. And they also track what's in the future, the results, basically the harvest of all the work that the farmer has put in. Okay? Now, when conversions drop off, it's diagnosed by stage and their salespeople have one or two key [00:32:00] metrics that they are constantly monitoring because they know that on the short term, if those numbers fall behind, they know that it will have an impact on the lag indicators on the dashboard.
And so they have crystal clarity about what matters and what doesn't. So they focus on what matters and they can easily then procrastinate and not pay attention to the things that don't matter or matter less. The point of it is not everything is equally important.
If a team is trained on being clear what is important and 80% of their results go back to 20% of the things they do. You can imagine that those organizations will focus on doing those things first and all the other stuff will become secondary. It's clear what needs to be done and what can be delayed. They are supported and encouraged to do those things and procrastinate on the other stuff.
It's [00:33:00] clear and people are empowered to do the things that are actually driving the results. So conversion drop-offs are diagnosed by stage and they then therefore see that whether the problem is in discovery. The proposal stage or the close coaching is in great organizations targeted, not generic. And so this basically brings us again to this whole topic of sales management and sales enablement.
Success is done by design in the best of cases. It's not luck, and too often people, great people even are left to their own devices and that is not good enough. There's a reason why good people will only stay shortly in one organization and while they will stay a lot longer in others. And guess what: your organization benefits from not only attracting great people, but keeping them for a much longer period of time.
The more you do, the more you will thrive. Any [00:34:00] thoughts or questions on this particular topic, please post them below. This was another episode of the Commercial Leader Podcast. I look forward to seeing you again next time. My name is Bram, and thank you for tuning in.
