Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
1, Get everyone’s input on creating the sales process. Not only will you get multiple ideas, but salespeople will self-select areas to refine, and you will develop buy-in to the process you document.
2, Get a CRM that can scale with you. Pick software that is affordable to you now and can grow with you as your sales grow.
3, Keep salespeople accountable. Meet with them weekly to ensure they are performing the number of activities that lead to sales and are putting their information in the CRM.
4, Hire from outside of your industry. Find a sales star who is at the top of their field making 80 percent of what they will earn with you. They will stay longer because they see you as a career move, not a job change.
Business owners and top executives usually fall in one of two buckets. The first is the owner who really knows how to produce the product or service the company makes. They systemized their operations using principles like LEAN management.
The second group is the owners who are excellent salespeople. They close deals. They either make most of the company’s sales or oversee the sales department themselves. They hope they can get salespeople who can sell like them, as well as them and as fast as them. They later get frustrated because no one sells like they do.
Sales really is as repeatable as your operations. Here are the benchmarks you need to accomplish to get your sales systems repeatable and growing.
The days of solely trusting sales to come in from the salesperson bringing donuts to an account is over. To have repeatable sales, you need a repeatable sales process. To have a repeatable sales process, you need to document your sales process.
Just like your operations have a flow chart, create a flow chart showing the journey your prospects and customers go through with your sales and marketing departments. Start by documenting your proven lead generation system. If you don’t have one, get one. Use an A/B test to track two systems and see which produces more leads per dollar spent.
Continue the flow chart as the prospects work with sales. Ask these questions:
What does sales do with the lead?
How do they qualify the lead?
How do they discover the needs or wants of the lead?
How do they present solutions and negotiate contracts?
How do they hand off the completed contract to your operations team?
When the flow chart is complete, you are ready to produce a sales playbook. This playbook goes into greater detail for each step of the process. It is a document with links to the quote forms, videos, testimonials, contracts and any other tools you use in the sales process. This is a detailed document you give future sales employees to run your sales process.
I had one client who told me he kept track of everyone in their sales pipeline on a whiteboard! Could you imagine what would happen if the cleaning staff accidentally cleaned the board one night?
Have a CRM that is easy for the sales team to use and easy for you to see a dashboard. You need to quickly see the data you require to manage the team. This data should show not only the sales but the indicators and activity levels of your sales team leading up to the sale.
Consider a salesperson named Peter. Peter was second out of six on one company’s sales team. However, the CRM dashboard showed his meeting counts were low and therefore, the number of quotes was low. Since their sales cycle was three months, the company and its partners warned him he’d better bring his activities up or he would have a famine in his future. He didn’t believe it. Since he didn’t work on the leading indicators shown in the CRM, three months later he became the lowest salesperson by a long shot.
The same way you can take a process in operations and begin improving it, you can do that with the sales process. Just as you would hold your operations people to the process of production, you must hold salespeople accountable to the sales streamlined processes.
Streamlining can be done in sales meetings and one-on-one sessions, but the best place for accountability is out in the field. Watch salespeople live. Discuss how to improve after each meeting. Do not use these meetings for you to close the sale. Use these meetings to observe.
Most owners settle for “B” or “C” salespeople and don’t know how to find “A” players. Look for great salespeople outside of your industry. That’s right. Outside. If they are inside your industry, superstars don’t want to leave their companies for yours because they have a great thing going. The people who leave another company for another in the same industry are average employees who see problems on their horizon.
Ask yourself these two key questions?
How many people at your company could teach someone in your industry how to be an incredible salesperson?
How many people at your company could teach an awesome salesperson the industry?
Develop a plan that tells a new employee what they should do, learn and experience for the first 90 days. Ensure they take responsibility for completing the plan, not you. Now your onboarding is scalable.
Make sure at least once a week they are scheduled to demonstrate, report or prove they learned what was required.
Great salespeople are drawn to your company because you have a proven process, a CRM to keep track of everything and a launch plan when they come. “A” players love accountability because it gives them a chance to show off. Great salespeople are what you are looking for to scale sales and they will dramatically increase the quality of your culture.
When business owners implement these five steps, not only do you get a scalable sales system, but you increase revenue and valuation.
