As we discussed in our last CRO-focused article, the current landscape around sales is uncertain, and good insights are half the battle. But once you have that data, how can you get more from your sales organization? And how do you prioritize the most important steps for your organization? In this article, we focus on several things you can do to boost sales performance, focusing on process changes, shifts in your approach, and other things that can be done with a minimum of financial investment.
If you’re seeing difficulties at any point in the sales process, one useful thing to consider is how your sales team is configured. While team structure will vary from company to company and industry to industry, there are three main models that most use: Island, Pod, and Assembly Line.
Island configuration is a model most sales professionals will be familiar with: Each sales rep is provided with limited support from the central office and otherwise left to fend for themselves, pitching to clients independently. This model keeps relationships between the customer and business clear and concise, and it puts individual reps on the hook to close deals, fast. However, some companies have found this model to be less scalable as a long-term model, and it also can create a mismatch in incentives between the rep succeeding in the short term and the company succeeding over the long term.
Other companies have adopted the pod configuration, where small teams work together to manage customer relationships through the sales cycle and beyond. This model often provides a more holistic experience for customers, since each pod member works closely with their pod-mates. On the other hand, the model can also hide poor performers or discourage advancement and ambition among sales staff.
In the assembly line configuration, specialization is the key. The company has a pool of talent focused on each stage of the process, with leads passed from reps to account executives to customer success managers. This configuration provides the most expertise possible in each area of the process, but most members of each team will only know the functions adjacent to them on the assembly line, leading to a siloed experience in the organization.
What’s the best model? It depends mostly on your needs, your challenges, and your size. The important thing is to think critically about the strengths and weaknesses of whichever you choose and work proactively to mitigate—or to adopt a new model as needed. And still more important are the individuals that make up your teams.
No matter the market, good sales talent will always be scarcer than you’d like it to be. Having a good GTM plan, optimized structure, and competitive pay will help attract a lot of candidates. But how do you hire well? Here are some tips:
Hiring skilled team members is an important step, but having the right people in the right places is critical. Misallocating members of your team or allowing job descriptions to creep larger not only prevents your talent from fulfilling their core responsibilities effectively, it also harms morale, increasing your seller turnover. If you’re seeing more and more work accumulating for your customer-facing sellers, consider these two questions:
Sales enablement done right not only attracts top talent but retains it, and it can be integral to revenue-driving initiatives. Excellent salespeople are always learning, and it’s your business’s responsibility to support their professional development. Ongoing training, sales assets, and technology are all critical ways to support your team, with each resource tailored to the needs of the person who will use it. Support can take a variety of forms, including:
Every member of your team learns differently, so you’ll probably need a combination of these resources tailored to their needs. While it’s certainly a try-and-adjust practice, getting it right will yield excellent results. It’s also applicable to every level of your company: Your sales leaders need to be just as supported and enabled as anyone else, and they need their own resources.
Coaching your team is key to enabling your business, and the first step is coaching the leaders who will coach your team. Sales managers need to be as skilled in mentoring and coaching up-and-coming salespeople as they are at selling, able to earn their team’s trust, identify strengths and gaps, and guide their direct reports into selling like champs. This can take work—the skills of an excellent seller don’t directly translate to managing.
It’s crucial to provide sales managers with ongoing support and training so they can supply it for their own teams in turn. This can be as simple as showing them how to talk through problems with sales reps, actively applaud victories, and be able to break down sales calls to talk about both the great moments and areas for improvement. Most importantly, a good sales manager needs to know how to motivate each person on their team, making them feel confident in their abilities. With managers who can create excitement around closing deals and hitting goals, much less energy will need to be spent on performance management for individual sellers, and you can focus that much more on the work that directly drives revenue.
Lastly, make sure your team has the right technology to drive revenue. On top of sales enablement-specific technology, it’s important that your sales team has technological support through the sales cycle, an ecosystem that keeps them in-the-know on marketing efforts, data on customer relationships, and other resources to take their prospects from first contact to close and through retention.
When starting from a blank slate or converting from legacy programs, four necessary technologies that bolster performance include:
These technologies are important on their own but give you maximum value when they’re connected. For example, using Salesforce as your CRM, you can easily integrate DocuSign CLM to reduce times between approvals and eliminate confusion over where a contract is in the pipeline. Tacking on a BSM tool such as Coupa makes travel and expense management a breeze and can reduce supplier risk through improved buyer-supplier relationships and management—even more so when you connect it to your contracting system.
Having technology that all integrates is also key for leaders across the company, who can then see a single source of truth and make better business decisions faster.
CROs directly influence the future of the company. Pivotal to this role is constantly keeping an eye on how to improve sales performance, which requires getting multiple teams in alignment. At Spaulding Ridge, we help CROs develop an ideal tech stack to align departments, eliminate silos, and reveal data that lets you make better business decisions. If you’d like to learn more about how to take your company to its full sales performance potential, let’s talk.
