Mid-year is approaching.  I’m talking to a lot of people about where they are with quota performance.  With too many, their hands start waving around, the stories start, the excuses start.

“We’re still seeing the effects of the economy, customers aren’t buying….”  I know their peers in the same company are making the numbers, their competitors are selling, so I wonder.

“Our marketing programs and collateral are really insufficient, I don’t have the tools I need to be successful…”  Again, there are a number of their peers faced with the same thing who don’t let this stop them.

“”We just don’t have enough leads….”  I’ve never met a salesperson that has enough leads, so I wonder, what’s stopping them from prospecting.

“The dog ate my sales call plan…….”

I may be a little hardnosed about this, but there is only one thing sacrosanct in sales, it’s The Number.  Our job, our responsibility, our obligation to our companies is to do everything possible to make our number.  There are simply no excuses.

Everything else about sales is changeable, but we can’t change our obligation to make the number.

If we don’t have enough leads, then we have to do something.  Can we get referrals, can we go back to past customers to see if they have a need?  How do we start prospecting to find new opportunities?

If our customers aren’t buying, how do we find those that are?  Can we create a different or more compelling value proposition.  How do we find those customers that are buying?  Let’s invest our time in those that are.

We don’t have the right materials and collateral—-well create it yourself!  Never let materials, tools, collateral stop you.

There are simply no excuses to do everything you possibly can do to make your number!

Does this mean you’ll be successful?  Well you won’t be successful if you don’t, that’s virtually guaranteed.  But doing everything you possibly can may still mean you don’t make the number.  But at least you have learned, you have solid data about why and you can leverage that data to improve.

Sales success is about leaving no stone unturned.  It’s about figuring out what it tales to win and owning the responsibility for that.  It’s about determination–not letting anything to keep you from achieving your goals. Sometimes it means we have to change our approaches.  What has worked in the past may not be successful, so we have to figure out what creates success.  We may have to develop new skills, we may have to change our process, we may have to go after different customers, we may have to be clearer about our value proposition.  Everything in sales is open to change—except for making the number.

Are you prepared to change everything to achieve your goals?  Are you totally committed to achieving them and will let nothing stand in your way?

There are a huge number of tools available to help sales professionals be more effective and efficient.  Properly used and implemented they can have a profound impact in improving sales performance.  At the same time, used improperly, the provide the potential of causing great problems or creating crap at the speed of light.  Every tool has the opportunity, properly used to have great impact or improperly used to have great negative impact.

Too often, however, it seems the implementation of the tool in itself, is the end rather than just a means.  People implement CRM thinking “because we have CRM, we have much greater insight into our customers, pipelines, opportunities, and so forth.”  Or implementing powerful research tools to provide great sales intelligence–without providing a foundation the sales people can intelligently use these tools.  Or providing great content and email marketing tools that are used to blindly inflict content on people who have no interest or desire to get that content.

 We too often forget about the fundamentals–the basic blocking and tackling, the foundations of sales effectiveness.  None of these tools replace the need for this, but the amplify the impact of the sales person using it.  A high performing sales person, executing a well defined sales process will get phenomenal benefit and create much more value using these tools.  They will be able to leverage their time and presence in ways they couldn’t without the tools.

We have to continue to focus on building a sound platform based on the fundamentals:  Do we have a well defined sales process aligned with the customer buying process?  Do we know how to develop and execute high impact sales strategies?  Do we have the knowledge and business acumen that enables sales professionals to connect with their customers discussing their issues, concerns or helping them discover new opportunities?  Do we understand what customers value, how we create, communicate, and deliver differentiated value?  Do we understand how to listen and really understand?  Do we have the ability to confront the customer–appropriately, to ask for money in exchange for value and to defend that value without resorting to discounting?  Do we understand how to manage our time, leveraging it for maximum impact?  Do we understand how to prospect and gain the attention and interest of people we may have never met?  Do we understand how to create, build and maintain relationships?  Do we understand how to trust and be trusted?  As managers, do we understand how to analyze performance, how to coach and develop people to achieve their full potential, how to measure performance and hold people accountable for that performance?

All of these are the foundations of high performance selling.  Implementing tools, whether they are CRM, sales intelligence, analytic, content management/delivery, presentation or other tools on this sound foundation can magnify the impact and effectiveness of the sales team.

Absent these foundations the tools can be harmful.  Not only do we waste time, resource,  money on tools that aren’t used, used well, or used properly.  But we run an even greater danger–used improperly they can have exactly the opposite affect.  They can alienate and create great distance with customers.  They can magnify poor strategies and stupid execution.  Recently, I encountered a sales person selling a marketing/lead development tool–his thoughtless use of the tool he was selling caused him to spam 1000′s of people.  My feedback to him was that his use of his tool made me certain that I would never use his tool and would actively recommend people avoid his company.  He didn’t seem to understand.  This week, I get prospecting calls from a person selling a tool that was to provide great insight into customers.  His first question was, “What does your company do?”  I get endless offers for content, newsletters for thing I never requested, things that I have no interest in. 

I talk to people who are considering the acquisition of very powerful tools.  I ask a few questions.  For example, powerful analytic tools–but are you asking the right questions?  The quality of the analytics is dependent on the quality of the question you are applying the analytics after–or the quality of the data being analyzed.  Bad questions, bad data give you terrible answers.  The greatest presentation, storytelling, whiteboarding tools are meaningless if your people do not understand the customer, what they value and how to create value.

I can’t imagine any high performing sales professional not leveraging these tools to their full potential!  They are very powerful.  But the tools are the means, not the end.  If you don’t have a strong foundation in place, they are worse than useless.  Before wasting time, resource, and money on these tools, make sure you are building on a strong foundation.

The human brain is an awesome instrument!  One of the things it enables us to do, sometimes almost unconsciously, is to instantly recognize patterns.  We encounter a situation, in nano seconds, our brains compare the situation with others we have encountered through our life.  It quickly enables us to recognize, “I’ve encountered something like this before—-this is how I recognized it, this is what I did, this is what happened as a result.”  We do it thousands of times a day, comparing everything we have encountered, looking for common patterns that have produced successful outcomes, then acting based on our experience of those patterns.

Top performers take this even further.  They move pattern recognition from the unconscious to the conscious.  They constantly compare the characteristics of what they are encountering to their experiences in the past.  They understand the characteristics or variables that are most critical to what they are trying to achieve, they assess the actions they should take based on those characteristics.  They also assess what’s different about these patterns and can quickly adjust what they do based on their past experience and the assessment of the current situation.

People who have mastered something–say a top athlete, musician, someone who has invested the 10,000 hours experts say is required for mastery have thousands of patterns built up in their brains, they have the ability to quickly assess situations they encounter, match that with the most appropriate patterns from their past experience and quickly act.  This capability is often called “muscle memory” or “instinct,” but is really the result of the brain’s tremendous pattern recognition, pattern processing capabilities.

Top performers in sales do the same thing.  They have patterns built up, based on their experience.  They are quickly able to evaluate a customer and just “know” the right way to deal with that customer.  They encounter a sales opportunity and are able to assess it against their past experience, leveraging that experience to develop and execute winning strategies.  Top sales people constantly seek to replicate that experience—find customer that fit the past patterns of success, find situations and opportunities that match the most successful opportunities from the past, and leverage that experience to be successful in these current situations.

When you speak to top sales performers about this, they can precisely describe what they look for (the patterns) and how those patterns influence their activities.  When you watch them in action, they are constantly looking for those situations that match the patterns of past success.  In fact, what they are describing is their personal sales process—the things they look for, the things they do, the responses they expect based on what they have experienced in the past.

The sales process–when taken from an individual level to and organizational level is really the collection of all those past patterns of success.  It is based on the collective experiences and collective patterns of top performers and what has made them successful.  The sales process becomes a “template” or a pattern that all other sales people can leverage to increase their success.  In some sense, it’s a shortcut to the 10,000 hours to mastery, because you are able to leverage the collective “10,000 hours” of all the top performers.

Do you recognize the patterns of your own past successes in sales?  Are you able to leverage them to improve your own personal effectiveness?

Are you leveraging the collective experiences and successes of everyone in the sales organization to contribute to your personal success–you can’t be doing this if your organization doesn’t have a sales process, or you aren’t using it?

Do you constantly update your sales process, based on the new patterns of success you see?

Every year, I sit through hundreds of deal reviews.  They all seem to go the same way.  The sales person talks about the deal, the competition, what the sales person or team has done.  Too often, too much time is spent reviewing and discussing past history.  However, at some point in the review, the discussion shifts to, “What do we do next?”

Often, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable silence.  Then a lot of random ideas start surfacing, “We should probably meet with…..,”  “Maybe we should do this……, “  “Let’s do a demo…..,” “Let’s have one of our executives call on them…..,” “What if we tried this…..”

I’m always struck by the seeming randomness of the discussion.  Lots of brainstorming, lots of (and some very good) ideas, but they sometimes seem unfocused or like we are grasping at straws struggling to identify the critical next steps in improving our positioning, and moving to winning a deal.

There’s simply no reason for this.  There’s no reason to be guessing, there’s no reason for the randomness in thinking.  The next steps must always be purposeful and have a strong direction.  They must be based on our experience in winning deals, knowing what’s most effective in producing results, and how we win.

Guess what, the tool that we use to do this, executing our best practices consistently is the Sales Process.  The sales process provides direction and context to our discussion on what’s next.  While the specifics will vary deal by deal, the Sales Process provides a structure and framework that’s based on our best practices and knowledge of what wins.

The conversations that are random brainstorming sessions, the confused discussions about what to do next are the result of not having a Sales Process–or not using it.  In the absence of a sales process, we have to “invent” a way to win each time every time.  We have to invent it continuously as the customer executes their buying process.  We aren’t leveraging our experience of what it takes to win, so we put our ability to win at greater risk.

One of the best things about a Sales Process is it provides a structure and a framework that helps us win!  It helps us understand what it takes to win and provides us a starting point to answer the question, “What do we do next?”  Why not focus the next steps based on what we know causes us to win, rather than guessing?  Why not use the process as the starting point to identifying specifically what advances us–yest we have to adjust what we do to the specifics of the situation, but we do in a structured, efficient and effective context.

I don’t know about you, but somehow winning–and winning fast is important to me.  I can’t imagine having to guess.  I can’t imagine putting my ability to win at risk–in fact I want to minimize that risk.  I can’t imagine not leveraging our best practices to give me direction and insight into what to do next.  I can’t imagine not leveraging the Sales Process for it’s maximum impact.

Are you comfortable with guessing and putting your ability to win at risk?  If you are, then you don’t need a Sales Process.  If not, then the answer should be clear.

We all know the shifts in buying.  The web offers a tremendous resource to all of us.  There is an overhwelming amount of information available on virtually every topic.  There’s a lot of data that says customers don’t want to see sales people until later in their buying cycle–presumably the final phases, as they have developed a short list of alternatives.

Many think this is wonderful–certainly on the customer side they get to avoid all those terrible sales people.  From the sales side, we now get involved with really serious customers and our sales cycles can be much shorter.  So somehow people seem to think we create this terribly efficient buying and selling environment.  From the sales side, we shift our focus to high quality content, SEO, and all sorts of things that increase our visibility to customers who let their fingers wander their keyboards.

But you have to pause and wonder, is this really a good thing for customers and for sales?  Perhaps for simpler transactions, or where professional well informed buyers are invovled, this may be OK.  But in the world of complex B2B solutions, one really wonders.

What are the problems with self education?  Is it really the “right” thing for customers?  Perhaps this is an arrogant view, but as sales people are we fulfilling our responsibilities in creating great value for customers by succumbing to this self education/information?

Here are some of the challenges:

First, we all know that if something is on the web it must be 100% true, right?  This is the easiest concern, probably the majority of stuff on the web is wrong or out of date.  So how do our customers determine what’s good, what’s accurate, and what information they can rely on?  I suppose if you wander around enough, perhaps participate in discussion forums (but who knows who those people really are), we can sort through the piles of information– perhaps finding things that are more accurate than not.  Perhaps is we narrow our search to “trusted” suppliers, then we can feel more comfortable that we are getting accurate information — but how do we know who is to be trusted?  Just as with working with sales people, smart buyers need to be skeptical.

Second, “my problem is different.”  In complex business decisions, everyone has a different problem or need.  Yes, 80% of the requirements may be the same, but it’s the last 20% that really make the difference.  Companies are different, strategies, culture, priorities are different.  Their goals, objectives vary.  Their processes, history, legacy systems (in the broadest sense) are different.  That last 20% is probably the most critical to the success of any project the customer is undertaking.  Where are they going to get the answers specific to them, where are they going to get the answers specific to that critical 20%? 

Third, do they know what to look for?  Do they know what questions they should be  asking, what they should be researching?  This, to my mind is probably one of the most important concerns customers should have about self educating.  In the complex world of B2B solutions, knowing what questions to ask, what things they should be looking for, what things might be possible is critical.  How do customers know what they don’t know?  A CFO and her staff may be very knowledgeable about how they run the financial operations in their organization—but what do they know about buying a new financial system?  How many times have they bought financial systems in their careers?  What are the capabilities of these systems?  What should they be looking for and why?  How can they change their operations and processes to get much better results? 

We’r all prisoners of our experience.  We know what we know, we don’t know what we don’t know.  If we are self educating, we are constrained in our search to what we know and think we need to know.   Our ability to solve our problems is constrained by the quality of our questions.  Sure, we might stumble upon some interesting content on a web site, we might talk to people and learn new things we should be considering–but that takes a huge amount of time and can really be hit or miss.  Is this the most effective way to buy?  Is this the most effective way to drive tremendous improvements in our operations? 

Fourth, to the customers know how to buy?  Do they have the right people involved, do they know how to organize themselves, do they know how to align their objectives and put together a project plan to identify, select, and implement a solution?    After all, unless they are professional buyers or sourcing people, their jobs aren’t to buy (which, as a side note, is why we are seeing strategic sourcing being involved in more decisions where they haven’t had a presence in the past).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do customers even recognize they have an opportunity to change, and opportunity to improve and grow?  Do they realize they are missing opportunities, or understand how they could seize them?  Simply put, from a sales point of view, we are being irresponsible in serving our customers.  Our job is to help customers identify new opportunities to improve, to grow.  We can’t let our customers cheat themselves of the opportunity to achieve their dreams.  We have to bring them new ideas and insight.

Self education and self directed learning works — after all, there has been great progress in distance based learning.  But the reason those programs work, is they have very clear objectives, very clear methods, and are well structured–not random.  Self education and self directed learning can be very effective in buying, but only in well structured and well defined environments, and in using trusted sources.  For certain types of purchases this is very effective.  But in complex B2B solutions and complex business problems, things are seldom so clearly defined.

One of the major roles of sales people has been to teach.  Too often, our teaching has been misdirected, we focus on teaching/pitching our products.  The greatest value we can create is to teach our customers about different ways of doing things, about new opportunities, about things they may not even realize.  We have to help our customers learn.  We have to help our customers understand the questions they should be asking.  We have to help our customers learn what they should research, what they should be looking for. 

It’s important that we have high quality content, that we continue to create great web/social presence.  But this is most impactful when we have an educated buyer, a buyer who knows the questions they should be asking, a buyer who knows what they should be looking for, a buyer that can critically evaluate the alternatives.

Are you prepared to teach your customers?  Not about your products, but about how they can improve their operations and businesses, how they can better serve their customers, how they can outperform their competition.

What are you doing to help your customers learn?  What are you doing to prepare yourself to teach?  What are you doing to prepare your customers to buy?

Truth be told, most sales people would prefer to have a root canal than prospect.  Sales people do deals—we love the engagement with a customer that wants to buy and is willing to give us an audience.  We love the adrenaline rush of competing in the final stages of the customer buying process, convincing the customer that we have the superior solution and can create the greatest value for the customer.  Then, it’s capped off by the customer calling us to let us know we got the deal!

In an ideal world, we would be blessed with never-ending qualified opportunities in our pipelines.  Marketing working it’s magic somehow produces great leads, we qualify virtually all of them, then get into doing deals.  Life would be wonderful!

Unfortunately, the real world is seldom like that.  Too often, we don’t have healthy funnels.  As much as we try to increase our win rates, as much as we try to cross sell to increase our average transaction size, most of the time there’s a great gap–we don’t have enough opportunities to pursue to make our number.  We may be successful, we may be closing deals–but that empties our funnels.  Unless we have new opportunities coming into the funnel, we won’t continue to make our numbers.

Ideally, marketing is creating enough demand to provide the continued flow of new opportunities.  But if, for whatever reason marketing can’t provide that flow of great leads, we still have to figure out how to make out number—that’s our obligation to our companies and to ourselves.  It is unacceptable to go to our managers saying, “I’ve closed every deal in my pipeline, now I just have to wait and twiddle my thumbs until marketing gives me good leads.”

If marketing can’t create a sufficient number of leads, then we have to go out to find them.  We have to go out and prospect.  Hopefully, there’s a willing audience–a list of people that are willing to sign up for our seminars.  Ideally, we can go back to past customers, seeing if they have new opportunities.  If they don’t have opportunities, ideally they will introduce us to people who do–they’ll actively refer and sponsor us to new people in their organizations or other companies.  Getting a referral or introduction is very powerful in helping us identify new opportunities and we should leverage them as much as possible.

But what if that doesn’t produce a sufficient volume of great leads that we can qualify and fill our funnels?  We are still obligated to achieve our goals—anything less is just excuses.

So we leverage indirect relationships.  We ask people in our companies if they know people we should be talking to, we ask friends, neighbors, maybe the person sitting on the bar stool next to us (though I’d be a little careful with those).  We leverage our connections in LinkedIn or Facebook.  We do everything we can to leverage even the most distant connections or relationships—”Did you know you are the third cousin of my next door neighbor’s high school buddy’s roommate in college?”

Any time we have anything we can leverage–a close relationship, a past relationship, a powerful referral, a distant relationship, whatever—we leverage those because it’s out job to find a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve our goals.

But what if we’ve exhausted all of those and we still have a gap in our pipelines–maybe not for today, but what about tomorrow?  We still have an obligation, a commitment to reach our goals.  We have to continue to look for new opportunities. We have to……. I’m hesitant to say…….  I guess I’m scraping the bottom…..  God forbid…..  but we have to cold call!

There, I said it, the dreaded words—”the cold call.”  Well actually, it’s the well researched call to someone we may not know and to whom we have no possible introduction.  We have to do the research and find a meaningful way to pick up the phone or email or show up in their office or whatever.  We have to find a way to engage theses “total strangers” and reach out to them with a well researched and prepared “cold call.”  And we have to do one, and another, and another…..

Cold calls are tough, they’re tough, they take a lot of work.  Clearly, if we can leverage anything else that is more effective, we’d be foolish not to.

As sales professionals we have an obligation–it’s our commitment to make our goals.  Again, in an ideal world, we have perpetually healthy pipelines and never have to prospect.  In a real world we have to prospect, we have to go out and find new opportunities.  We have all sorts of ways to do it, and we should choose the simplest and most efficient possible.  but if that doesn’t produce the right volume of opportunities we can’t stop there–we have to keep exploring, we have to keep searching, we have to find new opportunities.

When we have a gap in our ability to achieve our goals–today’s and tomorrow’s, it is irresponsible not to exhaust every single alternative in our prospecting efforts–there is simply no excuse.

Recently I was in China in a series of meetings with CEO’s of Chinese companies.  The meetings were great, but we each struggled to maximize their impact.  My Mandarin is very limited–basically to “Hello,”  “Thank you,” and a couple of other words.  Many of the executives spoke some English and were very polite in trying to communicate in a way that I could understand.

Mostly we relied on an interpreter.  The problem was, the interpreter interpreted the discussion–that is he describe things based on how he heard them, not necessarily what was intended.  So we had to be very careful in what we were saying and in verifying that we were aligned in our discussions and what we were trying to achieve.  Fortunately, our shared intention allowed us to be effective in our meetings.

Often, when I go on sales calls with sales people, I think that we are speaking different languages.  The customer is speaking their language, the sales person is speaking their—and there is no interpreter.

Each of organization and industry have their own terminology, jargon, buzzwords, and shorthand.  We have ways of expressing things, that others may not understand.  Too often, I see sales people reeling off terms and acronyms–often to make them sound important, but meaningless to the customer.  Or sales people don’t take the time to understand and communicate in terms that are meaningful to the customer.

A very simple example–many years ago, I managed an organization whose key customer segments were automotive and aerospace design engineers.  Even though the design processes were very similar, the terminology used in each industry were profoundly different.  Automotive engineers tended to talk about “flow lines,”  aerospace engineers tended to talk about “aerodynamics.”  Same concepts, but if we used the term “flow line” with the aerospace guys, we would both lose credibility but we would lose the customer–they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about.

As sales people, we want to maximize our impact on the customer.  We want to make sure our customers understand us and that we understand the customer.  It’s not the customer’s job to speak our language—we have to speak the customer’s language.

This goes beyond the words we and our customers use.  Each industry has key processes, metrics, practices, business drivers.  These are ingrained in everything the customer does.  For us to be impactful, we have to understand all of these, what they mean to the customer and how we can impact them.

Do you understand your customer’s language?

Do you speak the customer’s language?

Do you understand the key metrics, processes, practices, and business drivers for your customer?

A well known saying, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”  I’d like to add a corollary, “It helps to pay attention to the signposts.”  

Yes, this is a post about establishing and executing plans.  Whether it’s a plan to win a deal, to make a high impact sales call, to maximize your share within the account or territory, to make your quota, to hire the right people……  For all of these, we maximize our effectiveness and the quality of the result by having well defined goals and strategies in place, and refining our plan based on signs/signals we see as we execute the plan.

Many will say, “Dave, I have a plan and goals–my goal is to win a deal, my goal is to make quota….”  This is insufficient, the highest performers we have to know what path we are going to take to achieve our goal.  With aimless wandering, we may achieve our goal, but it could take us a very long time. 

High performers develop a specific plan, they map out specifically how they will achieve their goals.  Their plan focuses on effectiveness, efficiency, and impact.  They are purposeful in what they want to achieve, so they have strong plans in place.  If it’s a sales call, they are focused on accomplishing as much as possible–compressing their sales cycle.  If it’s a deal strategy, they focus on aligning with the customer buying process, creating the greatest value in the process, outperforming the competition.  If it’s a manager hiring a new sales person, they have a profile of the ideal candidate, they look for those that best match that profile.

With a plan that is purposeful, high performers can adapt to “road conditions.”  They recognize when things may be going off target — without a plan it’s impossible.  They are sensitive to the “signs” along the way–they can see obstacles, adjust their strategies to avoid or overcome them, they can see opportunities, taking advantage of them.

Everyone is time constrained–our customers, our team members, our managers.  We don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want or need to accomplish.  The highest performers manage this by having clear plans in place, executing those plans relentlessly, by paying attention to the signals they encounter–adjusting their plans appropriately?

Do you know where you are going?

Do you have a plan to get there?

Does your plan maximize your effectiveness in achieving your goal?

Does you adjust your plan based on signals you see on the way?

A strong sales process is critical to our effectiveness as sales professionals.  Without a strong process, it’s comparable to an aimless walk—we may reach our destination, but then again we may not.  Or we may reach our destination after an overly long journey.

As much as has been written about sales processes, I am constantly amazed by the number of organization that either have no process in place, their process is hopelessly outdated, or the sales people and managers don’t use the process.  We can never achieve the highest levels of performance without a process.

So since our goal is to develop the sales process that maximizes our personal effectiveness as sales professional, I thought it useful to outline five conditions your sales process must satisfy to enable you to be best in class.  I’ve restricted this to five, I’m interested in differing views.  Have I chosen the right five or should a different five be selected? (Please, out of pure arbitrariness I’m restricting this to five.  So if you have a sixth or seventh, you have to eliminate some of the original items.)

Condition 1:  Your sales process must not only be aligned with the customers buying process, but it must enable you to help lead and facilitate the customer’s buying process.  Too often we’re glib in talking about the customer buying process, when we really are talking about our sales process.  But buyers rule.  Buying is very complex.  They have to organize themselves to recgnize a problem or opportunity.  They have to get people invovled, define their goals, define how they will make a decision, align themselves internally, and do all sorts of other things.  In the world of complex B2B solutions, customers don’t know how to buy, they may not know they should buy (that is they have an opportunity or a problem).  Sales demonstrates it’s leadership and creates great value by aligning everything they do with the customer buying process.  If your sales process doesn’t drive this kind of behavior in your sales people, go back to Go, do not collect $200 and start all over again.

Condition 2:  The sales process is for the sales people, not anyone else.  The sales process is focused on helping sales people develop and execute high impact sales strategies. It focuses on deals and how sales people win deals.  The sales process is not for sales managers—though managers must use the process in coaching their people, and can get tremendous insight into deals, pipelines, and performance; but all of that is icing on the cake.  Sales people have to be involved in the design and development of the sales process, after all it’s for them and they must own and execute it.  There is no reason to have a sales process other than making sales people more effective.  If your sales people aren’t the center of your focus in your sales process, Go To Jail!

Condition 3:  The sales process must help your sales people improve their ability to win.  It has to be based on your best experience–things your best sales people consistently do to win.  It is unique to your organization, not something generic to all sales people.  You win and lose for specific reasons, there are uniqe trigger events or activities, that dramatically improve your ability to win.  If your sales process is not based on your sales people’s own experience, deep analysis of why you win, why you lose, what events amplify your ability to win, tear it up and start all over again.

Condition 4:  Your sales process should help your sales people compress the sales cycle. We know that wandering aimlessly through the sale results in sales cycles that never end.  The sales process provides structure and focus to the activities sales people undertake.  Sales people should constantly be looking at each opportunity, identifying where they are in the sales process and seeking to compress the process as much as possible.  The salles process provides a framework for the sales person to look at the next steps or critical activities, they can analyze them, they can consider “How many can I accomplish in my next step with the customer?”  Managers in coaching sales people on their deals should look at this, helping the sales person understand where the cycle can be compressed.

Condition 5:  Your sales process must maximize your deal value or profitability.  I know those sales people and organizations whose sole strategy is to win on price don’t read my blogs.  There’s no skill in winning by price, there’s no value creation if you compete by being the lowest cost supplier (all other things equal).  So if you are reading this, you are interested in maximizing your deal value or profitability.  This means how you create value, how you communicate it, how you deliver it needs to be integral to your sales process.  It requires that your process focuses you on customers in your sweet spot, who demand and appreciate the value you create.  It demands that you can differentiate that value from the alternatives the customer is considering–if you can’t your only option is to win by price.

Does your sales process match all these criteria?  If it doesn’t, then you have a bad process.  You will never be able to maxmize the performance of each sales person, you will never maximize the performance of your team or organization.  It isn’t tough to design, your top performers already know it, though they may execute it unconsciously.

Does your sales process match some of the criteria?  Reassess it, tune it, improve it.  No sales process is forever.  How customers buy evolves, your value proposition and value creation evolves, competitors and customers raise the bar.  What worked a few years ago, may not be the most effective now?

If you don’t have a sales process, then you already know you aren’t performing at the highest levels possible.  In fact there is huge room for improvement!  Put together a team of your highest performers, lock them in a room for a couple of days, do some analysis. develop an initial cut of your process–making sure it satisfies all five conditions.  Roll it out, use it for six months, then tune it based on your experience.

If you have a good sales process in place and you aren’t using it, shame on you!  If you want to be a top performer, you have to use everything you can, you have to maximize your performance.  The sales process is the biggest lever a sales professional has to improving performance.

Do I have the right five?  I think so, but I’d love your views.  Remember, I’m arbitrary, I’m not interested in six, seven or more condition, I am only interested in the top five.  What are your thoughts?

One of the key roles of any leader or executive is to teach, coach, develop our people.  Our people are all too eager to learn from our experience, to learn what we did to be successful, as well as to learn what mistakes we may have made, so they can avoid them.

“Teaching,” whether formally or through coaching or mentoring is a privilege for any executive.  It’s a powerful way, not only to work on specific skills development, but to pass along values, to build the culture, to provide our people a broader context in which to position their contributions.  In growing our people, it’s our number one responsibility.

But often, we forget another key component of teaching/coaching/mentoring our people.  We forget the tremendous value we get in learning from them.

Today, I’ve been carrying on a couple of email conversations.  One with a sales manager in the Far East, another with a sales person in the Midwest.  With each, it became clear a telephone conversation would be valuable.  But each was reluctant to ask me to invest some time in it–not sure if there was a “business outcome” for me.  While I appreciate their sensitivity to my revenue generation, I told each, that I really value these conversations and learn a lot from them.  Each was overly humble in replying, “I can’t possibly imagine what you can learn from me.”

Learning–whether it is formal or through coaching or mentoring is really two ways.  I know what I can share as a sales executive or consultant — what people, whether they are sales people in my organization or clients, can learn from me.  But the value we get from them teaching us can never be over-stated.

It’s an opportunity for any executive to learn what’s really happening in the organization and the world.  We get the privilege to talk to people who are struggling to implement our strategies, to achieve the goals we have set, and who help make us successful.  We get an unfiltered view of what’s really happening–not the sterile numbers or text that may be in a report, but the context, emotions, and color commentary on what’s really happening.

We get much more than that.  For example, in the email conversations I was having with these two individuals, they were asking questions differently than had been posed before.  Each was asking about prospecting, demand generation, and sales process, but they expressed the questions a little differently–the questions were challenging and caused me to really think about my response.  They gave me the opportunity to look at what I thought I already knew, but to look at it a little differently.

The questions didn’t cause me to change my mind or point of view.  They didn’t create an “A-HA” moment, but they caused me to reflect and think about the appropriate response.  They forced me to consider something I thought I knew, but from a slightly different point of view.  It was something I could learn from.

Often, it’s the naive questions we may get from our subordinates.  We tend to think everyone understands things the same way we do, that just because it’s something we “get,” that everyone else does as well.  Then you encounter a sincere, but naive question, that causes you to sit back and realize you’ve been alone, that others simply may not get it.

Or, like any human being, we beome blind.  We don’t see what everyone else sees, we become a little disconnected from what’s really happening.  The questions and discussions with our subordinates or people deep in our organization are often a giant wake up call–but only if we are open to learning.

I, along with others, write often about how critical it is for executives and leaders to teach, coach, and mentor their people.  Almost always, we focus on the importance of it in developing our people and helping them perform at the highest levels.

One of the greatest values of teaching, coaching, and mentoring is what we learn from the person we are coaching.  It helps us grow and to perform at even higher levels.  When you are coaching, don’t cheat yourself of the opportunity to learn from those who you are coaching—that may be where the greatest value lies.