This is the eighth in a 10-part series, How to Be a Better Sales Manager. It’s my belief that the sales manager is underserved. There’s plenty of training and coaching available for sales people, but managers, the unheralded heroes of sales success, are all too often left to their own devices. These posts are designed for sales managers who want to do better and are looking for ideas.
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Imagine what it would be like driving in a big city like Chicago or Los Angeles if there were no traffic rules. Imagine people driving on the left side of the road or the right side of the road or the shoulder, at whatever speed struck their fancy. Pedestrians guessing whether you’d yield for them. Weaving, honking, swerving, dodging speeding semi trucks at every turn, brakes screeching, horn blasting.
Driving without a system is chaos — and extremely dangerous chaos at that. The same holds true for selling.
Great sales organizations are just that — organized. They have a system. They don’t reinvent the wheel with every new situation, because they have a pattern to follow. A system has many parts, including –
- A way to classify accounts and prospects
- A defined series of steps along the sales process
- Standard methods of presenting company information
- Clear expectations for new calls, follow up, and sales production
- Standard procedures for addressing customer objections and complaints
- A compensation system that supports these defined sales activities
Again, without a system, you reinvent the wheel every time you’re faced with a problem. And you will have mountains of problems to deal with, because a staff without a road map is driving blind.
Notice too that a sales system is NOT a marketing plan. Marketers can provide a messaging framework and help identify markets, but they cannot and should not develop an execution plan.
One of the most important contributions you can make to a sales organization is to define and refine its system. Technology won’t do it — CRM packages can automate and scale a good system, but they cannot create one outa of thin air or patch the holes in a poor one.
Without a system, you are continually reacting and improvising. You might think, reacting and improvising works great for Saturday Night Live and Second City, so why not me? Don’t think that way! My cousin was actually in Second City for a while, and the amount of preparation that goes in to being “spontaneous” is unbelievable.
With a system, your sales team is a force to be reckoned with. Why? Because chances are your competitors aren’t as organized as they should be. And that, my friend, spells o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y.
How would you rate your sales system on a scale of 1-10? (1 is no system, 10 is NASA)
Hi Brad,
I learned recently that you don’t have to ‘imagine’ what driving without road rules ‘would’ be like – you can see what it indeed is like by visiting Manila in The Philippines.
I spent a couple of days in Manila last month on my way to a southern island in The Philippines for my friend’s wedding.
Apparently, the capital city does have road rules, but they are rarely enforced. The city streets resemble a pure free-for-all. Drivers just go anywhere they please anytime. It’s a war zone – it’s every driver for themselves. Passengers can expect to experience approximately one near miss every two hundred meters.
If you want to see the results of a sales team without a system, just look at Hewlett Package during the 1990s.
I remember reading in Business Week several years ago that the company once had no fewer than 86 divisions, many of which operated independently and had their own sales team.
Worse still, there was negligible communication between divisions. The upshot was that corporate customers received different sales calls from different divisions in the company, each trying to sell them different products. Often the client would receive conflicting sales messages and advice from different HP divisions.
Of course, from the corporate customer’s point of view, HP looked dysfunctional and dealing with them was a nightmare.
Cheers
Andrew
Andrew, sounds like HP would have been right at home with headquarters in Manila! Large companies really have to resist the temptation to complicate things – the results are typically what you describe.
You’re absolutely right, Brad.
Large companies need to manage their internal affairs so that, from the customers’ point of view, the organization appears to act in a simple and coherent manner.
Cheers
Andrew