Sales Acceleration is a relatively new term which is gaining traction with businesses and refers to any action you can take to enable the sales team's increased performance. It relates to processes, methodologies, tools and technology. In its most basic form, it refers to everything you can do to enable your sales team to perform at their peak.
In this article we give our perspective on sales acceleration and provide a foundation for you to establish how it can help your business grow faster.
Defining Sales Acceleration
Sales Acceleration is all about improving the speed and efficiency of your sales cycle. It looks at every step of the sales funnel to optimise it for conversion, minimise time spent at any stage and ultimately accelerating revenue growth. In achieving that ambition it is not just about technology or automation, it is about the quality of the interactions you have with your customers. Their interactions need to be relevant to the customer's needs and aim to solve critical problems for them. So in short, whilst you can provide a platform for your representatives to operate efficiently by giving technology and process, it is their skills and competencies that ultimately determine how much you can accelerate growth.
The skills your sales reps have are becoming increasingly important to succeed in today's marketplace. With the internet, the expectations customers have become more demanding. They demand instant gratification, high competition means they expect better customer service and since all information is available online, they are also much more knowledgeable than ever before. To engage them effectively, and to differentiate from the competition, your sales team requires all the help they can get to have better conversations, handle objections, solve obstacles and present the best solutions.
Rep Skills that Accelerate Sales
Let's first look at the general skills representatives need to perform well. These skills are required to succeed in a sales role in general. In the light of Sales Acceleration it's your tasks to extend and supplement them when necessary. Let's look at 5 skills that have a high impact on sales rep performance:
1. Communication & Active Listening
In sales, communication is everything. It's foundational in every step of a sales cycle, whether that means articulating the value proposition clearly, asking focused questions to assess a customer's situation or simplifying context when necessary. Communication is the single most important tool in the sales toolbox and it underpins every customer interaction.
Selling is more about listening than about talking, something many sales reps are yet to appreciate. Active listening entails hearing what the customer says, asking relevant questions to the context and using that information to create a closely aligned value proposition. I like to view this as a sales rep being 'in the conversation', where they actively engage in what the customer says and use that to drive the meeting to a great outcome. It builds trust and rapport, creating partnerships over sales relationships.
2. Method & Structure
Whilst sales is a highly fluid work environment where situations change all the time, having a clear method to work along and applying structure greatly helps sales build effectiveness. This comes down to two reasons:
- Having a standard sales methodology gives guardrails for sales reps to follow during sales cycles. It ensures they take the right steps, allows for easier analyses when deals don't progress and give a framework to coach against. Methodologies create a common language within your team that everyone can understand and use.
- Working in a structured way ensures sales stays productive and performance is repeatable. Structure minimises the time sales reps spend on each activity, focuses them on doing the right type of activities and makes performance more predictable. It also allows you to automate tasks which are simple and repetitive, maximising the time sales spends with customers.
3. Interpersonal Skills
Notice that we have not called this 'relationship building'? There's a good reason for this. Imagine you have a trusted advisor that is your go-to person to validate strategy, decisions and management. Now imagine that this person always says 'yes' to whatever you say, doesn't sound very useful right?
Interpersonal skills in sales means being able to respectfully work together as a trusted advisor with a customer. It means you build a relationship, but that is not the end goal. The end goal is to make the customer's business better and that sometimes involves calling out mistakes or suggesting improvements. This mindset creates a far stronger and more productive relationship.
4. Adaptability & Perseverance
The reality of sales still is that most sales cycles will not produce a deal. On top of that, sales is about unique companies and unique customers, making every sales cycle different from the previous one. Reps that are able to constantly adapt to new situations, stay creative and never give up, are the ones that will be your top performers.
Whilst this is a characteristic and a mindset, you can put things in place to support your team. Help reps create a clear plan with milestones to break annual goals down in smaller, weekly achievements. Create a culture of support, where a failed deal is not a negative, but merely a learning opportunity on the road to achieving success.
5. Technological Proficiency
Sales reps are most productive when they spend time with your customers. Using technology can greatly limit the time they spend on administrative tasks, finding new prospects to speak with and even the time it takes them to book meetings. High technological proficiency will allow reps to fully leverage the benefits of technology, maximising the time they spend on actually selling.
Note that this does not mean they become tech experts. Being proficient as a sales person is far more about using existing technology effectively, instead of finding and implementing new technology. The benefits of using technology are vast, when we supported a company recently to build their tech stack, we managed to double revenue productivity per sales rep within the first year.
Supporting Sales Representatives for Acceleration
Having the right skills in the sales team starts with hiring the right people. Beyond that, you will have to put specific things in place to ensure you create an environment where sales thrives and develops. This is where sales acceleration becomes practical.
The trick to sales acceleration is to go beyond implementing the basics. You need to know where sales encounters bottlenecks and put solutions in place to solve them. Here are a few ways you may achieve that:
1. Training and Development
Provide regular training and development for your sales team. This includes choosing and training to a sales methodology, giving communications training and ensuring the team is proficient in using the technology you implement.
A mistake often made is that training takes place when someone joins the company, which causes development to stall and skills to fade. Learning is an ongoing practice and repeating courses makes application perfect.
2. Recognition and Rewards
Sales people are often driven by competition, recognition and rewards. Creating a well thought out structured can drive the right behaviours and in turn accelerate sales. It is not merely a compensation structure, it's a tool to correct and promote how the team executes sales.
Start by defining what behaviours in your company drive the best performance. For example, if you are a high volume low value company, reward the amount of calls sales makes to ensure you motivate the right activities. We recommend staying away from complicated and subjective bonus structures as they tend to have the opposite effect on sales performance.
Similarly, healthy competition can help accelerate sales in the team. Healthy competition follows a similar setup as incentives, where you promote the right behaviours and do not shame those who are not top of the stack. For example, run a monthly competition to reward the best proposal. This promotes best practice and does not single out one person as the loser. Remember that positive reinforcement remains the highest impact motivation you can give.
3. Providing the Right Tools
Just like a carpenter, sales cannot work effectively without the right tools. Ensure they have access to a solid CRM system which gives them easy access to information. Automate tasks that are time consuming, simple and repetitive. Give them tools to enhance their knowledge and provide tools to overcome unexpected challenges.
The aim of providing the right tools is to maximise the time sales spends with customers, instead of performing laborious tasks that do not directly contribute to sales performance. Human interaction is where sales adds most value, not adding a note to the CRM.
4. Creating a Supportive Culture
Sales is a high pressure environment where deals are lost all the time. Creating a culture where failure is accepted as an opportunity to learn moves the team from experiencing stress, to finding solutions that improve performance. It takes roadblocks away for sales to seek out support when they get stuck, even if they are behind target.
A supportive culture encourages collaboration, continuous learning and open communications. It ensures the team is willing to share challenges they experience giving you the opportunity to resolve them. Culture is not merely a result of what you say, it requires setting up collaboration meetings, allowing others to speak and adopting suggestions from the team. Culture grows over time and is not created instantly.
5. Constant Coaching & Mentoring
Giving support to your sales team is not a single, one-off monthly event. It is constant activity that goes well beyond reinforcing sales processes and standards. Research shows that the support you give in individual deals to help reps overcome obstacles with new solutions is the single highest impact activity you can implement.
Keep an open door policy and put structures in place that promote this constant mentoring and coaching. It will help you develop a great culture and enable you to give the support there where it is needed most. If you are struggling to find the time, put alternative structures in place that ensure reps still get deal support.
Conclusion
Sales Acceleration is not just about content, technology or tools. Whilst these have a substantial impact on performance, it is having the right types of skills and support in place that has the highest impact on performance. If you are looking to accelerate sales performance in your company, this is where you should start.
When you think of sales acceleration, do not think about it as just moving faster. Think about it as working smarter, maximising the effectiveness of the team by giving them the skills and support that matter most. It is not about trying to do everything, it is about focusing on those things you know work best.
If you are part of a starting or scaling business there's one more point to consider. Implementing sales acceleration for your team helps you scale. By giving reps the right skills and tools to succeed, they will be less dependent on you to close business. Your time is focused on fixing obstacles, not on executing parts of the sales cycle.
Are you curious to learn about what studies say about Sales Acceleration and how you can get started? Continue reading with these two articles:
