Recently I spoke to a business owner about sales acceleration and our platform. He brought forward the great question 'why'? Why would he take his time and invest in sales acceleration? What makes it so interesting that it deserves a spot on his agenda? It's a great question and I realised one that could benefit many others.
If you are not sure what sales acceleration is, we recommend reading the article What is Sales Acceleration first.
In this article we're taking a scientific approach to answering the question why you should care about sales acceleration. When we designed our sales acceleration platform, we spend a few months researching what makes for an effective sales team, specifically we wanted to know what a company can do to help sales be more effective during selling. This meant going beyond operational solutions like processes, data and technology.
Defining Effective Sales Management
We first took a step back to define effective sales management. We wanted to know what interactions and activities have the biggest impact on an individual rep's performance, to see if they are things we could replicate.
Common knowledge includes activities like a professional onboarding program, sales training and perhaps ensuring reps have a clear process to follow. Whilst this is all true, when we started investigating we found other factors have a far larger impact.
One of the best sources we used is a study done by Mathew Dixon in 2011 (CEB, now Gartner). He wrote a book called the Challenger Sale, where he describes the findings from a study of three years amongst thousands of sales people, making the case for a new type of sales methodology. It's a great study, with lots of great insights and I definitely recommend reading it. Whilst it mostly focuses on the case for a new sales approach, a section of the book addresses the role of the manager in sales effectiveness. It's here where we found some crucial findings.
Real Drivers of Performance
In the study they observed the attributes of sales managers that led to great performance. To highlight how big the impact of each attribute is on overall manager effectiveness, they assigned a percentage to each category. A higher percentage indicates a larger positive impact on individual rep performance. A few highlights:
Selling
The first 26.6% of manager effectiveness comes down them acting like a sales rep. This means the manager will perform direct sales activities as an individual, and explicitly excludes selling alongside one of the team members as a coaching activity. It refers to situations like covering an open territory or when a rep is on leave.
Whilst it's crucial to realise that it means your sales manager should be able to sell, it is not the highest impact item on the list and will certainly will not progress the performance of a whole team. For the purpose of our research, we noted this observation and put it to the side.
Coaching
The next 28% of effectiveness relates to coaching. In The Challenger Sale, coaching is defined as 'all activities to build known behaviours in sales reps to prepare them for traditional, predictable sales situations'.
The crucial part of looking at coaching this way, is that it prepares and perfects approaches to known, documented sales situations. You find this type of coaching in training materials, playbooks and other materials. The study highlights that helping reps tailor their story effectively and showing them how (and when) to assert control in a sales cycle are the most important activities in coaching.
Owning
The final 45.4% of sales management effectiveness comes from 'owning'. This part is defined as the activities sales managers undertake to own and build their business, which breaks up into two parts: managing resources effectively and innovation.
The interesting part is that resource management, which includes sales process compliance and corrective action, only accounted for 16.2% of overall contribution to sales manager effectiveness. It's traditionally one of the most central tasks of a sales manager but the study showed that impact on performance is minimal.
As Matthew Dixon says quite accurately; so what is 'owning' about then? They found that the remaining 29.2% of sales manager effectiveness comes down to innovation, or the ability of the manager to work with their reps in handling unexpected situations. The two main activities that drive performance in this category are:
- Generating new ways of solving deal-level problems.
- To find new ways to position an offer.
The keyword here is handling 'unexpected' situations. Sales reps encounter new, unknown issues in their deals all the time and the ability for sales management and reps to work together greatly impacts the likelihood of a deal closing. Crucially, this does not mean they change your company's offering, but that they find creative solutions to progress deals down the funnel.
In summary, if a manager wants to create the perfect foundation for success, all the traditional activities still matter. But they are no longer the most important. The very best managers go beyond, as they innovate approaches to get individual deals across the line and support their reps with practical advice.
The State of Sales Reps
A second angle we investigated was how sales reps actually feel about the place they work at. Conveniently Gartner's How to Motivate and Retain Your Sales Team (Gartner eBook, 2023) provided interesting insights to further understand how we set a foundation for sales success. The eBook references various studies which show that reps are experiencing 'drag' in their work and this causes them to get demotivated, perform less and look for new roles. None of those are great precursors for success.
Drag is described as everything a rep experiences as holding them back from doing and excelling at their jobs. They break it down into 4 main categories:
- Lack of development opportunities: this relates to the career prospects a sales rep has with the company, such as promotion or professional development.
- Feel like a cog in the machine: the feeling reps get when they need to execute a standard process, have no room for interpretation and innovation, and are merely a number in a much larger organisation.
- Vague, unactionable manager feedback: this is vague feedback given by managers that does not include actionable, useable points that help reps overcome the obstacles they face.
- Administrative burden: the amount of time and effort reps need to spend on things like tracking performance and customer interactions.
None of these may come as a surprise. My personal insight here is the correlation between the two studies.
Matching Manager and Seller Perspective
Linking one study to the other gives confirmation of what each of them say, despite being 12 years apart. Sales reps are saying they feel their work environment is lacking, because they don't see progression, don't get the right type of support from their managers, feel there's no personal attention and experience they need to do a lot of administrative work. It's causing them to perform less than what they are capable of.
On the other end of the spectrum we've seen what effective sales management looks like. They focus on working alongside sales reps by tackling challenges in individual deals. It's highly personalised and pragmatic support that genuinely helps improve a rep's performance and professional development. What's more, because it deals with unknown challenges, it is impossible to standardise the support for a rep and make them feel like a cog in the machine.
Yet somehow, even twelve years later and despite having the knowledge of what effective sales management looks like, many companies do not manage to deliver. It directly contributes to a shocking 93% of sales reps reporting medium to high drag in their work in the Gartner study, and 54% looking for a new role as we speak.
The correlation between the two studies confirmed for us that sales acceleration matters, and what the components are to have the highest impact. It's personalised, highly collaborative and helps rep close deals when they encounter unexpected obstacles. Traditional management tasks still matter, but it's that 'owning' portion that clearly has a huge impact.
Why Sales Acceleration?
In our approach to sales acceleration, it's these factors that we aim to improve and bring to companies. If you're not sure about it yet, let me share the two stats from these studies that really drive the point home:
- Managers that focus on effectiveness (innovation) over efficiency (coaching/compliance) outperform their peers by 1.8x. That means this type of manager will almost double the performance of your sales team.
- Sales reps that experience low drag achieve 1.69x more quota than their peers and stay with their employer. In short; when sellers feel good they perform better and stay longer!
Taking these two simple stats into account, the question becomes whether you can really afford not to put sales acceleration on the agenda. If you are convinced of the 'why', make sure to continue reading about the 'how'.
In the article 4 Pragmatic Sales Acceleration Strategies we've summarised easy ways for you to adopt some of the key findings from these studies.
