Sales Acceleration is a great way of getting your sales team the support they need to perform at their peak. Using the research findings from our previous post (find it here) we distilled 4 easy ways for you to start supporting your sales team better. Our goal is to offer practical, easy to implement solutions that you can start using today. We are also staying away from the 'Open Doors' such as give training and a CRM. These strategies are about simple things you can do with the resources you have today.
So, without further introduction, let's dive straight in.
Strategy 1: Create a Common Language & Framework
Our first strategy is to create a common language to speak, working along a framework that's known to everyone involved. It often happens in a meeting, not just sales-specific ones, that a group spends more time trying to understand each other rather than doing actual work.
The perfect example is a weekly team business update. A team comes together to discuss their deals and the forecast. When one sales rep explains their deal, others ask questions to clarify information and understand how far the deal has progressed. Often the team spends more time to fully understand the facts of the deal, rather than evaluating it and offering advice. The end result is a meeting where deals are discussed, but there is a lack of tangible, practical outcomes that progress business.
Using common language solves a that friction. When you decide on a language to use, it needs to be explicitly agreed upon and known by all members of the team. Follow these two steps to create your language:
- Choose a common framework, such as a sales methodology, to frame deals and their components. Whilst the framework should be relevant to your type of business, the actual setup is irrelevant as long as it gives a common understanding and language.
- Work along predetermined structures in meetings. Known structures in recurring meetings set clear expectations and allow for everyone to get prepared with the right information. Everyone knows what matters and how to communicate it to others, boosting meeting productivity.
A common language and structure moves meetings from clarification to production, bringing minds together to find the best solutions.
Strategy 2: Collaborative Deal Reviews & Clinics
The second and highest impact strategy is to implement periodic deal reviews, or deal clinics (which sounds a lot friendlier). In a deal clinic a sales rep discusses their deal(s), to validate if they have the right information and solve unexpected challenges. Studies have shown that this is the single most important thing you can do as a business to help sales reps accelerate their performance.
A deal clinic happen ad-hoc, when one of the team members runs into an issue. Often a manager and a rep will sit down together to discuss the obstacle and brainstorm solutions. Best practice however, is to have sessions scheduled periodically to ensure deal coaching happens and the daily activities do not take over. Including the whole team in these sessions increases overall problem solving capacity and shares new solutions across the team, building the wider skill set.
For a deal clinic to work you need a standard framework to evaluate deals along. The key is to create objective evaluation points that rule out opinions and bias. In sales it is incredibly easy to be overly positive about the progress of a deal. Staying objective is the only way to get a realistic deal snapshot and to find those areas where you can accelerate.
At Gysho we have defined 6 categories within each deal that we call puzzle pieces. These are items such as prospect fit, challenges and solutions. For a deal to come to a close all puzzle pieces need to be in place. During deal clinics we work our way from the very beginning of a deal (is it the right type of prospect?) all the way to the final piece (do we have a plan to support them?).
The most effective deal clinics rely on solid preparation and compliance to the approach you choose. The clinic should be about tackling challenges and coming up with solutions, not about gathering the information needed to give everyone a good view of the deal.
We have created a generic deal clinic worksheet for you to download. You can use it as-is or create your own version specific to your organisation.
Strategy 3: Personalise a Standard Approach
The third easily implemented measure is to adopt a standard approach which you personalise to each interaction. This means you have the common framework and language we discussed before, and use that as a guiding principle whilst staying open and flexible to give the team the right answers. There are two driving factors that require personalisation to accelerate sales:
- Unexpected or new obstacles are amongst the biggest reasons why a deal will not close. Often these result in 'no decision', where a deal is neither dead nor alive. Everyone has simply agreed it is a good idea, but no one knows how to progress it further. Through their very nature these are unexpected obstacles that require innovation to find a suitable solution. This is where the guiding framework helps the thought process and conversation, but finding a solution will require creativity. In short, every deal requires a unique approach.
- One study showed that sales people often feel like a cog in a machine, and manager feedback is generic and not useable enough for a situation. Personalising your approach builds stronger relationships with your teams and make them feel appreciated through the time you spend with them. This in turn opens the door to discussing the true and unique challenges a person is facing, allowing you to tailor the solutions you come up with, making feedback tangible and relevant.
Interestingly, you will find that your standard helps get the conversation started and you soon dig into the specifics of a particular challenge- which are unique. Once you hit a solution, you will often see that the solution does naturally fit somewhere into the standard framework.
Strategy 4: Plan, Discipline & Scale
Accelerating the performance of a sales team is not a one-off action, it requires constant attention. Teams often start out with great ideas and ambitions, which are applied for the first few weeks and abandoned shortly after. Schedules get too busy and ad-hoc issues take prevalence over what was a great idea. This happens incredibly often and is a real issue as the day-to-day takes over from structured performance improvement.
Plan
When you and the team have come up with an idea for a recurring activity which will help you sell better, put it in the calendar. If you do not schedule these sessions in advance, they're extremely unlikely to happen. What's more, be very clear about what scheduling means. No one should allow for other things to be booked during these slots.
Discipline
Various studies show it takes on average 66 days for a person to form a new habit. So if you, for example, decide to start weekly deal clinics with the team, it will take almost 2,5 months for that to become a habit. Getting through that first period takes discipline from everyone involved. Excusing one person from the meeting will open the door for others to do the same, indicating a first breakdown of a great habit. It is a genuine team effort to hold each other accountable for the meetings to happen.
Scale
Once you are past this point, you will have to scale your approach. This may be the hardest part since there are always more good things to do than you have time for in a day. The standardisation of approaches helps, as no one needs to think about what is going to happen or how deals will be described. As the company grows, you may have to find other creative ways to ensure acceleration activities continue. Here are a few ideas to scale these strategies:
- Assign tasks to ambitious team members. They will get additional responsibilities and grow to a natural next team leader, whilst your time is freed up to spend elsewhere.
- Use technology, such as our own Gysho Sales Acceleration platform, to give sales reps their own tools to perform deal clinics and get advice.
- Increase meeting focus. If your team struggles with a certain part of the sales cycle, focus solely on that part of the deal before addressing any other part.
Whatever is the best solution for you, make sure activities keep on happening on a regular basis. This is the only path to capitalising on the 1.8x revenue growth studies showed when implementing effective sales acceleration strategies.
To get you started, you can download Gysho's deal clinic worksheet. This simple framework assesses all of the deal puzzle pieces we mentioned before and includes objective questions to assess whether you have the right information. All of these principles are also integrated in our Sales Acceleration platform, get in touch with us if you want to learn more.
