All businesses come down to sales. There’s no revenue or customers without them. I find most business owners are pretty good at it personally. They usually know their product or service and how to get someone else to pay for it. Unfortunately they aren’t so great at helping other people do the same. So when the connections and span of control of sales grows beyond the owners ability or time, the business usually plateaus. Most owners try one of three things.
Solution #1: Hire an Experienced/Connected Sales Person
So what do we do? Staying small is one option but most owners don’t want that. The typical owner tries to hire a sales person. “A good sales person should know what to do. Let’s just hand them our non-existent process and we can check that box off, right?” You can tell from my sarcasm that I’ve collected a few battle scars with this approach.
To be fair, if you select well and have a well enough defined service or product, the hired gun can help. She comes with a set of contacts that she works through but inevitably there comes a day when new sales start drying up. Once the contacts are worked through, the sales person can’t generate new ones of her own. Adding to the problem, she is also probably heavily involved in customer service to keep those contacts happy so she can sell to them again at her next job. The customer ends up with more of a relationship with the sales person than the company. Then after about two years, it is on to the next hired gun.
A very few sales people can help develop processes in the company. This is really more of a sales management job and can be successful. Unfortunately, most owners don’t think that is what they need and the newly hired sales person is incentivized to just generate new sales and not really to fix the process.
Solution #2 - Promote an Internal Rock Star to Sales
I’ve also tried developing internal people to do the job. There’s almost always an overachiever that is competitive and likes talking so it occurs to us to make him the new salesperson. The only problem here is that if sales are dependent on the owner, then it is almost impossible for someone else to replicate that owner’s process. The newly promoted person doesn’t have the connections or knowledge that the owner has.
To compound the problem, owners resort to the sales promotion after the business has plateaued and the owner is out of ideas. I think you can see the problem with promoting a more junior person to do a job you yourself don’t know how to do. It’s a no win situation no matter how eager and smart that employee is. After failing with this technique a few times I started thinking that becoming our sales person was like becoming Darth Vader’s Admiral. No one choked to death but longevity wasn’t a part of the position.
Solution #3 - Some Combo of Sales Person, Owner-Led Sales, and a Dash of Luck
Most of us just bumble along with some combination of these strategies and a few of us get lucky and find something that works well enough to grow the company. That’s about the best advice I had after over a decade in business. I had really good systems for finance, for people management, and for delivering our services but nothing that fully worked for sales. We had the CRM. We had a person we called a sales person. We had a sales meeting but none of it worked well.
Things usually started off well but as soon as a proposal came in to answer, we stopped doing pre-proposal work on other opportunities. We chased things we had no business going after. We couldn’t focus and maintain effort on multiple opportunities at once. The CRM was a graveyard full of outdated information.
The results were lumpy and inconsistent sales. I’d sell something or we’d get some additional work with an existing client. Sometimes we’d get lucky and new work fell into our lap but it was stressful and we’d go long periods without bringing in net new work.
Enter Justin Roff Marsh and Sale Process Engineering
That’s how things went and I had to face facts after our fourth sales person left after less than a week on the job. If you’ve been divorced four times, it’s probably not about the other person. It’s about you and I knew I needed a new approach. I looked at sales training but what I found was unsatisfying. The training seemed tactical and focused on techniques rather than processes and strategies. There was no match with the challenges I was facing in my industry. I was at a dead end. Then fate intervened.
I’ve had a few moments over the years when every dollar I’ve spent on joining the Entrepreneurs Organization is paid for in 20 minutes. Maybe I was just ready for enlightenment after four failed sales hires and as the Good Book says, “Seek and ye shall find.” That’s what happened when I tuned into a webinar with Justin Roff Marsh and his Sales Process Engineering (SPE) approach. It was like the clouds parted and Justin was shooting rays of wisdom down from the heavens. I hadn’t been jolted with insights like this since I first saw Greg Crabtree speak.
SPE took a lot of the mystery out of sales. Like most great things, SPE is simple but not necessarily easy. The problem SPE solves is that I and most other owners and managers are asking our sales people to do too many things. If you’re a lawyer would you hire an associate and then turn over all your business to her with no guidance, oversight, or process in place? I hope your answer is no. That’s effectively what we are doing when we hire a sales person and hope that he figures it out.
The Basics of SPE
What we really need to focus on for scalable sales is creating a sales process. That means pulling apart all the activities of sales and resourcing them appropriately. As I mentioned above, sales people are involved in a lot of administration and non-core tasks like setting up meetings, updating the CRM, and servicing clients after a sale. Servicing clients after sales is hugely important but it’s not a sales job. If you let your sales people do it then they run out of time to do actual sales very quickly.
The goal of SPE is to focus sales people on only one thing: having selling conversations with customers. That’s it. Everything else is a distraction: finding prospects (that’s marketing), updating a CRM (admin), reports (admin), scheduling sales meetings (admin), quoting or proposals (customer service), and post sale service (customer service/delivery). If you looked at your organization right now, I’d wager you (if you’re the sales person) and your sales people are spending the majority of your time doing the non-core tasks I just listed. The result of that approach is just fewer selling conversations and fewer sales. Sales people are supposed to be good at selling to people and not doing data entry so don’t waste your resources.
But Small Businesses Can’t Do This
I know the challenge. In a large organization implementing SPE isn’t easy. It requires a re-configuration of your organization. You bulk up customer service to handle proposals, quotes, and post close issues. In fact you might want to reassign some lower level sales people to customer service. You beef up marketing to find new prospects and assign administrative resources to help sales people schedule meetings and keep the CRM and reports up to date. When people have a job with more focus, they will get better. If they have multiple tasks, they’ll just focus on what is most pressing or what they like to do the most. Without focus they will also lack the repetitions needed to learn effectively and improve. For a big company, SPE isn’t easy but at least you have resources to reorganize.
Small companies have a different problem. There just aren’t that many resources and certainly not enough to separate functions this much. Sales? That’s me. Customer service? That’s me too. I get it but all is not lost. Even slight improvements can have large impacts. SPE has a solution for you. The first order of business is to get cheap resources focused on admin tasks: booking meetings, entering data in a CRM, etc. Any business can use virtual assistants and simply using cheaper administrative resources to focus more of your time on actually selling conversations is going to lead to a massive improvement. Then as you get more sales, you can start hiring resources to do the other functions. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. So just get started with an admin booking meetings, taking notes, and managing the CRM. You’ll be amazed at how much easier things become when you do this.
I highly encourage you to read Justin’s book, The Machine and to watch some of his talks on YouTube. Implementing his ideas have been transformational in my business. I look at our sales process now and it works! The CRM is a living, breathing thing. Sales calls happen…EVERY WEEK!!! We can now work on proposals for customers and find new opportunities….at the same time. If you’ve never walked and chewed gum at the same time, let me tell you, it is thrilling. The other benefit I’ve noticed is that people actually know what their jobs are. Instead of flitting from task to task, never doing any of them well, our people are more focused and know the exact value they add. That’s a huge improvement. So next time you think you need to hire a sales person, think twice. My guess is you really need a sales process.
That’s it for this week.