Don’t rely on product knowledge and a smile to grow sales

Don’t rely on product knowledge and a smile to grow sales.

Is it realistic to forecast sales growth based on the willingness of your brightest, most ambitious, marketing or pre-sales head to accept a target? It’s not so unusual to find early stage businesses winning customers without a recognisable sales team. The Founder will most likely be a force of nature and an early stage team will respond positively to the collective energy created by the challenges and obstacles of proving out the business plan.

As leaders look to grow sales they are, increasingly, questioning the value of expensive, dedicated, sales people believing that buyers complete 80% of their work online and the best subject matter experts are in the building, being influential, ready for when the buyer calls. The sales growth challenge gets downgraded to one of making customer facing people ‘more commercial’. They are critical to every new customer win so why not give them a target?

If the answer is key to the sales strategy, then consider this critical four-point agenda.

What does the business really need?

The headline answer will be obvious, but the detail must be challenged. At the highest level there is a major distinction between a Hunter and a Farmer which will breakout into sales support, sales development, account management or customer success roles, and refined further by the balance of expectations between inbound and outbound activity for new business growth. Each profile is driven by a strong commercial focus but mean different things and attract people who bring different skills, expectations and challenges.

Create the role profile honestly and include expected behaviours and challenges. There are lots of templates available and these can be a good start but should be heavily adapted to reflect the role, the realities of business today and the expectations for the added contribution this role will make to the business and its culture.

This exercise will take a number of iterations but will quickly highlight the skills, knowledge, perspectives and reach the business needs. Resist cutting and pasting a templated role description and hoping the hiring process will sort things out and avoid softening the language to coax a specific individual into a sales role. Each scenario risks creating a role that doesn’t exist. It may accelerate the process and create short term optimism but stores performance and personnel issues for later.

The business will have no shortage of people willing to share their experience of what it takes to succeed in sales. Consider new perspectives by conducting informal win/loss reviews with customers to understand what they value in their supplier relationships and getting outside help to add challenge and perspective to the process.

Where are we selling?

This is key to understanding the profile of the role. Set a time window and decide what markets you will be selling to. The business will have a foothold in some, but others will require lots of missionary work. More regulated markets – education, healthcare, areas of government – will value knowledge, insights and compliance more than tenacity, personality or process. Others will be more like contact sport with well-established buying criteria and shorter sales cycles.

Successful engagement at an operational level, even generating add on sales, may not describe the person to deliver new business success at board level. Different skills, experience and behaviours will be prioritised by the realities of the markets being targeted and how they buy. The selling skills and confidence needed will, most likely, take time to develop and no amount of reading or googling can fast track sales mastery.

What lessons are repeatable?

When early stage sales are won, credit is widely shared so a picture is created that recognises success and propagates a winning mentality.

The risk is that a self-serving narrative is also created, often with no scrutiny. History is re-written, excluding bits we don’t like, for the benefit of investors, morale and playbooks. So, we re-frame the past and imagine what the future could look like if only everything stays the same, but bigger.

The role of most contributors to the sales campaigns is likely to have been unconscious competence.Super smart, positive and willing contributors, happy to take direction and engage with a tolerant prospect with limited expectations or individual pressure.

This is no criticism. These are massively valuable contributions, but they are selective, and the lessons learned will be too few, and too customer specific, to build a play book.Contributions to early sales success are unlikely to describe a sales warrior.

Selling is the easy bit

There are many examples of non-salespeoplewhose mindset and behaviours are a seen as a good fit with the disciplines of asales role. The processes, models and skills of needs discovery, storytellingand objection handling can be taught. Transferable skills such as willingnessto listen and learn, resilience and a knack for problem-solving can berecognised and encouraged.

But the transition to a sales role brings other pressures such as personal targets, forecasting, rejection and the numerate scrutiny of performance. Customer relationships may become gamified as the role moves from gamekeeper to, perceived, poacher.

Success in the old role was defined by the quality of responses to scenarios presented or help needed by colleagues and customers. The new role is defined by the ability to present compelling evidence of issues and consequences other people didn’t know they needed to deal with. Most of all, the new role demands ask for something.

Margin notes...

In reality, everyone sells.Everyone is a persuader and influencer. It may be convincing kids to do homeschooling, pitching a holiday idea or raising investment but it is all selling.

Figure out who and where your ideal customers are and how they buy. Scrutinise what skills and attributes the business actually needs and, using the best resources available, build the role profile.The conclusion could still be an internal hire but let it be the result of diligent challenge and review of both business and personal success factors.