During my first year in sales, I made my quota. So did slightly less than half of the sales team. But what we all had in common, whether we hit our number or missed it, was that each of us held the ability to render the company strategy utterly useless. That’s because the sales function has the primary responsibility of executing the strategy for your business.

There are three elements at the heart of every strategy: 1) a broad objective or set of objectives to achieve, 2) a clearly defined target market, and 3) competitive advantages or reasons why clients who meet the profile will choose you. In practice, here’s how strategy plays out through the actions of the sales team, using my experience as an example: despite the fact that the target market in our strategy was Fortune 1000 companies, I spent less than a third of my time pursuing opportunities within that market. I was more concerned with reaching my target for meetings each week, so I’d frequently meet with companies far outside our ideal profile.

It also didn’t matter that my company had invested tens of millions of dollars in new solutions to specifically appeal to the Fortune 1000 market. It was often easier to sell our traditional suite of products and services. I was further discouraged from selling these new products by rumors that the new solutions were especially challenging to implement, which could take up a lot of time and prevent me from hitting my numbers.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with the opportunistic sale – leveraging clients that are easy to acquire or taking the path of least resistance in a sale. But when less than 25% of your client base comes from your target market, or your new offerings are slow to gain traction, you have to ask who is leading the strategy. Because it certainly isn’t the executives who created it.

It requires discipline and focus on the part of sales leadership to proactively drive the execution of your strategy in every sales interaction. Because each sales call represents the success or failure of your strategy, leaders can take these three actions to help sellers stay on target and win business from ideal clients:

Evaluate your sellers’ pipeline activity. Move beyond the usual tactical review, determining the current month or quarter forecast, and start thinking strategically. Cull the pipeline of accounts that don’t meet your ideal client profile. Identify the top late stage opportunities AND the top value opportunities at all stages. Use every tool at your disposal to help sellers focus their efforts. One company I work with won’t pay sales professionals on accounts that aren’t identified on their target account list; this is a highly effective way to put boundaries on who they are selling to.

I frequently counsel leaders to get clear about business that is “On Strategy” and “Off Strategy,” based on the kind of business and/or what you are selling them. Pursuing some Off Strategy business is acceptable, as long as there is a good reason for it, such as a longer-term opportunity or a contact that can provide leverage in other companies. If Off Strategy business is easy to acquire and requires little to no sales or implementation effort, take as much as you can. No one expects 100% of the business to be “On Strategy.” But if only 30% of the business is “On Strategy,” that’s a red flag that you don’t really have a strategy beyond “sell whatever you can.”

Collaborate with your team to sell “the right things” to the right buyers. Sales professionals are notoriously bad at selling something they don’t believe in. This was the case in my story above: even though we were told it was important to sell the new solutions, many reps continued to focus on the traditional products.

To get your sales team on board with the products or services you expect them to sell, collaborate with your team to help them see where the solutions will provide the greatest value. Help them understand the ins and outs of implementation and the advantages that make your preferred offerings the superior choice. You’ll also have to really listen to address real or perceived concerns about selling a new product or service, working with your sellers to minimize the impact of those concerns. Of course, if the concerns are significant you may have a bigger issue with the company product strategy. Making sure your sales team is selling the right things requires collaboration, understanding and support.

Coach sellers on how to create value. Having observed over a thousand sales calls throughout my career, I’m convinced that the reason so few sellers create value and sell solutions at a high level is a lack of coaching. Most companies massively underestimate how challenging it is for sellers to master the interactive skills and business acumen required in a consultative, solution, or value focused sale.

Two or three days of sales training a year won’t prepare a team to create value through the sales process. It requires deliberate practice of specific skills to gain proficiency, which only happens through consistent coaching. Leaders must be able to diagnose development priorities, create action plans, and most importantly, lead coaching sessions where sellers practice the skills you expect them to execute with customers. It’s a mistake to think you can tell someone what to do and expect them to instantly master complex communication and relational skills.

Sales leadership provides the critical bridge to successful execution of the company strategy. That means balancing both directive and collaborative leadership as well as prioritizing the coaching and development of talent. After all, it’s the sales team who must execute these strategies with clients every day – sales leadership should provide the tools they need to be prepared. Applied effectively, a business strategy drives behaviors in the field that help your company succeed at winning the right business. Otherwise, your strategy’s finest moments may be in PowerPoint.

This article is by –

Scott Edinger – consultant, author, speaker and executive coach

and the article has been taken from here.



Leave a Reply