What are the sales practices most highly correlated to continuous sales growth?
by Todd Youngblood
It’s one thing to make decisions without all the facts. It’s quite another thing to make them without any. No sane business person would expect to be consistently right relying solely on judgment. But sales execs do it all the time…
Write down your top three answers. Don’t rack your brain. The first three things that come to mind are most likely the three activities that should comprise the bulk of the selling time of the reps in your company; the activities that – according to the prevailing wisdom – are your sales “best” practices.
As with most “simple” questions, your answer prompts another question. Is your opinion about the three practices you just wrote down based on judgment or fact? It’s based on judgment if you just “know” that you’re right; because you have learned it through your personal experience and study of other successful sales people. It’s based on fact if, and only if, you have hard, empirical data that clearly supports your opinion.
Overwhelmingly with sales execs, judgment is the foundation upon which sales best practices are built. What’s most troubling about this is that history has proven time and again that judgment alone is an extremely unreliable driver of progress. Real, sustainable progress is possible ONLY when judgment is tightly coupled with hard, data-based proof.
Here’s another perspective. Sarbanes-Oxley? is a hot topic these days because it requires CEOs to personally certify the accuracy of information from their finance departments. The investing public demanded it, and Congress delivered the law.
How long do it think it will take CEOs to get used to having additional detail, additional backup, additional analysis? Might they conclude that additional scrutiny is a good thing? (Do they have any choice?) Might they conclude that other business functions could also be dramatically improved by applying the same level of scrutiny? Why not start with what has traditionally been the most expensive, yet least accountable department – sales?
Might smart sales VPs decide to get a head start? They might. They might begin to:
- Collect hard, cold facts about their sales “best” practices
- Mathematically correlate those practices to the results produced
- Mathematically correlate various combinations of practices to results
- Compare that analysis to industry benchmarks
- Develop and implement action plans based on the resulting facts
Different mind-set. Different approach. As soon as your CEO hears about it, you’ll be asked (told?) to adopt that style of sales management. Are you ready for it? Maybe it is time to kick-off that Sales Process Engineering project…
Think about it…
