At a Glance
What separates good sales people from great sales people?
Great sales people use the most effective selling behaviors to accomplish their
goals. But it’s possible to impart many of those behaviors across your entire
selling force with the help of a few new methods.
Shortcut to:
Key Performance Indicators
Supporting the Right Behaviors
The Abilities that Lead to the Right Behaviors
The Motivation to Succeed
The Right Context for the Right Behaviors Post-mortem analyses of underperforming products and
services often reveal the sales people, who are critical to the success of any
new release, were inadequately prepared. The problem is not that sales force
training is ignored; it’s typically a line item in the budget for the new
product or service. The problem is, rather, that most training focuses solely
on information about the new products. That’s not enough. It’s not just what
your sales people know that matters; it’s what they
do.
Fortunately, new thinking and new tools are available that
can help companies prepare their sales people better by supporting and
influencing the selling behaviors that are more likely to lead to success.
Key Performance Indicators Changing behaviors is not necessarily simple, because human
behavior is not simple. Yet we know a lot about how to help people perform at
higher levels, and it makes sense to apply that research with some science and
rigor. Behavior change begins with a collaborative assessment process whereby
the right target behaviors are identified by agreeing to key performance
indicators (KPIs) such as:
- Increase the value of selling
time.
- Sell the most profitable solutions.
- Increase the market share of new products.
Companies can then attach realistic metrics to those KPIs,
as well as the key behaviors most likely to increase the probability of hitting
the metrics.
Supporting the Right Behaviors Influencing people so that their behaviors lead to strong
key performance indicators involves attention to three related areas:
The abilities that
lead to the right behaviors. Developing the ability to
sell new things in new ways always involves some training to give people
knowledge about the product. Yet the traditional approach to delivering
knowledge—take this class, read this manual, sign up for this online training
course—typically results in only a slight degree of behavior change. If you
really want to deliver knowledge that gives your people deep skills and allows
them to enact those skills in real life, simulation-based training is one of
the best ways to do it. Performance simulation—either using sophisticated
computer applications or role-playing—allows people to practice skills in a
failure-safe environment, getting instant feedback about their selling
behaviors, the outcomes from those behaviors and what they could do better next
time.
Ability involves more than training, however. The lag time
between training and performance often undermines even the best intentions when
it comes to sales force enablement. Someone goes through a training course in
January, but the product launch doesn’t actually happen until April. In the
meantime, much of the knowledge learned has leaked away. So more advanced
integrated performance support systems are also needed to help people find the
information they need, just when they need it, to answer a customer inquiry or
find an innovative way to address a customer’s problem. Advanced “workspace
solutions,” as we call them, combine knowledge management, content management,
collaboration tools and portals to deliver focused information to a
workstation, laptop or PDA.
The
motivation to succeed. Next, we come to the aspect of
workforce performance that receives too little attention in most companies:
motivation. Your people may know how to sell, they may have access to the best
supporting tools, but do they want to sell in these new ways? We’re not talking
about measuring some vaguely defined concept like “employee satisfaction,” or
firing people up with motivational speakers or coaches. We’re talking instead
about a systematic approach where people understand what they are to do, and
why; where they have a personal stake in the success of the new sales
initiative; where they receive near-instantaneous feedback about how well they
are performing; and where the proper incentives are in place to reward their
behaviors.
It’s this last area—incentives—where organizational
traditions sometimes conspire to produce negative results. Think of situations
where companies have embraced collaborative selling: You need to bring in the
right team to make the sale. But if you use traditional accounting methods,
where someone has to split commissions with everyone brought in to help, you
are sending mixed (even illogical) messages: We want you to collaborate, but we
are dis-incenting you to do so. The practice of double accounting has addressed
this issue for many companies, and it’s an example of how structural change
needs to accompany sales force enablement.
The right context for the right behaviors.
Structural change is, in fact, the third primary enabler for the right
behaviors. Here’s an example. At one client, I rode along with their sales
persons to help assess what they could do better in one key performance area:
increasing the value of their selling time. What I saw were not problems with
the ability or motivation of the sales person; I saw a problem with the context
in which the person was working. Sales people were doing relationship
management—primarily answering customer questions—during their work day. Sounds
fine, except such interaction with clients sometimes are better handled through
an effective call center, freeing up the sales people to do what they should be
doing: selling. Companies should closely examine the context in which their
people work, so they can remove any unintended barriers to success.
It’s a challenging selling world out there, to be sure, with
competition coming from new directions every day, with products and services
increasing in complexity, and with customers demanding more as their options
expand. Companies need to do everything they can to take advantage of new
thinking and techniques to encourage the most effective sales force
behaviors—those that can pay off in a big way in increased sales.
About the Author: Patrick Mosher is an
associate partner in Accenture’s Human Performance group.
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