How to build a lean mean selling machine
Updated: Nov 11, 2021
Every Sales Manager wants to build a sales system that delivers a high conversion rate which enables them to grow a high performing sales team. Sales guru and author Jeb Blount has built a career on helping sales teams build and optimise the sales process. According to Jeb, it all starts with defining the sales stages, implementing tracking and making changes to optimise the process.
At the heart of the Sales System is the CRM, which records your sales teams interactions with your prospects. With a CRM in place, the next step is to build out a Sales Dashboard, that provides you as a Sales Leader the data you need to track and monitor the performance of your team.
“Elite salespeople, like elite athletes, track everything. You will never reach peak performance until you know your numbers and use those numbers to make directional corrections.” Jeb Blount
Arguably the most important chart on your dashboard will be the Sales Pipeline. One example of a sales pipeline, is shown below. This stacked bar chart view of the sales pipeline allows a Sales Manager to quickly identify which team members are performing well and which need intervention or optimisation.
In the example above we can see that Thomasine has had a great quarter, with a large number of sales, but now his pipeline is not looking great. Whereas, Williams has had a solid number of deals come in, as well as continuing to manage his pipeline well. From this data it looks like he will have another solid performance. The chart also shows that Chet is having a large number of deals stall, some further support and mentoring could really improve his performance. A simple chart like this is the start of building a high performing sales system.
This chart has been built using ThoughtSpot, a BI tool that has been created specifically for business users. The data in this example is being sourced from Salesforce, however we can produce the same chart using data from any CRM. ThoughtSpot allows Sales Managers to use a Google-like search to ask questions and understand their sales data, without being dependent on an analyst. For example, if the Sales Manager wants to know what the win rate is for each of their team, they can use a simple search like the one below.
ThoughtSpot will do the hard work and produce a simple chart like this one.
In a couple of seconds the Sales Manager can see that Sid has been their best closer, by a big margin.
According to a Harvard Business Review study, 50% of high-performing sales organisations have a closely-monitored, well-structured sales process, compared to 28% of under-performing organisations.
If you would like to know how we can help you create a Sales Management Dashboard to provide structure to your sales operation, please drop me an email at james@harperstone.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/harperj/.
