As the new year 2020 just started, business leaders are planning sales and growth for the year. There is no better place to help leaders with accountability and execution of sales plans than at Executive Forums Silicon Valley (EFSV), where business owners, CEOs and executives “ignite your leadership engine.” EFSV is a confidential peer advisory board where selected business owners and executives work together to create clarity, insight and accountability that improves their business and accelerates their personal leadership, learning and growth.

Steve Johnson of Scaling Sales, a sales specialist and consultant, recently presented at the Executive Forum Silicon Valley (EFSV) business owner forum about “Six Steps to Build a High-Performance Sales Team” that 

• Maximize quarterly, monthly and yearly sales
• Are scalable and repeatable; and 
• Find and win “good’ deals

The “Six Steps to Build a High-Performance Sales Team” focused on people, process and systems, as summarized follows:

Step 1 – How much do you want to sell within a time frame? This step focuses on developing clarity around sales goals and quotas, more than mere spreadsheets. Establish key parameters such as leads to qualified opportunities, average sales per deal, deal closing rate, sales per salesperson, lead value, etc..

Step 2 – What are your customers biggest problems? Prior to selling, first gain insight about a customer’s specific problems. For instance, when a customer is running from alligators they are trying to save their life and are not worried about price.

Step 3 – People – Who can best sell to my customers? This key step provides the insight for aligning the sales team to the customers buying process and risk tolerance.

The illustrations below show how to identify and use the right salespeople for different sales types:

Step 4 – What processes best support these people? Simplified and well-defined processes enable consistency, repeatability and personnel interchangeability necessary to scale sales, such as:

• Sales Process mirroring customers’ decision process with step by step actions
• Lead Generation, Accurate Sales Forecasting & Pipeline
• New Employee Onboarding, Accountability and Coaching

These processes must also be reinforced with accountability as shown in the following graphic.

Step 5 – What systems enable and enforce the processes? With all of the tools available in the marketplace to support the sales process, a key discussion point was to keep things simple and aligned to the size of your team and the complexity of your sales process, using some of the key system tools such as: 

• Dashboard, CRM, Data & Reporting
• Intelligent Sales Assistant/Coach, Call Recording
• Sales Enablement, Forecasting and Pipeline Tools

When building a sales team, to establish accountability, it is necessary to measure individual performance (as shown in the graphic below) and the performance of the team. 

An example of a salesperson’s dashboard:

Step 6 – Execution – Getting it done. Building sales teams and scaling sales requires focusing on activities that have the largest impact and adjusting your efforts as you learn:

• Make a plan & prioritize
• What’s the one thing that if implemented would have the biggest impact?
• Only introduce ONE improvement or change every 2-4 weeks
• Test and adjust as needed
• Follow through – Do what you say you’re going to do
• Rinse and repeat

The educational component in the “Six Steps to Build a High-Performance Sales Team” allowed the business owners at the monthly Executive Forums Silicon Valley (EFSV) to take something away to improve their sales. 

To learn more about Steve Johnson’s “Six Steps to Build a High Performance Sales Team”, about his background and how to apply these techniques to building your sales teams, please contact him at steve@scalingsales.com, 415-259-7882, or visit www.scalingsales.com.

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If you are interested in participating or learning more about becoming a member at Executive Forum Silicon Valley, please contact @GlennPerkins at gperkins@executiveforums.com or call 408-901-0321. For more information visit www.execforumssv.com.