Power House Partnerships: Marketing and Sales Performance Improvement

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World class sales organisations grow organic revenues by 20% each year. They grow at least 20% in both the acquisition of new clients and the retention and development of existing accounts. There are three critical keys to their success.

1. Their total client focus in how they service and sell:
In one study companies attaining top client focus and loyalty ratings had a three-year annual revenue income growth that was 682 percent higher than companies scoring low in client focus and loyalty

2. They leverage the best practices of their high performers:
High performers are less than 20% of any team yet often produce 80% of the revenues. They consistently deliver 2, 3 or 4 times more than the average performer.

3. Effectively train and develop the right people:
Leadership’s primary role must be to recruit train and retain the sales people and client facing professionals who have the skills and demonstrate the client focus that clients reward with loyalty. They equip people with the tools required and reinforce their client focus throughout the sales process.

A method that has proven successful for doing just that is the focus of this briefing.

Step 1 is identifying the performance requirements. What are the key skills and activities we need to build a world class, client focused team?

Internal organisation view
Within our companies we can all point to a group of high performers who have built outstanding client relationships, who experience higher retention and growth rates and whose results exceed the average. We can learn much from these individuals and observations of their performance can provide us with internal benchmarks. The objective is to identify what already works and leverage those activities into training for the rest of our team(s)

The problem is high performers apply skills, habits and tools they have built up over years. If asked what they actually do that produces success, they are rarely able to explain, they just do it and expect everyone else to as well. We identify high performance in 4 steps:

Step 1: Define the performance measures to use (which indicators are best for
determining high performance – for example, total revenue, revenue to
target, margin, account growth etc.)

Step 2: Interview key management stakeholders one to one, to obtain
insights into critical sales skills and activities

Step 3: Accompany high performers on a client meeting. This non intrusive but
intensive observation exercise highlights critical activities and
provides valuable insights into the behaviours and approaches being
applied

Step 4: Supplement the accompanied client visits which is limited to single
snapshot, with more detailed information from an activity log.
The logs provide real insights into results from different sets of
activities across the organisation. Although not every ones favourite
exercise and needs to be introduced with care, the insights can be
critical. With one team of account executives we found that high
performers spent 65% of their week with clients where low performers
spent 25%. Accurate data is difficult to argue with

External client view
Input from clients about the activities and behaviours they expect is an essential element. Why do new client first chose our company and why do they continue to buy from us? This is not feedback on our service levels but getting to the core of what clients truly value about us and our people. Our objective must be to build a client focused organisation and we can only do that with direct client input.

Industry view
What is it world class sales organisations actually do differently? How do we compare with them? What can we learn from the activities of other sales teams? Often, we find that tools and skills used successfully in one industry are yet to be applied in another. What can we take and adapt to our changing markets?

High Performance Model:

Once we have our client input, internal benchmarks and best-practice examples we have a powerful model to define client focused selling. The only remaining challenge is to put the method into action to transform the performance of our sales organisation. There are two primary steps: 1) recruiting the right people 2) training and developing people

Recruiting: The client focused performance model will help you assess the capabilities of potential recruits and enable you to take on the people with the right ability and potential.

Training and development: the same tool used to evaluate new recruits can be used to assess the existing team to identify gaps and prioritise training and development. The common gaps will identify the most needed training modules. A challenge with training is to link costs with business return. In this model you have already quantified the impact of sales skills and activities on revenue and business results.

Summary
“Transforming the sales organisation” and “client focused selling” are more than just slogans they are business imperatives if we want to drive up organic growth and get ahead of the competition.

CASE STUDY