Train Your Sales Team with Howard P. Stevens, How to Create A World-Class Sales Team

This article is based on a conversation with Howard P. Stevens, chairman and CEO of The HR Chally Group, a sales performance consulting corporation providing personnel assessment and research services to over 2,500 clients, including General Motors, International Paper, Standard Register, CareerBuilder.com, Charles Schwab, and Siemens. He is the author of several books on sales and management, and he has written many articles. His most recent book is Achieve Sales Excellence: Becoming the New Sales Professional (Platinum Press, 2007). He can be reached at The HR Chally Group
1900 Founders Dr., Ste. 350
Dayton, OH 45420.
Tel: 937/259-1200.
Web: www.chally.com

What is World-Class Selling?
For the past fifteen years, The HR Chally Group has conducted over 80,000 telephone interviews with a wide range of buying organizations. These buyers rated the effectiveness of over 200,000 salespeople who called on them. The HR Chally research team could then determine which selling organizations were the best at serving customer needs. When that process reveals world-class performing sales teams, HR Chally then works with those teams to identify and profile the best practices, best metrics, and best management processes, so that other firms can emulate them. These profiles have changed over the years as the general business environment has changed. What’s needed today to make a sales force world-class is very different than what was required 15 years ago.

In the past, B2B customers viewed sales reps similar to sales clerks in B2C environments, but with specialized knowledge about B2B products and services. Today, however, customers view sales professionals much as they would look at an outsourcing firm.
Customers now expect sales professionals to take responsibility for a segment of the customer’s business and become an integral element of the customer’s plan for success. That’s a very different role than simply selling and requires a very different skill set. It’s no longer sufficient to merely be knowledgeable about the products and services that your company offers. The sales rep must now understand the customer’s business as thoroughly as the customer does – and even more thoroughly when it comes to the area that customer is outsourcing to the sales rep.

For example, suppose that you’re selling raw materials to a chemical manufacturer. In the past, it would have been enough to know your price book and have a good idea of availability of the raw materials relative to the customer’s requirements. Most of the sales process would have consisted of assessing those requirements and making certain that your firm could provide them at the lowest cost. Today, however, that same chemical manufacturer will want not just product information but the ability of your firm to adapt to rapid changes in the customer’s demand; assess the environmental impact of mining, shipment, and disposal; and take advantage of seasonal price variations resulting from industry-wide demand. The buyer will expect the sales rep to understand the complexities of that segment of the business and, ideally (from the customer’s viewpoint) will want the sales professional to personally manage the raw materials segment of that customer’s business – and ensure that everything happens in a timely, cost-effective manner.

How Do You Create a
World-Class Sales Team?

First the bad news. The HR Chally research strongly indicates world-class sales teams are only possible inside organizations where the desire for such a team is driven from the very top of the organization. Top management must be completely committed to creating a corporate culture that focuses entirely on the customer. Even with all the good intentions in the world, that may not be entirely possible inside companies that must also focus on manufacturing, engineering, finance, or other elements of the business process. Companies that have, for example, an engineering culture will always tend to put technical excellence (however they define it) ahead of what customers feel that they really need.

In fact, the companies and sales organizations that customers like best are so customer-focused that they don’t do anything else. World-class sales organizations tend to outsource all elements of their business – like engineering and manufacturing – that are not directly customer-facing. This is not to say that a company with an engineering-centric culture can’t have an effective sales force. It means only that the sales force will need to overcome the cultural bias of the larger corporate environment. That effort inevitably involves additional resources and effort, preventing such sales teams from ever being able to reach the very highest levels of world-class selling.

And that leads us to the good news. While it’s not always possible to align an entire corporation into a customer-focused culture, it is possible to create, within an individual sales team, a subculture that’s customer-focused and capable of approaching, if not entirely achieving, world-class status. However, this effort will require the sales manager and the sales team to make a major effort to culturally isolate the sales team from the rest of the corporation.

The Management Challenge

To create a world-class selling subculture, the sales manager must accomplish three major tasks:
1. Train the staff to a world-class level. The sales manager must find and fund training and coaching for the individuals in the sales team so that they can transcend typical B2B selling and instead act as managers for key elements of the customer’s business. In most cases, this also involves building a sales process that encapsulates that customer experience and then, within the context of that process, building a customized training plan for each individual sales professional.
2. Achieve functional autonomy. The sales manager must take control of the sales organization, especially in the areas of hiring and training. Without this, the dominant culture of the corporation will quickly impinge upon the sales team and “normalize” it. For example, if the sales manager in an engineering-focused organization allows the engineering manager to make hiring decisions for the sales team, that team will quickly be filled with grade B engineers who weren’t talented enough to be hired into the engineering group.
3. Secure support resources from the rest of the company. The sales manager must constantly manage upward and outward so the resources of the rest of the company are put at the disposal of the sales team. For example, in a manufacturing-focused firm, the sales manager must make certain that the manufacturing staff can act as consultants and experts during the sales process in order to help the sales team build customer-focused solutions. While there is no question that this is a difficult task, it is a necessary one if a company (that is not inherently customer-focused) is to achieve above-average sales results.

How to Move Forward

Needless to say, creating a sales subculture that can support world-class selling is not an overnight affair, nor is it likely to take place as the result of a single sales training session. However, it is possible to begin the process with a single meeting, especially when it comes to creating the individual training plans that are the key element of customer-focused behavior.

As you move forward with this long-term campaign to become world class, remember that your customers are your greatest natural allies. As your sales organization begins to behave in ways that the customers find essential to their own success, your customers will become more vocal in their praises for your customer-focused behavior. Sales figures will grow rapidly and your customer satisfaction ratings will soar. These positive results will become increasingly obvious to top management, making it easier for you to maintain the subculture without interference. In fact, over time, a world-class sales organization can begin to transform the rest of a company, making the entire organization more customer-focused.

Quick tips for your sales meeting

 Here’s what a sales organization must accomplish in order to be world-class sellers:

Create a customer-driven culture.
Recruit and select the right sales talent.
Train and develop the right set of skills.
Segment markets in meaningful ways.
Implement a formal sales process.
Develop enabling information technology.
Integrate other business functions with sales.

Sales Manager’s Training Guide

At Your Next Sales Meeting

Below are 10 practical steps to help you begin to create a sales subculture that’s capable of world-class selling. Although this sales meeting requires significant preparation, the meeting itself should only take an hour.

1. Prior to the meeting, have every salesperson read this article. Becoming a world-class selling organization is a major effort, so everyone needs to understand the big picture of what’s involved.

2. Prior to the meeting, prepare two summary slides. The first slide, which you can take from “Quick Tips for Your Sales Meeting” (see page 52) gives an overview of what you, as a sales manager, will be trying to accomplish over the coming months. The second slide, which you can take from “Quick Tips for Your Sales Training Session” (see page 54) provides an overview of what your sales team will need to do in order to participate in the transformation.

3. Prior to the meeting, review the employee files and your personal recollections and notes on the skill set belonging to every member of your team. Briefly compare the team’s current skill set with what will be required inside a world-class selling organization. Similarly, review your current corporate culture to confirm to what extent it is customer-focused. Do not become discouraged if there is a large “delta” between where you currently are and where you’d like to be. It takes time and patience to become the best.

4. Open the meeting with a statement that you appreciate everything that the team has accomplished and that you want to help reach the next level of performance. Tell the team that you will need their help because the team is going to be undertaking a quest to become the best sales organization in the company, if not the entire industry.

5. Using your first slide, share the basic concepts of world-class selling as it looks from a corporate culture standpoint. Ask the team to rate your current corporate culture against that ideal.

6. Open the floor for discussion with the question: “How well do we, as a company, conform to what’s needed to achieve world-class selling?” Keep the discussion positive; be sure to emphasize the areas where your firm is on target at least as much as the areas that your firm is off-base. Spend no more than 10 minutes on this step.

7. Using your second slide, share the basic concepts of what customers are seeking from a world-class sales organization. Ask each team member to assess how well he or she is capable of fulfilling those roles.

8. Have each team member privately note their strengths and weaknesses as it relates to those definitions. Ask them, over the next week, to come up with some suggestions to overcome the weaknesses and leverage the strengths. Promise to meet with each team member individually to work on a personal development plan.

9. Open the floor for general discussion with the question: “What can we do as a team to help achieve the goal of becoming a world-class sales organization?” Working with the team, identify three to five specific action steps that will help create a subculture that’s closer to the ideal. Spend at least 30 minutes on this task, so that the steps are clearly delineated, actionable, and measurable.

10. Close the meeting by thanking the team for their participation and with a resolution to revisit the status of the action steps at successive sales meetings until goals are achieved.

QUICK TIPS FOR YOUR SALES TRAINING SESSION

Here’s a list of what today’s customers are seeking from
today’s sales professionals:
1. Be personally accountable for our desired results. It’s not acceptable to “pass the buck.” You have to put your own skin in the game.
2. Understand our business. If you’re going to manage the customer’s results, you need to know how the customer’s business works.
3. Be on our side. Since you’re the customer’s gateway into your firm, they want to feel that you will fairly represent their interests.
4. Design the right applications. Think beyond technical features and functions to the application of your solution inside the customer’s business.
5. Be easily accessible. Customers know that you have a mobile computer and a cell phone and expect you to answer emails or
vmails within minutes.
6. Solve our problems. Customers are no longer interested in products and services per se, but in solutions built from products and services.
7. Be creative in responding to our needs. With the Internet, customers can find just about anything they need, when they need it. You have to do more.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Why do I need to know about general business, if I’m just in sales?
A: Every customer is ultimately concerned with revenue, profit, loss, and larger issues, such as corporate governance. If you don’t understand how businesses work in general, you’ll never understand specifically how your customer’s business works.

Q: Why is the role of the sales professional changing?
A: Proliferation of information, workforce mobility, the ease of communications, and the
globalization of markets are completely altering the way that we work and live. As a result, the sales professional must provide value to the customer’s business, rather than just information about the seller’s offerings.

Q: What is the most important trend in sales today?
A: The increasing desire for “professionalism” among sales professionals. As with other professions, this will involve increased specialization and additional education. This is why an increasing number of colleges and universities are offering majors and minors in sales.