Manage Your Sales Team: An Image of Success

This article is based on a conversation with Donal Daly, the author of four books, including the best-selling Select Selling Sales Fieldbook. Daly is also the CEO of The TAS Group, a company that provides on-demand, sales-performance automation. Address: 803 Kirkland Avenue, Suite 100, Kirkland, WA 98033 Tel: 1-866-570-3836
Web: www.thetasgroup.com

(Note: Although this case study is based on a real company, at the request of the consulting company some specifics about the client, including the company name, have been concealed.)

ACME, founded in 1972, is an independent provider of imaging IT solutions for the healthcare industry. It provides end-to-end solutions intended to enhance clinical, operational, and administrative functions for imaging centers, ambulatory care facilities, radiology practices, and cardiology practices. The firm employs 500 people and generated $50 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year. It just completed acquisition of a major competitor, expanding its capabilities in the cardiology segment of its business.

ACME’s sales organization faced four major challenges:

1. A complex sales cycle. Medical imaging applications often combine a variety of capabilities and solutions packaged in different ways. Because the purchasing process often involves multiple stakeholders from different customer organizations, the sales cycle could easily get bogged down in internal politics and budgetary delays. As a result, ACME’s sales cycles were as long as a year or more, making it easy for key sales activities to fall through the cracks during lulls in the cycle.

2. A competitive market. Several large, multinational corporations, many of which are able to bring to bear more manpower and financial resources than ACME could typically muster, dominate the medical-imaging market. To make matters worse, ACME often found itself losing opportunities to competitors simply because it was not aware of the opportunities soon enough to become involved.

3. Weak process consistency. ACME’s three regions had developed their own sales practices without much regard or attention to the other regions. This resulted in disjointed sales efforts that were often difficult for the rest of the company to adequately support.

4. Weak lead prequalification. ACME lacked a go/no-go decision-making process at the beginning of the sales cycle. Because there was little prequalification, the company ended up pursuing many “opportunities” that either petered out in the middle of the sales cycle or ended with no decision. Because they consumed sales resources that could have been deployed in qualified opportunities, these sales efforts reduced the company’s ability to generate both revenue and profit; however, ACME’s sales organization also had three substantial strengths:

1. Its sales teams were knowledgeable. The sales teams understood the technical characteristics of their product and could be a credible source of information for customers. But this strength was often counterproductive, because it led the sales force to emphasize industry-standard features and functions, which in turn rendered sales activities exercises in competitive pricing.

2. The sales force was tech savvy. The sales force was fanatical about using a CRM system to track all stages of the sales process. While that ensured that management could track sales, it also encouraged the sales force to follow a sales process that had little or nothing to do with the way individual customers bought these products. As a result, CRM tended to get in the way of selling, rather than help the sales team to sell.

3. The sales force was also market savvy.  ACME had a very strong marketing group with extensive experience in software product marketing; however, while this group was undoubtedly talented, the team tended to think in terms of brand building and standardized messages, rather than address specific customer needs. As a result, ACME had a set of highly attractive marketing materials that were unfortunately of little use in actual sales situations.

ACME’s management realized that it needed to shift the sales organization away from selling product to selling value, but it lacked the experience and perspective to drive that change in-house.

ACME hired ES Research as an independent consultant to locate a sales training/system integration firm that could both create a value-selling methodology and make certain that methodology was integrated and reflected in the company’s CRM system. ES Research helped ACME winnow the list of possibilities to three firms, with the final contract going to The TAS Group.

To more clearly understand the problem, the TAS group interviewed individual account managers and sales managers. That process uncovered sales reps who were very successful at winning against the competition or decreasing the elapsed time in the sales cycle. They discovered that these wins typically involved a sales approach that was highly customized to the individual prospect, not the generic approach followed most of the time.

Based on that research and best practices borrowed from other successful software firms, The TAS Group built a sales methodology that more closely matched the way customers wanted to buy this product. They also created a sales terminology for use by all of ACME’s sales groups so that sales teams could better coordinate their sales activities. A robust lead-qualification process with well-defined go/no-go decision points was a major change from the prior methodology.

That methodology was programmed into Dealmaker, an on-demand software program that’s integrated with ACME’s CRM system. The TAS Group then prepared classroom
and online training covering both the methodology and the use of the software inside the CRM environment.