Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. The place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Earlier this month I was sitting down with one of my favorite customers. They’re a really meaty sized business closing in on $5 billion in revenue. They have multiple sales leaders who report into a sales director and they have closing in also on about 40 people out in the field. So, a total sales team of between 50 and 60 people with some really serious revenue that goes through the business.
We were talking about the evolution of the growth program that this sales director had put into their team. The program’s closing in on 12 months, not quite there and had a real focus on growing the capability of the leaders within this team to soon flow through into the rest of the field force that are out there as individual contributors. And what we were speaking about was expected horizons to really develop your teams and make significant changes into behaviors, into actions, outputs and in the end results that that team experiences. And one of the things we agreed on was that growth had been significant within the team across the last close to 12 months. But something that we hadn’t spoken about freely was around the expected structure that this team should expect to see across their learning journey over the coming period of time.
So, I thought today this is a fantastic topic for us to talk through and that’s around how we can expect to see growth appear in our teams and some really common approaches and formats that I’ve used and the teams I work with have used to make sure that that growth happens.
And I think to do so I’m going to focus in on one particular format that I think is the most powerful and the most commonly used certainly within our business and within those that we work with to make sure that growth happens.
So very specific topic here today around making sure that we not only plan for growth within our leaders and within our sales team members, but how we can build a format that we know will work and some expectations within the business around how the following growth periods will roll out.
So that’s what we’re going to buckle in for today. We’re going to be really punchy and short and sharp in how we go through it. But of course I’m always going to be available to anyone should you want to explore this a little bit more, because there is a lot more to it than what often meets the eye.
Okay. So when it comes to growing sales in particular teams, we’re dealing with a group of people who generally are professional relationship builders or influencers. And the reason that I think that’s an important note to begin with is that these people are very, very good at presenting themselves in a manner that builds confidence. So often when we’re talking to teams around their behaviors, around what they want to grow, around things that are really important to them, we get that facade that can come through of positivity and crisp communication and one that doesn’t really scratch below the surface.
So sometimes to get real growth happening within teams, we’ve got to be prepared to dig deep and go wide early. And that’s why I love to really focus around behaviours as the first up port of call when it comes to growth within teams.
For me, when you get behaviors right. So when we can align a team around a set of behaviors that everyone will consistently focus on, enact and really make sure is flowing through to their teams, we start to build alignment really early.
Now that’s not to say that your team might be sitting there now with broken behaviors. I’m not necessarily talking about working only on behaviours. When we have a team who don’t turn up on time, they don’t dress properly, they’re rude to customers, they don’t follow through what they’re doing. Right. They’re behaviours that we don’t often see in teams we work with because they’re very open to growing.
I’m talking about how we take behaviours from perhaps a level of mediocrity around results, perhaps behaviours around looking at why things aren’t working by first looking at others rather than within yourselves. Perhaps when we talk about not being able to have open and real conversations that get to the bottom of issues, rather than those surface level courteous type of discussions that don’t really solve problems, they’re the type of behaviours that I’m talking about needing to optimise and grow to really see personal development across your team.
So how do I like to go about the behavioural growth piece? Well, for me, there’s a really important element to make sure that we first set the scene around how we want to review behaviours. A lens that I’ve used a number of times is anything is possible. So we look at the possible over the plausible. I’ve also used lenses around changing before. We have to have also used lenses around teams choosing their own journey. Right? Remember those old choose your own adventure books for those that are old enough and you’ll be able to open those books and choose which direction you go in. Yes, I cheated on them. I sometimes did look ahead and pick the journey I wanted by coming backwards. But I’ve certainly used themes around choosing your own adventure when it comes to behaviours and within those themes, setting up really concrete areas that we want to focus our behaviours around.
So, for the models and frameworks that I use, it’s all around the Team Step Model, right? There’s a free resource, strongersalesteams.com resources. You’ll be able to find it in there. It’s called the teamstep model that works around strategy, around energy, around talent, all leading towards peak performance.
So, when I’m running behavioural workshops with our team around how we can focus on growing behaviors as the first priority, we’ll tend to focus our work around strategy, energy and talent as the key three pillars. Now, they’re by no means frameworks that I’ve created myself. I’ve certainly optimized them and made them suit how I like to work and teach. But strategy, talent and energy are three terrific ways that we can frame our thinking around behaviors. What I love to do in this instance is to say, okay, so when we talk about selling to our strategy, leading our talent and aligning our energy, where do we think we sit as a business at the moment? And this is all about taking those three. So, for example, selling to our strategy and breaking down some of the key behaviors that we have in the business and ranking them. And some of those key behaviors will be things like accountability will be around ongoing commitment to our customers, around making sure that our sales process, right, the behaviors around our sales process are consistent. When we look at talent, we’re looking at behaviours around learning, around coaching, around making sure that we are consistently committed to bringing out the best in each other, around having the hard discussions when we need to. And when we talk about energy, we’re looking at things like the behaviours, around punctuality, the Behaviours around how we present ourselves, the behaviours around keeping our word, right trust how we all work together. And by no means is this exhaustive. I have dozens and dozens of areas we look at across each of those three frameworks. But for me, when we’re first looking at behaviors, we say, right, let’s set the scene. Selling to our strategy, leading our talent and aligning our energy. And we bring out some of the key behaviors across the teams and we rank where we’re at with them.
That sets the groundwork, that sets the room to say, right here’s where we are now, where we tend to move from, from there is really widen the scope and say, is there anything else missing before we start to look at right, where should we be moving to.
So, in selling to our strategy, what is the sales process, behaviours that we need to consistently be working on in leading our talent, what’s the type of training and coaching behaviors that we know are first rate within our industry or certainly across the globe? And when it comes to energy, what are those behaviors at a more cultural level that are going to set us up for success, particularly around accountability, for example.
And the teams can then work to start to say, hey, here’s where we are now, but here’s where we want to get to. These are the behaviors that we really want to be evidencing. And you do it through those three frameworks so it doesn’t become a significant and overwhelming challenge. Right? By then really having a broad scope, it gives us something to work with, to refine into a really chunky set of behaviors.
So, once we’ve had that process down pat of selling to our strategy, leading our talent and aligning our energy and we’ve really ideated around where we are now and, and where we want to get to, that’s when we can start to try and pull these into half a dozen really tight behaviors. Teams will vary around this. Sometimes we’ll see four or five, sometimes we’ll see up to eight, maybe 10. But where we can bring our behavioral aspirations into a nice chunky set of, for example, six bubbles if you like, that we can all be working towards. That’s where the magic starts to happen with behaviours. That’s where we start to say, okay, we’ve got three leaders within the team or six leaders, or we have one leader plus some key sales team members and we start to allocate out one or maybe two behaviors each that we get to work on and think about some really key action items around how we make this happen.
So, if we’re looking around a piece around accountability, we can start to set in some behaviors that work around our response times to customers. What we do when we don’t understand something, how we make sure that we are consistently meeting the needs of our customers through a great presentation or quote template or areas of our collateral or information flows that we can make consistent. What we do when we don’t meet targets, how we call in for help when we’re having issues. Right. We can start to really build out some really chunky action items around these behaviours before we actually get into improving our offer in the market.
For me, the behaviours are the most important part because once we all get aligned on how we behave, the action items or the more tactical pieces tend to fall into place because we have some synergy in thinking. I will say behaviours are the hardest. I’ve certainly worked with customers and one comes to mind last year a terrific business and a really terrific group of sales leaders in a fintech business with some real pushback around growing out behaviors. Not because they didn’t want to grow as a team, but they didn’t see the point of working on behaviours before the more chunky action items. Now this process took some time to get through and we really had to work hard on where they’re at now and where the journey needed to go. But it was worth it because that team now I’m seeing terrific success in terms of their buy in at a strategic and tactical level when it comes to actually improving their offer and how they work with customers.
So behaviors are generally gonna take between one and six months to make an impact around. I’ve certainly seen some tangible results happen within that one-month period, but the median is around two to three months before we see behaviours start to stick. I’ll often work off a frame of 21 days to remember something and three, lots of 21 days to cement that as permanent behavioural change that tends to be around about the three-month mark and something I work with is a good target for businesses.
Okay, so we’re through stage one around our evolution of growth of our sales team and it’s focused heavily on behaviors. This is the point where we start to roll in and exactly how my conversation went with my customer earlier this month. This is where we start to roll in some of the strategic imperatives that we want to roll out in this instance. Again, and I really like to talk about three, four or five type of goals or action items or behaviors. Right. They’re very memorable when you Talk, particularly in threes.
This is where we start to go into that typical strategic planning where we’re setting goals. Let’s say, for example, three goals. One might be around revenue growth, one might be around some process improvements. The. The third one might be a cultural piece around how we work together or getting the basics right. Right. Generally, they do tend to fall into some really obvious categories around financial, around process and around cultural behavioural growth. And again, we really start to ideate wide. Right. If one of our objectives is to grow the business by 25%, maintaining gross margin and keeping customer satisfaction scores to an NPS of 8 out of 10. Right. We can then really start to ideate around that goal that says, okay, so we need to work on our sales process, we need to work on our sourcing of our products, we need to work on a couple of key features when it comes to our presentations with our customers. We need to get better at. Objection Handling. Right. We can really start to ideate out exactly what we need to do to improve around those three goals. And typically, I’m going to say kind of 40 to 60 goals come out of this before we narrow our eyes again and start to work into building an action plan. I won’t spend too much time on this because certainly it’s something we’ve spoken about in this podcast quite significantly. And I’d encourage you to look back at episodes 98 and probably 51 from the Strongest Sales Teams podcast archive. That really gives you some good ideas around how to run this session. I don’t want to spend too much time on this today because it’s certainly something we’ve obviously covered.
However, the key part here is that once we’ve built behavioural change, we can have some confidence that the strategic framework we build and where we want to focus our teams for growth, we’ll have a chance of success because our thinking is aligned. In this instance, we generally won’t kick this in until we see some behavioural change. Right? So, it starts to kick in anywhere around months 3, 4, 5 or even 6, and can work through to about month 12 before we start to see that embedded.
The reason that can take some time is we often need to run through existing strategies and roll them out. We often have a level of background work or base planning that needs to happen. I.e, if we want to be improving our sales process, we need to be doing an audit on our process. We need to be mapping it against our customer journey, understanding where the gaps are before we can really get to work to improve it. And also we have salespeople who have very busy lives.
I find generally with strategic planning that if we get a half day, a fortnight out of teams to focus on how we can grow together, that that’s a really good result because at the end of the day we still have quotas to meet, we have targets that we really want to ramp down and pipelines that we want to be building. And I will say a really good example of this is a team I work with in the renewable space that have focused around lead generation, right within that lead generation strategic growth program. The first thing they did was focus around behaviours, ways we need to behave to ensure that lead generation is a focus of our team. They these were things like always looking out for prospecting opportunities.
These were things like making sure we understand the options available through our business and how we can then tailor them to ourselves personally. So it was really powerful to get the behaviours done first. We’ve then moved into three goals around lead generation which will naturally flow into further development around our first meetings, our quotation processes and then into closing and post-sale key account management.
So, by getting the behaviours right we can then build that structure. We’re about six months into that program and we’re starting to see some results. They’re not consistent, but certainly we know we’re working around a set of behaviours and a key structure that we want to focus on for growth. So, we’re rolling through this program, we’re into the second half of the first year and in most instances towards the end of the first year where we start to say, right, the focus now is on action and results.
So, this is where we start to roll in more metrics, more measurements to say, hey, here’s what we said we were going to be doing as a team. We were going to focus on 25% growth, right? With a net promoter score of 8. And here’s all the actions we were going to do around our sales process and improving our offer and making sure that we are running two people to every meeting and that customers who are longer than 90 days, we’re putting them through a different nurturing program, right? All these things we said we were going to be doing, using our CRM really effectively, are we doing them?
And this is when we really start to measure that progress. Now that’s not to say that measurement shouldn’t be there earlier on, right? But given that growth takes time, noting that salespeople have lots to do in their roles generally tend to really hold back on the heavy measurement and essentially the compliance Part of what we’re doing until we’ve built some momentum.
So, we’re out there, we’re building the action plans, we’re starting to focus in a more binary level on outcomes. And this is where we can start to the rubber hitting the road and any cracks in the behavioural change or the frameworks that we’ve built start to appear.
So, it’s not unusual that we’ll go back to behaviours or back to the framework that we’ve set the strategic planning kind of targets and say, hey, hey, team, let’s remind ourselves what we’re out there to do. Let’s have a look at what we’ve planned and perhaps let’s review it, refine it and reroll it out.
So, we start to say, you know what, maybe this didn’t work. Some of these ideas weren’t quite practical. We’ve had 6, 9, 12 months to roll them out. It’s time to start to look at adjusting these or refining these before we get out to market again. It’s at this point that I will say it becomes really obvious around those who are on board with the growth program and those who are not, because those who are not, they won’t have made much significant progress. Their well will start to run dry when it comes to ideas and how they want to implement them, and you’ll start to get a little bit more pushback. Great. Time for you to know who’s on the bus when it comes to continually improving and who’s not. And the piece around attrition and turnover probably starts to come into the equation at this point.
So, a really important message to add to this part of the strategic growth or the personal development program is that it takes time for us to grow and cement that ongoing change. So having a little bit of patience, really difficult for a lot of sales leaders in the market, but certainly being able to have that patience while we go through this growth period is really important because it’s in that second year where I really start to see the magic happen. I have a customer that’s in an outdoor service industry. Their first six months we didn’t see a lot of progress on the scoreboard, but gee, were they committed to ripping through their sales process, looking at ways they could continue to provide value to their customers? And we focused really, really heavily on providing value early and often.
But that second six months they actually made up all the deficit they had on their budget and they had a significant deficit in their budget when we started to work together, made up all that deficit and then Grew the business by 10%, which is an outstanding result considering where they were when we first met. But that came from having the courage to look at behaviours, to look at a broad framework and then to continually review and revise the action plans that they put together.
So, my advice is certainly that when it comes to team growth, sales, team growth, personal development, if you can think around these three stages in the process, step one being behavioural, one to six months with a median of three months. Step two being setting the strategic goals once we’ve made progress on behaviours with a three to 12 month process and a median sitting in that kind of nine month area, followed by some really binary focus on measuring our actions and our progress comes in around the six to 12 month period, running through to up to about 24 months with a median here of between about one and one and a half years before we start to see consistent actions.
Well, then that gives you a really nice framework around how you can talk to your team around. Right. We’re in a process here that’s going to take us 12 to 18 months. It allows to talk to you, to management, around a process that’s going to take 12 to 18 months. But more importantly a process that’s going to stick. Because when we look for little sugar hits, they can often lead to significant detriments to our business. 12 to 18 months down the track, I’ve certainly seen that, particularly across businesses with sales teams dominated by only a few people, where the sugar hits are influenced by those one or two individuals and the business starts to become really reliant on personalities rather than good system and process. And of course that is a great stifler of growth.
So, I hope what we’ve gone through today is helpful for you around aligning how you can go about a process to grow your team. Clearly there’s a lot of work that needs to happen in there and I’m always happy to talk to you about it. We have five steps that we follow around strategy. The second piece being sales process, the third one being metrics, behaviours and celebrations. Fourth one, training. And last but not least, coaching. Right. Which we deliberately separate them because they’re so important. Terrific framework. It works really well. So, we do this every day. Right. But I can recognise that for leaders, this is something that we don’t undertake every day because we are so heavily involved in growing our team and making sure that they can do what they need to do. So, I’m hopeful that this is helpful for you. Please get in touch with me if you need to Because I’d really like to talk through it with you before we go.
Something that, from the health and fitness type of mindset that I love to share, just had five weeks away, my longest holiday I’ve had in quite a long time. And we had three weeks in America. And one thing I noticed is I put in on a fair amount of weight, right. For me, it was about 4 kilos, 5% of my body weight, something that I have not done ever in my life. And it really impacted me when I got home.
Certainly, didn’t have the confidence in my body that I had previously. But I think for me, the piece I’d like to share is that when you can be disciplined and get really clear around what you want to achieve, it’s amazing how quickly you can turn that around. So, it didn’t take me long to get back into my regime, but what I did above everything else was that I prioritised that health and fitness as first thing in the morning. And it made sure that I rebuilt those habits really quickly. Those ones I’d stepped off from tacos and burgers, oh my. I think I could recommend a Taco and Burger place, at least one in every town that we went to across the States. But for me it’s make sure that as we come back into the new year, right, we’re into the new year now, that we really start to make sure that those behaviours that we want to tick off, that we are setting ourselves up to do them.
So, a little bit of encouragement. I’m halfway there, by the way, to getting back to that level of fitness that I wanted and it won’t take me too much longer. But for everyone listening, thank you for today. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E103 Setting Ourselves Up for Team Growth This Year
