Having Trouble Hiring? We Can Help

Before we talk about confidence with successfully hiring a sales team individual, whether they’re a VP of sales, a sales manager, or a salesperson, let’s be clear on the risk of a mishire and its associated costs. For most positions, hiring organizations find that for every two hires, they get one good one. Our experience suggests these mishire rates of 50% are higher with smaller business – likely due to the fact that larger organizations have well-established hiring processes. With sales positions, the risk of a mishire is even greater, and the cost of a mishire can approach 6 to 15 times the annual salary of that sales position.

So, for a salesperson who is paid $100K/year, a mishire can cost $600K. A mishire at the VP level can cost $3.75Mil, based on an annual salary of $250K. These are whopping numbers and reflect the all-in costs that may include down time, ramp-up and even remediation efforts that span a period of 6 months or more. Amazingly, 75% of all hires include some level of candidate disappointment.

We’ve all heard the expression ‘money makes the world go ‘round’. Companies are dependent on employees, and great team members grow revenue streams so cash can flow. The two main drivers of revenue in a company are marketing and sales. A lot is at stake when it comes to hiring sales talent.  

If you could resolve all or most of the concerns about your sales position hiring and how that has worked for you and your organization, what concerns would you want to address? Too often we’re blind to certain factors in a sales position candidate and don’t have any way to ‘try them on’ before we hire them. It’s something we only discover after we have made our hiring decision. 

Read more about hiring for your sales team on our website! 

Are you ready to begin your journey?

Are you ready to build a sales-focused organization with a high performing sales team and an effective sales management solution? Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales team, many people we speak with have been hesitant to act – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together.

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a sample sales candidate assessment report! Together, we can assess how your company is doing, what potential it has, how to realize this potential, how long it will take along with expected gains. We are here to help you determine the best way to achieve your goals.

Could a SEIA Analysis Help Your Company Achieve Sales Success?

Our Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis (SEIA) will help you understand the current state of your sales efforts and provide valuable insights into where to invest your time to affect change that will improve your overall sales performance and effectiveness. 

This analysis will help you make informed decisions on bigger and smaller changes you can make to improve the effectiveness and performance of your sales team, sales management, and sales leadership as it exists today. 

For many who opt to conduct the SEIA with their sales department, the report will open possibilities and expose blind spots that become important catalysts for change and performance enhancement. 

 How will the SEIA be helpful to your organization and its sales efforts and results? Think about your current sales efforts and results. Now think about where you would like your sales efforts and results to be. Using a 1-10 scale where 1 is low and 10 is high, rate your current sales efforts and results against what you would like to see. What number have you given your current sales efforts and results? 

Now let’s examine that number. If your score is less than 10, there is room for improvement. You might have some idea on where improvements can be made. The SEIA will help you confirm your ideas, and it will give you more specific information on gains you will realize upon implementing change. 

If you scored a 10 out of 10, does this mean there is no room for improvement? We hope not… the SEIA can help you make decisions on what to tackle next to realize gains. Creating a Sales-Focused organization that is resilient, focused on new and repeat business, and successful in achieving its revenue and profit goals is not transactional. It requires a commitment and the investment of time, energy, and effort with a clear vision of what success looks like. 

Read the full article about achieving sales success on our website!

Hire a Company to Help You Achieve Sales Success

Why not take stock now and expose some areas that will make a dramatic difference? Is your company focused on the right areas, and producing the performance and outcomes you seek? Give us a call, the SEIA is not for everyone, but we can help you determine whether it’s a viable option for your organization and its sales success.

Sales Success: In Search of Answers to Impact Your Sales Efforts and Success

If you could ask and answer any or all the questions you have about your sales efforts and the results you’re getting, what would that mean to you? 

Answers to some basic or more challenging questions help organizations make informed decisions. 

These answers impact why action should be taken, when, and with what level of investment of time, energy, effort, and money. Some questions that come to mind include:

• can we shorten our sales cycle?
• who can become more effective in their sales role?
• can we generate more new business?
• do our systems and processes support a high-performance sales team?
• can we close more opportunities and get better sales results?
• how is sales leadership impacting our sales force and their performance?
• what are the short-term priorities for accelerated growth?
• what are our current sales capabilities?
• can we improve our sales culture?
• how motivated are our salespeople and what motivates them?  

What questions would you like to ask and have answers to that will guide your next decisions regarding your sales efforts and results? Questions fall into a few categories: people, process, execution, culture, and results. For each of these areas, we can ask about current capacity and capability, how much more potential we have, and how we realize that potential to achieve better results. 

Other questions include: “where can I maximize the impact of any changes we introduce and how long will it likely take to make changes that have measurable results?”

Read more about how to achieve sales success on our website! 

Are you ready to begin your journey toward Sales Success?

Are you ready to build a sales-focused organization with a high performing sales team and an effective sales management solution?

Have you struggled in the past to develop an effective sales focus, giving your business what it needs to thrive and achieve sales success?

Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales team, many people we speak with have been hesitant to act – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together.

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact us form to receive a sample SEIA report! Together, we can assess how your company is doing, what potential it has, how to realize this potential, how long it will take along with expected gains. We are here to help you determine the best way to achieve your goals.

How Can Creating a Sales-Focused Organization Evolve Your Business?

As a business owner/leader, are you frustrated that you're not hitting your sales goals and know something needs to change?

Based on our experience, we have found that the importance of a strong foundation can’t be understated.

If the foundation of your home had a large crack, you would be rightfully worried and call a professional to get it taken care of as soon as possible. Why look at business any differently?

We believe in creating a Sales-Focused Organization including:

• Sales fundamentals such as an effective sales process, your power statements with strong messaging, and powerful conversations that combine these fundamentals, to build upon and drive success for you and your team.
• Effective sales management, meaning the sales leader/manager should squarely be focused on the development of strong performing sales team members and working closely with them to refine skills and abilities that result in enhanced performance and therefore better results.
  

Read the full list on our website.

Are you ready to begin your journey toward sales success?

Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales process, many clients we work with aren’t ready to take action – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together

Call us at 248-468-7400 or contact us and we’ll reach out to you right away!

Ready to Begin Your Journey Toward Sales Success?

As a business owner/leader, are you frustrated that you're not hitting your sales goals and know something needs to change?

Let’s face it, Sales and a Company’s Sales Function form some of the most important success elements through the life cycles of any business that begins as a start-up, advances through early-stage growth, second stage growth, on to maturity, sustainability, and beyond.

If you are like many of the businesses we have worked with, you may have experienced the following:

• frustration with not reaching your sales targets
• sales cycles that are longer than expected
• a pipeline that is too weak to make up the difference on too-slow-to-close opportunities
• unsure if you have a good or the right sales process in place
• as a business owner/leader, overwhelmed with both running the business and managing the sales function and/or sales team
• struggling to find the right sales manager
• as a sales manager, overwhelmed by too many responsibilities
• as a sales manager, pressure to find an efficient process to lead and coach a sales team
• as a sales manager, feeling conflicted about having to grow and lead your sales team while also trying to achieve your own sales targets
  

This is not an exhaustive list. Which items above might be true for you?

What other factors are you experiencing that lead you to be less than satisfied with your sales efforts and performance?

Based on our experience, we have found that the importance of a strong foundation can’t be understated. If the foundation of your home had a large crack, you would be rightfully worried and call a professional to get it taken care of as soon as possible. Why look at business any differently?

Find out more about our sales-focused organization training on our website.

Are you ready to begin your journey toward sales success?

Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales process, many clients we work with aren’t ready to take action – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together

Call us at 248-468-7400 or contact us and we’ll reach out to you right away!

Are You Building a High Performance Sales Team?

Is your company focused on the right areas, and producing the performance and outcomes you seek? 

Thinking of your current organization, its focus on sales, the culture, employee & management attitudes (mindset), along with sales performance, read the statements below and ask yourself: are these in place and are they optimized? 

If your answer is NO to two or more statements, then you would likely benefit from a shift in sales related focus in your organization.

• All employees have a positive view of sales and selling in our organization
• The sales leader meets regularly with the business owner /leadership to ensure alignment of sales and organizational strategy
• Strategic prospecting targets are defined and included in each salesperson’s territory plan
• All employees in the organization understand the importance of sales and the role they play in supporting and increasing both sales and customer satisfaction
• The organizational culture supports sales efforts and our goal of being easy to do business with for our customers
• Each salesperson has a dashboard or individual sales plan that is reviewed regularly
• The sales team is viewed by the organization as a high-performance team, much like a sports team

Read more about creating a sales-focused organization on our website.

Every sales-focused organization has room for improvement! If you aren’t implementing all the statements above, or only a few, you may need to adjust your thinking or priorities around your sales efforts and function… it may be time to get help.

Over the past few months, we’ve provided an in-depth look at key areas of a successful Sales Focused Organization including sales fundamentals, effective sales management, and a high-performance sales team. Please click here to request your copy of our comprehensive checklist outlining specific focus areas toward building a sales focused organization that succeeds and thrives.

Want to get the best out of your sales efforts?

We work with sales leaders, managers, teams, individual salespeople, and their organizations.  With both our standard offerings and our customized coaching and consulting engagements, we focus on the gap areas to drive better sales results.  Our work varies in length from just one quarter to multi-year engagements depending upon the size of the organization and needs. In some cases, we operate as a Fractional Sales Leader and other times we coach with an existing Sales Manager and sales team. We often work at all levels of the organization to help build a Sales Focused Organization - leadership, strategic direction, systems, management, departments, and individual contributors. We also assist in the recruiting and evaluation of “Qualified, New Business” Sales representatives.

Creating a Sales-Focused Organization

What goes into creating a Sales-Focused Organization? In our series, we have addressed elements that include sales process, messaging, the conversations salespeople have, sales management and a high-performance sales team. We now turn our attention to creating a sales-focused organization. 

Critical elements that must come together include leadership, strategic direction, clear targets (markets, differentiators, goals) and all the sales elements we’ve covered in our last 3 articles. For some organizations, evaluating the current team through a Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis (SEIA) can be a game changer. For companies that have many salespeople, have had a sales manager in place for a while, this analysis can rapidly offer insight on gaps that once closed create for a great return on investment.

What is the view or mindset of your organization toward its sales team? The sales team should be viewed as a high performance team, no different than a professional sports team. The entire organization (employees / leadership) must get behind the sales team and be supportive, helpful, and passionate about winning, succeeding, and driving results. Something as simple as setting the mindset of ‘everyone sells’ can be a shift in the culture and attitudes embraced by the organization.

Has organizational leadership made clear its go-to-market strategy, along with high value targets? Is the sales manager and sales team equipped and armed with the needed information to carry to prospective customers? Too often sales teams are expected to function just like an owner or leader would, often relying on passion and inside knowledge the sales team doesn’t have access to. Is your sales team set up for success or failure? What information does the owner or leadership have that once shared becomes a game-changer?

Read the full article on our website.

Are you ready to begin your journey?

Have you struggled in the past to develop an effective sales focus, giving your business what it needs to thrive?

Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales team, many people we speak with have been hesitant to act – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together.

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a download of our Sales-Focused Organizational Checklist! Together, we can assess how your company is doing from a sales, messaging, management, and performance standpoint, and determine the best way to help you achieve your goals.