I love getting and answering questions, as it helps shape my thoughts into useful forms to share. Here’s a recent answer I posted on ExpertCEO (a private online community for CEOs), to a question that was along the lines of…
“Do you have any advice for a company with a strong services practice that has sold mostly through partners in the past, but who is now looking to build their own Sales Machine? Any advice would much appreciated.”
That’s a pretty broad question, so here’s a broad answer. principles I feel would help anyone get going in the right direction:
1) Be PATIENT. Developing a sales engine that predictably generates revenue can take 12-24+ months, depending on the state of your company. Even any one new program in b2b sales can take 3-6 months to be defined, show measured progress, and become integrated & habitual (i.e. machine-like).
2) Experiment. With everything. Constantly.
3) No one-offs! (Unless it’s an experiment to learn something for the future). It’s not worth doing if it’s not repeatable. One-off efforts, even for a quick payoff, are a distraction from focusing your energy on sustainable efforts.
4) If it doesn’t exist in your CRM system, it doesn’t exist. (Sales)people must be comp’d only off data in the CRM system. Reports must be run totally in salesforce.com/CRM, whenever possible. Etc. [Update: thank you Ken Rudin of for the comment below, I agree the data just needs to be in a system and accessible. I should have said here that reports must not be in Excel whenever possible!]
5) Can you sketch out how things work on a flow chart? Even simply, on paper or a whiteboard? If not, that’s a problem. What’s the desired outcome, and process that leads to that outcome? Is it being done ad-hoc today? Sketching it out is the first step to bringing some order to the process…and thus outcome.
6) Focus on results rather than activity (ex: number of qualified opportunities created per month is much more meaningful than number of sales calls made)
7) Track fewer, more important metrics. It’s easy to go way overboard in building reports and dashboards. Work with your team to prioritize metrics. Think in handfuls, not dozens.
8) Special attention on batons that cross functions. Whenever a process crosses teams (marketing to sales, or sales to professional services, or…), a baton is passed, and you have all the ripest conditions for problems.
9) Babysteps! Consistently try lots of little improvements. If you keep at them, they’ll add up to big changes over time. (Remember the patience part?)
Additional posts
A few other blog posts that help illustrate the kind of thinking it takes to build a sales machine: