Cadence and Consistency: Set and manage the heart beat of the team
By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication
Once upon a time, sales success was defined by the high-energy, entrepreneurial sales rep who relied on his own set of tricks and strategies, personalized and honed over time, to help him land and keep big accounts. Sales managers might not have much control over them, nor did they always understand what they were doing, but as long as these “top gun” sellers kept retiring quota, it didn’t really matter.
Those days are long gone, or they are about to be. The current economic client demands that sales organizations rethink their whole approach to the sales process. Sales is the lifeblood of any company, and yet too many companies still can‘t honestly say they have a good handle on what is going on with their sales teams most of the time. The problem is especially troubling when it comes to high dollar/high value deals with enterprise clients involving long sales cycles. Many sales organizations still have a disturbing lack of coordination or control over what their sales teams are doing, or when and why they are doing it. The biggest problem with this approach – among many – is that it is very difficult to tell which sales processes and strategies work, and which don‘t. If you aren‘t sure what is broken, how can you know what needs to be fixed? And perhaps even worse, if you don‘t know what is working, how can you ensure you are doing more of what works?
The current economy, facilitated by the Sales 2.0 revolution, has turned tradition selling concepts upside down, and has perpetrated a drastic and permanent shift in the way sales organizations must function. Many products and services now require much more complex solutions. Companies are now global in every sense of the word. The cost of complex sales is high; long sales cycles, large teams, travel, etc., can all contribute to these costs. However, those costs pale in comparison to the price an organization pays for not rigorously managing their sales teams according to a consistent, well-conceived sales cadence. If sales organizations don’t operate according to what is known today as a tightly integrated sales cadence that defines how and when the sales process rolls out and also captures vital information that can be leveraged to quickly respond to changing solutions, they will miss opportunities and lose more than they should.
Creating an effective, consistent cadence must take into consideration a number of factors including:
- How to track customer contacts, in order to make sure sales opportunities and cycles aren’t missed and customer relationships aren’t being neglected.
- How to implement a unified strategy that creates a consistent sales culture adopted by every member of the team.
- How to make sure all the right data is getting into the right hands at the right time.
- How to align and evaluate the metrics to make sure everyone is on the same page and comparing “apples to apples”.
- How to make sure that teams separated by geography and working on different opportunities within the same account are adhering to the same standards and coordinating their efforts.
- How to more effectively coordinate sales efforts with marketing, finance, and executive leadership.
Ultimately, sales cadence will involve adjusting internal processes for the whole organization, and will probably hinge on learning how to redeploy or redesign the organization’s CRM in order to more efficiently track, manage and organize information across all divisions. However, in addition, the sales manager will need to concentrate on imparting a new vision to the whole sales team, one that is built on communication and collaboration as the teams pursue a uniform process based on a well-defined strategy to manage larger and more complex opportunities.
Here are the questions that the sales manager must ask and answer in order to move his sales organization in this new direction:
- Is the sales team participating with the rest of the company to improve the overall health of the business, or are we off in our own little word? What steps must be taken to align our activities with the rest of the company?
- Are sales efforts integrated and coordinated across all teams and accounts? If not, where is the disconnect and what can be done about it?
- Am I happy with the timeliness and the depth of sales, pipeline and performance data I am receiving now? Do I truly have access to enough data to make timely strategic decisions and coach to the needs of the team?
- Does everyone on the team have a shared understanding of, and a commitment to, functioning as a team, using the same process, tools and standards in a way that will drive revenue instead of just generate more activity? What one thing could I do right now that would begin to make this situation better?
Because each industry, market, company and sales team is unique, there aren’t standardized “right” answers to these questions. The important thing is to ask the questions and then let the answers guide you to the next steps – and the next set of questions and answers – you need to pursue. The important thing is to immediately take whatever action is necessary to embrace these changes and move your organization forward. In today’s whirlwind economy, failure to change – even failure to change fast enough – equals failure, period.
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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