Episode 11: The Strategic Approach to Building a High Performing Sales Team

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Right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. Really excited about today. I seem to be excited so much when we're talking about the TeamSTEPPS playbook, which we're obviously going to jump into in greater detail today. But I'm particularly excited today because we get to stop and talk a little bit about strategy and how important it is to our teams. So often we get caught up in the day to day running of our teams around coaching, around firefighting, around the importance of closing deals and hitting targets that I like to be able to just take that step back every now and then and have a look at our true North Star and see exactly where we're heading. So two weeks ago we introduced the TeamSTEPPS playbook. This all came about from four key habits that we really consistently see driving success of sales leaders. I want to go through those four key habits again because I think they're just so important to get into people's minds. Mostly because I think if we can nail the four of them and they're all pretty achievable, we are well on our way to being able to have high performing sales teams. Okay, so the first of those four key habits that we consistently see driving the success of sales leaders is a sales process. We've been through this a couple of times, but I wanted to reiterate the importance of actually going through the process to set it up, but also making sure it's executable and something the teams can follow. The second was the focus around the TeamSTEPPS playbook. This is where we introduced two weeks ago. Now in episode nine, these three key levers leading to a fourth key lever, which is peak performance. We're going to talk a little bit more about that today. So I'll just hold. Hold on there. The third key habit that we consistently see driving the success of sales leaders is a form of measurement. The statistics are really clear. Teams that measure performance consistently perform infinitely better than those around. And we can see stats from Forbes, from Business Insider, from HubSpot, from Salesforce, from a lot of the key bodies out there that are from the Harvard Review that are really clearly saying, but that measurement metrics are critical to be able to accurately and effectively drive your team. Last but not least, the fourth key habit that we see is sales leaders who place a long term focus on training. So that's training from a coaching point of view, but also that there's an accountability to doing training regularly and ensuring it's followed through. So it's no surprise that we're focusing on these four key habits in our podcast series. For the first half of this year, we've gone through the sales process in quite a lot of detail and now we've started to introduce the TeamSTEPPS playbook. Episode 9 was all about a top line look at what the TeamStep playbook means. So the three key levers that drive the fourth lever of Peak performance. But today we're going to be spending some time looking at specifically the word step, and that's the S for strategy. When we get all of our levers combining well, so that's step, strategy, talent, energy leading to peak performance, we generally can be pretty comfortable that we're going to have a team that has an environment absolutely conducive to success. It doesn't guarantee it, but certainly the teams we see that get this right really do set themselves up for that ongoing success piece in their business. So why do we use the Teamstep Playbook instead of a traditional sales strategy document? Well, for me, I grew up with very traditional and often sterile sales strategy documents and to a lesser extent, process documents, but they generally felt really generic. For me, what I like about the TeamSTEPPS playbook and the reason that we've created it is that it adds some real agility to how you go about your strategic planning. It's a very broad framework that actually allows you to then choose your own adventure in terms of how you go to implement it. Let's have a bit of a look as to why that's the case while we focus on the strategy elements. So the S in the step of the model over the course of the next 15 to 20 minutes or so. So the strategy part of TeamSTEPPS, generally we're going to find that this has A half yearly to a quarterly focus. So often you'll plan once per year from a team strategy point of view, but you'll review it. For me, I love seeing teams review it quarterly. It's a great way to get everyone together. Really fantastic way to look at course corrections, look at what you're doing well, look at what you're not doing well. But also importantly, what's changed, what in that strategy is no longer relevant if you're in a really fast moving young industry? Well, we certainly find that things tend to become obsolete a lot quicker than if we're in a very stable, mature market. So quarterly focus on strategy for me, for the teams that are doing really well. But definitely it's more than just putting in a 10 page document from a kind of team wide planning day that details how you grow your business by double digit percentages over the coming year. Right. So for the best organizations, I see them viewing it as an evolving process, more like a beginning point that will determine how they think, how they act, how they respond, and then I guess, how they learn on a daily basis. They're also thinking about the customer. They're thinking about the capabilities needed to service the customer and to really give them a great experience. And on top of that, the prevailing market now and into the future. There's a Henry Ford quote. I love it. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. Time. Now, I definitely don't subscribe to ignoring your competitors, but I do love the focus that that Henry Ford quote has around making your business, your team, your offer, your relationship with your customers better and better and better at every single opportunity. So let's have a bit of a deeper dive into what exactly the strategy step involves in the TeamSTEPPS model. Okay, so when we're looking at strategy, generally, we're going to start with the structural elements of our team's offer. They're the key target market. So who are we going to be selling our products and services to in the IT segment? For example, are we only hitting businesses with certain number of employees or certain sizes of turnover? Because we have systems that really need to be offered to businesses with scale or in a manufacturing segment. Are we looking for people that need bespoke designs rather than custom designs? Right. Working out exactly who we're going to supply to or provide a service to? Critically important. Naturally, we'll then move into key target geographies. So where are we going to be selling our products and Services, Are we going to be looking at the Eastern seaboard, the Western seaboard, part of a region? Are we going to be looking at the North America region, including Canada, or are we going to be going global or through Asia or. Very important to be setting out our key target geographies because that will make sure we're aligned with the delivery part of our business and how we're going to go about keeping those promises we make to customers. Next up, what are the key products and our services? Right. What are we offering to our customers? Really important as part of this team step, the strategy part of this process that we actually know what we're offering. We need to know what our lead products are as well. So the ones that we're really going to be focusing on driving the majority of our revenue, most of the time, that old Pareto principle rule applies. 80% of our revenue, 80% of our customer service, and what we do with our customers will come from 20% of our offering. I've seen it hold true in most of the businesses that I've worked with over the last. Getting closer to 25 years now, certainly not non negotiable, but generally we tend to find that our major products will often make up most of our revenue. Next up, from the structural stuff, and I will say this is the more mechanical part of the strategic piece. Most of us will have heard this plenty of times. We will have gone through it in trainings plenty of times. But as sales leaders, we actually have an ownership of making sure it happens. So yes, mechanical, yes. Not as exciting as some of the other parts of running our team, but we need to make sure it happens. Okay, so we said key target markets, key target geographies and key products and services. Right. Depending on the industry that we're in. Next is pricing strategy. So how do we price our products? How do we price our services? Is it based on following competitors? Is it based on looking at what the market will bear? Is it based on value pricing? Right. So looking at what we offer and the value it can add to customers, for me, I kind of let into it that last one there. The value based pricing, certainly with the people we've worked with over the many years, that tends to have the ability to build more of a competitive moat. But what I recommend to everyone that I work with is run some different price models out in the market, do some A B testing, find out what works, find out what works in different segments. Because achieving a margin that allows you to run your team and fulfill your promises to your customers is really important. Nobody wants to buy from a business that isn't making money, particularly when they need support down the track. Because if that business isn't here to honour the warranties or provide support or have the ongoing services, both parties lose. So for me, I always encourage any businesses I've worked with and any businesses I've run is make sure that there is an element of win win in the deal that we're doing so that the parties can meet their promises, as I said. Alright, next one on the structural piece of strategy is revenue and profit targets. We need to make sure we have these. But the part that I think gets missed a lot in sales leadership is transparency across the business. There is no harm in setting really clear targets. I also think it's really important to be sharing profit targets. If we share profit targets, our teams get some perspective on the type of margins that we're making on products and that will impact their level of discounting. What do I mean by that? Well, salespeople will often take the path of least resistance when it comes to selling out in the market. Are you ready to go?

Yeah, I am.

Look, can you give me something better? Yeah, sure. We'll give you a 10% discount and away we go. Yes, I'm really simplifying it, but when you're in a product market that has a margin of 15% and you're offering 10% discounts, that is not a sustainable business. When you're in a market, when you have 80% gross margins on your revenue and you're offering a 10% discount, you're generally going to find that's going to have a much more sustainable impact on the business. So profit targets really give perspective, particularly when you're setting rules and boundaries for teams around offering discounts. Last but not least in the structural piece is team vision. Vision and mission. Every business has them. I like a team vision being done for a sales team or any function on its own because it allows you to tailor something that's relevant to you. Get it right and it can be powerful because you can pass it on the walls, you can have it on backgrounds, you can have it in messaging and you can actually use it as a really nice North Star when you're running your business. Get it wrong and it becomes a bit wishy washy and no one tends to follow it. But there's generally not a risk of playing in this area. So for me it's upside spending a little bit of time on team vision. Okay, so that's the structural part around the teamstepps model being s for strategy. Now let's have a look at some of the key selling strategies that will come into this part of your team planning. The first one is a sales process. You've heard me talk about it plenty of times. It is just critical that we get it right. Generally five to nine steps is what we're going to see. And the best sales processes are going to be really clear and easy to follow within your teams. But also they're going to have thought about how the customer goes through that process too. So how do we have a sales process that can match the steps we expect a customer to take and thereby just bring us that little bit closer together when we're working through the process? Sales methodology. So where your sales process are the bones of your sales team, the methodology is the nervous system. So it's the type of selling approach that takes us through our sales process that connects our sales process together. Solution selling challenges, selling spin selling. Lots of different sales methodologies out there. I think last time I looked they were well into the teens. Some of them I'd never heard of. But certainly there's some really key ones out there like solution selling. And challenger selling is really growing in popularity. So next in the strategy piece is the consultation process. So how are we prospecting? How are we holding discovery meetings or calls? Where are we doing demonstrations? Are we doing demonstrations? How are we quoting? What's the solution guiding principle that we're putting forward to our customers? The consultation process is all about how we bring to life our sales process and our sales methodologies, but puts a little bit more meat to the bones. So for example, if you're in a business that's new technology, demonstrations are going to be really important, really important, because you need to be educating people about your product. Whereas if in reverse, if you're in a very mature market, they're going to be less important and it's going to be more about building trust, reliability on your products and leveraging your networks. Same would go in a saturated market. Trust, reliability, quality of networks. Super important when you have a market with lots and lots of competitors because you need to be able to find that edge. Complicated markets or complicated sales processes. Generally your technical support and your discovery sections are going to be really important here because it's such a complicated sale, you want to make sure that you're getting the best information you can from customers early so that you don't go down a path of significant time investment that ends up with the wrong result. We often don't get second chances to put forward our solution to customers. So we need to get it right first. Go. Okay, so we've had a look at in the strategy part of Teamstep. We've had a look at the structural side of strategy. We've had a look at the selling side of strategy, a lot of S's today. Now we're looking at the supporting part of our strategy planning. So these are things like our presentation and our quotation tools. So sales and marketing collateral is critical. We know that. But for businesses to spend time on it, they actually need to understand what they're putting forward to their customer. I'm a big fan of using copywriters to make sure that our sales and marketing collateral isn't just written well, but it's written in a way that will put us ahead of our competitors. The best copywriters I've worked with know how to not only make sure your words are nice, but make sure they're resonating with customers. Right. To give you that edge so that before you've even walked in the door, you are seen as that favorable company for them to work with. Other supporting strategies. Your quoting tools. So how do we quote our products and services? So many times we see really clunky systems for sales teams to use, and they get overlooked because we rely heavily on the quality of our salespeople to do the work. Businesses that really get this right, they make sure that not only have they got a great presentation of their quotes or it looks good and has the right information, but it's easy enough for their sales team to use and it integrates in with their system. You've got a CRM and you have a quoting tool critical that they're integrating. You've got API links happening and your sales teams aren't needing to double and triple and quadruple enter information really difficult to achieve. But those teams that spend time on it, they essentially free their salespeople's time to be working on the important parts of their deals. Okay, next one in terms of supporting strategies becoming super important now. And that's the sales technology stack. So this is beyond quoting and marketing tools, but includes things like video messaging. I'm a fan of loom. You're attaching a video message, making it more personalized. There is so much SaaS, so much machine learning software out there, and AI is not far away. We should be spending time as leaders having a look at the technology stacks that we can help to simplify our business moving along. Elevator pitch. There's five or six more. This is Quite a chunky part of the teamstep model. And look, there's about 18 in total here. And I certainly don't see teams get all of this right. But the point of today is running through all the different things that you can look at in your strategy and aim to get as many as you can right for your team. So let's keep moving. Elevator pitch. Yes. This is very strategic. Workshop it. Right. Sales letters out there. You need to make sure that your team have a great one to two sentence elevator pitch. What's the problem and opportunity you're trying to solve and how do you do it? So we solve unblocking toilets by using a revolutionary new plunger. If you get your elevator pitch right, if you know the opportunity or problem that you can solve or bring to life for a customer and be able to convey to them that you can do it in one sentence, then it resonates with them. I build super powered sales teams by bringing real world structure to how sales leaders manage their teams. One type of sales pitch, what the opportunity is. For me, if I was sitting in there wordsmithing that I would be saying something along the lines of I help sales teams achieve double digit growth year on year on year by bringing strategy and structure to their sales processes. Right. So even better is you're quantifying what you're achieving with them and how you're doing it. We could go on and on with elevator pitches and everyone has their own impression on it. But for me the key piece is to make sure you're communicating the problem you solve as explicitly as you can and how you're doing it. Next part, key communication templates. So these are your pre defined templates and emails and messaging that we get to customers. It's okay to have scripts, salespeople can go and change those scripts, but the more resources you give them they can use, the more they'll use them. Right. So put them in your CRM, make sure they're refined and they're reviewed as often as needed and get them out there. Sales handover process. Big part of strategy. What is it? How do you get information across from your sales team to your delivery teams? Right. And what are the KPIs around IT industry relationships really like this one from a strategic point of view, who are we going to affiliate with? So if you're selling to the timber industry, get involved with the timber association. That's pretty logical. We see lots of businesses do it, but then get involved with the timber association's customers. There's nothing more powerful than if you're selling to a timber merchant, then you can sit in there and say, actually, we've provided a product or service to your customers. They loved it and I think it'll do a world of good for your relationship with them if they know that you're doing it too. You can get really clever when you start to think beyond that. First layer. Second last, recruitment strategy. So how are we going to recruit talent to our team? Yep, your HR divisions, your people and culture divisions, they're going to be involved in this. But as sales leaders, we should always be looking for sales talent, so where we can have it as part of our strategy, that is that we have our entire team on the lookout, really does wonders in terms of bringing new talent in. Last but not least part of the strategic planning, we need to make sure that we're really clear on headcounts and composition of our team. How many front of house people have we got? How many support roles are we going to need? We talk a little bit further in the talent section of the TeamSTEPPS playbook about the types of roles that we have, but we certainly need to have some real broad brush budgeting done from our strategic process. Okay, so that's it. And whilst that approach is pretty straightforward, I certainly recognise it can be daunting. Right, bringing structure to sales teams. We're so busy, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, that we often don't have time to stop and think about how we do this. So let's just take a minute to have a look at how we can help you do this. Right, so how can you, as sales leaders, bring some strategy to your teams? Okay, so first of all, get the team engaged. When you're looking at the TeamSTEPPS playbook and you're talking strategy, you want them involved. Pre brief them, though, on what they're thinking about. Right. We hire salespeople to be good on their feet, sure. But a lot of people like to have a chance to think about what they're going through rather than offer on the spot. A lot of people are actually more comfortable once they've been able to think about what they have and what ideas they have. And it also balances out the conversation rather than leaning it towards only those people that can think quickly on their feet. Split it over two sessions. I'd highly recommend the first session is about ideation and thinking and exploring ideas, and the second session becomes about actions. So you have an ideation piece and then you have an action piece. Once you've got the strategy sorted so once your TeamSTEPPS playbook is underway, items from the strategic piece that are very relevant to the sales teams, to the individual contributors, they have to go into one to ones, they have to go into sales meetings. Put them in as system symbols and norms everywhere you do and they will get focused on. Last but not least, review it. Really regularly review it with your leaders, review it with your peers and review it with your sales team because it's amazing how quickly strategies can change how and you need to move quickly with it. So there you have it, a deep dive into the strategy part of the TeamSTEPPS playbook that helps us drive peak performance in our sales teams. Not only have we gone through strategically what's important, but we've also given some real perspective as to why you should do it and how you can get your teams involved. There was a lot of data though today, a lot of things to write down. So if you weren't able to capture it, just jump onto the show notes in your own time. They'll be on the website. You can get them through your podcast directory as well. Www.strongersalesteams.com of course, if you want a little bit of extra help, feel free to book in a discovery call with me. You can get in contact through any of our social media channels. DM me on Instagram or LinkedIn. I'm across everything that comes into the business, so likely you'll hear from me directly. All right, next on the list. Next week is all about talent. So the T from the step of the Teamstep Playbook. Once we get through the talent and the energy pieces, I'll be launching a free how to guide that really goes into the details of the TeamSTEPPS playbook. Gives you even more meat than what we've gone through in the podcasts. So if you want to be on the list for when that launches, just DM me teamstep on any of the socials or via our contact page and we'll make sure you're on it. So before we leave today, our health and fitness tip. It's small but mighty. It's very, very simple taking breaks. For me, I know when I'm managing teams it can get really heavy and I can bounce from meeting to meeting to meeting. A few techniques you can use to just give yourself a break during the day. Set your meetings to be 55 minutes. So instead of an hour or half an hour, 55 or 25 minutes, give yourself three periods of the day where you have a half an hour break from meetings. Fantastic. Way to do it. Scheduling meetings that are in different formats. Write a walking meeting, for example. Eat your lunch away from your desk. Really important. Return a phone call that's non work related. Just give your mind a break from work before you get into it. And look, there's lots and lots of ways we can do this, but for me, taking little short micro breaks during the day just helps you stay switched on until the day's over. Okay, that's it for me today. Until next time. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks everyone.

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