Sales in the time of COVID – A note to the VP of Sales

While organizations across the world and grappling with sustaining the productivity of their work-force – a one-size-fits all approach usually does not work. Slack and Zoom might be perfect for engineering, product or to some extent even business teams – but are not really the right tools to empower or engage Sales teams during these times.

So what do you do with your Sales teams when they are sitting at home and you would rather have them on the field? How do YOU use your time well?

Disclaimer: Sales teams vary greatly by industry, size of company, type of sales roles (inside vs field vs partner vs account) etc. The ideas suggested below are generic in nature and might render well to some cases and not so much to others.

Educate

One of the biggest challenges for any VP of Sales / Sales Leader is to ensure her/his team has a good working knowledge of the product/s. This seems like an obvious point, but I am yet to come across a Sales leader who is very confident of the ability of her/his team to 1. Understand and 2. Articulate the offering of the company to a customer. Sales teams do not have a lot of free bandwidth to dedicate to learning and if they do – they are generally too frustrated to learn as they face customers day in and out and have to multi-hat as product, finance, legal, support – you name it.

These 2 weeks are a good time to train your sales teams. Below are a few pointers that you should consider when planning knowledge transfer sessions for your sales teams.  While some established companies do have a sales enablement or training function, this time could be used well to set up direct lines of communication between your product, business line owner and distributed sales teams.

-Identify key products or processes you see failing and nominate both the business and product owners for the same. Nominate owners from your sales teams as well. Examples could be- sales team has a poor “say-do” ratio leading to poor revenue forecasts, MoM revenue from a specific product line has remained stagnant or dropped in the past quarter, Poor NPS etc

- Ask the business line owner to take a KRA of # webcast sessions to share actionable insights to solve for these problems. This could be to drive product understanding, guidance to sell better or to take feedback from the sales teams. The key point here is that the content shared must be made keeping your average customer in mind. Creating fancy slides loaded with data and jargon is not something your average salesperson understands. Make sure to REVIEW this content. If your business or product leader has no exposure to ground sales – the issues with the way the content is structured will be glaringly obvious. This is a good time to get involved and get such issues sorted for future interactions.

In my limited experience, I have worked for and interacted with primarily two kinds of companies – “Sales first” and “Product first” companies. Life for a salesperson is relatively easier in a sales first company since all other functions align to support sales. Sales teams tend to be very aggressive in getting revenues in, but not necessarily very well trained on product or taking ownership/interest in anything beyond getting numbers in. From a long-term view, you can afford this mindset only if your company is a cash cow and has other well-developed functions to support and retain the customer. If you do not have a strong support function layered with sales – this model fails.

 In a product first company – sales struggles to get the mind-share of senior leadership and alignment from functions. More importantly – the HQ tends to move at breakneck speed – iterating, releasing new products and features and there tends to be low/no representation from sales in the decision-making processes – and they are expected to sell what comes out. It can lead to a lot of dissatisfaction in the sales team and my next point addresses this problem.

Any company that does have a need for strong sales teams – needs to pick a side and solve for the problems that come with it. Of what I have seen, If the company relies a lot on its sales team – the “Sales First” approach works well.

Improve channels of communication

One of the biggest challenges with a large / distributed sales team is that information flow is extremely poor. Often, if there is a new product or process introduced, the members of your sales team who are “innovators” and “early adopters” or those “glued-in” to the “system” that is your company will learn about it and leverage it. This asymmetry is natural. However – you can use this time to reduce this asymmetry and identify people from key product and business process teams to OWN setting up and sustaining these channels of communication. Obviously, these should be 2 way. There is no team that can give you as much customer insight than a sales team can. This time should be used to create templates to capture on-ground feedback across areas that are key for the company and later analysed by business/product with necessary discretion. Often NPS surveys, customer surveys are done monthly, quarterly – why not keep this open for a daily update to predict problems and areas of improvement and opportunities? All you need is a google sheet tracker and you can have invaluable insights daily with minimal effort.

Upskill

Sales as a job can get very monotonous and a lot of salespeople I know do not want to build a career in sales, at-least when they start off. Most ambitious salespeople want to transition to P&L ownership roles, to product roles – the list goes on. Some of the “woke” ones know they are best suited for sales from the start – and God bless them. Clarity is everything in the corporate world.

Below are some ideas to upskill your sales teams:

-Run scenarios with sales team – one way to identify what these scenarios could be to aggregate a list of customer-facing challenges that the company has faced in the last 6 months which have gotten escalated to the VP sales for intervention. Easy way is to search the email inbox of your VP Sales with key-works like “problem”, “issue”, etc and look for mails that have the customer’s name as well in the subject line. These issues could also be recollected between team members. This is a manual exercise but should be worth the effort.

If there is an issue that has required the VP to get involved to solve – there is scope for improving one or many things related to the business process or product that lead your there. This is the raw material to work with to create scenarios/learnings that your sales teams should know how to handle/leverage.

-Create a robust meeting template and enforce the culture of sending meeting minutes after EVERY customer meeting. In the age of tracking geo-locations of sales teams and analyzing their call patterns – the basic truth remains that a salesperson can fake meetings. Building trust is as important as tracking sales teams and creating a culture of sharing meeting notes keeping the concerned sales regional/business line head in loop helps build discipline and gives early indications to sales heads of problems and to the reps - visibility that they crave.

- This is a good time to expose the most ambitious members of your sales teams to business projects and let them tinker around. Revenue forecasts will most likely not be met, but you could potentially get some new ideas for revenue generation in the current economic climate. Create competition among them to come up with innovative ideas to solve your biggest problems – they spend most time with your customers. You lose nothing, and it also keeps the sales teams motivated.