If you are the manager of a sales team in a customer intimate business then whether relatively straightforward or particularly complex, a successful strategy boils down to two main things:
KEEP WHAT YOU WANT TO KEEP GET WHAT YOU WANT TO GET
We all learn the importance of repeat business and the relative ease of selling to existing clients in every sales 101, so avoiding ‘churn’ is an important part of your selling strategy.
Perhaps you have experienced one of those years or quarters when new business was rolling in but old business was drifting away. I have seen many times working closely with sales teams the latter exceed the former. To paraphrase Dickens
‘Annual revenue gain twenty pounds, annual revenue loss twenty one pounds, result misery’
Everyone in sales knows that if your results are good then it is because of your obvious talents and if results are poor then it is because of things outside your talents. A sales team encounters many, many variables and vagaries in any given time period but with a good strategy executed by a good team the plusses will outweigh the minuses. Of course, changing the direction is a lot easier than changing the team. In order to maximise the talent there are many systems available to managers these days. We can analyse people’s personalities every which way, from Hats to ‘which Star Trek character are you most like’.
You may be a fan of such systems (personally I think there is a lot of merit in some of them) or you may be with Sting and think ‘you still know nothing ‘bout me’, but I am not going to look at those things here, you have likely already done that stuff. I want to look at a very simple and common sense way to think about your sales team. I call it TRIANGLE THEORY.
That is because there is a triangle in it.
Consider this as the three cornerstones of ability your team needs to execute your good strategy knowing that strategy is useless until it degenerates in to work:
KEEP WHAT YOU WANT TO KEEP GET WHAT YOU WANT TO GET
We all learn the importance of repeat business and the relative ease of selling to existing clients in every sales 101, so avoiding ‘churn’ is an important part of your selling strategy.
Perhaps you have experienced one of those years or quarters when new business was rolling in but old business was drifting away. I have seen many times working closely with sales teams the latter exceed the former. To paraphrase Dickens
‘Annual revenue gain twenty pounds, annual revenue loss twenty one pounds, result misery’
Everyone in sales knows that if your results are good then it is because of your obvious talents and if results are poor then it is because of things outside your talents. A sales team encounters many, many variables and vagaries in any given time period but with a good strategy executed by a good team the plusses will outweigh the minuses. Of course, changing the direction is a lot easier than changing the team. In order to maximise the talent there are many systems available to managers these days. We can analyse people’s personalities every which way, from Hats to ‘which Star Trek character are you most like’.
You may be a fan of such systems (personally I think there is a lot of merit in some of them) or you may be with Sting and think ‘you still know nothing ‘bout me’, but I am not going to look at those things here, you have likely already done that stuff. I want to look at a very simple and common sense way to think about your sales team. I call it TRIANGLE THEORY.
That is because there is a triangle in it.
Consider this as the three cornerstones of ability your team needs to execute your good strategy knowing that strategy is useless until it degenerates in to work:
Unlike Micawber, sales teams cannot live in hopeful expectation
Mark Hazard
Mark Hazard
In the diagram above we argue that success, the gold medal, is delivered by selling new business, looking after existing business and having technical expertise. The degree and nature of that expertise and the need for it you will know for your business but whether just general product knowledge or subject matter expertise, there will be some need for it of course.
In the picture we see that the Sales point of the triangle is red; this represents a weakness in the ability of a sales person. Not necessarily that they are rubbish at selling but that that is not their strength. The same may be true for the other elements:
In the picture we see that the Sales point of the triangle is red; this represents a weakness in the ability of a sales person. Not necessarily that they are rubbish at selling but that that is not their strength. The same may be true for the other elements:
I will assume for the sake of this article that you do not have people in your sales team that would be red in all elements!
A full green triangle for all members of the team is a noble goal and if you have this then many will be envious, but if reading this is making you think ‘Now hold on a minute, Steven is a bit weak on that one and Susan is a bit weak on that one’ then perhaps there is something for you in here.
Each individual profile - which you probably know off the top of your head anyway, and people know their own triangle for sure - carries a knock on effect which is likely to be manifested in results, or at the very least play a significant part in those results.
Examples are
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT in short supply
- New business is generated regularly and targets met or exceeded
- Churn occurs
SALES in short supply
- Business is well looked after and technically sound
- The business struggles to grow
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE in short supply
- New business is generated and existing business is looked after
- All business is potentially under threat from expertise/new ideas
Go on, do it quickly for your team, you only need a pen and paper.
The next two triangles show a simple picture of, in the first diagram, two individuals, and in the second diagram, a sales area. These are not using any particularly scientific scale, the positions of the dots on the diagram are rather arbitrary, but hey, you see what we are getting at - it’s simple and it’s clear.But it can tell you a lot, and it can make you think, and it can make you change things for the better.
A full green triangle for all members of the team is a noble goal and if you have this then many will be envious, but if reading this is making you think ‘Now hold on a minute, Steven is a bit weak on that one and Susan is a bit weak on that one’ then perhaps there is something for you in here.
Each individual profile - which you probably know off the top of your head anyway, and people know their own triangle for sure - carries a knock on effect which is likely to be manifested in results, or at the very least play a significant part in those results.
Examples are
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT in short supply
- New business is generated regularly and targets met or exceeded
- Churn occurs
SALES in short supply
- Business is well looked after and technically sound
- The business struggles to grow
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE in short supply
- New business is generated and existing business is looked after
- All business is potentially under threat from expertise/new ideas
Go on, do it quickly for your team, you only need a pen and paper.
The next two triangles show a simple picture of, in the first diagram, two individuals, and in the second diagram, a sales area. These are not using any particularly scientific scale, the positions of the dots on the diagram are rather arbitrary, but hey, you see what we are getting at - it’s simple and it’s clear.But it can tell you a lot, and it can make you think, and it can make you change things for the better.
I worked with a European Sales Director on this theory and we mapped out her whole sales force, which was a relatively easy task - we used a similar model for different levels of sales management. The organisation operated from Portugal to the Middle East and from North Africa to Finland.
Once we had worked out the whole pattern, she compared the result to the actual sales performance over a number of years, it was even easy to compare staff that had left with their replacements. With her extensive knowledge of her business, anomalies and force majeure and suchlike could be taken in to account. We rather rapidly were looking at a very interesting picture and she had the humility to admit she had never thought of it this way.
Try it - you really have nothing to lose, we don't always need a fancy system, just a simple idea that uses your knowledge to leverage
Once we had worked out the whole pattern, she compared the result to the actual sales performance over a number of years, it was even easy to compare staff that had left with their replacements. With her extensive knowledge of her business, anomalies and force majeure and suchlike could be taken in to account. We rather rapidly were looking at a very interesting picture and she had the humility to admit she had never thought of it this way.
Try it - you really have nothing to lose, we don't always need a fancy system, just a simple idea that uses your knowledge to leverage
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