This is a note especially for those in the Sales seat.
My rock this quarter was to implement Pipedrive – a CRM tool – so I have been thinking a lot about the Sales seat I sit in on my own accountability chart.
EOS tries to keep this simple for you as the Sales leader by giving you two basic tools to help you focus your energy and build a more sales-focused ‘organization’ to support your work:
- Tool #1 – Sales Department Check-up (p. 36 of your leadership team manual): This one-page checklist defines all of the most critical pieces of a healthy and effective sales organization. It is simple – read the statement and check the box if that is in place and SBA or FBA. A more effective way to use this is to get input from your Integrator and/or sales team on each item. Any non-checked boxes or disagreements are issues that need to be resolved.
- Tool #2: Defining your sales process and measurables that need to be tracked to help you see what needs to happen. My story on this was a recent period of time where Emily (my admin lead) and I had not had an L10 in 4 weeks. During an L10 we did an IDS on the pipeline by opening my CRM and reviewing all the companies in the pipeline that were new and all of my clients that were in Mastery Journey pipeline (where all of you are that have completed the VB2 session). This helped us look at every client and decide what needed to happen to keep the experience on track and/or move them in/out of the pipeline. It took 20 minutes, but the result was a new closed deal and 2 scheduled 90-Minute Meetings. It also highlighted that my measurables need to be more defined so I can see the health of the process without having to take a deep dive on it.
I see too many sales leaders trying to keep the sales process hidden or vague, whether on purpose or because you don’t GWC that part of your role. I have only met a few sales leaders who possessed the unique ability to define and implement a sales process. If this is not your unique ability, get some help! When this critical work gets done, it provides the opportunity to build a sales organization where everyone is working on sales. This allows you to focus your unique abilities on the pieces you do well and delegate much of the other work.
Tips for building your sales process: I have designed and delivered a workshop that takes 45-60 minutes per process to arrive at a draft definition, and another 30 minutes to draft measurables. I would be glad to demonstrate it to you if it would help you strengthen this key component in your organization. Get in touch if you would be interested in exploring this option.