For the past few years, businesses have been in survival mode. Executives have had their hands full just keeping their business afloat while weathering the pandemic, labor issues, supply chain problems, rising interest rates, recession, and more. As a leader, your job is not to simply maintain the status quo. To thrive, an organization must grow.
In my new book The Growth Leader, I highlight strategies for leaders to drive top- and bottom-line results. Here are three critical lessons to successfully lead growth.
1. Don’t neglect the sales experience in your customer experience.
Executives recognize that the customer experience is a point of differentiation for their company and build strategies for growth that factor CX into their plans. Unfortunately, most CX efforts focus on what happens after a prospect becomes a customer, neglecting entirely what comes first: the sales experience. The sales experience is the first leg of the race to gain and keep customers, and if your company doesn’t win it, your prospects will be having a customer experience with your competitor.
Research on B2B transactions indicates that as much as 25% of your customer’s decision criteria is based on the sales experience. The sales experience is the most valuable decision factor for customers after the quality of the products and services you provide. So when your offering looks similar or the same as your competitors’ in the eyes of prospects, it’s the sales experience that will differentiate your company and tip the scales in your favor.
Leaders need to focus on designing a sales experience based on value, not just pitching products or presenting capabilities. Use your organizational insights and expertise to help clients think differently about their circumstances and needs and how to best address them. Focus your sales organization on helping clients recognize issues they haven’t identified as priorities, or the implications of challenges they hadn’t considered. Help prospects see answers to their problems using your solutions in ways they hadn’t previously thought of. The value built into this kind of partnership delivers a sales experience that customers are willing to pay for. They will vote for you with their dollars.
2. Eliminate Sales Stigma.
One of the primary reasons organizations fail to leverage the sales experience is the presence of sales stigma: the negative perceptions and stereotypes associated with the sales profession. Most executives have functional backgrounds in finance, operations, technical fields or sometimes marketing. Very rarely do they come from sales. While the role of sales has evolved dramatically since the early days of the U.S. census when sales jobs were relegated to “huckster” or “peddler,” the stigma lingers. This affects the characteristics we typically look for in sales professionals, overemphasizing traits like an extraverted personality or aggressiveness, which are counterproductive in the complex selling of solutions. It also affects the way sales teams are developed and managed to pitch or close, with nowhere near enough attention on consultative practices.
This has a limiting effect on how a business acquires new customers, expands its work with existing ones, and creates customer loyalty. These outdated stereotypes and negative perceptions still influence dozens of critical decisions made by CEOs and executives about the sales function: the kind of people we recruit, how we manage them, how we pay them, how we develop them, and how we communicate with them.
Since beliefs shape behavior, stigma and counterproductive beliefs about sales need to be addressed to lead growth. Creating a high-performance sales culture requires leaders to prioritize strategic perspective, technical or functional expertise, and intellect in recruiting sales professionals, since these are the skills most valued by customers. Leaders must also recognize the sophistication required to consultatively sell solutions and invest strategically in coaching and management. Most of all, leaders need to separate the purpose of the sales organization from the results they achieve. Revenue and profit are often the primary objectives pursued in sales. But these metrics are the result of creating a valuable sales process for your customers, which is what a great sales force delivers.
3. Align your sales organization with your strategy.
Every sales call determines the success or failure of your go-to-market strategy. In researching The Growth Leader, many CEOs said the sales organization is always naturally more distant from the C-suite than other functions, but the sales function is also the closest to market. If you accept the natural distance between sales and leadership, you also admit a huge—and costly—distance between leadership and customers.
It’s up to executives to get more strategically involved with their sales organization. My research shows that most sales teams have little understanding of their company’s strategy - a 4.2 on a scale of 1-10. That is a huge risk to growth objectives, since the sales team is the execution of your strategy. This execution happens hundreds—even thousands—of times each day. It’s either a massive accumulation of wins or death by a thousand cuts.
Spend time with your sales leaders and frontline sellers to ensure they understand your strategy and what it means to execute that strategy in the field. Be clear about the right kind of business to pursue, and the kind of business to walk away from. Help them understand the connections between your new products, services, and capabilities and the outcomes and results you believe your solutions will produce for them. Reinforce that the role of the sales organization is not just to produce numbers – but to create a valuable sales experience for customers. Do that well, and the numbers will follow.
If your business relies on a sales organization to connect with your customers, then growth and sales are inextricably linked. One of the predictable failures for companies is the disconnect between leadership, strategy, and sales. Address these three critical topics with your sales organization and you’ll be on your way to growth, not just staying afloat.
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November 04, 2023 at 01:36AM
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