Sales are often considered to be a series of individual processes. Structured processes are senior management's way of monitoring and predicting revenues on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. These processes are supposed to form the basis of the sales planning and forecasting models for the company. Unfortunately, processes are often confused with demands for information. Everyone feels that they can demand any information at any time from the sales team. Over the course of time, these demands metamorphose into imposed processes, which provide information to a variety groups within the company, but add very little value to the sales cycles. Sales people are required to comply with these processes or risk losing their jobs. As the key professionals who generate revenue for the company, is this how the sales team should be treated?

In an environment such as this, processes generally spiral out of control. The reason for this is very simple: instead of processes being used to assist in the sales cycle, they become highly structured controls used to monitor and measure behavior instead of results. Sales people are required to complete forms and follow specific processes as dictated by their management team when they should be more constructively employed determining the best course of action to secure sales from their customers.

The current business environment is subject to increasingly higher levels of competition. Sales people need to be flexible and adaptable at all times to accommodate the needs of their clients. Business is done at light speed and sales people need to be able to operate effectively in this environment. Now, more than ever, sales people must be customer-centric in order to secure business and achieve their objectives. Sales people need to focus on relationship development and work towards longer-term partnerships with their clients.

In this climate it is therefore no longer appropriate to make continual demands for information updates from the sales people. You must add value to your sales people in the way that they try to add value to their clients. This is easier said than done and to offer some insight into how this may be achieved you should consider the following.

What do you want from your sales people?

It is rather vague to simply say that you want the sales people to 'sell more'. You must be specific if you want to assure the success of your sales team. After you remove all of the superfluous detail, what you really need from your sales people is the following:

• To achieve their revenue and/or margin targets.
• To forecast accurately and close business and predictably.
• To use resources efficiently and effectively.
• To represent your company professionally with clients and business partners.
• To maximize their selling time in front of clients.
  

You have probably invested heavily in recruiting the best sales people that you could find, now you have to give them the room to perform. Nurture their creativity and encourage their individuality. Most companies have developed sales management structures (at great expense) to validate the business potential and consolidate the forecasts. Many companies actually place their sales people (and their managers) in a restrictive environment, fraught with unnecessary internal processes and endless demands for information. This creates an environment of low morale and high staff attrition. These are highly negative consequences arising from a lack of focus for the sales team.

Only when you have clearly defined your expectations for your sales team can you create processes to manage them effectively. You can then work with the sales team to ensure they achieve these objectives.

Focus on Planning and Strategy

A major factor to managing a successful sales team is to focus attention on planning and strategy. Many organizations pay far too little time and attention to the motivational benefits of Sales Planning and Control Systems. This can result in the sales teams becoming frustrated and bored and as a result produce a de-motivational process. Planning effectively means that:

1. You can predict the future trends that will impact on the business.
2. You are able to influence what you should be trying to achieve.
3. You can describe how to plan to achieve your objectives.
4. You can provide feedback against how you are doing against the Plan.
5. You can be proactive, not just reactive.
6. You can focus on the activities that achieve results.

However, inappropriate or cumbersome processes will result in incorrect focus, including:

1. A focus only on sales targets without understanding how they will be achieved.
2. A lack of commitment from the sales team.
3. Poor sales and forecast accuracy.
4. A perceived lack of vision and strategy from the management.
5. Plans in people's minds not written or communicated.
6. A lack of common plan formats.
7. Too little time to plan.
8. Poor information on results against the Plan.

In short, 'In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.'

You also reach a situation where blissful ignorance exists and senior management 'don't know what it is that they don't know.' This is an unacceptable circumstance in any organisation, and potentially devastating in the business environment.

It is not surprising that the sales team will start to switch off from processes and try everything that they can to avoid compliance. Companies become increasingly frustrated with sales people and impose ever more ridiculous demands. What then follows is usually an unhealthy and unproductive working environment for everyone. Does this sound familiar?

By focusing on planning and strategy up front you can clearly set expectations with your sales people and gain their commitment to fully support the processes.

When is a process going to work?

Of course, allowing a sales team to go about their business without any structure or process at all is far from ideal. The company will generate some revenues of course, but it will be impossible to forecast and even harder to plan. So process is a necessary business practice. However, you must carefully consider what information you want and, more importantly, you must obtain it with the full commitment and co-operation of the sales team.

One methodology commonly used is to review past wins and to create processes based on those successes. While this is a valid approach in part, it should not constitute the entire basis for process development. This would be like trying to drive a car by looking only in the rear view mirror. You may eventually get where you want to go, but your competitors will arrive much faster!

What worked with one customer will not necessarily work with another, so the processes must have flexibility built in. You will also need to consider the current economic climate and industry trends, as well as seeking out new and innovative approaches to sales.

When a sales team is truly committed to providing information and following a process, they do it because they see value in the process for themselves. Simply making demands for information won't work. It is de-motivating for sales people when what they really want (and need) is guidance, support and reassurance.

Many companies insist on high levels of information input from their sales teams. The 'typical' justification is that they want to know enough to continue the sales cycle even if the sales person is suddenly no longer involved ("Just in case you get hit by a bus"). This is misguided reasoning. No matter how much information the sales person provides, the reality is, that unless you have two people on every phone call, meeting, and presentation, replacing the sales person delays the sale. Sales people are also highly suspicious of being asked for too much information, as they continually fear that they will become disposable. Their insecurity creates the opposite effect desired by the company in that the sales people come to believe that their only means of ensuring their value to the company is to withhold essential information. This is the ultimate in process breakdown.

Another frustration faced by sales people is to have their colleagues in other departments continually demanding information. How would you personally feel in this situation? Every time that something changes you get the 'Spanish Inquisition'. Perhaps the worst part of this is when employees in the finance department start dishing out demands for information and then imply that the sales people are not doing a good job. I always wonder where they have earned the right to pass any comment at all. After all, the sales people don't criticize the accountants for the way they do their job - They are not qualified to do so. So why does the finance function believe that they are qualified to comment on sales people? Both Sales and Finance are professions and they should treat one another with respect.

Let me give you an example of when a sales process doesn't work or is at odds with the needs of the sales people and their customers. There are usually strict order-processing rules policed by the Sales Administration Group. Sales people are expected to detail specific system configurations into a CRM application to highlight, for example, exactly how many copies of each different software product is likely to be purchased by the customer. For small deals or add-on business this is applicable, but for larger corporate initiatives these demands for specific system configurations are irrelevant.

The salesperson is trying to demonstrate flexibility to their customers and having an internal rule imposed on them is highly restrictive to progressing the sale. Often, for larger deals, the exact configuration (including number of users) is not determined until the final negotiation. Sales people can provide a 'best guess' estimate at this stage but nothing more. This Sales Administration process can introduce huge inaccuracies to the forecast, as the CRM system is simply not geared up to deal with large enterprise software deals and site licenses.

The Sales Administration team complains when the order is placed, since the order does not match what it forecast in the CRM system. The salesperson is then deemed to be 'difficult' and resistant to corporate policy in spite of the fact that they secured the order. Stricter requirements are imposed on the sales people who, to avoid future aggravation, start inputting information only after the sale is completed and may even stop forecasting altogether.

The process that was initially designed to improve forecasting accuracy and enhance order processing has actually had the opposite effect. It is hardly surprising then, that the Sales Administration Group is often referred to as the Sales Prevention Department.

Large deals must be managed in a different way to the smaller ones. Therefore, you should always have a sales process that offers flexibility in representing all of the different types of sales campaigns.

To compound the situation, CRM applications are commonly used to track, monitor and measure the activities and performance of the sales team. The objectives for having common sales tools (such as a CRM) are fundamentally sound but in many cases they have been implemented without reference to, or consultation with, the sales team. If the sales people obtain real value from the processes then they will work pro-actively with them. Neither the sales people nor their employers want to spend hours everyday just filling in information on a CRM system. Bear in mind that CRM systems really capture the past as opposed to focusing on business planning in the sales campaigns. It is good to analyze what happened in order to learn from mistakes and spot trends, but it is far better to concentrate effort on moving forward. Both the sales people and their companies want to maximize their time selling rather than being bogged down in administration.

CRM systems provide some great benefits. Most notably they ensure that there are consistent sets of criteria to accurately measure the sales forecast. There is nothing worse than a potential deal that is forecast at 75% by one sales person that would be forecast at 50% by another. People differ enormously in whether they are more optimistic or pessimistic, so you can end up with a meaningless forecast unless you have standard sales qualification criteria. However, you should work with the sales teams to establish these criteria not anyone else. Then everyone will know exactly what a 75% forecasted deal really means.

Just as you should allow your sales people to do their job without restricting them with processes, you should also allow sales management to do the same. Sales management is about planning, vision, strategy and execution and it is they who are responsible for managing the sales team on a day-to-day basis and not the CRM system.

So, any process that is going to be effective requires the full commitment of all. The rewards for getting this balance right are enormous.

The job role and remuneration

The most important factor to determine the behavior of a sales team is the compensation plan. Link this with the sales person's job description - their list of corporate objectives if you like - and you often have some contradictions. Unless you link the sales person's objectives to their compensation plan you will only meet a percentage of your corporate goals. Let me give you an example. Everyone understands that obtaining strong customer case studies and reference stories is a valuable sales tool for developing additional business opportunities. However, expecting a salesperson to be pro-active in obtaining the case study from their customer, after they have closed the deal, is not realistic unless they are remunerated to do so.

Another example could be an organization that has a large installed customer base that has been neglected for some time. The organization recognizes that they have a ready-made market for their new products but need to rebuild the relationships with their existing customers in order to realize the revenue potential. Expecting sales people to rebuild a broken relationship with an indifferent, or even hostile, customer base whilst simultaneously trying to promote the new products is inappropriate. The customers perceive that they only see their account manager when they have something new to sell and will go back to ignoring them after the sale is made. As sales people are often not remunerated to develop relationships with their existing customers they will look for easier sales situations. This can mean that they sell to entirely new customers, which doesn't address the corporate problem at all. After all, selling to a new customer means that the sales people don't have to deal with the insults and cynicism of the existing customers. This is madness as everyone knows that selling to an existing customer is at least six times easier than selling to a new customer.

Another area where poor compensation planning often exists is amongst organizations' Channel Alliance teams. Senior Management often target them on revenue only, yet the Channel Managers are expected to develop and manage relationships with alliance partners. Once a sales opportunity is identified, the channel manager hands over individual sales campaigns to the appropriate direct sales people. Furthermore, the Channel Managers are also expected to produce a sales forecast using the same standard templates that the direct sales people use. The channel managers then have to fight for recognition as they have effectively done their job, but now have no control over (or are unable to accurately forecast) the customer order.

In some cases the inflexibility of reporting tools means that Channel Managers find it virtually impossible to represent sales opportunities in the CRM and are then questioned as to whether they are doing their jobs. All of this because the Channel Managers' compensation plan is not focused on relationship development and the way in which the CRM system was implemented didn't consider their needs.

Developing accurate compensation plans that directly align with corporate objectives will ensure that you benefit from the behavior you are looking for from your employees. Remember to consider targets for employees other than your sales people.

What should you consider?

When looking at your sales processes you should consider the following:

• Do your sales processes add value to your sales people in the way that they try to add value to their clients
  
  
• Nurture sales people's creativity and encourage their individuality.
  
  
• Involve the sales team in your process development activity.
  
  
• Clearly define expectations for your sales team - including objectives beyond just their revenue targets.
  
  
• Align compensation plans with corporate objectives in order to obtain the employee behaviors that you want.
  
  
• Focus attention on planning and strategy.
  
  
• Make sure you incorporate flexibility in all of your sales processes.
  
  
• Encourage new and creative approaches to sales, in response to changing economic conditions and industry trends.
  
  
• Make sure that all sales processes add value to the sales team in order to gain their support and commitment.