By Tim Searcy

Ahh meetings—those wonderful illusions of productivity, collaboration and focus.  Meetings are the standard reaction to sales management crisis just as running an IV is the standard answer in an emergency room.

OK, you are going to have a meeting because you are in a crisis. What are you going to meet about?

Enthusiastic yelling, leading and hours of meetings will only create the illusion of problem solving.  Instead, you need information.  There are three types of information you have to get a stranglehold on right away in a sales crisis: pipeline, prospects and potential.

1. Pipeline. The pipeline is defined as the list of real opportunities for which you have credible, verifiable information including all of the following:

• Dollars. How big is this, how soon can we see it, and how long will the opportunity continue to pay us and is there a bigger payout later?  But even more important than that is the rock solid assurance that a trigger event has occurred that will make certain this deal happens, and an unshakeable knowledge that a budget of sufficient size has been allocated to do the work. Without these, the dollars are dreams, not dollars.
• Dates. When the deal is going to close is less relevant than when it will bill.  More importantly, what control do we have on moving the dates forward versus waiting for things to happen?  Sometimes a prospect will make accommodation or we can directly impact how quickly actions can take place by what we do.
• Decision Making. You have to know the criteria upon which the awarding of the work will pivot.  If we don’t know how the fears that the deal will alleviate in the client’s mind, we don’t know enough to win.
• Decision Makers. Is the economic buyer involved and have we personally engaged with them yet?   What do we know about these people as individuals, and what research do we have on them and their history in decision making?  Again, do we know what has triggered the choice to change providers or move outside?

The goal of the pipeline information analysis is to trim down the pipeline to a 30-60 day action cycle. Clean out everything that does not provide the information you need, set it aside for reconnaissance work and now focus on the remaining pipeline over which planning and energy can have impact.

2. Prospects. What if your remaining pipeline is ‘thin’? The crisis may not be able to be addressed with the opportunities in the pipeline even if we close at a slightly higher rate than we have in the past.  We have to look above the pipeline to find out where we can hope to see more opportunities.

• Source. Often a crisis is at least in part about our own expenses. As a sales leader, you will be asked to address things like trade shows, advertising, sponsorships, client gifts and T &E.  You need to have a great sense of where your best leads are coming from.  In a crisis, there is nothing you have to do.
• Rate of flow. What is the pace of demand generation and does it have seasonality?  Trade show season is often touted as the best time to get new leads.  However, every marketing activity has a lifecycle, and someone needs to work through a calendar to give you an expected number of leads for each cycle.  Then you need to determine if the lead flow will be sufficient, and if not, what expense trade offs are you willing to make to gain a greater or different yield of leads.
• Distribution. This is no time to play fair.  If you have been using a standard distribution of leads to sales people, you need to rethink this.  In a time of crisis, you need your best people chasing the best opportunities.  Crisis by its nature means you will have to sacrifice something, and unfortunately the feelings of your less productive salespeople may need to be ignored.

These steps are all valid if the pipeline is too small to overcome the gap that is creating the crisis. If you have a big enough pipeline, however, WORK THE PIPELINE and leave the fresh prospecting efforts until you have exhausted the pipeline.

3.    Potential from current clients. Often the place we go first is our current clients.  We know them, and they know us, and it is likely that we are not getting all the business from them that we should.

• Current status. With which clients are we currently in good standing?  This is not the time to chase someone who is angry at us to ask for more business.  As a sales leader, it will require nerves of steel to face down an owner or boss and say “No, it is not time to ask for more business from this client, because they are already on the edge of firing us.”  I have seen many organizations in which the CEO is completely unaware of the current relationship challenges and the severity of those challenges.
• State of Triggers. It is very difficult to pull a trigger that is not there.  We have to assess whether we have a good story other than our need for why we should be getting more business from a current client.  If the client does not have their own rationale for giving you more, you will need to take one with you.  Ask yourself, “What problem do I solve for my client or fear do I alleviate for them when they give me more business?”  Conversely, you need to assess what problems or fears you create when they give you more business.

With this information, you can begin to make the most important decision any leader can make: what not to focus on.  That’s right, this is a reductive process.  Get rid of the lower impact items and drive the things you can manage like a ten penny nail (That means really, really hard!)  Many times, the answers you get from your investigation will drop that pit in your stomach to depths you had not realized existed.  However, from real truth comes real change.  You need to design a plan that takes into account Pareto’s law, and focus on the 20% that can give you the 80% you have to have to get out of the crisis.

Old men aren’t the first to die in shipwrecks.

You would think they would be since they do not have the strength or endurance of young men, but in maritime records, young men die first. Why?  Because they flail about and waste precious energy while old men grab onto drifting debris, conserve their energy and wait for daylight to determine what to do.

Right now, one of my client’s business unit leaders is acting just like a young sailor during his first shipwreck.  His biggest deals are finishing up with little backlog to absorb the headcount and he’s flailing, yelling into the darkness and panicking.  He’s frightened and he has the right to be.

So what can he do?

1)    Shut up. Quit talking to everyone about how frightened you are, how quickly the sky is falling and how new and different strategies need to be implemented.  For the most part, this is not new news and does not serve a proactive purpose. Start talking when you have a consistent strategy and when you can articulate it clearly, often and with conviction.

2)    Grab onto some driftwood. Just because you are frightened, it doesn’t mean that everything is not working. You have to define the core pieces that are working and start building a boat (your strategy) based on them.  At the very least, you need to cling to what is working until daylight comes.

3)    Quit kicking until you spot land. There are no silver bullet solutions. Changing the offering to the market on a 72-hour cycle confuses your people and your prospects. Follow a strategy with 10 prospects and determine the outcomes.  Don’t just take a sample size of one conversation with one prospect and decide that you “have the answer.”  Calm down. Follow the plan through 10 conversations with 10 prospects and then decide if a complete change in strategy is necessary.

4)    Conserve energy. Make choices. More of more is not necessarily going to yield more.  Focus on the opportunities that you are hunting one at a time and with rigor.  It is the opposite of the shotgun approach—a flurry of activity in many directions—but it is more effective in the long run.  It’s better to pick out strategic targets and drive hard at those opportunities.
5)    Give encouragement. Chances are that other people on the team are frightened.  Use your experience and judgment to show them that your team will get through this tough time.

As in life, the people who need the most help are usually the least likely to take it.  If you are the drowning man, follow this list. If you know a drowning man, give him this list. If you are doing just fine, keep this list.  You may need it the next time there is a sales shipwreck.

The inspiration for this post came from NPR’s “Only a Game”. While I was listening to the program that covers “sports for the rest of us,” it struck me that Hunt Big Sales should create its own set of Olympic events for large account selling. Now, these events may not be as compelling as the “competitive bird watching” or “Winnebego Backwards Blindfolded Obstacle Course Driving” that “Only a Game” covers, but since sales people are competitive by nature, I thought we would all have a good time.

A few guiding principles as we consider the proposed events:

1. Large account selling is a team activity. There are no solo events.
2. No commissions will be paid to winning teams, but you may receive a title-only promotion at your company.
3. It is assumed that all events will take the form of some “real world” exercise. For this reason, food will need to be supplied by the contestants for themselves and the judges. Food points will be awarded and depending upon quality could make up as much as half of all points awarded.
4. Neither alcohol nor caffeine will be considered “performance enhancing drugs.”

Now to the proposed events…
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I just finished Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, an oldie but a goodie. It tells the story of the Oakland A’s and their manager Billy Beane’s fight against the Conventional Wisdom of professional baseball. Beane guided his team in a battle against the “system”—the well established conventions of what it takes to make a great baseball team (or a baseball team great)—and won. Beane understood that his team was not just a group of players, but a group of people whose individual skills are needed to orchestrate a win. The same can be said for your sales team. The sales person, sales manager, designers, engineers, operations and client services personnel all have a hand in hunting a big sale. It’s the combination of skills they bring to the table that will help accomplish the goal.

What can hunters learn from Beane and his team?

Go Against Conventional Wisdom (CW)
Let’s start with some of the “Conventional Wisdom” that organizations use when fielding their sales teams. Remember, these are the things you’ll be working against when putting together your team.

• “Our team must come from our industry.” I hear this statement 90+% of the time. This is true for some positions, but as I will discuss later, not all. This CW is limiting and can be expensive.
• “Have a set of deep contacts in the prospect base.” People like the idea of having access to large accounts via previous contacts, but with all the turnover and reorganization in the marketplace, this is not as valuable or as relevant as it once was.
• “Sales people are the most important part of the sale.” I have railed against the “rockstar” idea before. In the complex sale, one person may be the most important part of a single step, but is still, in the end, just one part of the overall team.
• Rockstar pedigree. You may be looking for players with the “big company” background, but in what way is experience from a behemoth, matrixed, highly-resourced and deeply branded company going to benefit a company like yours? In other words, how will those players’ backgrounds serve you?
• Look the part. There is a widely-held belief as to what a sales person looks, talks and “feels” like. In reality, there’s no real “look” to a great sales person. It’s his or her skill that will make the sale.

Team Building on Your Payroll (or lack thereof)
Like Beane, small and mid-size companies don’t always have big league budgets to hire the “rockstars” to play for their teams. But since we play in the big leagues, we need to figure out a strategy to win…
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