Today’s economic climate has been challenging for sales, but great salespeople will succeed no matter what the economic conditions are.
“In its simplest form, the goal of a salesperson is to get someone to do the thing you want them to do within a certain time frame,” says Chris Hayes, adjunct professor at Delaware Valley College and director of strategic accounts at WebMD. “It takes a special type of individual to have the skills to be able to do that. It takes someone who is passionate about selling, motivated, with customer relationship skills and self-discipline.”
Smart Business spoke with Hayes about how successful sales forces have adapted to fit the times.
How are sales forces changing?
One of the biggest changes in sales forces is an increased emphasis on how they are structured based upon account types and account segmentations. It’s important to put the right people on the right accounts. You want to keep your best people engaged and challenged, because those are your money-makers. The need to find new and effective ways to motivate salespeople ties into it, as well.
The most important way to motivate is through appropriate compensation programs. Continue to innovate and find creative incentives for the sales force, because, at the end of the day, salespeople are going to behave in the manner in which they are incented. So keep your sales goals in line with your overall company goals. That way everyone is on the same page and working toward the same endgame.
How does the segmentation approach work?
Most companies today employ a segmentation approach, which entails establishing different types of tiers for your customers. Basically, your highly valued, highly strategic accounts fall into a top segment. Your small to midsized accounts fall into a middle segment. At the bottom, you have your pure new business development type of accounts.
The key to making this work well is aligning your sales force with the makeup of these accounts. Every account has its own personality, and successful sales managers are able to effectively align the salesperson to an account.
For instance, if one person historically has not had much luck with an account, it may make sense for you to consider replacing that person with someone who may be better suited for that account from a personality perspective, resulting in the improved performance of the account. Or you could put someone who is not a right fit from a personality perspective on a highly performing account and face a subsequent decline in the performance of the account.
One of the challenges an effective sales manager has today is linking those right personalities together to let you optimize the account’s effectiveness. There are salespeople who like the comfort of calling on large accounts. They sell through their relationships on those accounts. There are other salespeople who like working off a blank sheet of paper; they like the perspective of new accounts where they may not know people.
You need to have an understanding of your account structure and the nature of your accounts and be able to effectively segment those accounts based on those variables.
Find out what motivates and drives them, and link the two together. The extent to which you do that will determine their success or failure.