I spent quite a lot of the last week working with a company that has
gone through 6 sales managers in less than 3 years. That is a lot of sales
managers for a young business with aggressive growth targets!
As we worked with the company it became increasingly clear that
while the sales managers had not helped much, there were a couple of deeper
issues that stopped the company being able to achieve its sales targets.
Basically the lack of sales was a message from the market to say, “You are
not offering anything we want, so we are not going to buy.” The sales managers
were the unwitting messengers.
This was clearly uncomfortable news to the company we have been
working with for two reasons:
- It is normal to assume that a lack of sales from a sales person means that the sales person has failed. The result is usually a high turnover of sales staff with all the associated cost and upheaval to the business that might well have been avoided by getting things right earlier.
- It means that the company needs to look deeper and start analyzing more than just a lack of sales. This is an alarming prospect for most companies, which raises all sorts of issues and risks they would rather avoid.
1 It can be very difficult for a management team, especially if it
includes the founders of the business to accept this kind of market feedback,
especially when it comes from the people that most managers trust least in
their businesses – the dreaded sales punter.
There is no hiding from this issue. If your business is not making
sales, it’s because the market you are targeting does not want to buy your
products as they stand. You can change the sales folk as often as you want, but
unless you change the product, or the way you are positioning the product in
the market, sales are unlikely to increase.
However, there is a flipside to this.
In all the years we have been doing this kind of work, we have yet
to come across a terminal case. In fact some have been resolved with simple
measures that have been put in place in a matter of days.
One memorable case I can think of is a tech company that was
struggling to make sales and suffering from high staff turnover. Simply by
changing the way it communicated with the market and tweaking the message,
which took about 2 weeks, the market perception was transformed. As a result
that business increased its sales revenues by a factor of more than 10 in less
than a year.
So what is the point of this little blog article?
Well it simply this, if your sales team isn’t delivering the goods,
don’t just assume it’s their fault. It may well be and we certainly are not
suggesting you ignore that.
But…it might also be something that the average sales person can’t
change because they are either not skilled enough, or because it is beyond
their pay grade.
As always, I hope this helps and I’d love to hear your views and
experiences on this.
