Why You Should Treat Your Sales Team Like 5 Year-Olds

Embracing The Inner Child of Top PerformersThe Salesforce blog featured a new article by Veelo VP of Marketing Brian Fravel, entitled “Why You Should Treat Your Sales Team Like 5 Year-Olds: Embracing The Inner Child of Top Performers.”

I have a friend who proudly announces that he is like a 5 year old. He has a short attention span, likes to play, but doesn’t like too many rules. He stubbornly avoids tasks he finds uncomfortable, even if they benefit him. He is short on patience, is fairly unorganized, but really passionate if he can see the reward. All these traits can be frustrating to work with, but the most surprising thing? He is the best salesperson I’ve ever met.

Either in spite of those traits, or because of them, this guy is great at sales and it’s probably true that many others in the sales profession share his childlike attributes.

Unfortunately, if this is accurate, traditional sales training and coaching strategies have some inherent flaws and work against these natural traits.

Intrigued? Read the entirety of “Why You Should Treat Your Sales Team Like 5 Year-Olds” on the Salesforce blog.

Demystifying the Sales Tech Landscape: Part 1

Demystifying the Sales Tech Stack | Veelo

An Introduction to the Sales Tech Landscape

The sales tech landscape has become incredibly complex in recent years, and it continues to grow very quickly and become even more confusing. We want to bring some order to the chaos, and clarity to the smoke and mirrors.

This blog kicks off a series of blog posts, webinars and guides to help make sense of the sales tech landscape through the eyes of the buyer. Many existing landscapes today categorize the platforms from the sales tech industry’s point of view. As a buyer, you have a business challenge you want to solve which isn’t necessarily served by an industry-centric take.

So you won’t see any categories with confusing, obscure terms like “multi-channel orchestration” or “proactive engagement” in this landscape. You’ll see categories that make sense and align to your business challenges.

Subscribe to our blog to be notified as we post more details and roll out visual aids to help you make sense of the sales tech landscape.

 


 

In the Beginning

The sales function is the last organization in B2B businesses to be hit by the technology wave. While back-end processes like payroll started automating in the 50’s, salespeople were still using a Rolodex and phone. When enterprise ERP systems deployed in the 80’s and 90’s, sales people simply upgraded their Rolodex to a computer with email.

And then, in the last decade, the martech tsunami hit marketing. The Chiefmartec blog has done an excellent job of documenting the fast-paced changes. The first landscape they published in 2011 featured 150 companies. The 2016 landscape has over 4,000 vendors!

Sales leaders, are you ready for the sales tech tsunami?

Making Sense of Sales Tech Language

Start navigating the sales tech waters and you’ll soon be neck-deep in a sea of nebulous terms. What the heck is the difference between sales enablement vs sales acceleration vs sales performance? The answer: depends on who is doing the defining. Many vendors in this space also use the same language for different products, so discerning what vendor X does vs. vendor Y can be time consuming, difficult and frustrating. In this framework, we will do our best to avoid nebulous terms and use simple words that make sense, like “gather prospect information” or “decide which prospect to contact.”

This Sales Tech Framework Scope

Before jumping into the framework, let’s define the scope. This sales tech landscape focuses on B2B selling and improving sales performance. It does not cover customer retention or customer service. It also does not cover the martech landscape mentioned above. Although CRM and marketing automation (MAS) systems are critical to the sales tech and martech stack, adoption is relatively high, larger players have emerged, and there is plenty of good information available for those platforms.

This sales tech framework specifically seeks to make sense of all of the fragmented technology that sits around the CRM and MAS.

Sales Tech Framework Introduction

Let’s start at the highest level and keep this simple. We’ve divided the landscape into 4 basic categories:

The Sales Process: involves the activity of selling. It includes all of the activities from gathering information about prospects, to contacting them, to the sales conversations to getting a signed contract.

People Development: includes onboarding, training and coaching

Administrative Support Functions: activities which aren’t necessarily part of the actual act of selling, but are critical to having a productive sales force. This includes forecasting, quota management, compensation, content management and more.

Business Intelligence & Analytics: includes the tools to take all of the data and generate not just reports, but actual insights that will ultimately allow companies to direct their resources to the highest ROI markets and opportunities.

Diving a Little Deeper into the Sales Tech Framework

Sales Process

This category is by far the largest, and in future posts, webinars and briefs, we will dive deeper, but most capabilities fit into these sub-categories:

  1. Gather prospect/contact/lead information: Based on your target, who are the companies and contacts you should contact? What is their phone number, email, title, etc.?
  2. Contact decision-making: Who should you call? When? How do you make sure you are working accounts and contacts with the highest probability of a sale?
  3. How to contact: To maximize my productivity, what tools can you use to make contacting and communicating with prospects fast and efficient?
  4. What to say and do: Once you contact your prospect, what should you do? What do you share? What do you say?
  5. How to close: Your opportunity is ready to make a purchase. How do you deliver a pricing quote, get the contract signed, and make it official?
People Development

People Development is fairly straightforward. The capabilities include:

  1. Onboarding: Onboarding is all about getting new sales rep to quota as fast as possible. This means not just getting knowledge transferred, but also getting sales reps to follow your company’s sales methodology.
  2. Training: Very closely related to onboarding. How do you efficiently AND effectively keep you sales reps well-versed on the latest products, competitive landscape, etc.
  3. Coaching: In an ideal world, managers could coach one-on-one, face-to-face on a regular basis, but that is almost never the case. These tools help managers virtually coach when they can’t be there in person.
Administrative Support Functions

These are often tools focused on efficiency. Where many of the Sales Process tools are about growing top line revenue, many of the administrative support tools are about cutting costs and doing things cheaper and faster.

  1. Forecasting: How can you more accurately forecast quarterly, yearly, etc. goals so the corporation more efficiently allocate resources?
  2. Quota Management: How do you set quota? How do you monitor and manage it, especially when you have a large diversified salesforce?
  3. Compensation & Incentives: A close cousin to quota management. How do you manage commissions, bonus, contests, SPIFFs, etc?
  4. Territory Management: What should my territories look like? How many and what kind of sales reps should I have in each territory? Where should put more to grow sales?
  5. Content Management: You have a lot of sales and marketing content. How do you manage it? Where do you store it? How do sales reps find it? How to you manage version control?
Business Intelligence & Analytics

Although most of the tools in this category tools aren’t sales-specific technologies, all of the other tools I’ve just listed generate a massive amount of data. How do you take all that data and get insights out of it? Especially when you have multiple data sources. Oh, and by the way, the divisional GM probably has some pretty specific personal preferences on how the data should be sliced and diced for the quarterly reports. Business Intelligence & Analytic to the rescue…

Wrapping up…For now.

We’ve just scratched the surface and will be diving deeper in subsequent blog posts and webinars. Check out our introductory webcast on this topic, which rolls out a graphical framework and provides example companies in each of the categories and sub-categories.

Did we miss something? Agree or disagree with our framework? We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below.

Demystifying the Sales Tech Stack Webinar | Veelo