Integrating Values Into Your Company's Sales Culture

If you're like so many sales leaders or CEOs out there, you know how important values are to creating a company that people want to be a part of. In fact, today's best companies, the ones that win in their markets and dominate their segments, often times have a deep connection to inner values that radiate out through the company to their customers, and make people want to do business with them.

There are a lot of misconceptions about values as it relates to sales. The typical stereotypes of fast talkin', slick lookin', superficial sales people who are only interested in taking your money. All of those images are conjured up as we think about our own experiences in dealing with the worst of sales people in our own personal lives.

The fact is, a healthy sales culture is one that instills the core values and beliefs of the company. Values such as caring for customers, honesty and integrity, consistently exceeding expectations, providing long-term value, doing what's right for the customer even if it means recommending another vendor or passing up a sale.

The core values that you'd like to instill in our people throughout your company are certainly applicable to the sales department. They're also the values that you want to make sure that your sales managers are imparting to your team and reinforcing through what they do and what they say.

Showing people that you're committed to healthy, honest communication, to respectful corrective action discussions or even terminations, to solve a customer's problems, even when the customer is yelling and screaming at your people. Those are all things that a sales leader needs to be willing to do in order to show his/her people how important it is to uphold the company's values when it comes to sales.

Talking about values with your sales people is equally as important as leading by example. What do we want to be as a team? What do we want to stand for? How do we want to treat others? How do we want to be treated? What are our core beliefs? These are questions that are easily asked of a sales team.

If you go through this kind of an exercise at an off-site or an annual planning session you'll be surprised to see that most sales people, at least the best ones, are deeply committed to upholding the right values.

Integrating values into your sales culture is an important job and one that sales management must embrace in order to optimize the success of your company.

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Great Leaders Build Great Cultures

The fact is, the single most important ingredient to building a great company culture is leadership. Good sales and marketing leadership can act as a powerful energizing force for your company. It can help you achieve the cultural shift that we've been talking about (in my previous blogs). If you're suspicious about these types of people, you may need to work on getting over that suspicion and embracing the fact that good sales and marketing leadership goes hand-in-hand with good company management.

If you don't know how to find or attract that kind of talent, it's easy to retain the services of an executive search firm which specializes in recruiting top sales and marketing executives. That kind of firm is worth it's weight in gold, in terms of helping you to acquire the person or people that you need in order to energize your company and take it to the top of it's market.

If your company is lacking the kind of sales and marketing leadership that is going to create a winning scenario for your company, think about going outside and finding the best that you can get and using a recruiting firm to help you in this process.

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Build A Healthy Sales Culture At Your Company

Is your company struggling to hit its revenue growth targets? Is sales viewed as a necessary evil inside your business? How do people's attitudes reflect upon the sales department? What do they think of the individuals and the leadership in that part of your company? Do people generally distrust the sales and marketing people at your company? Are people hesitant to talk about sales and/or participate in the sales process or be associated with it? These are the symptoms that I find at companies that need to transform themselves and to develop a more healthy sales culture.

There are lots of companies that are striving for excellence in everything they do, yet they completely miss the mark in sales. Why is this? Well, often times companies which are headed by technologists, engineers, operations, or finance people lack a level of experience in sales that is commensurate with their other core strengths. Companies that excel however, are ones that embrace the importance of having a healthy, strong sales culture as part of their company values. They work to foster and develop a spirit of achievement, competitiveness, accountability, a drive to win and other significant values that embody a positive sales culture.

If your company is looking to create that sort of culture and is lacking it, start by looking within. Do a gap analysis. Figure out what it is that you're missing. Is it leadership? Often times this is the critical missing ingredient. Acquiring and integrating top-level sales leadership into your executive team is absolutely critical to a company that wants to develop a strong sales culture. Is it management's own attitudes about sales? Sometimes management just looks down on sales and as a result, even though the sales people are doing their jobs, they're not viewed as an important part of the company and its overall success.

If your company is suffering from a lack of high energy, commitment, and motivation from your sales team or if sales isn't celebrated inside your business, think again about how this reflects upon your overall competitiveness, your profitability, and your own ability to achieve your company's objectives. Companies with healthy sales cultures are the ones that win in today's day and age. Healthy sales cultures start with leadership that's committed to emphasizing the importance of sales and embracing it as core part of their values.

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What Is Good Internet Marketing?

If your company is considering investing in internet marketing activities, and on the verge of hiring somebody to take over this effort, here is a quick list of the types of responsibilities that you should be thinking of for their job description:

- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay Per Click Campaign Management (Google, MSN, Yahoo)
- Web analytics
- Blogging
- Link Building
- Text Optimization
- Syndication of Content (from your website onto other websites)
- Graphic Website Development
- Copywriting

These are all a part of the arsenal you should be thinking about building when you do Internet marketing. In addition to all of these activities, there is a healthy dose of campaign planning, budgeting, tracking, and management that goes along with effectively managing these activities. If you are thinking about hiring an internet marketing specialist, make sure that you get somebody who has a span of skill sets which include the following:

- HTML and Web Design
- Email Platform Experience
- Database Entry
- Quantitative Analysis
- Spreadsheet Skills
- CRM Abilities
- Analytical Skills
- Project Management Abilities
- Written Communication Abilities (including the ability to write marketing copy)

Those are the kinds of core skills you should be looking for in an Internet marketing specialist.

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Drive Your Sales Process But Don't Let It Drive You (Crazy That Is)

In today's day and age, a company that doesn't have a well defined and repeatable sales process can't get ahead in the marketplace. Why? Modern sales forces, particularly in highly competitive markets, need to have well defined repeatable and scalable sales processes in order to effectively compete against national as well as global competition. The foundation for a good sales process has been covered in our other white papers, guides and blogs. That foundation includes a strong level of process definition, a strong level of automation using CRM and a strong level of accountability and discipline as instilled by management. Definition, automation and discipline are three characteristics of well-executed sales processes.

On the other end of the spectrum, we see companies that spend so much of their time measuring and tweaking their sales process that their sales people have very little time left to sell. Reporting, forecasting, metrics, selling upward in the organization to the boss, being accountable for miniscule, granular reporting and activity measurements --those can drive sales people crazy. Your best sales people are the ones who have a good combination of structure and freedom. Structure means process, but freedom means an ability to improvise and to use their own best practices to maximize their prospecting, qualifying, development and closing of new business for your company.

One thing you don't want to do is drive yourself or your sales people crazy by over defining or over measuring or over insisting upon rigorous sales process. A well-defined sales process should be smooth, easy flowing and well lubricated. What I mean by lubricated is that you have to have the systems in place, but you also have to have people excited about doing their job and not dreading following up on endless data entries, reports, and things like that.

If your company is suffering on either end of the spectrum, you should consider bringing in an outside sales consultant to help you go through an assessment and streamlining project. If you are over-engineered in your sales process, a consultant can help you to reduce or eliminate unnecessary steps and measurements that aren't critical to obtaining the results you're looking for. If you need to bring some order to chaos, as is more often the case, they can help you take the rudimentary steps in order to build a workflow that helps your sales force to improve its results, without over encumbering them.

Think about sales process. Make sure that you're driving it -- and what I mean by that is focusing on driving people to be accountable for following the process -- but that it’s not driving you or your team crazy.

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Does Your Company Really Just Need Sales Training?

We get calls from companies across the country, asking us whether or not we can provide them with sales training. Upon further discussion and examination of the problems that they describe, we realize that in fact they don't need sales training at all! What they need is something completely different. I am amazed to see how often Sales Training is diagnosed as the root cause of underperformance.

As we question the CEO, we end up discovering a multitude of other issues: they need to revamp their go to market strategy, they need to reposition their company, they need to realign their sales team and channels with changing market realities, etc. There are a whole host of different reasons why a company needs to make changes in its sales department in order to improve its success. Often times, management calls us to say that they have a training issue, when it's not about training at all.

If your company needs to improve the prospecting, qualifying, developing and closing techniques of your sales representatives and if they need to be trained on how to do an improved job of probing and solution selling, sales training could very well be the right answer for your company. If your sales people aren't delivering enough prospects into the pipeline or closing a high enough percentage of deals, it may not be a training issue at all. It may very well be that you're trying to sell the wrong product into the wrong market or that you're positioned poorly against your competitors.

So don't jump to conclusions and just automatically pick up the phone and start looking for training when you're experiencing a shortfall in your sales numbers. Go deeper to diagnose the root cause of the reason why your team is not selling enough. Often times you'll find the problems are very different from the ones you initially thought.

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Autumn is a Great Time to Start Your 2007 Sales and Marketing Planning

Yes, all of sudden we're in Fall. Now's a great time to begin the process of putting together your numbers for next year. Why should you start now? Well, because it takes several months to develop really solid a proforma P&L which has been vetted by all of your people.

If you go to work now, you should have plenty of time for working on these issues and settling them to a point where your whole team is on the same page about your performance plan for 2007.

Companies that don't go through this planning period with enough advanced notice end up being caught by the seat of their pants and struggling to have a well executable plan.

What are your plans for 2007? When are you going to start working on them?

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How Much Should You Be Spending on Marketing and Sales?

This is a question that we often get from companies that are trying to figure out what percentage from their revenues they should be spending on generating demand and driving leads in the door through marketing activities, versus prospecting, qualifying, developing and closing deals with their sales department.

A lot of our customers work in businesses that are manufacturing-oriented where the gross margins are approximately 50%. A good rule of thumb for those kinds of business is that a company that is at 50% gross margins should be spending no more than 15% of it's revenues on sales and marketing. Typically, the breakdown between sales and marketing is 5% for marketing and 10% for sales. When I'm talking about 10% for sales, I'm talking about total sales costs, which includes base salaries, incentive compensation, benefits, as well as sales administration and sales operations.

If these numbers seem out of line to you because of the industry you're in, remember that these can vary tremendously. We work with software businesses where the gross margins are approaching 98%, and that are spending upwards of 25 to 30% of their revenues on marketing and sales activities.

Why is this, you ask? Well, usually it's because they can afford to. Companies that are in the software business are dealing with a lot higher gross margins and as a result, are capable of spending a greater percentage of their revenues to generate demand and drive business development, while at the same time ensuring a healthy bottom line.

If your company is trying to figure out what is an appropriate percentage of spending for it's marketing and sales activities, you might want to consider bringing in a sales and marketing consultant to help you work through this process.

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Don't Get Too Theoretical With Your Marketing

Now that I've talked about how to connect the strategic with the tactical when it comes to marketing programs management, it's important to mention the need to remember marketing's charter within any successful company: drive demand and generate leads for the sales force. If you're spending too much time at the strategic level and not executing good marketing programs that generate a steady flow of leads for sales, you're wasting your time. "Keep your head in the sky, and your feet on the ground."

I see marketing managers that spend way too much of their time working on strategy and who are not able to execute the kinds of lead generation programs that feed the Sales team. This is where Marketing gets a bad rap: sales teams who are under-fed when it comes to leads feel like the marketing department is not pulling its weight.

If your company is thinking about how to improve the effectiveness of its marketing programs, make sure that you start evaluating your marketing effectiveness in terms of the quantity and quality of sales leads, and the return on investment that's coming from those activities.

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Stay Strategic With Your Marketing

We have a client right now who we're working with to plan and execute a wide variety of marketing communication programs including redesigning their website, search engine optimization and building new sales collateral. This client has called upon us to help them execute a makeover in their marketing tactics and activities, but one thing that they seem to be missing is a more strategic view of how to spend their marketing dollars.

Lots of companies get so tactical with their marketing programs that they fail to see the big picture, like to how to maximize their effectiveness when it comes to reaching customers, generating demand, and driving sales leads in the door. The goal of any marketing manager is to live in the two worlds of both strategic and tactical, to balance those interests and make sure that they continue to stay aligned. It's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities related to marketing program development, and forget what it is that you're trying to accomplish at a higher level.

This is where strategic marketing planning and marketing communications connect. A good marketing manager is always asking him/herself how their tactical marketing programs are aligned with their overall strategic marketing goals. In fact, a strong marketing communications plan typically lists all programs in a format where it is easy to see how those programs directly support the company's overall strategy.

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Sales Management: Lead by Example or Lose Your Best People!

I talk to sales reps seeking new employment who come through our office and complain about really poor managers they've worked with in their previous job, and why they left as a result of that poor management culture. I'm astounded to hear of many top companies out there that have strong reputations, but their sales management definitely is deficient in its ability to lead and manage its teams.

One of the biggest concerns that I hear from people who speak of poor sales managers is their unwillingness to spend time with their people in the trenches, to really help them understand what's required to be successful in sales, and to coach and mentor them. This includes simple things like spending time on the road together, doing detailed opportunity reviews, performing account planning functions - the kinds of things that lead to deeper levels of connection and respect from your sales people.

The sales manager today is called upon to lead by example in his/her thoughts, behavior and actions. Sales managers who sit in their office all day or spend most of their time managing up as opposed to working with their people, are good examples of sales managers who can't cut it. Effective sales managers should spend 75% of their time focusing on working with their people. Of that 75%, 25% of their time should be spent in the field, 25% of their time in performance management and review discussions, and 25% of their time should be coaching their people to succeed. The other 25% of their time can be reserved for corporate duties, but a sales manager spending 75% of their time managing internally but not focusing on the sales team itself is a manager that nobody wants to follow.

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Terminate Sales & Marketing Employees with Dignity

It’s never easy to have to terminate a relationship with an employee who's not producing or who is not a fit with your organization. Yet, I believe that how you terminate poor producers has a huge impact on your ability to recruit top talent as you move forward with your sales organization.

Why is this? Because the people who stick with your organization see how you treat people. In fact, how you treat people becomes the foundation for your reputation as an employer, as a manager, and as a leader. If you are in the process of considering letting go an employee, particularly one who's been there a long time or who has been respected, making that termination decision may very well be the right decision, but how you proceed to the actual point of termination will largely define how you are perceived by the employees who stay, as well as potential employees.

Before you ever terminate an employee, its very important that you implement a corrective action plan, that the plan has quantifiable goals and improvement objectives, and that it is discussed in detail and agreed to with the person that you are considering terminating. It's very important that you also outline the consequences of not achieving those goals for the individual, and that they are clearly understood. By doing this, at the time the person is finally terminated, there is no mistake or question about what your intent was in calling for them to change their performance or to increase their results. If you develop and execute a corrective action program, by the time the person is terminated, they won't be surprised and they won't have any complaints against you as an employer. You will have given them a fair chance to meet your company's expectations to achieve the required sales and marketing results and to turn around their job performance.

When you actually go through the termination process, it's very important that all emotions be kept aside. This includes avoiding judgments or accusatory remarks regarding the employee's particular lack of effort or poor behavior, but rather, really focusing on the lack of results as it relates to the reason for your termination decision. If you can keep a level of respect and decorum in the termination process, you will find that it will have a major impact on your ability to continue to motivate the team that stays with you, and build upon it by attracting top talent. People look for managers, leaders, and employers who are willing to take the high road when it comes to terminations. Your company's reputation as an employer is enhanced by terminating people with dignity.

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