Great Online Sales Assessment Tools

If you are a sales director, VP of sales, or CEO stepping in to figure out how your sales team performance relates to the skills, ability, and motivation of the people on your team, today you can select and utilize online sales assessment tools that are available from a variety of different vendors. Here's what you need to know about them:

1. Make sure that you look for a sales assessment tool that has a statistically validity sampling and has proven correlation between the assessment and the actual performance of the sales people who have used it.

2. Make sure that the assessment tool requires that you provide a detailed profile of the exact sales positions that you are rating in terms of sales cycle, competitive environment, size of sale, competition, account management vs. hunter, etc.

3. Make sure that the sales assessment tool provides you with a clear understanding of whether or not each sales rep can and will sell for your company. Do they have the underlying motivation, skill, and ability in order to get the job done?

4. Make sure that the sales assessment tool also provides an overview of your entire sales team. This is important because evaluating the skills of each individual is only the first step towards looking at overall team performance assessment. Make sure the software is able to integrate all of those different sales team members into a holistic look at your sales team.

5. Make sure the online assessment tool assesses management as well. You have individual contributors and you have managers in a sales team and you can't assess the performance of one without understanding the characteristics of another and how they interact.

6. Make sure that your tool is bundled with an expert who is capable of providing you with interpretations of the reports themselves as well as consulting services to set up, execute, and analyze the results of the tool. The consultant that you select should be a sales consultant with a depth of experience and training on the use of the tool. That's absolutely critical in being successful.

7. The tool also needs to be able to provide you with a punch list and recommendation of sales training topics that could be used to enhance the skills of your sales team.

The online sales assessment tool that we highly recommend is from Objective Management This tool has the complete capability to provide the sort of performance measurement that you need in order to understand whether or not your sales team is working at peak performance and what sort of training and or skills upgrades you need to be focusing on in order to get your sales team's performance to the next level.

To Make or To Buy - That is The Question.

Some companies have the luxury of developing training programs and strong internal career paths for young up starts that they bring onto their sales team. But in this day in age there are many companies, particularly small and medium businesses, that have a very difficult time creating an environment for growth that manages the development of their people. In fact, all companies today are squeezed on margins and have a hard time creating enough infrastructure to provide full time sales training programs, mentoring, and other types of developmental activities for their sales people.

If your company is thinking about making or buying, one of the key considerations as to whether or not you buy the best or grow from within really comes down to resources. If you are a small or medium company, perform an assessment of what it is you can do to help grow your sales people. Write down a list of all the activities that ideally you'd be able to perform as a sales manager to mentor and grow new hires into your company. When you come up with that list, figure out whether or not those tasks are things that you can perform internally. If you can’t perform internally, then the next question is, is there a way to outsource these activities to make sure that they are getting done by somebody? Often times a sales consulting firm can help you with some of those activities that are not ongoing but require specific specialist inputs from time to time.

Sometimes it's easier to buy in the best talent by bringing outsides sales consultants, but other times it makes a lot of sense to just go ahead and hire a sales resource that can help you from the outside. If your company is going through a make or buy decision as to whether or not to grow from within or to hire the best, consider using a recruiting firm that can help you get the best people. Those people require less training and less time to develop in order to get to your overall sales growth objectives. This is why it's so critical to be clear with yourself as to what you are capable of doing as it comes to hiring people.

If your company has a well developed sales infrastructure, training programs, incentive motivation schemes, mentoring, coaching, and those kinds of capabilities, then you could very well go it alone and hire people of less experience hoping to bring them along, but if you are like most companies who are struggling to get all of these tasks done while continuing to focus on the day to day business, it's better for you to either bring in a outside sales consultant or hire a recruiter that can help you go find the talent you need.
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Advice for Sales Team Benchmarking and Forecasting

If your company has an entrenched sales force with an average tenure of 3 to 5 years, now is a great time for you to perform an assessment of your team using new tools that are available online and which can be easily deployed to perform an objective evaluation of each of your sales team member’s individual selling skills as well as on overall team performance assessment. These tools are readily available and easy to access, even if you don't want to deploy a sales consultant to do the work.

One tool that we use, represent, and work with is the evaluation tool from Objective Management. The objective management sales team evaluation process is an easy one to perform and one that any sales manager can use to come up with actionable information that can be turned into making decisions on performance management, termination, and/or team upgrading. It's very easy to use these tools and it doesn't take a lot of time or effort.

The output of a team evaluation is an individual report that you can use with each of your sales team members so that you can have a clear discussion to figure out what they can do to improve their overall productivity and enhance their value to your company. If you are thinking about 2007 and how to get more revenue from your existing sales team, use this kind of tool to make such an assessment. They're easy to access, easy to set up, and easy to interpret.

The next step is establishing a sales forecasting process. If you're like most sales managers, one of your jobs is to regularly scrutinize the sales forecast and look into the pipeline to see what's dead and what's actually moving forward. The job of your sales people is to advance the sale as much as possible but also to be clear when an opportunity is dead in the water and not moving. Your job as a sales manager is to scrutinize those entries that look like they've been languishing for a long time in your forecast and get them to either move forward or to move them out of the forecast and kill those opportunities that are dead.

To often we find sales managers who are taking at face value what their sales people are saying about a given opportunity. Indeed, I have a situation right now where one of my sales people is actually continuously updating old pipeline entries which are really dead opportunities. She is in the process of wishing and hoping they'll turn into a sale, but the fact is that she is really in denial that they will not close. My job as a sale manager is to call those entries to her attention and make sure that she comes to clarity about the fact that those opportunities are no longer worth keeping in the sales pipeline.

If you have a modern CRM system, it's easy to manage the sales pipeline, scrutinize the activity, and talk through those issues with your sales people. If you are using salesforce.com you probably have a dashboard that allows you to quickly look at activity related to specific pipeline entries and to call your sales people's bluff when those sales entries are not advancing. The best way to get your sales people back on the track to prospecting, qualifying, and closing new business, is to make sure that their sales forecast isn't filled with opportunities that are in fact dead. The faster that you can get a sales person to clarity about what's not going to happen, then faster that you can get them working on new opportunities and creating new opportunities that will actually turn into sales.

A lot of sales people like to keep old pipeline entries active thinking that they'll eventually turn into sales when in fact they're not going to. So make sure that on a regular basis you are reviewing your old CRM entries and opportunities and killing the ones that are not going to happen. It'll save you a lot of time and energy talking through the same old deals over and over with your sales representatives so that you can get on to the subject of finding out what they're doing to create new ones. That's the role of the sales manager.


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Your Current Customers are Your Platform for Increased Sales

We have a healthcare client whose sales strategy is to build business through its current customer base. Yet, that doesn't mean that all its doing is trying to get its current customers to buy more. This client has a huge network of clients across the country that in turn all have networks of colleagues, former coworkers and/or industry connections. The company's sales strategy is to proactively drive referrals from its existing client contacts to gain access to new ones and leverage its clients network for faster access to more prospects than it could gain on its own. It helps that this client has a very high customer satisfaction rating.

A referral and a warm lead from a trusted friend, coworker, or former colleague are five times more powerful than the best direct mail piece or the best cold call.

When a trusted friend or colleague recommends that you talk to a vendor, don't you typically pay attention to them. The fact is, everybody wants to do business with somebody who they know and trust, or even better, somebody they know and like. So referrals become a very powerful tool for growing your business.

If you company has a very strong reputation with its current clients, it becomes even easier because those people are not only willing to provide you with referrals and ideas or people to call on with friends and connections, they're actually glad to pick up the phone and make an introduction on your behalf. Why? Because they love your product and your service.

If your company doesn't have an active strategy to mine your current customer base, looking for referrals to new ones, you're probably missing a great opportunity to tap into the easiest revenue expansion channel that is available to most companies: referral sales from existing clients.
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Finding the Best Sales & Marketing Talent for Venture-Backed Firms

If you are venture capitalists, you’re working actively and aggressively to gain high returns on your investment by putting your shareholder's cash into companies that have an outstanding opportunity for high growth and high returns. The stakes are high and in order to get to those results, you have to have an infallible team. In fact, venture capitalists that we work with consistently tell us that the most important aspect of their investment decision is the quality of the management.

We’ve all heard the adage, "You don't bet on the horse, you bet on the jockey." This is very true for most Venture Capitalist's and as a result of that, they look to mitigate their management risk by hiring the absolute best. A top sales leader can have a dramatic impact on a company’s ability to enter a new market and win against entrenched competition. For that, you need to have people who have a very unique profile of management, leadership, innovation, and above all, they must really be sales heroes.

Venture capitalists can't afford to risk their investments on B or C players when it comes to sales and marketing leadership. The best way to make sure that your getting to the A level talent you need is by retaining the services of a executive search or recruiting firm that specializes in the sales and marketing functions for high technology. As a Venture Capitalist looking to verify whether or not the person you have in place is going to hit their sales, bringing in an outside assessment firm or sales consulting company can also help you to mitigate risk.

By bringing in a company with experience hiring and assessing top sales and marketing leadership, you can determine whether or not the people that you have in the key positions in the company that you're investing in are going to be able to carry the water that you're looking for them to carry. Start-ups require a rare breed of talent when it comes to sales and marketing leadership. Typically, a sales or marketing leader in a start up has got to have an outstanding combination of individual contributor skills and the ability to get results through others by building and leading outstanding teams. Most top sales candidates for start-ups can't pass the muster because they're not capable of flexing from gaining the initial market traction and performing rain-making duties to landing those big initial accounts through to hiring, training, and developing a team of people who can replicate their own individual efforts.

As I recruit sales and marketing talent across the country for different venture backed clients that we work with, I realize that there are very few candidates that actually can do both of these things well consistently and therefore, who would qualify for start-up VP of sales or VP of marketing position. The same is true on the marketing side of the equation. A person who has been buried or even at the top of a large marketing organization or a mature company doesn't have the kind of critical thinking and fast moving skills that are required in order to lead a company through its initial go-to-market strategy and then iterate that and fine tune it over and over until it's working properly for a start-up company.

So, if you're a venture capitalist and thinking about whether or not you've got the right team members at the top of your portfolio companies, start first by getting an outside assessment as you go in through the do diligence process. Second of all, make sure that if you do need to make a adjustments, that you don't short change yourself.
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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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