Sales Process and Oat Bran
Mark is a colleague of mine. He sells software. Actually, he sells a lot of software. Since I first met him six years ago he has been the top salesman at his company.
Mark is 45 years old and has never had any sales training whatsoever—don’t even mention it to him; he’ll go on a rant. Until his accidental segue into the sales world in 2001, Mark had been a teacher in the public school system for some 15 years. Within six months at his software sales job Mark was consistently selling four to six times more than the salespeople around him.
I can sit and tell stories of the Marks I’ve met in most every industry you can name, and I can tell you what the common denominator of every one of these ultra top producers is, but I do that all day. Today let me tell you what it is not. It is not a sales “process”.
I’m not trying to be a naysayer, but to do my job properly I have to list not only what does work in sales force productivity—I have to comment on the “fads” when they begin to influence a critical mass, and process has officially reached fad status. Process is the new oat bran. Ten years ago oat bran was the cure-all of the day; you couldn’t buy anything that didn’t boast, “Now with more oat bran!” on its label. Where’s oat bran today?
Let me be blunt. Adopting a company-wide sales process will not raise your team’s performance to stellar levels (here is a randomly selected example of what I mean; this is one of so many companies that claim their sales process is the performance enhancer you need) and it is the Marks of the sales world who, every day in every sale type, blatantly make the point for us all to see. No training, no process—six times more sales. And if you try to teach Mark a selling process—of just about any kind—his performance will not only not go up, it usually goes down.
Understand that processes only come into being when there is lagging performance. No one ever created a process for doing a thing, after all, when that thing is already being done at consistently high levels by all of its practitioners. A process is conceived only when the “all” part of that last sentence disappears, and when the process creator believes that this is the way to address the issue—by teaching everyone a “proven” series of steps. But here’s the whole kicker. When you study top sales performers you will quickly see that they all reach those top levels via very different selling styles! So how do you know who to base your sales process on? Process-izing only makes sense if it chronicles the one proven best way of doing something, which you will never find in sales. This is the fundamental flaw of sales process.
Today’s top sales teams have returned to a more human mindset of hiring talented people and then allowing them—actually encouraging them—to exploit each of their own styles; to do things their own way rather than overriding those natural talents with a rigid common process that must be used by everyone. This first requires a very clear definition of which natural talents are needed for their specific sale type, but at least that can be identified.
A process-driven sales forces make me think of a professional football team spending great time and resources to hire the five best quarterbacks in the world—who all have their own unique style that they have honed over many years and that works for them—only to then retrain all five to do things one common way. We know that in such a case, overall productivity will drop.
Process has its place, but where human performance is concerned there is rarely one best way to do something. Every time you think there is—every single time—someone will come along and shatter all previous records by doing things his own way, thus rendering that superior process of yours moot.
Stop entrusting your salespeople’s performance to a process that someone else says is best. Return instead to what sales has always been about; different people’s unique and natural born ability to influence and lead others to decision, each in their own way.
February 7th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
…seems like I’ve made every mistake there is to make!