Sales Process - The Elephant in the Boardroom

Weight Loss Diets and Sales Process - It’s Not What “We Know”

Sticking to a sales process is a lot like losing weight.  If you type “lose weight” into google, you will get back 1.1 billion results; 138 million if you put it in quotes.  When it comes to losing weight, we all know it’s increasingly important given our sedentary lifestyles.  We are also informed almost daily of the various benefits of weight loss including a decreased risk of diabetes and heart disease, lower blood pressure, improved mobility and many more.  Lastly, if you are looking for knowledge and advice on how to lose weight, there are hundreds, if not thousands of diets which will guide you through the step by step process to lose weight. Yet, according to the CDC, the obesity rate has steadily increased from 23% when it was initially recorded in 1962 to 36.5% today.  Every time we hear about another diet or weight loss pill, we roll our eyes at the next big fad which will inevitably fail to deliver results.  How do we square the fact that Americans are getting more and more obese despite the widespread knowledge related to the increasing importance, health benefits and detailed instructions on losing weight?

While it’s not standing in the bedroom, there is another elephant in the room – this one is in the boardroom.  If you type “sales process” into Google, you will get 2.17 billion results.  If you narrow your search to “enterprise sales process,” you will still get back 1.25 million results.  We are constantly inundated with the increasing importance of following an enterprise sales process. We can spout off the facts about the many changes to the buying process including how late our sales team gets engaged and how the number of buyers in the process continues to rise.  We hear constantly about the substantial performance delta in companies that follow a standard sales process versus those that do not. Lastly, there is a massive amount of information on how to build a sales process including:

• The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Sales Process

• Five Steps to Better Connecting Your Sales Process to the Buyer's Journey

• The 6 Components of a Brilliant Sales Process

• An Expert’s Guide to Creating a Highly Effective Sales Process

My personal favorite is “How to Sell Anything to Anybody.”  Regardless of your industry, this certainly looks like the definitive guide to achieving success in the sales profession.  Yet, according to the Objective Management Group, 68% of all salespeople do not follow any sales process.  So, we ask the same question -- how do we square the fact that salespeople don’t follow a process despite the widespread knowledge that it is increasingly important, drives better outcomes and there are detailed instructions on how to implement one?

A False Choice: Commitment or Discipline

As in the obesity problem, the prescription for addressing the continued lack of sales process does not lie in more blogs convincing us of the rising importance, increasing value or know-how on how to build one.  Especially in today’s information-rich society, our failures are rarely a result of what we know, but rather what we do.  Our inability to lose weight and follow a sales process is a function of both our personal commitment and discipline. 

In the case of losing weight, it’s not typically our personal commitment, but rather our discipline which limits our success.  We can envision a slimmer version of ourselves and we ultimately get to choose which plan best fits our lifestyle.  By the time January 1st comes around, we are fully committed.  The challenge is sticking to the plan hour by hour and day by day long enough to see the results – that is the discipline.  Recognition of the discipline gap has given rise to a $6+B health coaching services market poised to grow to $7.9B by 2022. 

However, in the case of the sales process, the reverse is (at least partly) true.  The coach, in the form of a front-line sales manager comes free with the job.  It is their responsibility to hold frontline salespeople accountable for following the sales process through a prescribed sales cadence.  However, since the front-line seller had little influence in developing the sales process and often struggles to connect the dots between the process and their compensation, they tend to lack the personal commitment, not the discipline.  The stronger sales leaders will augment the discipline stick by gaining commitment through demonstrating how sales process can positively impact a seller’s personal success. 

Here’s the irony – where else in the organization does a lack of commitment impact our decision to drive a disciplined process? What if the CFO cannot get the buy-in from accounting to close the books this month?  What if the Plant Manager cannot get buy-in from the quality team to run today’s inspection on the production line?  While we rarely hear those complaints, how often do we hear leadership’s frustration with the sales organization’s inability to follow a process.  In the end, and just like weight loss, the failure to follow a sales process is due to a lack of discipline.  In this case it is not individual discipline but rather organizational discipline.    

Driving this organizational discipline is particularly challenging when companies are moving from growth to scale.  At this inflection point, the old guard, which previously had to “pull out all the punches” to get deals done, pushes back on systems and process which “inhibit their creativity.”  It’s even more challenging in the enterprise B2B space where new sales pursuits require resources outside the sales organization to get a deal closed – here, it’s a matter of both organizational discipline and alignment across a six or more-month sales cycle. 

Executing the Alignment and Change Process

Therefore, if the challenge on sales process comes down to execution, the challenge on execution at this stage of a company’s growth largely comes down to change management.  Facilitating this type of change from the inside-out is often difficult at this period in the business given the cultural battles between old and new-timers and across various functions.  Bringing in a 3rd-party expert with a proven set of “accelerators” such as tools, processes and frameworks is often a better alternative. Rather than engage in debates about the business itself, a 3rd party can objectively enable decisions on the right resources to involve at each stage of the buyer journey. This gives key stakeholders in the business the opportunity to own the change process and create organizational commitment. 

As leaders, our responsibility to our investors and our employees is to be strong corporate stewards and enablers of profitable growth.  We can no longer accept excuses related to what we don’t know, and we must align our cross-functional teams through a thoughtful change process to better execute and demonstrate the results we’re accountable to deliver.