by Susan Walsh, President and CEO, Sales-Link, Inc.
I’ve been working hard at perfecting a talk that I’m giving soon entitled “The Sales Centric Team”.
I spent a lot of time working on the details of the talk last week. For Sales-Link’s extended family of followers specifically, I want to share the heart of my talk with you. It is reprinted below:
“We need to pay attention to the shift taking place in sales today and how to recapture the essence of trusting sales by working together to better understand the needs and requests of customers. What I’m describing for you today, is a sales centric organization. It takes an entire cast of like-minded individuals to make a sales centric organization work properly.
By definition, a sales centric organization is focused on two objectives: meeting sales numbers and increasing market share. These two objectives take priority over any other consideration and provide permission to do whatever it takes to achieve them. In other words, everyone in the organization is supporting the sales activities. It takes sales associates with a hunter mentality, supportive managers who understand how to motivate and reward their teams for working together, and a CEO who is very focused on sales.
Signs You Are Not Operating a Sales Centric Organization:
Sales is not bringing forth new opportunities
You are not seeing a lot of new prospects/customers
Opportunities coming in are not new, interesting projects, showing challenges industry is trying to solve
There are communications problems between Sales and Operations
A sales centric minded sales associate has passion and persistence. They want to deliver excellence, have good story-telling materials, good case histories, and they are hunters; natural hunters. They want meaningful sales meetings to go over services, packaging, and value and they have mentors or seek mentors in their own organization who converse with employees regularly about customers and opportunities in the pipeline.
Each department, whether sales or operations, needs strong managers who understand what a sales centric organization acts like and how to identify issues that may deter the organizations from working together.
Specific to sales departments, having a CRM system that distinguishes “good” from “bad” sales activity is vital. Metrics are important so the sales manager has information with which to mentor the sales team. Other information from the sales system can be distributed to department heads so they know what activities are occurring in the sales pipeline, and they can then help by discussing the needs early, while sales is courting the prospect. If a system does not offer this data and interaction, then it is not the right system.
My talk has additional information I will share once completed. Until then, I hope the four signs mentioned above will tell you if you are operating a sales centric organization.