Sales Team Performance: How To Improve It
If you’re a sales team leader, this is for you.
You’re always under pressure to hit your short-term targets, but also build longer-term sustainability and upskill your teams.
In a time when sales team performance strategies form the basis of an organization’s success, some of the fundamentals of team design are being neglected, impacting outcomes. Here, we’ll focus on issues plaguing your teams, different ways misalignment hinders any of your work, and then finish with different sales tips from sales experts.
Four Issues Plaguing Sales Teams Today
A sales team functions well with clear direction and integration. As organizations and sales teams within them grow and integrate with marketing and other departments, this becomes a more strenuous and testing task. Typically, integration between departments depends on the business model and sales strategy. Much documentation suggests B2B sales strategy involves less cross-departmental integration than a B2C sales strategy. The latter usually requires a strong link between sales and marketing to deliver a more flexible, customer-centric offering. These continue to challenge organizations of all levels, and especially enterprise sales teams.Issue 1: Organizational Design and Direction
This starts with the hiring process and subsequent onboarding processes instilled by sales teams.
Massive communication gaps can occur even at this early stage if the team’s message and direction is not known and understood by both the onboarding trainer and the trainee. A clear mission statement communicated throughout the organization and individual teams can mitigate this problem. Beyond that, a breakdown of future strategies (3 month, 6 month, 1 year, etc.) aligns direction as well as expectations. Some sales teams have suggested they have “different goals” within individual teams causing confusion and a subsequent lack of direction.
Direction is one thing, but nurturing the team to ensure continued execution is another. 9Lenses has found that sales teams can be over-managed but not well led—a common theme in larger organizations. Our recent findings have demonstrated the need for more focus on coaching new hires and on continuing regular coaching and mentorship throughout a sales employees tenure.
Issue 2: Working in Silos
We’ve crowd-sourced some of the largest organizations in the world, and found internal teams rarely communicate effectively between one another. This directly results in inadvertent silo working. We have even found some teams that are disincentivized to integrate and collaborate—unsurprisingly resulting in poor sales team performance.
Common root causes include lack of CRM usage. Teams have advised that tools such as Salesforce are not being uniformly used across the organization. Even when used, these tools are not optimized to share success stories and to track sales pipeline effectively. Often sales teams have pockets of expertise and knowledge which minimize collaboration. A sales person in a Fortune 50 company recently explained that “every cloud sales person is a silo” and they “never come together as a group to share ideas.” Duplication of work is a regular by-product of silo working. 9Lenses recently discovered that two groups within the same sales team unknowingly pursued the same task at the same time. Leveraging the right people within a team will reduce the sales pipeline and should ensure that work is no longer duplicated.
Issue 3: Strained Inter-Team Working Relationships
While not solely a sales team issue, poor integration across different teams often creates considerable bottleneck in sales pipelines. 9Lenses has found that poor marketing-sales and sales-delivery handoffs & communication often lead to this dilemma. Often, a misunderstanding of other teams’ roles coupled with confusion around communication and handoff are the root causes.
A commonly-suggested solution is to introduce inter-team players earlier in the sales pipeline. A recent engagement with a Fortune 50 company demonstrated that the sales-delivery handoff in particular was causing a massive issue. Sales team members explained that if the delivery team were brought into the pipeline earlier it would have expedited sales pursuits and maintained a strong customer relationship.
Related: 9Lenses helps break down inter-team barriers.
Issue 4: Imbalanced Incentive Structure
When asked about incentives, a sales employee at a Fortune 50 Company responded, “Keep fighting the internal battle.”
This reaction stemmed from the imbalance of incentives related to their sales process. This company had four different sales teams were involved at different stages … and all of them had different incentives, so there was no internal promotion to collaborate. The end result in this particular sales pursuit was that three of the sales teams responsible for acquiring the customer and moving the process forward received no incentive. On the other hand, the fourth sales team who finally executed the deal was incentivized to complete it.
Negative team morale and frustration among these teams resulted. Furthermore without solving this imbalance, future sales pursuits cannot be improved. Instead of making the same mistake, celebrate together as teams—don’t wait too long and be sure to include all involved in the sales pursuit with an equal share of the success.
How Misaligned Teams Cripple Organizations
By some estimates, businesses lose an incredible $1 trillion annually due to wasted resources in sales and marketing. Organizations with well-aligned sales and marketing teams, on the other hand, surpass their competitors in revenue by 208%. In fact, sales consultants have found misalignment to be one of the top issues sales teams faces.
Although sales/marketing misalignment is the most common type of misalignment in sales teams, alignment issues are not exclusive to sales and marketing. Our data has revealed that sales teams have challenges with misalignment in a number of areas and with a number of different organizational departments.
These stories of five companies suffering from misalignment in sales, ranging from Fortune 500 to Fortune 10 companies, illustrate well its crippling effects.
Company 1: Internal Team Misalignment
Our first sales team experienced difficulty in selling a particular hardware/software integrated solution due to severe misalignment between its hardware and software teams. Neither team had a solid understanding of the other’s offering, and the teams lacked a cohesive message that would compel a prospective customer to buy the integrated solution.
In addition to needing cross-training between the hardware and software teams, the teams were largely inconsistent in collaborating and engaging with each other to sell the solution due to a lack of central leadership over both teams. Moreover, the teams had incongruous goals:the hardware team found it particularly difficult to position the software part of the solution, disincentivizing the team to sell the software.
Company 2: Leadership Silos
The second team faced difficulty from silos in leadership that created barriers to selling. The team was focused on outcome selling, but due to the siloed structure of the organization, the team was not empowered to make decisions. As a result, the team had to wait for leadership to make key decisions, wasting the time of prospective customers and leading to extended sales cycles.
Additional silos existed in knowledge management, and thus the sales and product teams were misaligned in their understanding of customer needs and products that met those needs. Communication and collaboration between commercial teams and product line leadership was lacking, so the teams did not have a clear understanding of the offering’s value proposition.
Company 3: Misaligned Incentives
Team three suffered from misaligned incentives, which made selling a comprehensive cross-brand solution extremely difficult. Different teams were selling different parts of a solution under different brands, but the way the teams’ incentive structure worked incentivized the different teams to compete with each other rather than collaborating and cross-selling a solution.
As a result, the teams missed opportunities for upselling and expanding customer relationships. Moreover, a lack of thorough understanding of the solution’s value proposition discouraged some teams from selling the solution at all.
Because they did not fully understand the value proposition, the teams found the solution difficult to sell, so they preferred to focus on selling other offerings in order to fill their quotas. The team needed education on how to position the cross-brand solution and an incentive structure that aligned them to sell together instead of competing internally for customers.
Company 4: Regional Misalignment
Our fourth example company was a global company impaired by regional misalignment. Some regions had no understanding of the organization’s sales strategy and roadmap, even claiming they were left out of participation in strategic initiatives.
Other regions had a poor understanding of the offerings themselves, how these offerings were delivered, and ultimately how to sell them. A lack of organizational focus around regions meant that the need for local solutions was not sufficiently met.
Resources were another major issue, with some regions claiming they did not have the basic tools to be able to do their jobs. In addition to resources, the teams needed a combination of training to align around how to sell the offerings and training around how to customize solutions to each individual region.
Company 5: Sales-Product Misalignment
The final sales team had issues with misalignment between the sales team and the product and support teams. Product teams developed products without fully understanding what customers truly wanted, and support teams were unable to effectively support the products sold. Team members noted that products were difficult to set up, but there was little to no documentation or user guides explaining how to do so.
Misaligned sales teams occur frequently within larger organizations, and Fortune 500 companies are no exception. While misalignment between sales and marketing is often the focus for sales consultants, however, the examples above demonstrate a number of additional ways that sales team misalignment can hurt organizations. The solutions to misalignment problems are often relatively simple: training to ensure thorough understanding of offerings, communicative leadership, and incentive structures that prompt alignment can be the first steps to fixing misaligned sales teams. Thoroughly understanding the root causes of misalignment, therefore, is a critical first step.
