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B2B Lead Generation Articles on 9 Principles of Building a Sales Machine
- 9 Principles of Building a Sales Machine
Build A Sales Machine | Mar 02, 2010 | Permalink
I love getting and answering questions, as it helps shape my thoughts into useful forms to share. Here's a recent answer I posted on ExpertCEO (a private online community for CEOs), to a question that was along the lines of..."Do you have any advice for a company with a strong services practice that has sold mostly through partners in the past, but who is now looking to build their own Sales Machine? Any advice would much appreciated."That's a pretty broad question, so here's a broad answer. principles I feel would help anyone get going in the right direction:1) Be PATIENT. Developing a sales engine that predictably generates revenue can take 12-24+ months, depending on the state of your company. Even any one new program in b2b sales can take 3-6 months to be defined, show measure...
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- 9 Principles of Building a Sales Machine
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, to a question that was along the lines of...</span><span style='font-style: italic;'><br/><br/>"Do you have any advice for a company with a strong services practice that has sold mostly through partners in the past, but who is now looking to build their own Sales Machine? Any advice would much appreciated."</span><br/><br/>That's a pretty broad question, so here's a broad answer. principles I feel would help anyone get going in the right direction:<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>1) Be PATIENT. </span>Developing a sales engine that predictably generates revenue can take 12-24+ months, depending on the state of your company. Even any one new program in b2b sales can take 3-6 months to be defined, show measured progress, and<span style='font-style: italic;'> become integrated & habitual (i.e. machine-like).</span><br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>2) Experiment</span>. With everything. Constantly.<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>3) No one-offs! </span> (Unless it's an experiment to learn something for the future). It's not worth doing if it's not repeatable. One-off efforts, even for a quick payoff, are a distraction from focusing your energy on sustainable efforts.<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>4) If it doesn't exist in your CRM system, it doesn't exist. </span> (Sales)people must be comp'd only off data in the CRM system. Reports must be run totally in salesforce.com/CRM, whenever possible. Etc.<span style='font-style: italic;'> [Update: thank you Ken Rudin of <span style='text-decoration: underline;'> </span><a href='http://www.lucidera.com/'/>for the comment below, I agree the data just needs to be in a system and accessible. I should have said here that reports must not be in Excel whenever possible!]</span><br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>5) Can you sketch out how things work on a flow chart? </span>Even simply, on paper or a whiteboard? If not, that's a problem. What's the desired outcome, and process that leads to that outcome? Is it being done ad-hoc today? Sketching it out is the first step to bringing some order to the process...and thus outcome.<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>6) Focus on results rather than activity</span> (ex: number of qualified opportunities created per month is much more meaningful than number of sales calls made)<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>7) Track fewer, more important metrics.</span> It's easy to go way overboard in building reports and dashboards. Work with your team to prioritize metrics. Think in handfuls, not dozens.<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>8) Special attention on batons that cross functions. </span><span>Whenever a process crosses teams (marketing to sales, or sales to professional services, or...), a baton is passed, and you have all the ripest conditions for problems.<br/></span><span style='font-weight: bold;'><br/>9) Babysteps! </span><span>Consistently try lots of little improvements</span>. If you keep at them, they'll add up to big changes over time. (Remember the patience part?)<br/><br/><span style='font-weight: bold;'>Additional posts</span><br/>A few other blog posts that help illustrate the kind of thinking it takes to build a sales machine:<br/><ul><li><a href='http://www.buildasalesmachine.com/2007/01/joy-of-weekly-pipeline-metrics.html'>The Joy of Weekly Pipeline Metrics</a></li><li><a href='http://www.buildasalesmachine.com/2007/03/establishing-your-sales-waterfall.html'>Waterfall Metrics</a></li><li><a href='http://www.buildasalesmachine.com/2007/01/stop-measuring-calls-per-day.html'>Stop Measuring Calls Per Day</a></li><li><a href='http://www.buildasalesmachine.com/2008/09/problems-with-lumping-separate-four.html'>The Problems with "Lumping"; Separate the Four Core Sales Functions</a></li></ul><div class='blogger-post-footer'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/11038454-9125663142020992011?l=www.buildasalesmachine.com' height='1' alt='' width='1'/></div>)
