Avoiding Unstable Sales Foundations

Here’s the punchline: Do everything in your power to help salespeople do one thing—SELL. 

You’re in the middle of a new sales revolution, which may seem counterintuitive. It’s all about getting back to Basix. We love the new movement that is all about embracing what makes selling great—the relationships and serving the customer at your highest level. 

Over the past ten to twenty years, we’ve seen a shift in selling that puts too much focus on technology and tactics. This shift has caused the industry to lose sight of what it means to sell professionally at the highest levels. Salespeople are taking shortcuts or bombarded by tech and are spending less and less time personalizing their customers’ experience. Or, because of all this noise, sales reps have gone the other direction and just doing whatever they feel like doing, based on their experience. Sometimes reps end up over-personalizing the process, which makes it completely unrepeatable and unmeasurable. Over-personalization is when they treat every customer interaction as a new creative task, so they have unstructured conversations that go-with-the-flow or create messages like emails on the fly. They also “go with their gut” and trust their “instincts” to sell.

This, to them, feels like selling, and often what creates a sense of pride in salespeople.  

Misplaced sales pride.

Neither of these approaches is scalable or sustainable. The challenge is that they do create short-term bumps that ultimately hurt in the long run.

A sales process, including conversations and messaging, should have a sense of predictability and be built around best practices while at the same time feeling personal to the prospect. The salesperson should use their human instincts and communication skills on top of a well-defined and tested sales process. 

If you’re a chef and you cook at home, you can treat every dish like a unique experience, take your time, and play with your food. If you’re a professional in a restaurant, you need systems, predictability, timing, and temperature to create consistent results that keep customers coming back. 

Two unstable foundations in sales teams right now

We’ve worked with all types of sales teams and structures and have found the two most common situations that cause long-term underperformance. These are structures that may work for some time but are destined to fail.

We call these “unstable sales foundations.”

Outlaw Sales Foundation: Don’t mess with the sales outlaws.

A handful of reps bring in the revenue, so they just let them do whatever they want, and don’t care about a process or system. They may be doing it for their own self-interest, or as what’s best for the company or customer. And often, the rest of the team is under-utilized. This is the reality of the 80/20 rule...

1. Managers can’t manage
2. Inconsistent approach
3. Use terms like “it depends” and “sometimes”
4. No shared knowledge with the team
5. Reps are cherry-picking lists and leads
6. Tip-toeing around reps and egos
7. The inability to scale
8. No real sales activity data (if they use a CRM at all)

Complexity Sales Foundation

Automate everything, add unnecessary complexity, micro-manage every aspect of the sale: Because we love big data and technology, organizations will add every piece of tech possible. Salespeople add just one more click and report on just one more thing, use just one more system, and answer one more communication channel.

1. The need to control outweighs the need to sell
2. Take pride in salespeople being multitaskers and generalists
3. Over-manage and big brother effect
4. Salespeople are just part of a machine (Robo-salespeople)
5. Salespeople are becoming mass email marketers
6. A never-ending series of process and tech stacking
7. A lack of focus on leveling up sales reps human skills and personal development
8. Little time spent on selling

Well, what about combining them and getting the best of both worlds? That’s not the solution either. Both directions are WRONG. It’s time to get back to Basix.

“But we are making sales!”

If you have your sales teams functioning in either one of these ways, you may have some high-performing reps, but they will succeed, despite, not because of your structure.

The 80/20 rule is a travesty in selling—and both these unstable foundations contribute to it. It IS possible to have a system that allows all reps to be performers. More A-Players and more high potential B-Players.

Build a solid sales foundation

Yes, your business is complex. And yes, your sales process might need to be complex as well to meet those business needs. You might have big teams with multiple roles, many varying offers, 50 Ideal Client Profiles, vastly different territories, we get it. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make it as simple as possible for a sales rep to do their job. Keep your complexity, but help your reps serve clients, help them grow in their role, and give them the tools to succeed.

Stable sales foundation is about the FOUR KEYS:

1. Role design: Who does what and how do we align it to our business objectives?
2. Practice management: What is your sales process? How do you train? How do you coach?
3. Capacity management: What does the optimal team look like to achieve the desired outcomes?
4. Incentives/Performance: What is the value created and how do we set rewards that drive the overall goals?

Ask yourself how well you’ve set your foundation in place. Perhaps you have some people that the rules don’t apply or you rely too much on technology.

Inconsistency is the enemy of selling

“What I can repeat, I can improve.”

This is a foundational thought process behind high-performing sales teams. It’s not necessarily about data, but the data can help you find the right patterns to identify opportunities and challenges. 

Sales reps need to be clear on their expectations for their role, and you have to ensure they have the tools and resources to meet those expectations while getting everything else out of their way.

A high performer knows the power of consistency. They know that each day should have some predictability to it and they know their numbers. High performers find ways to improve based on things they test over and over. They find the sweet spots and get into sales flow. 

In order to get to a high-performance road, reps need to manage their time well and find ways to execute consistently. This also means you can’t keep making changes to their world.

Do you find yourself doing any of these things?

1. Treating your sales team as guinea pigs for new ideas or technology
2. Adding some new step to their process and announcing it starts today
3. Being reactive to their issues and making small fixes to the system
4. Making your team use copy and paste across multiple reports to ensure you have all the data you need
5. Having meetings to just check-in and get updates
6. Changing comp plans or rewards more than twice a year
7. Not agreeing on the report numbers, inability to connect rep actions to outcomes, and having to stop selling to clarify data 
8. Trying to prioritize more than 3-5 core metrics
9. Adding a new product for teams to sell without sufficient ramp-up time

If you have an overall, inconsistent approach that might change weekly, monthly, or quarterly, you ultimately make your sales team feel insecure and uncertain. They start to doubt what you say, and they will resist new initiatives—even if they make sense. 

We suggest that you start to think more about how to be “subtractive” in your thinking, rather than additive. Find ways to take things off their plates before you add something. Think of a high-performance rep like a high-performance car or laptop. You wouldn’t cram more stuff into the engine or the computer case. You’d look for the fastest and lightest components and ensure only the vital parts to performance are there.

It may be difficult to discover that your high-performance sales rep is like a poorly cared for Ferrari. 

We feel strongly that complexity kills salespeople, and we are happy to do a sales process review to help identify some challenges or hidden opportunities.

Recruit, train, and retain high performing sales reps

You are on borrowed time if you have an unstable sales foundation. Let’s think for a moment about how we will bring potential high-performers into the systems we defined above.

Bringing new reps into a “sales outlaw” foundation:

In this scenario, your sales results rely on the knowledge and activities of reps who haven’t had the time to document their best practices or tell you it’s an art form where “it depends…” or “sometimes…”

How will you onboard new reps? Usually, this will happen by having them job shadow which the outlaws may or may not want to do. And if they do, you might have heard them say, “I know that’s what the process says, but here’s how I actually do it.”

In this unstable outlaw sales foundation:

• No clearly defined process or documents to train to
• No testing for competency
• Hope that the rep retains some of the information and can apply it
• No shared language, values, or process
• Teams may or may not even use the technology
• Need to rely on hiring other sales outlaws that will simply create their own paths as well. You can’t scale outlaws—not even a little bit.
• Your data/reports and interpretations are most likely inconsistent
• Your business is held hostage by reps
• Most of your team is underutilized

Bringing new reps into an “unnecessarily complex” foundation:

When you bring a rep into a system with too many moving parts, you can probably imagine how overwhelming it would be to get them up to speed and not be missing steps. You must ensure that your processes are well-defined and well-documented.

Your other major challenge is the time to get them to high performance because the actual time spent selling is low compared to the time spent managing all the admin tasks.

You can spot this quickly as new reps move from excited to overwhelmed very quickly. They just want to start and be able to do their jobs. 

In this unstable complex sales foundation:

• Rely on minimizing inevitable human error
• Need for extensive training documentation
• Spent most of the onboarding on systems rather than selling
• Set reps up to feel insecure from the start
• Need to rely on hiring reps who are masters in computers and systems first, sales second
• Your data/reports are most likely inaccurate and not meaningful
• Your business is a victim of its own complexity and you hold reps hostage

Focus on simple systems, and coach your reps on selling skills rather than systems, productivity, or admin tasks. We’re trying to avoid creating “robo-salespeople.”

Your goal is to speed up the time to recruit, onboard, ramp up to high-performance, AND offboard non-performers.

“What if we train them and they leave? Well...What if you DON’T and they STAY?”

The magic ratio is “reps per manager”

What this all boils down to is how you enable salespeople to sell. If you remove most of the guesswork or admin work, what’s possible for your organization?

What’s possible is that managers spend less time managing, and more time coaching. How you know this is with one metric. Your reps per manager.

More reps per manager—or we have a really cool METRIC: REP/MGR 

Imagine what’s possible for your organization if you:

• Increase the average dollar per rep
• Increase the number of high performing reps
• Increase the number of reps per manager

I’ll save you the math—it means more revenue overall to do more cool stuff with.

Basix is based on stable sales foundations

We’ve developed our system to do exactly this—help reps sell and set them up to win consistently using best practices, while also allowing them to have creativity. 

We don’t require them to log tasks, create reports, or do any of the myriads of other things their current systems ask of them. 

We allow outlaws to have the freedom they desire with the system supporting them, and we eliminate complexity so the rest of the team can get to selling. All you need to do is have a great offer and people who want to sell it. 

It’s called “getting back to basix.” 

See for yourself and let’s book a call to show you how it works.