How Sales Managers Can More Accurately Predict Their Team's Outcomes
This article was first published on Forbes.com.
I was never given a manual to sales management. I have had the pleasure of supporting the buildout of sales teams across the globe, from the Fortune 500 ranks down to startups. The career progression I made was based on failing quickly and learning — and not getting much right on the first go-around. Isn’t that how we all learn now?
We collect data based on past events and react as quickly as possible. By default, it means we admit defeat to the fact we have no idea if our decision will be good or bad. We’re going to use what once was to predict the future, but this isn’t how success works in sales management, or any management, for that matter.
Our workforce changes every month, the market shifts every week and our conversion rates fluctuate daily. Yet, we look at metrics in our CRM and marketing automation platforms as the dictators of our future. Let’s see how this plays out. Take a sales specialist by the name of Chris as an example. He had been closing 34% of his qualified deals month after month up until January. Leads were great, deals were closing above industry norms and commission was growing. Boom. February hit with COVID-19, layoffs and tight budgets.
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Sound familiar? The old-school sales management team is probably going to look at the economic factors and start laying off lower-performing sales reps. Chris is safe … for now. But it turns out Chris didn’t have the competitive drive to succeed in closing buyers who were holding their budgets closely. He could sell when it was like taking candy from a baby but did not have the right drive or demeanor to stay afloat. He failed while the newer, lower-performing sales rep, Sophia, was just getting started and on her feet but had the perfect set of drives, needs and behaviors to keep the company afloat even in the most difficult times.
Is this a dramatic example? Yes. But isn’t this what so many companies are experiencing right now? They looked at metrics and made decisions. Now that the workforce is slowly getting back to work, many companies will be using past metrics to predict future results. There’s an alternative to this paradigm.
If you understand the operating system of your people, you can predict the results of your team.
When you understand the core operating system of your team — something my company helps with, but you can also pursue independently — you can predict the needs and behaviors that you’ll observe later. Here’s a practical example: If Chris in the prior story had a more competitive drive, mixed with a bit of empathy and a hint of patience, he’d do better in a bear market. Instead, he failed. Yet, someone with a stronger drive for collaboration and patience may tend to do better in a bull market where the opportunities are plentiful but you have to slowly work through the pool of competition your prospect is also vetting.
These are very high-level examples to illustrate the point. If you understand your team’s core drives, you can predict the results. Do conversion rates matter? Of course. It’d be foolish not to take any historical records into account. The problem is when you come to rely only on history to predict the future. I attribute my success in sales and building sales teams to my ability to understand every individual on the team, what drives them, how they will react in given situations, and so on. Too few sales leaders take their teams seriously and solely rely on technology. I believe the answer is the gray area in between a focus on people and a focus on technology; however, let’s make this practical.
These three steps can help you understand team drivers.
1. Use the right assessments.
There are countless personality assessments on the market, but they analyze very high-level attributes of your team. Use something like Predictive Index (my company is a PI partner) or DiSC to analyze the “why” behind the behaviors you see every day.
2. Compare the drives of your team to your management style.
What one sales rep will find supportive, another may interpret as micromanagement. The former will be engaged and appreciative, while the other may be disengaged and a bit ticked. Tailor your management style to the drives of your people on an individual basis. Based on what drives them, you can predict the outcomes of your management decisions.
3. Expand your window of review.
A sales leader has massive pressure on them. They are responsible for the lifeblood of an organization: revenue. With that, sales leaders tend to be short-sighted and look at short-term stats and metrics. What a sales leader looking for legitimate predictive capabilities needs to look at are long-term behaviors and patterns of a team. Who responds well to pressure-driven months where quotas are falling short? Who responded well in the last recession, and who grew revenue in 2019? These are the questions we need to answer but too often overlook.