Do Your Company’s Sales Calls Reflect Your Strategy?

When talking to a Fortune 25 company EVP about a new market segment expansion, he became irate with the kind of companies the sales team had been pursuing. “I have no idea why we’re calling on many of these companies,” he emphasized. Despite the go-to-market strategy, significant time, energy and money was being wasted on businesses which didn’t fit the outlined goals.

Senior executives build strategies for growth, but it’s easy to forget about those strategic targets during an individual sales call. Every sales call represents the one moment where the core elements of a strategy are executed in real time. For many organizations, it happens hundreds, even thousands of times each day. This can become either a massive accumulation of wins, or death by a thousand cuts for the business.

Consider the basic elements of most strategy frameworks, typically centered on the following areas of focus:

• Objectives: The overarching goals the organization intends to achieve with the strategy. Make certain your sales team aligns its quotas comparatively to your objectives. Revenue targets need to be achieved, but not at the sacrifice of the targeted margin. Possibly, you’ve invested millions into an integrated offering only to have the seller stick with your company’s traditional offerings that felt more comfortable.

• Market: The primary base of potential customers to be pursued and won are defined in your “Ideal Customer Profile.” Sales professionals frequently call on whoever they can get a meeting with to demonstrate activity, which can hinder your growth strategy. Make certain your sellers have the necessary skill or expertise to earn meetings with higher-level decision-makers who can authorize the kind of solutions your company is offering.

• Competitive Advantage: The reason (or reasons) that customers will ultimately choose to work with you instead of competing options. No matter your competitive advantage (product superiority, price, uniqueness, etc.), it’s vital your sellers clearly understand the decision-maker’s priorities and relate how the desired business outcomes will be achieved with your company’s latest offerings. This can include product superiority or functionality, price, ability to integrate, and unique or valuable processes or capabilities. All are examples of areas where companies invest to build an advantage.

You can see how these factors fit together to determine the success or failure of the company strategy in each sales call. Meeting with a C-suite leader who is the decision-maker at a large OEM is great, but if the seller can only deliver a capabilities presentation and fails to engage in any depth of conversation about the business outcomes being pursued, the sales call devolves to a simple pitch and close event. When you recognize that sales is about the alignment of a clear strategy and execution, executives can shift their attention further upstream where strategy is formulated and execution plans are built. Done well, every sales call should reflect the successful implementation of the company strategy. And making that happen is up to the executives in the C-suite.

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Setting Realistic Expectations: Often There Are No Shortcuts to Doing Things Well

There is this idea perpetuated by Internet culture that difficult things can be accomplished easily with minimal time and effort on our part. We see it in the endless flurry of programs touting “six-minute abs” and “3x your financial portfolio in three months,” which make difficult things seem too easy. The truth is, often there are no shortcuts to doing things well, and we need to acknowledge how hard something is going to be from the beginning.

Jeff Bezos is no stranger to the concept of communicating the challenge of accomplishing difficult things. He shared his thoughts on this subject in his 2018 Letter to Shareholders:

“A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. ‘Most people,’ he said, ‘think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.’ Unrealistic beliefs on scope—often hidden and undiscussed—kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be—something this coach understood really well.”

We can apply the same concept when company executives set out to design and deliver a sales experience. Frequently, senior leaders underestimate the time and effort that goes into the essential components of a company’s sales experience: strategy, process, training, management systems, coaching, and support. Just like a handstand that looks easy but is actually very difficult to master, developing a winning sales experience is hard and often takes a lot of time and effort.

The reality is difficult things are just that—difficult. The more you set realistic expectations from the outset and communicate those expectations to your team, the more likely you are to achieve success as an organization. 

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