Stop buying players. Start buying wins.

1. Build Execution Skills

The best market intelligence in the world won’t deliver revenue unless your team knows how to execute when they get in front of the client. Focus on these things:

• Identify the key client meeting types that really move the needle (as opposed to the other 85% of activity). Meetings early in the sales process are critical – deals are won and lost on the front end.
• Get really, really good at executing these meetings (in other words, get on base a lot).
• Train and empower your front-line managers to coach these critical skills so that the whole team (as opposed to just the top performers) can make bigger contributions.

2. Team Performance > Individual Stats

Baseball is famous for its statistics. On-base percentage, slugging percentage, batting average, runs batted in and literally dozens more. Back in the nineties, most team owners and managers focused on the stars who dominated these stats.

Billy Beane changed the game by thinking about the performance of the team, not just the star players. When he lost his all-star hitter Johnny Damon to the Red Sox for $31 million at the end of 2001, Beane couldn’t afford a replacement superstar. But he was able to replicate him in the aggregate – across the team. And he got his team to the finals on a shoestring budget – by getting on base a lot.

3. Reduce Strike-Outs

Let’s look at some different sales performance metrics. Here’s an analysis for illustrative purposes of a B2B sales team (I’ve blended and averaged the numbers across several healthcare and technology companies from mid-market to large enterprise to protect the innocent).

This very rough calculation highlights a few interesting facts:

• Based on front-line manager ride-along data, fewer than half of “material” sales calls achieved the call objective (this is not unusual, and I’ve seen lower). Even worse, most companies can’t even track this number, which is like managing a baseball team without knowing On-Base Percentage. This # is a critical output from manager field travel.
• Each meeting costs, on average, $755. This might seem high but it’s probably a significant underestimation of true cost – it’s based purely on direct labor costs, and it ignores the much bigger cost of lost revenue from a poorly executed meeting. In enterprise sales with high Average Contract Value, a single “strike-out” meeting can kill a deal and literally cost you millions of dollars of revenue. (And yet most companies don’t implement a robust pre-call plan process).
• The direct (salary) cost of the 55% of “strike-outs” is about $14M per year, and again, this ignores the much higher opportunity cost of lost revenue. Yet many companies this size will baulk at spending half a million dollars implementing high end skills training and an effective coaching process. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Few companies even collect the data listed above. Fewer can say what percentage of meetings are successful and even fewer understand why. Only a small minority of companies collect data that shows them which of their front-line managers know how to coach effectively. Yet they can spend days every month reviewing pipeline reports!!!

Plug your own numbers in and see what you learn. And if you can’t access each of these numbers easily, spend a little time with your sales operations team and find out. You’ll be amazed how it changes your thinking on the value of disciplined pre-call planning and empowering effective front-line manager coaching.