Over the course of our projects, we’ve interacted with thousands of sales people. Given the nature of our work, that shouldn’t be surprising. 

However a lesser known fact is that we also meet a lot of ‘non-sales’ people: from product, operations, recruitment, HR, purchase and others. We also speak to a lot of founders who come primarily from a product, tech background. 

Here’s a somewhat imaginary conversations between a non-sales leader and us

Hey so we’re working with your sales team on some improvements.  What do you think is wrong with sales?

Ahh interesting, what specifically do you think they do wrong?

And how would you explain the benefits of the product/offering?

Got it. Have you had any customer conversations recently? How did they go?

The fun part is, this conversation will not seem odd to most people. In fact, most people would have been a part or heard such a conversation before. 

The central theme in such conversations is that other teams don’t need to know ‘sales’; sales problems are sales team problems and sales training is about getting sales teams to explain the product better.

Here’s why we find this to be a problem

Saurabh Sengupta, our founder, is coming up with a course on sales for  founders & other functions. If this resonates with you, we recommend you check out his programs at www.saurabhsengupta.com

We used to be ‘sales trainers’ for several B2B sales organizations. Assignments came in various forms. A few were ad-hoc 1-2 day events organised by HRs with or without specific topics to cover. Some were more planned based on skill assessment done internally where we had to cover the selected topics over 6-8 sessions over the period of a quarter. A few even involved us creating content for their learning portal. Irrespective of the nature of the assignment, there were some things that were common.

For us, it meant good revenue. Deals didn’t take much time to close, clients took care of all logistics and it paid well by the hour. After doing it for a while, we had ready material available for most common topics: discovery, objection handling, negotiations etc. which we could largely reuse.

There was enough & more interest from HR and L&D departments for such training sessions. Getting training assignments wasn’t a challenge. We also managed to make the sessions engaging. Feedback after the sessions from participants was good. HRs could tick off one of their KPIs and probably got an extra point on their annual appraisals.

Sales people didn’t mind these training sessions either. Training days were a good break from their daily routine ( some organisations did it on weekends, we usually resisted). Training usually happened at decent locations, good food and ended well within the specified time. Participants probably did pick up some useful tit-bits from the training.

Yet, we stopped doing sales training sessions. Mostly because they do not work.

It’s not that sales teams do not need upskilling, they certainly do. Learning is an important input into growing as a salesperson. However sales training, especially from outside trainers is a poor solution to this problem.

Sales learning needs context. Your sales team needs to understand how to deal with your prospects or clients while talking about your product. External trainers, even the good ones, can at best share generic practices which might be of use in various sales situations. However these ideas are as generic as one of those ‘how to become rich’ kind of books. They sound good, even point in the right direction, but they certainly don’t make the reader rich.

Learning in sales is like learning a new skill; to swim or to ride a bicycle. One can’t teach all there is in a classroom and then hope that people apply it on the field. One has to be around while the person is learning, providing continuous inputs or even showing them how it’s done.

We realise such individual attention isn’t feasible. How then does one solve for sales learning at scale?

We don’t have the perfect answer yet. But there’s one thing that has worked very well in all our assignments. We record sales mocks with top performing sales people. Usually these are simple recordings done over a phone. And we share them widely over whatsapp. Yes over whatsapp; not any learning portal, CRM, google drive, dropbox or any other fancy tool.

And we do this consistently. Record a mock every week or every fortnight. We broadcast it to the sales team through sales leaders- sales heads, ASMs etc.

We have a hypothesis on why this works. It has a lot to do with how today’s generation absorbs new information. For us it doesn’t make sense to fight that but rather use it to our advantage. Irrespective of the reason though, if you are someone grappling with learning in your sales team, we recommend you try this approach.

Founders are usually ‘data driven’, yet they do not look at basic sales data

At the outset, let’s explain what we mean by basic B2B sales data. There are two broad categories of sales data points that an organization must have:

Visibility into B2B sales funnel

1. Number of deals being created at the top of the funnel & progressively moving to subsequent stages ( Opportunities, Proposals, negotiations, closures etc.)
2. Conversion rates across each stage of the funnel
3. Conversion rates based on source of deal ( Inbound, outbound, referral etc)
4. Time taken in each stage of the funnel
5. Lost reasons for each stage of the funnel

Visibility into B2B sales performance

1. Target vs Achievement ( Revenue & # of deals)
2. New business vs repeat business
3. Product wise achievement
4. Performance against input parameters like deals created

We speak to tech focussed companies for their B2B lead generation. Founders of these companies often come from a strong product or tech background.  When it comes to discussing B2B demand generation however, we find something very counterintuitive in their narrative:

• Sales data is either completely absent or poorly captured
• Their views are mostly derived from anecdotal evidence
• Sales achievements (over/under) are usually attributed to the sales team

We found it odd that people from data-driven fields like product & tech completely abandon that thought process when it comes to sales. We spoke to a few of them to understand why that might be so.

Why do founders shy away from a data driven approach to sales?

Sales data is hard to capture

Unlike data related to user metrics or online spends, sales data is much more difficult to capture. One has to almost entirely rely on sales people to create useful & accurate sales data.

Most organizations simply buy a CRM system in the hopes that the sales team will enter data.  After a few unsuccessful attempts, the system is abandoned and they revert back to focussing on immediate expected closures through excel sheets.

 Sales data is harder to interpret

Sales performance is often impacted by a multitude of factors both external and internal. A new marketing campaign or a drop in prices could impact sales, so could any action by competition or a general change in economic environment.

In the real world with clients, it’s often difficult to create perfect data sets to derive clear insights from sales data. This inability to derive easy actionable insights from sales data makes organizations abandon the exercise completely.

Sales data is easy to manipulate

Sales data is eventually the sales person’s estimate of what the client is thinking. Salespeople are likely to get this wrong occasionally. A few are also likely to misrepresent data points intentionally to save face. This is fairly simple to catch for seasoned sales leaders. Even if it isn’t caught immediately, it can rarely go unnoticed beyond a few weeks.  However, most organizations lose faith in the system prematurely and abandon the system completely.

Long sales cycles imply considerable lag in data

B2B sales usually have long sales cycles. Any change you make is likely to take effect further down the line in the future. One needs to be patient while analysing sales data and ensure you’ve given it sufficient time.

For organisations used to seeing immediate impact of initiatives in other fields like online spending for example, waiting for a few weeks to understand the effectiveness of changes they’ve made does not seem worth the effort.

Top performing sales people often mask underlying issues

Finally, all organizations always have top performing salespeople. These rainmakers do well in spite of lacunae in the sales system. While one should always be on the lookout for such sales reps, that cannot be the basis of building a consistent & predictable sales engine at scale.

Unfortunately, It is easier for organizations to believe that getting more such people is a better way to tackle faltering sales rather than investing time in fixing the process

Our view

There are indeed several challenges in getting reliable sales data and actionable insights thereafter. This can be overwhelming for most startups.

However, the alternative of scaling up without sales data can be catastrophic. One can paraglide without navigation control.  Does that mean one can fly a large aircraft without navigation? That is what people are attempting when they try to scale businesses without sales data.  It is bound to fail.

Moreover, the challenges mentioned above can be overcome by appropriate sales design. Startups might be building sales systems for the first time, but sales as a function has existed for decades and centuries.

There is a wealth of knowledge out there about designing the right data capturing systems, processes to ensure adoption and interpreting sales data. It might be wise to not reinvent the wheel and learn from some of the existing best practices around sales.

When we speak to leadership teams at startups regarding sales, one area in the sales funnel that often seems to be blind spot is demand generation. In our discussions around sales, we have valiant defences for other lagging sales metrics: low conversion rate, low sales productivity, lower average revenue etc. But when it comes to B2B demand generation, there’s almost no one to explain how it’s doing, much less on why it is not doing better or how it can do better.

Here’s how a typical conversation about demand generation goes:

What they talk about:

• List of activities being done for demand generation- online ads, email campaigns etc.
• Vague ballpark number for outcomes: “ We could be getting x-y leads per quarter”.
• ‘Broad sense’ about the quality of leads- usually not a positive one.
• A general view that sales team isn’t handling these leads well

What they don’t talk about:

• Conversion numbers or lost reasons
• Data backed view on performance of individual lead sources; at best some anecdotal evidence
• Goals or targets for demand generation & who’s accountable for the same

Seeing this across organisations has made us wonder why demand generation does not occupy more mindspace of leadership in startups. While organisations often call us to help with demand generation strategy & execution, any intervention in such a scenario has a high chance of failure unless we fix one thing first.

Demand generation is an orphan in most organization

Most organizations regard demand generation as a marketing function. B2B Marketing teams on the other hand look at lead generation as a small part of their work with branding, engagement and even PR. Lead generation comes in way below their list of priorities.

Sales teams on the other hand are rarely involved in B2B Saas demand generation decision making. Their involvement is limited to providing feedback around the volume & quality of leads that are coming in.

With such a setup, it is nearly impossible to move things forward. We’ve seen organizations stuck in this state for a long period of time if not till eternity with tactical changes in lead generation making little difference to outcomes.

Fixing B2B Demand generation accountability:

There are however (somewhat rare), instances where we’ve seen SAAS demand generation run smoothly. While there were multiple factors contributing to this there was one that stood out clearly.
These were organisations where the leadership team including sales leadership was deeply involved in the demand generation process.

Sales leadership brought in a unique perspective of opportunity cost of a sales person’s time. This led to changes in the demand generation process. The initial reaction was over filtration of leads: sales pushing marketing to adhere to very strict qualification criteria.

However as time passed, the approach changed from merely ‘blaming’ the marketing team to contributing to the demand generation process. More often than not, sales leadership realised that there’s only so much you can do for filtration with a form or a questionnaire.
Most of them had realised the need for another layer between demand generation and sales; usually an inside sales team.

B2B demand generation is one of the most critical components of building a successful sales organisation. There are multiple steps to developing a strong demand generation with constant reviews, frequent iterations and continuous optimizations. However,the first step has to be fixing accountability for demand generation. If demand generation KPIs aren’t one of the things that the organization leadership looks at periodically, there’s little chance that any intervention in the process will yield results.