Failure is a two way street in that both management (the company) and the employee did not accomplish the objectives. Employee failures are always well documented but few leadership teams take the time to understand where and how they failed too. The typical sales leadership failures we see on a continuing basis are:

1. Setting growth goals to challenge hunters but hiring farmers to deliver the numbers. This never works so the company starts viewing the sales staff as independent contractors and retools the commission plan to performance levels no one in the history of the company has ever achieved. The underlying attitude is – if we don’t get what we want, we won’t pay them anything!

2. Not using objective screening tools to understand if applicants have the skills, aptitudes and motivations to do the job. Typical final selections are best described as beauty contests based on references, resumes and recruiting relationships build during the interview process.

3. No definition or accountability regarding a consistent go to market sales process thus allowing everyone to do their own thing. The chaos that results is only amplified in terms of gross forecast inaccuracies.

These leadership failures are all fixable – CRO’s have to own their role and do it.

Effective CRO’s typically invest 10-20% of their time with new hire talent – more at the front end dealing with performance metrics like new contacts per week, new qualified opportunities per the 4 Aces, etc. It is not a situation where new hunters can’t figure out management’s expectations – they will just launch faster with focused CRO leadership.

Here is Gary Brattland’s Recipe for Success:

1. Hire great people and place them in jobs that fit their strengths, skills and passions.

2. Get out of their way. Provide people with the freedom to do kick-ass work.

3. Provide regular, actionable feedback.

4. Inspire people with goals that are more meaningful than making the company more money.

As such, under our SRS 2.0 model, they have uniquely developed one of the 4 core processes of a complete Revenue System, albeit one that is totally optimized to their profile and may not be readily transferable to others.

The complete revenue system requires competence in 4 processes – not just one. That makes the CRO role requirements much different than those of an individual contributor. The CRO has to deliver coaching (5M’s Sales Process), accountability (Bankable Forecast Process), motivation (Incentive Process) and talent selection (Staffing Process).

The step up from individual contributor to CRO is a quantum leap in leadership and responsibility. Most of the time, these leadership responsibilities are not tasks that fit the true hunter profile.

Local legend has it that Jesse was interviewed in his early outlaw days and asked “Why do you rob banks?” His response, “Because that is where the money is.”

Here is the link if you want to read the article via our website.

I read through the online magazine and was most impressed with the breadth of sales topics. I strongly recommend it.  If you would like more information regarding this contemporary monthly sales resource just email custserv@eep.com.

- Customer support, service, satisfaction and retention programs

- Marketing Communications including new product pricing structures, sales strategy and product launch programs.

- Marketing Strategy to identify and prioritize target segments, primary competition and the windows of opportunity to make the revenue ramp.

- Strategic partnering with outside organizations for ramping/expanding target market segments.

The larger the organization, the larger the CRO role so you will need all the quality support you can get. One technique I have used with good success is to have manufacturing drive the forecast process. They need to translate forecast data into production schedules so being skilled with the 4 Aces data and understanding the closing strategies/schedules for key opportunities brings clarity to the whole process.

My response was “Thank You!”

Just like you never see a bad sales resume, you also never see a bad business plan. After decades of reviewing new company startup plans, it became obvious the plans all had the same motivational template in that everyone involved (founders and investors) would all be rich and famous very soon. Our landfills must have been overrun with these bogus documents because I can count on one hand the total number of companies that made it to 5 years. The plans were nothing short of elegant – color bar charts, pie charts, order processing flow charts, etc.  Excel delivered pro-forma financials that were so compelling that only paupers would say no to the deal. It seemed like the next logical step was to start planning the movie.

So what went wrong? Usually there was plenty of blame to spread around, but the one truth in every failure was a lack of revenue.  There wasn’t enough revenue generated to float the boat and investors finally pulled the plug. The market-modeling math may have been correct (5% market share will produce a $50M business opportunity, etc.) but the sales execution never got off the ground.

My observation was no one in the room (founders or investors) was hands-on about the revenue challenge associated with closing new business. Street level is where orders originate and where success is earned one order at a time.

Thank You for the “street-level” compliment. It is where companies are built by competent Chief Revenue Officers.