sales success |

Persuading sellers to change their behaviour is hard.

In the classic book on change “Who Moved My Cheese?” two mice have been trained to get their daily cheese from a certain point in a labyrinth. When the cheese then runs out the two mice behave differently – one keeps coming back to the same place, hoping the cheese will return, the other sets out for pastures new, ultimately to find a new source of cheese elsewhere in the labyrinth.

We human behave in much the same way when change comes our way.

For sales professionals, the “cheese” is where we get our next order from. For inside sales reps, sitting at a desk somewhere in the company office, it is all too easy to sit back and wait for the cheese to come to you – inbound sales calls and repeat orders all require no effort on the part of the rep.

However when it comes to selling to other businesses (B2B) the times they are a changing.

Just take a look at these stats:

90% of B2B customer buying decisions start online (Forrester)
75% of B2B buyers use social media to research vendors (IDC)
57% of the buyer’s journey takes place before a sales professional is involved. (CEB)

If these trends continue, pretty soon that ringing phone with potential new orders is going to dry up. Unless the sales rep is found on digital, they will never get that all important call.

This has led many organisations, including one large tech company that uses Rise, to provide re-skilling opportunities for their sales reps. Reps can be trained in creating a findable personal brand online, engaging an audience and then being found when a new purchase is imminent.

But training is only half the battle.

What really matters is what happens back at the desk during the daily 9 to 5. Are reps putting into practice the new skills they’ve been taught? Are they becoming power users of the tools provided by the business?

It is here that success tracking comes in. Our client is using Rise to provide a tracking score for each rep across a number of behaviours and tools. Each week the rep receives their personal score and a breakdown of how they scored it across different categories. The rep can drill down further and understand what activities they’ve managed to do this week, and which ones have regressed. Insights are provided into the metrics alerting them with, for example, declining behaviour 3 weeks in a row or celebrating a personal best.

rise single score personal dashboard — Sellers get a weekly personal score tracking on digital behaviours and sales tool use that contribute to online selling success. This means training can continue with automated coaching outside the classroom.

Activity and engagement is tracked in this way across multiple systems including internal CRM & seller tools, and external social media such as Twitter, Slideshare, Linkedin and blogs,

To drive further engagement with the program sellers can see the top 5 worldwide scores and top 5 for their region. This gives them a clear benchmark to aim for when trying to optimise their behaviour.

The key to the success of this program, now 3 years old, has been seeing the increase in desired behaviours across the whole seller population. For example, reps have on average increased their number of Linkedin connections by 83 each.

If you’d like to discover more or discuss, how you can run a success tracking program for your reps and partners who are making the transition to digital selling, then get in touch via the @risedotglobal Twitter account.

As a sales manager you have a pretty good idea of the tools and techniques it takes to be a successful seller.

Often you can see the behaviours that your top sellers are doing, mostly out of habit, that you’d love to see in your mid and lower range sellers.

These behaviours could be the big obvious macro-behaviours – like getting out of the office, picking up the phone and making calls, but they might also be micro-behaviours, those smaller tips and tweaks that over 100 calls would make an incremental difference.

Examples of micro-behaviours might be:

tweeting on social media once a day,
keeping track of customer birthdays,
checking the industry movers and shakers news,
exchanging news with a colleague or
doing extra call preparation.

The micro-behaviours might only result in small improvements for each individual– an extra sale here or there – but as a sales manager, you know that if everyone on the team did them, that would all add up to a sizeable difference.

But, if micro-behaviours are worth considering you still have the problem of how to incentivise them!

After all, most of your sales staff only get out of bed when there’s money to be earned, it’s the nature of the sales function and decades of conditioning from sales motivation programs based on financial rewards.

What you’ll find is that the big behaviours are already heavily incentivised: finding opportunities, making calls and closing deals are all covered within your formal sales incentive scheme. It’s formal because this scheme is compulsory – every seller is measured by it and the commissions they earn are the key reason they come to work.

You may have other mandatory sales motivation programs on top of the commission structure too – for example, I’ve seen many managers circulate a sales leaderboard to encourage competition between sellers and win an additional, local, prize.

But micro-behaviours aren’t valuable enough in themselves to be worth incentivising with cash. So how do you do it and sustainably?

One approach is to run a success tracking program.

In a success tracking program, you help a seller improve professionally by giving good, digital feedback.

To do so, you track, for each seller, the micro-behaviours that you’ve seen work – for example, if you’ve seen digital selling on Twitter make a difference then you can offer to count for each seller how many tweets they did each day.

You can save them the trouble of tracking and reporting the number of tweets themselves.

The exact micro-behaviours you identify will be according to your context and business. Your job as a sales manager is to identify them, make a list and then encourage the rest of the team to apply them.

Don’t forget, you need to offer your team your success tracking service on an optional basis. Don’t position the program as yet another sales incentive scheme or management and monitoring scheme, instead position it as a self-help tool for them to help them get better at selling. By getting better at the micro-behaviours of selling they can be sure that this will improve their results on the macro-behaviours where they are formally rewarded.

instead position it as a self-help tool for them to help them get better at selling.

Another way to look at this is, to think about “lead” and “lag” indicators.

Typically sales remuneration is focused on “lag” indicators – opportunities closed for example. These indicators track how you sellers did in the past but they are difficult for sellers to improve themselves – they can’t magic up sales opportunities to close.

Lead indicators are the KPIs that track behaviours that lead to successful sales (and closed opportunities) – filling the top of your sales pipeline with prospects for example. That’s a surefire way (if not the only way) to increase the number of closed deals that come out the other end.

A good success tracking program focuses on the lead indicators that bring success.

So, how do you go about designing your success tracking program?

You can test success tracking very easily today. These are the steps:

Decide what do you want to track = what metrics matter? How do you weight them or assign points? You might want to ask your team.
Who do you want to track? Are you tracking teams or individuals?
How will you collect the data? Can you automate data collection or will some steps need manual intervention?
How will you distribute the score to opted-in sellers?
How will you track your own success in running the program? Has it contributed to a positive change in behaviour among your sellers?

I recommend heading over to Success Tracking University where I present a couple of courses you can take to learn more about Success Tracking.