Attrition – “the action of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.”
Even our most effective sellers can start to tune out, it’s become the norm of senior sellers to be left to their own devices because they have been doing it so long there is no reason to waste their time. But at that rate – what is the point of having front line management? In fact 66.1% of salespeople said they absolutely want to be coached.
The deal review is not a waste of time, data recap wastes time. If a manager is to give feedback on a deal it needs to be less than 5 minutes, they need to have the information and provide valuable feedback – not do a deal interrogation.
Here let me give you an example – if you sell floor cleaning and you notice that a senior rep has done a discovery with a 24 hour store, but have not defined the revenue of the store on an hourly basis – is there a big question you are going to foresee happening later on in the conversation? We can either coach to that and mention casually “hey, you should talk with them about the inactive time they are going to see, and match that with the increased success after the cleaning” OR we can wait for the deal review that is happening in current organizations and spend 85% of the time asking details about the opportunity and frustrate everyone involved.
Attrition is also caused by expectations – or lack thereof – how often have you seen reps be frustrated by a random question fired off during a deal review? Even fluffing the answer to make it seem better than it really is. There is some fundamental misalignment though, in a survey of 1010 sales people 48% said they were being coached, and 82% of leaders said they were coaching….whatever coaching is being done, it might not be clear enough.
Lets put it to the test, call each front line manager into your office and ask what they look for in an opportunity. Often we assume because the company is aligned at the surface level, everyone must operate the same but we find that the process of rating an opportunity is fundamentally different for each manager.
27% – thats how much effective coaching can raise a win rate – but the current state of sales focuses so heavily on late stage or high dollar, because we put our focus on the whales to drag the quota across the line, instead of letting the forecast do it’s job.
With an average contract value for mid market Saas being 40K – every percentage point matters and if your are showing win rates lower than 30% it’s probably time to take a good hard look at your position, C suite after all, only survives two missed quarters before they are changed out.
How do we fix it? – Expectations, across the board, for every opportunity. Yes there will be one-off deals that close without those 15 things, but it is often said, we have never lost a deal if we have all 15. Our personal team uses GAP selling within our Noted Analytics, so every seller is actively tagging critical information for management to review directly in our notes that sync to salesforce.
Get involved early and often – opportunities that have been touched more than 2.5 times by managers have a 75% increase in the chances of closing. Don’t worry, we notify managers as soon as the opportunity is tagged by the rep and timestamp manager feedback so you can keep track of everything.
Noted Analytics facilitates the coaching process by making it easy to interact, analyze and coach reps, so they can win more deals. For the C suite leaders reading this, a dashboard that will give you insight into the effectiveness of your sales method, which managers are having the most impact, and how they are doing it, so that you can scale quicker and be more accurate every time with your projections.
