Sales Hierarchy of Needs

I posted this entry last year but thought it was a good complement to the 'Letter from Greg' entry because it discusses the order in which companies can go about 'fixing' their ecosystem.

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In the spirit of Abraham Maslow, the following represents a hierarchy of needs that organizes Sales Resource imperatives into a logical and linear set of needs where the initial (first order) needs must be addressed if companies hope to have success with later (higher order) needs.

Level I - Access to a consistent source of entry-level sales talent
Most companies acknowledge that a ‘hire my competitors’ strategy is flawed…if for no other reason than it does not represent a consistent and scalable approach (pronounced: It doesn’t work if you have 100s or 1000s of sales people.) Part of the problem is the large corporations (AT&T, Xerox, IBM, etc.) are no longer in the business of making new sales people. So…I it matters little how good your product, sales process, or internal development programs are! If you don’t have access to a consistent source of quality raw materials, you are losing a tremendous amount of efficiency. This is not much different than any manufacturing business. If you make chocolate, you can correct for poor quality cocoa in your quality control process. However, you end up throwing away a lot of chocolate!

Level II - Consistent, efficient, and effective process for candidate selection
Includes three components of successful sales resource selection:
- Effectiveness: Does our process deliver candidates with the highest probability for success? This can only be measured in hindsight with hard metrics like attrition, revenue per resource, and percent of sales resources on plan. The selection process is tasked with accomplishing two disparate goals 1) identifying a candidates competency (will they be successful?) and 2) ensuring individual and cultural suitability (will they fit in?) More often than not, a good fit (‘I like this candidate’) will translate into high levels of confidence that a candidate possesses the necessary competency.
- Efficiency: What good is a high success rate if your cost per hire is high or it takes eight weeks to complete the five interviews and three personality assessments necessary to make an offer. Our clients tell us that, on average, it takes 45 hours of a sales manager’s time to hire a single resource. While I applaud the desire to ‘make the right hire,’ I suggest companies must seek a better return on their investment of time.
- Consistency: Simply stated, does everyone in a hiring capacity utilize the same approach and measure success in the same way? If every interviewer is following their own ‘best practice’, it is impossible to determine what is working and what is not.

Level III - Consistent and efficient process for resource ramp
Do you possess a consistent (there’s that word again) and efficient means of indoctrinating new hires to your company, culture, technology, industry, and language? Otherwise: 1) resources take a unreasonably long time to be productive (get up to speed) and/or 2) your people are frustrated and overwhelmed for the first six months of their employment. The goal should be to minimize the time necessary to receive and absorb all the information necessary to become an integral part of your organization without sacrificing one day of productivity. How many days pass before a new sales hire makes their first outbound sales call?

Level IV - Formal and consistent sales process
Formal refers to the need for documentation. If you can’t produce a process document…then no formal process exists. The need for consistency should not be a surprise at this point (does everyone understand the process? Is everyone following the process?) Sales process is an unwieldy term that must be partitioned into specific competencies which including:
- Activity Management: the individual and team approach to capturing and evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of specific actions including calls, meetings, and proposals.
- Opportunity Management: the individual and team approach to assessing opportunity progress as well as identifying specific actions to advance the sale
- Gated Sales Process / Pipeline Management: the stages or ‘gates’ necessary to move opportunities from initial creation to closure.
- Individual expectations and compensation: the specific metrics, measures, and variable compensation used to reinforce behavior and motivate salespeople.

Level V - Formal and Consistent Resource Development process
Without access to ongoing learning opportunities (Knowledge Path), how can you expect individuals to improve? Better sales people require investments to improve their selling skills. Absent a consistent and transparent path to advancement (Career Path) individuals will not stay for long. If you fail to provide Career and Knowledge paths for your salespeople (or if nobody knows what those paths are) somebody else will!

Level VI - Sales Management Resource Development
Companies acknowledge that the majority of sales managers were once successful individual contributors given the unique opportunity to work more and receive less pay without the benefit of additional training. Absent a formal and consistent process for grooming top-performers into effective sales managers companies are relying on luck.

Level VII – Fault Tolerant Continuous Improvement Architecture
Does your sales ecosystem provide an effective framework for ongoing experimentation and iterative refinement? In simple terms, do you spend the majority of your energy improving the effectiveness of your sales engine? Or, are you still consumed with filling holes in your resource plan, making sure individuals make enough calls, and relying on heroics to close deals at the end of each quarter?