Scaling your sales capability – how to shift sales culture to unlock growth

When transitioning from start-up to scale-up, a key transformation in the business structure is hiring people to do the work once done by the founder. This includes relinquishing the all-important role of sales, which is essential in ensuring the business grows and survives. For a founder, relying on others to sell on your behalf can be daunting. How could anyone convey the importance and brilliance of your product to service as well as you do?

My guest on this week’s episode of Platform Diaries - Mark McInnes - illuminates that often, your sales team won’t be able to communicate the benefits of your product with the same fervour and complexity that you do. But that doesn’t have to stop them from delivering successful pitch decks, acquiring new customers, and demonstrating that your business is worth engaging with.

Mark, the founder of Sales Development As A Service, reveals that founders often feel let down by their sales team.

“The challenge that we see over and over again is founders will come out of a meeting with me, and they’ll say ‘Mark, I've got this sales team, and they just can’t sell. We've been in the business for X amount of years, and every month I still need to make a certain amount of revenue to keep the business going. Why can’t the team just sell like me?’. And the team can't sell like the founder because there are some significant differences about the way the founder talks about their business and sells their business.”

Mark reflects that when a founder is first trying to get their early customers, they will often go to other founders or CEOs to pitch their product. In their pitch, they will go deep into the finer details of the product, convey their vast knowledge of the context and industry in which it will be used, and demonstrate that their software or product is backed by someone trustworthy. This CEO may also be more inclined to do business with a start-up rather than an established multinational company, as they are in a position to take risks.

This dynamic changes when a sales team approaches prospects.

“When a founder takes his sales team out on his calls and says, ‘see, follow my lead and just do that’, the first problem is that they don't have that level of passion, even if they are industry professionals. The other big challenge is that founders will talk to other founders or CEOs and be able to access these people very easily… when a salesperson goes to have that conversation, they’re typically delegated down a little bit.”

When the sales team is delegated down to operations or the general manager, the person they are dealing with is less likely to take risks. This person will be fearful of making a mistake and potentially losing their job. As Mark joked, no one has been sacked for buying IBM.

“What happens is then we start selling through features and benefits, and it just becomes like an ugly brochure,” Mark says.

Mark revealed that he recently received a pitch deck from a large international business (that will remain nameless), that had around 20 slides. After around 15-16 pages of the executive's bios and statistics demonstrating how big they were, the pitch deck closed with a single page on their customers. Mark thinks that when the marketing department constructed this document, they were attempting to de-risk the decision-making process. By relying on information that conveyed their status, amount of customers and the integrity of their people, they were trying to show prospects that a decision to engage with them is a safe decision.

But what should sales teams do if not communicating the features and benefits of the product?

“There's a very simple methodology behind the way you need to think about going to the market… we call it the ‘three why’ scenario. Why should you do anything, why do it now, and then why do it with me or us.”

First and foremost, particularly in the case of CRM, there will be resistance to divert from the status quo. People need to know why they need to move from their current situation in order to act.

“Human beings are lazy. We’re designed to use as little energy as possible - for thinking, for our movement - that’s the way we’re designed; we're hardwired that way. So, if someone provides you with an option to do something different, you're naturally going to start thinking, ‘the way that I'm doing it now is better’ or ‘I’m comfortable with the way I do it now’. It is only until you've created a situation where the buyers say to themselves, ‘you know what, what I'm doing now is not gonna work, I need to find another way,’ that you can start to talk to them about why they need to do it now.”

Mark also points out that a regressive trait among many of us is that we won’t act until something forces us to. Despite all of the warnings, often it is only when a doctor informs someone that if they don’t quit smoking, they’ll die, do they finally take action. Convincing your buyer of the impossibility of attempting to onboard a new CRM system when they are attempting to grow or are absolutely flat will prompt them to act quicker for fear of losing revenue or inhibiting their growth. He boils this approach down to either a. linking the decision to their current situation; or b. the current economic environment. Using superficial selling techniques, such as a limited-time offer, aren't as powerful.

However, your sales technique must also vary depending on who you are talking to.

“You've got to use their language. You might say something like, “Darren, you know how every morning when you come in, you see how much stock you've got coming, and then you’ve got to allocate it to jobs, and you've got to have four different tabs open to do this. My guess is that it takes about 25 minutes to get that done every day. What if you could just come in and that was automatically allocated based on the way that it came into the warehouse on receipt? Would that make your day easier?”

Mark believes that you’ve still got to communicate those features and benefits, but you’ve got to do it in a way that is more palatable to the person you’re talking to – the buyer.

“What we need to do firstly is the value prop, and we're not reaching out saying some version of ‘we can save you time and money’, because most business processes can be distilled down to that.”

Using this broad language causes the person you’re pitching to zone out because this is not a unique selling point. Working on the value prop is key to ensuring that the story the seller is conveying resonates.

“The best way to do that is to interview your existing customers and ask them how their day is different from before to now using our product or service.”

By understanding how your current clients have overcome day-to-day challenges with your product or service, you can better communicate to prospective customers how this could do the same for them.

This also culminates in a good sales culture. Mark believes that when people talk positively about sales and revenue internally and share anecdotes from successful clients, it gives ammunition for other sellers to go out there and promote the product.

Is your sales team underperforming? Perhaps you’re a founder who thinks that your sales teams should just do what you do. Utilising the 'three whys' and instilling a good team culture may get your team locking in new meetings and securing clients.