 |
| TAG Panel on “How Dynamic Sales Orgs Drive Results”. Pictured from left to right: Jon Birdsong, Mary Ford, Ryan Radding, Eric Mercado, and Kyle Tothill |
I attended a Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) event for sales leadership a couple weeks ago about “How Dynamic Sales Orgs. Drive Results”. The panel included:
- Jon Birdsong (CEO, WideAngle)
- Mary Ford (Director of Sales Operations and Strategy, Dell SecureWorks)
- Ryan Radding (AVP, Salesforce)
- Eric Mercado (VP of Business Development, Force Marketing)
- Kyle Tothill (Partner and Managing Director, eHire)
The majority of the discussion revolved around engaging sales teams either in mentoring and coaching or via direct incentives. Here are a few take-aways:
- There’s a spectrum of engagement and performance that ranges from (low to high): Resistant, Reluctant, Existent, Compliant, Committed, and Compelled. Mitigate (or remove) reps in the first three groups while promoting and sharing practices of the high performance reps who exhibit innovation and leadership.
- Drive engagement in these areas: Connection (connect individuals together to form the team), Support (mentoring and coaching), Reward (incentives), Progress (clear career progression model), and Structure (ensure alignment and understanding of roles and responsibilities).
- Measuring success and engagement should go beyond metrics and activities. Include personal goals – set, met, exceeded? Understand that the “outside” lives of reps has a very real impact on work performance.
- Beyond retention and promotion stats, evaluate the effectiveness and engagement of the team with referrals by reps and how quickly reps ramp up.
- Gamification plays to the competitive nature of sales reps with a layer of transparency and accountability.
- Pull ideas from reps on selling, don’t just push “best practices”. Sales reps can be innovative in how they sell and pushing “best practices” may not be conducive to the reps’ individual styles.
- Coaching tends to have a “master-subordinate” structure set with boundaries while mentoring allows freer structure and less formality. Mentors tend to go beyond sales topics or even at the current job. Have/ establish both.
Good points raised by the team, and continues to illustrate that to drive sales, it’s all about driving engagement from the team. Companies are organizations of people. Engaging the people within, at the group and individual level, can produce a culture that drives sustainable practices for business growth and team motivation.