Sales White Paper: Sales Leadership Whatever The Weather

Sales Leadership
Whatever
theWeather
WHITE PAPER

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Sales LeadershipWhatever theWeather
INTRODUCTION
ThisWhite Paper discusses Sales Leadership. It
introduces perspectives, ideas, measurements and
tools to help Sales Leaders succeed in both buoyant
and challenging trading conditions. The chief take-
away from this paper is that there are key things
sales leaders should be focused on regardless of the
economic environment.
So what is Sales Leadership? Raymond LaForge of
the University of Louisville, Kentucky, provides a good
generic definition. He defines sales leadership as
‘activities performed by those in a sales organization
to influence others to achieve common goals for the
collective good of the sales organization and company.’
Traditionally, sales leadership activities are typically
performed by top-level sales executives and, to some
extent, by field sales managers.
However, nowadays we can broaden the sales
leadership domain to include self-leadership activities
performed by salespeople. Many companies have
seen the positive results of initiatives aimed at
expanding leadership capacity by developing the
leadership capabilities of as many employees as
possible. This is often called empowering or enabling.
In thisWhite Paper sales leadership refers in a general
sense to management, including junior, middle and
senior level managers and executives, and the tools
and ideas in this paper can be used by all levels in the
sales hierarchy.
As with any of our webinars, there will be a big
variance in the seniority and experience of the
readership. Some of you will perhaps be in your first
line-management role, having perhaps graduated
from a sales rep position and inheriting a different set
of objectives and challenges. Others may be more
seasoned sales leaders, at Director, Managing Partner
orVP level, tuning in to make sure you’re in step with
the latest thinking and technologies. ThisWhite Paper
aims to provide something for the complete range of
requirements, since the ideas and recommendations
have applicability right up the leadership hierarchy.
However, if you want to dig deeper, or move wider, we
urge you to get in touch with us individually. You can
do this via email to: info@thetasgroup.com.
The agenda for thisWhite Paper will cover 4 main
topics. First, we will talk about what makes sales
leadership difficult, discuss what happens when our
trading environment experiences a downturn, or
‘correction’as the economists like to call it. Second, we
explore what is important to selling organizations, and
introduce a simple test for analyzing your sales success
and helping you focus on the essentials. We’ll run
through some real world numbers to bring this to life.
From this it will be clear which of these essentials is the
most essential.
Third, we’re going to dig a little deeper into the sales
pipeline, sharing with you some metrics that give you
more of an insight into what’s really happening to your
sales efforts. Fourth and lastly, we’re going to touch on
some of the technology out there that will enable you
to lead and coach your sales professionals more cost-
effectively and productively.

Sales leaders are much more under the microscope, with
an increased focus on measurement, performance and
effectiveness, and these metrics are now visible across the
entire organization as well as up into the executive echelons.
Sales leaders have to get the objectives right, develop
the right performance metrics and make sure their teams
understand the importance of them. There’s a new metric for
productivity, and we’ll cover this a little later.
Although many sales organizations invest a great deal of time
and money to provide extensive training for salespeople,
we see not as much attention given to sales manager
training. Perhaps the assumption is that managers don’t
need it, they’ve been sales reps before in some cases and
management is, well, just management. But the fact is that
these days sales leaders need so many more strings to their
bow. The coaching and mentoring aspects of the role mean
they need to know how to support the process and methods
their sales teams use.
They need to be like a small business owner, running their
own business and constantly balancing short term targets
with longer term direction. They need to be more proactive,
try new things, take more risks, and generally provide an
example to the business that this is what you need to do
to deal with change, as change is a constant presence and
customers and competition don’t sit still either.
Sales leaders also need to be sensitive to emotions and strains
in a team of high octane, high stress individuals. They need a
range of listening, communicating and coaching leadership
styles depending upon the situation and the individual, who
could be the sales professional, the customer, the partner and
so on.
WHAT MAKES SALES
LEADERSHIP DIFFICULT
So what makes sales leadership difficult? In the 21st Century
business seems to move faster and faster and technology
has a lot to do with this. Bundled product offerings, more
informed customers, shorter product life cycles, and more
tailoring to customers has brought even greater challenges
to selling and sales leadership. Sales leaders need to
cut through this complexity, and provide a structure and
communicate a vision that is properly aligned to customers’
needs and wants and can accommodate the ever-changing
nature of the company’s business. They also need to develop
their teams so that this vision and behavior is second nature
to them as well.
The need to get in sync with the buying process of a more
informed buyer means relationships with customers are
more involved, sometimes more collaborative and less
rigid. This is in essence the consultative approach and one
of the cornerstones of account management, working with
customers to find those happy intersections where projects
of a high value to the selling organization and also to the
customer to address their business drivers. So while informed
buyers require a new way of selling, many organizations
already have this in the form of good account
management practices.
The gulfs between marketing and sales within the
organizations can be very destructive, so sales and marketing
leaders need to master integration of efforts, and coordinate
cross functional teams and efforts. Selling strategically
incorporates the best of 1:1 marketing after all. Leaders
must instill a teamwork orientation throughout the sales
organization and they have to get their salespeople and
marketing teams to change their approach from‘me’to‘us’.
This can be a delicate balance for the sales and
marketing leadership.

Organizations that were focused on growth, top line numbers,
investment and the long term, switch their focus to cost
reduction, risk reduction, the bottom line and the short term.
Despite our rally cries that this is just the time when you
should be investing, customers will look to reduce what they
see as non-essential expenditure, such as marketing
for example.
Some readers of course may have a unique business value
in cost reduction rather than growth, in which case you are
positioned nicely. In fact one ofTheTAS Group customers
develops and sells software which enables large enterprises
to see exactly what is on their sprawling infrastructure and
reduce costs by decommissioning those servers which are not
adding anything except expenditure. The US credit crunch
has provided our customer with what we inTarget Account
Selling terminology call a compelling event for their finance
customers to act quickly to reduce costs.
Of course, we’re not all focused on helping that area of the
customer’s Income Statement, and the recent events have
caused many organizations to question whether they need
to adjust their messaging, but it really does depend on the
specific customers your organization enjoys, and what the
circumstances are with their customers.
WHENTHEWEATHER GETS STORMY
A sales leader’s role is an incredibly diverse and challenging
one. And it can be particularly rewarding when the ship is
moving well, growth is good and salespeople are hitting their
numbers and smiling a lot. However, as we’ve noticed at least
twice this century, the world is moving faster than ever, and
economic good times are shorter and downturns are coming
more frequently as well. Are we in a downturn right now? If
you’re reading thisWhite Paper and you do acknowledge that
business is challenging at the moment, let’s explore what can
happen when things become turbulent.
Of course, as it is with everything to do with the selling
organization, it helps to look through the eyes of your
customers, and in fact you should really look through the eyes
of their customers. When your customers’customers are not
successful, then this might have a knock-on effect on your
customers, and in turn your organization.
Disappointing trading figures can precipitate a host of
rearguard, sometimes knee-jerk reactions. Budgets can get
cut, projects get delayed, decisions become more involved,
sometimes employees are moved or moved on and a whole
raft of investments, some of them earmarked for your
organization, look doubtful all of a sudden. What looked like
a sure-fire deal for this quarter slips a quarter, or may fall out
altogether.
In what seems like the blink of an eye, your pipeline no longer
looks robust, your forecast looks shaky, and as a sales leader
your instinct is to bring your salespeople close to you to
figure out what is still solid and what you can do to fix what
isn’t. This may also cause your organization to continue the
domino effect by contemplating just the kinds of things your
customers are doing.

That’s why we invented the SalesVelocity Equation, as a
measure of how effective your sales are. Focusing on just 4
elements is all you need to remember.
In the SalesVelocity Equation, SalesVelocity equals number of
deals multiplied by average value multiplied by percentage
close divided by length of sales cycle. Number of Deals
represents the number of qualified sales opportunities being
pursued, $Value represents the average value of each sale,
and of course any currency works, %Close represents the ratio
of deals won to qualified opportunities, and Length of Sales
Cycle is the length of time resources are being applied to a
sales opportunity before that opportunity is won.
The level of revenue that is generated by any organization
in any sales period is proportional to the number of deals or
qualified sales opportunities that are being worked; the value
of each sales opportunity; the percentage of those deals that
are closed; and inversely to the length of the sales cycle.
For a growth oriented company, the sales leadership might,
with appropriate sales performance disciplines, be successful
in increasing each of the #Deals, $Value and %Close by 10%,
and decreasing the Length of Sales Cycle by 10%. This results
in an increase in revenue of 48% without any increase in
headcount – which is almost equivalent to adding half the
number of salespeople at no cost.
THE SALESVELOCITY EQUATION
Let’s take a step back for a moment.What are the most
important things for sales organizations?TheTAS Index ran
from 2007 to 2009 and surveyed around 2000 companies
to help them benchmark their own sales effectiveness. In
November 2011 we launched the Dealmaker Index, which
extends the scope ofTheTAS Index, and you can take the
Dealmaker Index for free at www.dealmakerindex.com.
These were the top 5 initiatives as reported by those that
have taken the survey: number 1: Revenue Growth with 92%,
number 2: Customer Retention with 87%, 3rd equal: Profit
Growth and Sales Effectiveness with 84%, and 5th: Increased
Revenue per Customer with 70%.
Four of these are what we call‘lagging’indicators, business
results that come in some time after you’ve put in the effort
for a certain time period. They’re in the past, you can’t
influence them. They are items 1, 2, 3 and 5.
Sales effectiveness, however, while it’s 3rd equal it is still
viewed as‘mandatory’, or‘very important’by 84% of all
respondents, and this what we call a‘leading’indicator.
Crucially, it’s sales effectiveness that drives the success in the
other initiatives. So if you get the sales effectiveness right, the
others follow, and that of course is whatTheTAS Group has
been focused on for the last 20 years. Sales effectiveness can
be boiled down into 4 important things for sales leaders to
keep their eye on at all times.
A company’s sales effectiveness, or sales performance, is all
about its sales velocity. How quickly or effectively can we
put sales through the organization? What is our speed of
throughput? This is a function of revenue generated for a
fixed or variable cost.
Our main argument here is that regardless of your economic
circumstances, or how well you’re doing, or what your main
objectives are, sales effectiveness and your sales velocity
are changeable through the application of good or bad
practices. An organization might be in growth mode,
enjoying a successful position in a new or expanding market.
Alternatively, that organization might be in cost reduction or
risk reduction mode, in a declining market or in challenging
economic times.
#Deals x $Value x %Close
Length of Sales Cycle
Sales
Velocity
#Deals x $Value x %Close
Length of Sales Cycle
Sales
Velocity
10% 10% 10%
10%
+48%

The organization that was doing $1m per month on the basis
of 40 deals, 200K deal size, 25% close rate and 2 months sales
cycle is now working on 30 deals, but through being more
effective in its sales approach, has upped its deal value to
$220K and close rate to 27.5% and reduced its sales cycle to
1.8 months, resulting in a new velocity of $1.008m per month,
the same revenue, not the same costs. We hope you can see
from this example that it pays to watch, and work on, the 4
key variables in the good times and bad
Let’s bring this to life with an example below using some real
numbers. Let’s say we’re an organization that in a given time
period, a quarter, or a year for example, is working on 40 deals,
with an average size of 200K and is closing 25% of the deals in
that same period. The average sales cycle length is 2 months,
making the sales velocity for the period $1m dollars per
month, so $12m per year.
If the organization ups its sales performance where all the
levers improve by 10%, we now have 44 deals, average deal
size of 220K, the close rate goes up from 25% to 27.5%, and
the length of sales cycle comes down to 1.8 months from 2
months. This calculates to $1.478m per month, or $17.75m
per year, the 48% I referred to just now. So while a 48%
improvement might seem a difficult mountain to tackle,
moving any of these levers by just 10% is manageable, and
a realistic goal. Like compound interest through a financial
institution, the effects can be quite spectacular.
So that’s the growth scenario, what about a scenario in more
challenging economic times? When a company is focused
on cost reduction, the sales performance disciplines could
result in maintaining the same revenue while reducing costs.
Let’s imagine adverse trading conditions where marketing
expenditure is curtailed with the result that leads are reduced,
or worse still, where the sales force needs to be rationalized. If
the number of deals is downgraded to 75% as a consequence
of headcount or marketing expenditure reduction, you have
the ability to maintain your sales velocity by paying attention
to increasing deal value and close rate while decreasing the
length of sales cycle by 10%. So revenue can be maintained
and cost of sales can be reduced by at least 25%. Sales staff
or marketing expenditure reduction, therefore, doesn’t
necessarily mean reduced achievements.
40 x $200k x 25%
2 months
= $1 mil.
per month
44 x $220k x 27.5%
1.8 months
= $1.48 mil.
per month
40 x $200k x 25%
2 months
= $1 mil.
per month
30 x $220k x 27.5%
1.8 months
= $1 mil.
per month

But if you only cover the first half mile at 30mph, half the
average velocity you need for the whole journey, how fast
do you need to go to get to the finishing line at an average
of 60mph? Think about it for a moment. The usual answers
are 90mph, or perhaps 120mph, to get back on track. The sad
reality is that it should take you 1 minute to cover the whole
mile at your target 60 mph, but you have just taken 1 minute
to go half a mile at 30mph. You have no time left, you’re
done. You’d have to move at faster than the speed of light to
complete your goal, an impossibility in a car or in sales.
So if you have a 2-month sales cycle and a couple of days left
of that 2 months, and let’s say it coincides with the end of your
quarter, but you’re barely half way to getting the deal, you’re
in trouble. So what do you do? Well you do the equivalent of
time travel to do the second half mile in zero seconds, you do
crazy things. You ask for the sale well before the customer is
ready to buy, before you’ve fully explored their requirements
or proved your solution, or you discount heavily, and devalue
your offering, just to get the deal in the door. It’s all about
time and it’s all about velocity.
But as you can see, it’s also all about measurement. You
need to be able to measure the right things. You also need
to measure them accurately, and be confident that the data
is correct and that the data is sufficient to give you the right
picture of your organization’s sales performance. Otherwise
you can’t be sure that the assumptions and inferences
you’re making are the right ones. So now let’s talk about
measurement and take a look at the pipeline, the trusty and
well used snapshot of where your sales are at.
TIME ISTHE KILLER RESOURCE
Readers probably noticed that in the SalesVelocity Equation
there are 3 factors above the line and only one factor below
it. You can suffer in one of the top factors and still do well.
But if you suffer in the bottom factor, average sales cycle
length, you make it very difficult for yourself. This is of course
why sales leaders get nervous during more difficult times,
because decisions get postponed, projects get put back,
deals slip. Unless, of course, you are properly qualified in the
right deals, you have proven your unique business value, you
understand the compelling event for your customer, you have
communicated the value to them, they agree with you on all
these fronts, and you are correctly navigating their political
map.
When you really get down to it, it’s not usually money, time
is the killer resource in business, and this is why length of
sales cycle is perhaps the most important lever to adjust to
your advantage. Closing the good deals as soon as possible,
as well as qualifying out of the bad deals early, is crucial to
the equation. It’s no use doing really well with the factors
above the line if you let your sales cycle slip. You undo all of
your good work and damage your performance, your sales
throughput.
We want to illustrate the important of time, or more
accurately, the time value of money, with an analogy. We’re
indebted to BarryTrailer of CSO Insights for this. Imagine
you’re driving across a bridge. The bridge is one mile long and
you have set an objective to move at an average speed of 60
miles per hour (‘mph’), this is your target sales velocity. If you
prefer kilometers and kilometers per hour, it works just as well.

But what do you know about that $1.6m number? Are there
more deals in here? Have the existing deals increased in
value? Maybe some of the deals that were in the Negotiate
stage of the pipeline have moved backwards. Perhaps there
is one new very large deal that entered the pipeline during
the month and got to this stage very quickly. And what does
‘very quickly’mean?You could ask these questions for every
other stage. Also, what’s the normal velocity of deals in this
organization’s pipeline? How many deals are stuck in a given
stage?
So this traditional pipeline view may tell us quite a bit, but
there are really too many questions to make this pipeline
analysis valuable to the business as is. It leaves many more
things unknown, and these things that we know we don’t
know, if you follow, are the really important things.
Instead, a pipeline view could pay attention to the health of
each individual deal. How long have they been where they
are? Any opportunities that have not moved for more than a
certain time period, maybe 45 or 60 days, could be analyzed
as being‘Critical’and deals that are static for perhaps 30 days,
could be labeled as‘Stalled’. So while theTarget stage in the
pipeline is fairly robust in absolute value terms, if you knew
that $10m of the $19.7m (at the end of the period) is critical
and therefore probably never going to amount to anything
unless action is taken quickly, you could begin to get a better
sense of the value of its pipeline.While this is a better view, it
still doesn’t tell us the full picture.
With supporting technology, you can look at what really
happened to the pipeline during the period – right down to
the individual deal level, and here is where your metrics can
give you the confidence that you’re looking at the true sales
performance of your organization.
PIPELINEVELOCITY METRICS
First of all, let’s take a look at one of 2 important things about
a pipeline, and that’s its shape. You can see below 2 funnel
shapes. The same number of leads are at the top of the
funnel, the same number of deals come out of the bottom.
Which is the better pipeline? The one on the left seems to
have more coverage, and if you answered the left side, you
would be wrong.
When it comes to this idea of coverage,‘3X’,‘4X’and so on
is not relevant. It doesn’t help you. The left funnel shape
means you’re spending more time on the opportunities
you’re going to lose, and you’re not deploying your more
expensive resources on the later stages of the funnel where
you really need them. It goes back to velocity, the second
important thing about a pipeline, the speed you’re moving
deals through the funnel. You can have all the coverage in the
world, but it’s no use to you if it’s not moving, or if you don’t
know if it’s moving, or in fact how it’s moving.
To further speak to this, consider this representative pipeline
below.This may be similar to the view you are using today
to‘manage the pipeline’. This organization has 6 stages to
its sales process:Target, Qualify, Needs, Proof, Negotiate and
Close. You can see that the total pipeline value has gone up
from $33.5m to $40.3m in the period and that the value in the
Proof stage, for example, has increased by $1.6m.
START END
Target 22,901,437 19,788,524
Quality 4,401,770 9,579,837
Needs 3,985,050 6,681,734
Proof 758,732 2,394,224
Negotiate 1,045,320 1,163,461
Close 430,016 644,355
33,522,325 40,252,135

With this analysis, for each of the pipeline stages, you can
more accurately predict what’s going to happen in the
future based on the current state of the pipeline, down to
an individual sales person level.Traditionally we might have
been focused on having‘4X’in the top stage of the funnel.
Now with deeper understanding of the movement through
the funnel, time can be focused on the sales process to
maximize velocity through the funnel. In the past that wasn’t
measurable, and until you can measure something it’s really
hard to improve.
Looking at static pipeline numbers is not very illuminating.
Understanding movement from stage to stage, for each
salesperson and for each deal, you can begin to uncover real
insight that can help you to develop valuable foresight. And
that’s good whether you’re in growth or cost reduction mode.
If you can see the average time in each stage an individual
salesperson spends, plotted against the average for the selling
organization at the top, this can really help you coach your
salesperson to optimum sales performance.
Your best salespeople will be spending the right amount
of time in each stage for your sales process and your
organization. If your less successful salespeople are spending
excessive time in the early stages, perhaps they need to hone
their qualification skills to either qualify in or out more quickly.
If they’re spending too long at the latter stages, this might
be because they didn’t explore the customer requirements
properly and are now wasting their and the customer’s time
with a raft of different proposals. Of course you also need to
balance this against the number of deals for each salesperson
and their own individual sales velocity per day.
The table above shows the movement through the pipeline
in the month. For example, taking the top row, there was
$22.90m in theTarget stage at the start of the period. An
additional $9.16m arrived into that stage during the period,
which is the number at the bottom of theTarget column, then
back on the top row we see that $9.82m moved out ofTarget
into Qualify, $2.1m moved out ofTarget into Needs, and
$0.35m moved out ofTarget into ClosedWon, giving us the
end figure of $19.7m at the end of the period from the table
on the previous page.
You can see this graphically below, paying attention to the
dark blue bars. Of the $22.9m to start the period, $10.63m
has stayed withinTarget, and a total of $12.27m has moved
out, made up of $9.82m into Qualify, $2.1m has moved into
Needs, nothing has moved to Proof, Negotiate or Close and
$0.35m has moved toWon. $9.16m has come in, the light
green bar, which is about $3m less than the $12.27m that has
moved out, hence the $3m drop at period end to $19.7m at
the bottom.
Movement through the stages during the period
START Target Quality Needs Proof Negotiate Close Won Lost
Target 22.90 9.82 2.10 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.35 0.00
Quality 4.40 2.13 3.99 0.01 0.08 0.00 0.00 0.01
Needs 3.99 0.00 0.04 2.71 0.53 0.03 0.20 0.00
Proof 0.76 0.00 1.08 0.11 0.23 0.00 0.03 0.00
Negotiate 1.05 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.36 0.32 0.00 0.03
Close 0.43 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.14
Additions 9.16 11.39 6.21 3.08 0.83 0.36 0.59 0.59
Start
Target
Quality
Needs
Proof
Negotiate
Close
Won
Lost
Additions
End
0.00 5.00 10.00 15.00 20.00
22.90
10.63
9.82
2.10
9.16
19.79
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.35
TARGET STAGE

This kind of technology is an example of what has come
to be known as sales 2.0. Sales 2.0 takes its name from the
general term web 2.0 and in a sales 2.0 environment, sales
professionals want to learn, leverage and contribute selling
knowledge at their own pace, when they need to, as they
work, the idea of anytime, anyplace, anyhow.
Finally, technology, and specifically sales performance
applications, have the ability to provide sales leaders with the
tools to coach their teams on specific deals. Obviously your
sales performance application provides the framework for
your salespeople to repeat best practice in the deals they are
working. It gets them to do the right thing at the right time
on the right deal. Also, the application collects an enormous
amount of data that you can surface for the kind of reporting
and metrics that we discussed earlier.
But also software can help the leader be more proactive
as well. Intelligent software can help the sales leader be
more proactive. This is because it can give the sales leader a
structure for asking the salesperson the right questions. This
is made much easier in software compared to the world of
paper-based sales and account plans.
The great thing about technology is that it is just another
delivery mechanism, but it has the power to scale, the power
to leverage and the power to inform and communicate,
when done the right way. The software-as-a-service model
provides anytime, anywhere access to a sales leader and
the collaborative process in terms of sharing, updating and
communicating information is made almost instantaneous.
TECHNOLOGY COACHINGTOOLS
This is of course quite statistically heavy content, but does
illustrate how good measurement, good data and good
metrics can really bring some clarity to your pipeline numbers,
and clarity is what you need whether you’re riding the crest of
the wave or getting buffeted by the waves. It is also the first
example of how you can use technology tools at your disposal
to measure - and manage - your sales teams as effectively as
possible.
A second example is the webinar. Virtual meetings are a
great way of getting the key buyers together at the minimum
disruption to both them and you. This can greatly help you
keep your sales cycle as short as possible, since you might not
get the buyers together for a physical meeting for a month,
but they can all spare half an hour from their laptops at very
short notice. Additionally, from a selling expenses point of
view, if you can conduct more meetings virtually rather than
wasting travel time and money having physical meetings, not
only can you reduce costs but also massively improve your
productivity.
Another way of using technology to be a more effective
leader is in the area of online sales coaching. An example
of this is DealmakerVirtual Learning System (‘DVLS’), theTAS
Group’s online sales knowledge portal. DVLS is designed
to complement training for reinforcement and sustained
performance. The sales knowledge portal contains best
practices from proven sales methodologies in streaming
movies, audio, worksheets and other useful documents.
So, technologies like DVLS can either be used in a self-
reinforcing capacity or by sales leaders in a structured
coaching capacity. Sales leaders can work with their teams
through formal curricula or else develop customized curricula
for continued learning and coaching topics. Once the
curriculum is selected or designed, salespeople study the
required materials, attend a virtual instructor-led meeting to
reinforce their knowledge and then apply what they have
learned to a specific sales situation. Leaders then complete
the loop by reviewing progress with the salesperson to assess
progress and set out what needs to be adjusted in a constant
iterative process.

Alternatively, in an opportunity management context like in
the example below, a sales leader can study the sales mix of
his or her sales team in a given forecast. In good times or bad,
sales leaders want to know if there is a risk to the forecast,
either because of one abnormally large deal which could
make or break the forecast, or because the sales people won’t
have sufficient time to close enough of all the small deals that
they have in their pipeline to reach their forecast. They can fix
it early, rather than too late, after the quarter.
For example, in an account management context, if a sales
leader sees an Opportunity Map with potential opportunities
entered but no customer business drivers and initiatives
associated, he or she knows that the research has not been
done to come up with opportunities that feed into what is
important to the customer. This then prompts the sales leader
to ask: can you tell me what is important to the customer?
What are their important projects this year? How do the
opportunities you’ve identified feed into these projects?
What does success look like for these projects? This helps
sales people refine their approach, engage on only the right
opportunities and cut down the sales cycle.
SUMMARY
It’s worth summarizing this journey of sales leadership
through potentially stormy waters as well as calm
conditions.
First we explored Sales Leadership, what it means,
what makes it difficult and what can happen when
the economic conditions are less than plain sailing.
Second, we went back to basics and looked at sales
performance as a leading indicator of sales success
and explained how the SalesVelocity Equation, with
its laser focus on 4 important variables, should be your
sales barometer whatever the weather.
Then we looked at the shortcomings of traditional
pipeline analysis and argued how velocity metrics give
you the insight you need to figure out what is really
happening to your pipeline in a given time period.
Finally, we looked at the technology tools that can free
sales leaders to coach their sales teams, rather than
manage them, come rain or shine.
Since we’ve stressed how important time is in this
White Paper, we hope you feel that this has been time
well spent learning about some of the Sales Leadership
best practices recommended byTheTAS Group and
our customers. If you wish to find out more, please
contact us at info@thetasgroup.com.

ABOUTTHETAS GROUP
TheTAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger
deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded
within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves
sales performance and accelerates sales results.We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from
traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a
sales opportunity.
For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com
Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved.This briefing is for customer use only and no usage rights are conveyed. Nothing herein may be reproduced in any form without written permission ofTheTAS Group.

Sales White Paper: Sales Leadership Whatever The Weather

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