Sales Turnaround - First Things First

This post by Joe Murphy discusses one of the first things you can do to turn your sales around 180 degrees.

One of the first things I look at is the revenue decline over the past several periods (months/quarters) and to determine which products or services are facing problems.

What I look at - specifically - are the following areas;

1. Which services and/or products are not selling (declining sales numbers)
2. Which services and/or products are not selling at the same profit margin (declining margins)
3. Which services and/or products are having longer sales cycles (not closing as fast as they once were)
4. Which services and/or products do not have the same pipeline characteristics as they once had (dollar amount, volume, margin, close dates, and probability of winning/closing)

Once I have this data I can really begin to make some "informed hypotheses" where the sales force is failing or flailing. "Informed hypotheses" provide a useful tool that allow me to begin the next phase in the diagnosis as to why sales are declining.

Most executives want a turn-around specialist to come in and whip the sales force into shape. And you can find "sales leaders" who promise they will do that. They promise some of the following - what I call - "we needs:"

1. We need new training processes
2. We need to implement call reports
3. We need customer satisfaction surveys
4. We need new hiring processes
5. We need new sales management
6. We need new sales people

The "we needs" go on and on. But if you hear someone prescribing before diagnosing, run for the hills. Or show the person to the door and have them run for the hills.

An Outward Focus Toward Clients - 180

Turning around an organization, requires an outward focus toward the client. This comes right down to individual behavior. Where is everyone looking - inward? Or outward?

Often, when I come into an organization the first thing I notice is, where key people are spending the bulk of their time. Also, where they are spending the key hours of the day.

You know what I find? I find poor manaagement systems and a poor leadership practice. Sales is down, therefore "we put in place reporting systems to see what people (especially sales) are doing every day." Then, the financial people put in quality systems, that require sales people to fill out more paperwork on the front end to save their staff time.

Soon the entire organization is facing inwards. And the culture now is about filling out reports and reporting and meeting about reports, and the meeting turn into reports of the meetings of the reports, and then more questions and then more written emails about why this wasn't done, which gets sent down to the person in front of the client to write and then it is rewritten by management, and then management reads it or has gone on to another crisis and it is no longer important.

So how do you stop this malpractice? It ain't easy. Becuase the stupidity is now engrained in people's thinking and in processes. And worst of all - people who don't have client facing positions in the company - but who have the ear of the President, or CEO or Managing Director. And the new bad practices, become the new normal.

Stopping it requires recognizing the problem. See the next post.