Nothing tells you more about a company’s culture than when times are tough. One of those times can be when sales are not running to plan.

If you’ve spent any time in sales, it’s very likely that you have, at some point, sat through an emergency meeting where the leader sounded the alarm and demanded action from the sales team to produce more sales. The leader comes in, explains how far short of the target the team is, and, in the case I recall, demands activity, immediate and increased cold calling, for example, to drop new opportunities onto the pipeline. A morale-sapping moment, ‘Hello pressure, my old friend,’ but also a realisation that perhaps something is not quite right in the go-to-market approach.

That feeling of something not being right is worth exploring. Honestly speaking, and particularly if your typical deal cycles are long, such a crisis meeting is usually a signal that you are in a feast or famine business. Prospecting should be a consistent element of any sales operation and should utilise numerous channels, suddenly hitting the phones for many businesses; however, it is not going to fix a revenue crisis suddenly.

For some businesses, maybe, but in the business-to-business environment, I recall, any positive results coming from an intense prospecting round mid-way through the year would only show results in the second quarter of the next financial year. By this stage, things may already be too late, and a turnaround situation might be underway in terms of securing new commercial leadership to totally reset things.

This kind of directional crisis should certainly point to wider issues at play beyond the immediacy of needing new business to drop onto the profit and loss. It certainly speaks to an organisation that is solely relying on salespeople for the fix. I would wager in these cases, that there is a very administrative sales leadership that is looking retrospectively at the pipeline and results, with no creative analysis to support the team.

The experience for the team member therefore is going to be one whereby the realisation is that they are now set up for a sustained period of pressure, but equally, that leadership is not going to contribute to this experience changing any time soon.

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Navigating pressure and talent retention

Goes without saying, if things have reached this point, sales will not be a fun environment to be in, particularly if your leaders are directionally focused in their style. Sales can be seen to be scapegoated by management, which can begin to widely convey a sense that sales is broken, sales isn’t delivering.

It’s like trying to cure the illness by focusing on the symptoms alone, whilst adding another challenge to those trying to perform, pressure. Pressure like this is not likely to lead to sustainable solutions as it can easily lead to unsustainable activity for activity’s sakes.

In the situation I recall, the team went into two modalities, first of all, they immediately started prospecting, for new roles, elsewhere. The challenge gets incrementally worse if your talent is leaving, as it usually takes a new joiner six months to hit their stride. This is only going to contribute to the need for a reset.

Secondly, there was a panicked and unstructured shotgun approach to the increased sales activity. Folks reacted by trying to bring in any prospect, any deal, to avoid the spotlight. Ever noticed environments where a lot of the won business ends up contributing very little or nothing to the bottom line, for example, resulting in these accounts eventually, down the line, being cut? There is a better way.

Strategies for long-term growth

So what is the alternative? How best to avoid this scenario and how best to set up your sales for success, whilst building exceptional teams? How to break month by month, quarter by quarter, financial year to financial year survival approaches to market, and instead to inspire a transformation toward an environment focused on longer term exceptional growth?

The first step is for the commercial leadership to implement a thorough analysis of the business, to become the detectives to analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks, alongside what is needed to be true to win, including any big bets to back in order to either take the pressure off, or find new commercial opportunity. This effort has to include a clear understanding of what the winning use cases are, so that more sustainable and structured market activity can be effected by the sales team.

One obviously needs within this to also know what the pipeline data is telling us. Is the problem really finding new opportunity, which may take months to close, or are there ‘focus and finish’ opportunities within the existing mature opportunities? Part of this is to also understand if inefficiencies can be eliminated through streamlining onboarding and implementation processes to get signed clients to revenue quicker.

Ever worked at an organisation with no evident go to market plan? It’s not as uncommon as it sounds, though this responsibility sits squarely on the shoulders of the commercial P&L owner. One way to avoiding famine and feast is to move from a quota driven environment to a mission led one, with clearly articulated, universally understood go-to-market planning.

When leadership communicate this across functional departments, within their teams and to leadership, they have a better chance to bind their sales team, (and others,) to the mission, as well as helping them to focus and finish on finding repeatable and profitable business in a structured, sustainable way.

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The timing of sales planning and budgeting is also critical. Starting the annual budgeting process in the third or last quarter of the current financial year is key, as is asking individual sales team members to build their own sales plans, which can then be married to the top down budget and ambition. Involving them in the inevitable brainstorming to achieve gap planning is also important.

This is the beginning of breaking the boom and bust, because you can start the year with a plan, one that your team believes in, as they part authored it. The exercise also confers the responsibility on the team to think creatively about their individual businesses, and will have allowed you to identify the pivotal deals you’ll want to put down early in order to jump start the year.

It is highly unlikely that all of your planned outcomes will come off as originally conceived, especially if you are in complex industries. This is why it is essential to revisit your planning and to think of those plans as living documents. Your cadence  of weekly, (or bi-weekly,) monthly and quarterly sales meetings, should also go deeper than a simple ‘what are you committing to bring in this month,’ type of dialogue.

Create time with the team that supports their prosecution of the year, and helps you to understand where you can help. Ensuring you cover tactical, deeper dive analysis of why you are winning or losing, pipeline analysis, looking back to understand ‘what did we do right? where did we go wrong? what can we change?’ can also be undertaken to ensure that any course correction would be discussed and implemented as a team, with full understanding of the implications of the current speed of travel and focus.

Good data, cadence, and monitoring help you identify the need to tweak the plan, if required. It is also good to bring the team into the process. Present the challenges and brainstorm with them on ways to find solutions. Don’t be reactive, constantly digging into retrospective reports, forecast well instead, so you have a true sense of direction.

In so doing, pivots can become less stressful, and more creative environments can be forged, whereby you engage all in the business of identifying how, and what shifts or changes of emphasis might be necessary to sustainably win. Always focusing back to the ideal case study, the most profitable customer, and how to find and repeat this kind of business is key to a structured approach.

Once the direction is set, aligned, and communicated, then the leader can work to free their people to do their best work. When this go-to-market approach is then fused to the people element, you have the beginnings of a self-sustaining culture. Add to this a three to five year vision for the growth of the business and you potentially have a journey people will stay for. By changing the dynamic from directional leadership to people first-leadership you can kickstart a focus on behaviours which create culture leading to results.

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This article was first published on September 3, 2024

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