Situation: A CEO wants to improve the effectiveness of her sales team. As CEO of a young company she faces a choice between using contract versus direct sales reps. She seeks the advice of other CEOs as to what has worked most effectively with their sales approaches and teams. What are the attributes of a highly effective sales force?

Advice from the CEOs:

• Spend time vetting either contract or your own sales reps:
  • The choice of contract vs. direct sales reps is driven by market conditions and end desires.
  • Utilizing a contract rep is an effective way to gain entrée into the customer. Even though they are 1099s, they must be managed as though they were company employees.
  • It is important to spend considerable time vetting candidates for direct sales. Attitude, desire and commitment are much more important than experience and technical prowess. Spend as much time as necessary to make sure that you are hiring the best people. Test them, check references from employers and customers alike. Leave no stone unturned.
• Measure:
  • What gets measured get done. Determine what behaviors are necessary for success and develop metrics for these behaviors. This enables you to manage success.
  • For one CEO, the biggest challenge is selling above the gap – selling high and wide within the customer organization. Most reps concentrate their efforts on a few people in the client organization – generally low and mid-level people – and fail to establish relationships with senior management.
  • It is important, and rare, to have those senior relationships. Getting them requires deep understanding of the customer’s business combined with confidence, determination and persistence.
• Respect and manage reps:
  • Many companies treat sales as a “necessary evil,” setting up an antagonistic and ineffective relationship between sales and other departments. This causes the salespeople to hide much of their information or spend time “scamming the system” rather than working as part of the team.
  • The best companies treat sales as a revenue engine and encourage, value and respect input from the salespeople. This encourages sales to be part of the larger team.
  • There can be challenges transitioning people from a pure product sale to a long term service business relationship – a transition from Hunter and Farmer. Most believe that these are two very different personalities. It may be better having hunters who bring in the business and then transition the customer relationship to account managers to maintain long-term relationships.
  • It may be necessary to design two compensation plans to incentivize the desired behavior of each group.

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