by Michael Smith

Yesterday’s breakthrough became today’s baseline. And today’s successes will automatically set tomorrow’s expectations. Welcome to professional sales.

The name of the game is “compounded growth.” It’s a relentless game – like never having quite enough meat to feed a hungry lion. He’s just never satisfied.

Enter the sales manager – the person tasked with the unenviable responsibility of delivering acceptable, sustainable Sales results. This is the lion keeper, tasked with placating the hungry lion, usually from inside the cage.

Since the success of most Sales organizations is measured primarily by their team’s sales-growth rates (either in numbers of new accounts or gross sales revenues, or both), the natural response of many Sales managers forms reactively… to “drive sales” – any sales – to make the numbers.

Most sales managers have also been taught that the best way to motivate their team is to simply divide the total stress (required numbers) up between sales-team members, and then send them out to take their designated hills. Hopefully the sum of the individual contributions will meet the team’s required performance, sometime before sunset. Often it’s a tense day’s-end.

Here’s the harsh reality of running the numbers alone. Focusing primarily on top-end production assumes that all sales are “good” sales. This practice amounts to buying time in Sales, by shifting your stress on to Operations and Customer Service – both of which are now tasked with delivering “not-too-displeasing” products or services, to often “too-high-expectations” customers.

So what’s a “good” sale? Of course, “it depends”. Generally, in simplest terms, a “good sale” succeeds in four ways:

1. A “good” sale establishes accurate customer expectations,

2. According to what Operations and Customer Service can actually deliver successfully (“above customer expectation”),

3. For a competitive price,

4. Resulting in a profitable, per-unit transaction for the seller.

What’s a “bad” sale? In simplest terms, a “bad” sale is one that fails to deliver on all four of these success factors at once.

OneAccord’s unique Revenue Acceleration model digs down beneath the initial question of how best to increase sales, to these (and other) deeper questions.

We sometimes describe it as analogous to improving the performance of a Sales racecar. Rather than OneAccord just jumping in the drivers’ seat and running Sales harder and faster than the prior driver, we begin by lifting the hood. We’re looking first, to validate and improve:

1. The power and efficiency of the racecar’s profitable business engine (offering’s business model and strategy),

2. The transfer of that growth power to the wheels through the transmission and drive train (strategic marketing), and

3. The rubber that meets the road – often at the limits of it’s performance-potential and under variable environmental conditions (sales culture and sales-force competency).

Only when OneAccord and our clients are satisfied that the Sales machine is ready to race, can we then coach the current-driver and racing-team to world-class operational success. Interestingly, we almost never find ourselves in the driver-replacement business. Why? Because we usually find that the Revenue Acceleration issues weren’t driver-related in the first place!