Optimising sales: 5 mins with… John Cheney

Q: How can the organisation of sales teams be improved to drive sales?

A: We work with lots of different types of sales teams and there’s always a topic of debate — what’s the optimal structure for the team?

Some organisations structure their teams based on product and service knowledge, for example, based on brand or publication. Others structure their teams based on clients, for example by industry or geography.

The most important area your salespeople should understand is the needs of your client. Product knowledge comes after this. If they can really understand the needs and challenges your clients face, they can introduce the right product or service.

Then build the important trusted advisor status. If you want to drive sales, I’d recommend aligning your sales teams around industries or types of organisations as this often works best.

It’s also important to understand the distinction between organisation type and industry. For example, you might have a recruitment company that specialises in IT recruitment. In that case their industry is IT, but the organisation type is ‘Recruitment or Professional Services’.

Too often, those concepts are conflated making it more difficult to align sales teams with your clients and prospects.

Q: How can sales teams improve their use of data to increase sales?

A: Too often, CRM software is seen as a place to record information and not a place to get insights on your prospects and clients. Recording the notes from a meeting is useful, but it isn’t going to increase your sales.

Done well, CRM data will show you buying intent. For example, a prospect is on your website today or they have interacted with some content from your marketing team. From our experience, media and publishing firms are good at analysing the behaviour of their audiences, but they don’t always apply the same techniques to their customer data.

To improve your use of data to increase sales, ensure all your client and prospect information is in a single place and not across three or four different systems. This is the foundation that needs to be in place, so you can start using accurate data to drive sales growth.

It’s also important to remember what client data looks like. It’s not just contact details and your recent meeting notes. It’s all the transaction history, what products clients have bought before, their interaction with your marketing, where they’ve visited on the website, and how they’ve interacted with your customer services teams.

This 360-degree view of data provides insights that drive real sales growth.

Q: How, typically, can sales teams make better use of their CRM platform to improve performance?

A: The reality is, if your CRM isn’t helping salespeople achieve their targets, they won’t want to use it. Top-down directives help, but the key to CRM success is ensuring salespeople see it as a valuable tool, not an overhead.

Lots of companies implement CRM to access pipeline reporting and forecasting. But many make the mistake of not focusing enough on making the tool valuable to individual salespeople. It’s best to start with one question: How can I make my salespeople more effective? This might include:

• Using your CRM software as a prospect database so marketing can warm-up prospects and then sales can follow up.
• Embedding sales best practice in CRM. If you have a sales process which works for you, use CRM to guide your salespeople to do the right things at the right time.
• Make it easy to get stuff done — from creating quotes quickly to enabling the electronic signing of customer orders. Work out what’s going to make your team more effective.

Q: What are the key characteristics of top performing sales teams?

A: The key characteristics of a top-performing salesperson are:

• Tenacity: Its tough out there. You need your reps to be resilient and go the extra mile.
• Creating value for clients: The reps that understand what clients really need will always be better at building trust.
• Lack of fear: Too often salespeople don’t ask for what they need, like the order!

When it comes to top-performing sales teams, it’s important to balance competitive tension within the team, with teamwork. The best teams are the ones that win together.

Q: What are the best ways to optimise cross- and up-selling opportunities?

A: Selling to your existing client base is often the quickest way to close a revenue gap. However, you need your teams to sell to clients as a process, not only a relationship building exercise.

Firstly, you need to know who your clients are and what they have already purchased from you. That may sound obvious, but for many organisations, the CRM systems used by salespeople don’t contain the historic transaction information that’s locked away in their accounting systems.

Start by ensuring your marketing and sales teams have a good understanding of your existing client base, who the right contacts are, what they have purchased before, and where the cross-sale opportunities might be.

Then get your marketing teams to target them so your clients know what additional products and services you can provide. Don’t just rely on sales to convey all the messages, treat it as a campaign, evaluate results and learn from there.

Q: How do you envisage AI being used by sales teams in the future to improve performance?

A: Artificial intelligence will have a very positive impact in the next couple of years. From a sales perspective, we can see several benefits:

• Automating manual tasks: Let AI transcribe your Teams calls. It can automatically take notes and create actions for your next steps.
• Enabling self-service: If a client wants some help or needs to know the copy date of a magazine, they will be able to ask an AI chatbot which will know the answers to these questions and provide them in multiple languages.
• Simplifying data analysis: If you want to know what your sales pipeline looks like or who your top salespeople are, you won’t need to be an expert in report writing. You will be able to ask AI these questions and it will give you the answers you need.

Q: What’s in the pipeline from Workbooks?

A: Right now, we are busy building those AI examples above. We want Workbooks to be even easier to use and to create more customer value.

Workbooks CRM is a leading supplier of CRM and marketing automation solutions to mid-size companies. Workbooks CRM helps organisations grow revenue and streamline business processes. Their core CRM services extend beyond sales, marketing and customer services to include powerful marketing automation, event management, order management and fulfilment, invoicing and supplier management functionalities.