We will learn about putting the sales team on autopilot, the importance of having a proper sequence, identifying when you are ready for a sales manager, how to transition leadership over to the sales manager, and finally, we will review some sales managers’ SOPs.
What Are We Here To Build?
Eventually, when you have a high-performing sales team in your business, your aim should be for the company’s sales department to run on autopilot. Thus, you won’t have to regularly pour your attention, time, and energy into the sales team.
What Should You Do?
Once you are out of the sales department, your primary responsibility is to keep calendars full at all costs, along with work on positioning and messaging in the marketing place.
Some Mistakes
The biggest mistake is the “pendulum swing”; by this, we mean that as soon as a business’s sales team becomes independent or on autopilot, the owners hop on a pendulum swing and completely shift their attention, giving it no time whatsoever.
The second mistake is bringing on an external sales manager because this has statistically failed, particularly in our industry.
Validate Your Offer
In building a successful company, one of the initial steps is to validate your offer. Validation involves ensuring that your deliverables, packaging, and messaging clearly define and consistently attract customers.
Optimal Selling System
The next step is to validate your optimal selling system, which refers to a customer acquisition process that meets two critical criteria. Firstly, it should provide a consistent, repeatable, and scalable way to convert cold prospects into sales calls.
Secondly, it should offer a consistent, repeatable, and scalable approach to convert sales calls into clients. In the coaching, consulting, and agency industry, the primary channels for scalability are typically manual outbound or paid methods.
The System: Inputs and Outputs
A critical aspect of the optimal selling system is ensuring that the inputs and outputs are highly correlated. Hence, the system should yield predictable results based on the resources invested.
Cold Traffic Considerations
Ensuring it works effectively with cold traffic is crucial when validating your selling system. Relying solely on warm leads, referrals, or word-of-mouth may lead to misleading results.
If you later introduce cold traffic and encounter poor conversion rates, it becomes difficult to determine whether the issue lies with the sales team or the lead acquisition process.
Removing Yourself from the Sales Process
After you have a proven offer, consistent lead flow, and a repeatable sales procedure, remove yourself from the sales process. Instead of one salesperson, recruit two now. Your training and leadership show if both salesmen succeed. If only one grows, your sales process or activity needs to improve.
As you move from founder to sales manager, don’t forsake your sales staff and hope for the best. Manage, train, and coach your sales staff to succeed. Coaching and training, admin and ops, and leadership comprise this. Coaching and training include morning meetings, call evaluations, and role plays.
Delegating leads, calculating qualified marketing leads (MQLs), communicating with the marketing department, tracking and reporting, and ensuring consistency between marketing and sales reports are admin and operations duties.
Leadership involves expressing vision, mission, and values, keeping team members responsible, setting objectives, and educating salespeople. Hire a sales coordinator or have an operations person or executive assistant do these jobs to simplify. Thus, you may focus on coaching, training, and leadership.