High Performance Sales | Blog

Over the last few years, we’ve received an increasing number of questions about how to structure and/or optimize sales operations and enablement roles, while also observing an increase in the decision influence and authority of these roles. As such, we recently embarked on a project to document what success looks like for Sales Ops leaders, including how they can effectively drive impact in their first 90 days on the job. The culmination of this project is an eBook, "A Sales Operations Leader's First 90 Days", which includes a supporting set of frameworks and tools to help Sales Ops leaders establish quick wins and longer term strategy.

Through our project, we interviewed numerous sales operations, enablement, and effectiveness leaders from a variety of industries and sizes of companies in the US and UK. We collected a significant amount of feedback across strategic, organizational, process, technology, and skills-related considerations.

Read more for a high-level overview of our eBook, including a summary of the recommendations and tools we've developed. Each tool links to a download of our eBook and toolkit.

Like many of you, our Symmetrics Group team spent the majority of 2020 getting smarter about the functionality of tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and WebEx, so that we can more effectively work with our clients in the virtual world.

On the various platforms we studied things like: How to manage chat questions and live chat conversations, launch polling questions, build surveys, and manage virtual break-out rooms for group exercises. Our objective was learning how to best imitate an effective in-person training experience.

Though our team has worked virtually for years, we still faced a learning curve to make sure the virtual training experience felt easy and seamless to participants.

After several months of delivering 100+ hours of only virtual training and workshops to clients across a variety of industries, our Symmetrics Group team regrouped to reflect on what we had learned and where we had opportunities to improve. We arrived at four key lessons.

Sales professionals are occasionally faced with a lull in client meetings due to regular business seasonality, vacation schedules, or as we all know too well - a global health pandemic. While maximizing face time with clients should always be the #1 priority, it is important that sales teams take advantage of any extra time at their computers executing high value activities.

When the reason for the extra time calls for increased sensitivity around typical sales tactics (like aggressively cold calling for new meetings or asking for more business), we encourage sales teams to look inward and use the time to evaluate and improve their own business processes and tools so that they are ready to hit the ground running when a normal schedule resumes. One example of an internal tool that requires “TLC” in order to drive sales effectiveness is the CRM tool.

In this blog we explore four foundational CRM data elements that sales leaders should routinely evaluate to ensure the tool accurately reflects the status their client relationships in addition to their territory’s pipeline potential.

It is difficult to keep up with the latest generational trends, especially for sales leaders trying to drive performance while also balancing the needs of those they lead and serve. In fact, many sales leaders express how complicated it is to prioritize and implement any sort of business or culture change that they think will get the best return on their time, money, and effort.

My colleague, Kelsey, recently broke the bad news that Generation Z – yes, people born after 2001 – will soon be another key consideration for sales organizations. If you haven’t been paying attention to how generational differences are impacting your sales team, then you’re already late to the game. So, what’s our recommendation? Instead of just catching up on Millennials (which you can do here), this blog explores the critical places to focus in order to prepare for Generation Z that will also positively benefit Millennials along the way.

CRM (Client Relationship Management) can be defined as “the strategy upon which companies plan, manage and analyze interactions across their customer’s lifecycle to acquire, grow and retain customers”.

That’s at least what CRM is supposed to be. Instead, what we usually hear from clients about their CRM are comments like:

“It’s a mess.”

“We use it badly.”

“We bought it for reporting but since nobody uses it, it adds no value.” 

For a tool that is so expensive, time-consuming to implement, and promises to help sales people do their jobs more easily, it’s surprising how many companies struggle to get the full return on their CRM investment. Why is it so difficult?

Organizations across the globe are changing their sales & marketing strategies because of a fundamental shift in the buying process: access to information. Research shows that, on average, B2B customers are 57% of the way through the buying process and have consulted 10+ sources before engaging a sales person. [1] As a result, sales leaders are buying into the idea that “consumers increasingly use social media to inform their buying decisions” and that “social media has evolved from a marketing channel into a powerful lead generation and sales pipeline tool.” [2] 

While there is no question that social media can be an effective marketing channel, I began to wonder: who is really driving the demand for Social Selling, and is it the right channel to invest in for all customers?

Have you ever heard an experienced sales manager complain about the “young sellers” on their team who demand inordinate attention and TLC, lack accountability, and quickly jump ship to a new and exciting roles elsewhere?

The topic of Millennials and their prevalence in the work place is not uncommon and while many seasoned professionals complain about their insurgence, I rarely hear of helpful tips or useful recommendations of how to successfully manage these “odd creatures”.

If you read the first two editions of “The Highs and Lows of Sales,” you probably agree that achieving cyclical sales goals is hard, whether you are an individual sales representative or a manager. Here are a few tips that have helped me find stability when facing challenging business expectations – I hope they help you, too.

Achieving cyclical targets as an individual contributor in sales is not only a professional challenge – it’s also an emotional one. The role tests your ability to keep a constant positive attitude, despite high and low performance across multiple time horizons. When I moved from an individual contributor to a manager, I expected those feelings to lessen. I assumed the further removed I was from the customer, individual stack rankings and intense competition for incentive prizes, the easier it would be to see how my role affected the long-term outlook of the business.

Instead, I found that managing magnified my emotions. I often felt six times the excitement when my team performed well and six times the defeat when my team did not meet expectations. Having just been an individual contributor, I could too easily put myself in their shoes and empathize when team members were frustrated with their performance.

After several of years of facing challenging sales targets, I realized my job had started to feel like a roller coaster, constantly sending me through extreme emotional highs and lows depending on my performance. Most professionals who choose sales or account management as a career path care about hitting goals, but the fact is that most goals are manipulated to stretch the sales rep just enough to encourage him or her to put forth extra effort in order to achieve their targets.