High Performance Sales | Blog

A couple of years ago we published an e-book called A Sales Leader’s First 90 Days. It was inspired by the classic Michael Watkins book, but tailored specifically for Sales VPs, SVPs and CROs who had recently taken over a new organization. (For broader context on our Sales Leader's First 90 Days program, check out our introductory blog.)

Since so many companies have either re-organized or are in the midst of doing so, we find many of our "First 90 Days" principles relevant as established sales leaders plan their next 90 days.

We’ve condensed 90-day lessons into four key questions sales leaders can ask themselves as their companies undergo shifting strategies. Which of these challenges pertain to you and how can you address them in the next 90 days?

As sales consultants, we encounter sales leaders with a variety of fancy acronyms in their titles. In addition to the SVPs/EVPs of Sales, the sales leader landscape also includes CROs, CSOs, and CGOs. While these titles imply a distinction in roles, to most people, it’s just alphabet soup. 

What’s the difference between a Chief Sales Officer (CSO) and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or Chief Growth Officer (CGO)? From the CEO or board member perspective, which role does your business need? For a sales leader, which role is the best fit with your capabilities?

The easiest way to distinguish between these roles is to compare their scope of responsibility, core objectives, and what defines success. Appointing a “heavy hitter” to a CSO, CRO or CGO role, rather than a VP of Sales, indicates the need for a greater span of oversight from a strategic, revenue generation, and customer lifecycle perspective.

All too often we encounter sales leadership teams yearning for the skills and structure required to elevate their team’s performance. We are talking about sophisticated, highly educated, teams of men and women, the majority of which were top performers in their respective organizations.

The jarring realization, one we must often share with our clients, is that the skills required to be a high performing seller are different than the skills required to lead high performing sales teams. Seems obvious, no? Unfortunately, we see organizations seeking to retain top talent by rewarding them with upward mobility with little regard to skill set.

This anomaly is known as The Peter Principle which presupposes this fact: “If organizations promote the best people at their current jobs, then organizations will inevitably promote people until they’re no longer good at their jobs. In other words, organizations manage careers so that everyone ‘rises to the level of their incompetence’. ”

Sales is no different and here is the proof.

This is the conclusion of our multi-part exploration of how sales leaders approach their first 90 days in a new role. The topic was born from a startling statistic: The average tenure of a Sales VP working in the same role at the same company is incredibly brief – only about 18 months.

So many of our clients have found themselves in a new position, after a relatively short tenure elsewhere, that we wondered what we could learn from their experiences that could be put to pragmatic use by sales leaders changing jobs.

Post 4 of 4

In this, our final blog post (for days 60 through 90), we’ll show you how to organize the considerable information you’ve gathered, actively look for major alignment issues and build a roadmap that sets longer-term sales strategy.

Introduction

This is a continuation our multi-part exploration of how sales leaders approach their first 90 days in a new role at either a new company or with a new sales team at their current company. The topic was born from a startling statistic: The average tenure of a Sales VP working in the same role at the same company is incredibly brief – only about 18 months.

So many of our clients have found themselves in new positions, after a relatively short tenure in their previous roles, that we wondered what we could learn from their experiences.

Article 3 of 4

In Article 1, we tackled onboarding yourself with your new company to prepare for day 1. Article 2 offers concrete steps for balancing the need for learning with the need to take the quick actions required to achieve early wins – what we call our “Secure & Get Right” method.

In this article, we’ll show you how to dig deep into the sales organization so you can systematically surface the knowledge you need to determine longer-term strategy. We’ll also use our discovery process to understand the all-important political and cultural landscape. Finally, we’ll begin building relationships with key influencers whom you will, sooner or later, have to rely on to ensure your team’s success.