Man I love college football and watching the Georgia Bulldogs play. On Saturdays you can find me in my house, TV on, volume off, stereo blasting Larry Munson’s call of the game….ahhhh manna from heaven!
I remember a series of my former sales managers who, during the tough quarters, would recite a passage from Chapter One of old sales cliche’s handbook:
“We just need to keep our head down and focus on blocking and tackling and we’ll be alright”.
It’s true. During tough times you need to try harder to keep the pipeline filled by making more cold calls, being stringent on your qualification processes and applying your time to those deals you have the best shot of winning.
But it’s not enough.
Back to the Bulldogs. If Mark Richt took the advice of some sales managers, everytime they were in a close game they would block, tackle, and run the same play over and over, without regard to the level of execution or amount of gain. “Third and Twenty? Lets run it up the middle.”
Right now, sales managers around the globe are thinking “Ok, if we cut costs to the bone, slash the marketing budget, cut the training budget, and put off investing in a CRM and keep on using Excel spreadsheets to manage the pipeline, we’ll be ok”.
During recessions, people cut back, sales drop, budgets get cut, and you personally have to play another season with your old Callaways. It happens. However this does not give you permission to stop thinking, innovating, measuring and improving.
Making the Number
I recently had the pleasure of reading “Making the Number” by Greg Alexander, Aaron Barels, and Mike Drapeau. Every sales team leader should be judged on how well they implement the practices detailed in this book.
Leave a comment below if this sounds like you:
- You hate your company’s CRM. Its too complicated and you can not make heads or tails of the damn thing.
- You have to fill out 12 screens to put in the most basic deal information
- Out of frustration you have resorted to keeping your “real” pipeline in either your personal copy of ACT (for some reason, we all have a personal copy of ACT) or a spreadsheet that no one ever sees except you.
- Despite the 12 screens of information, your boss routinely calls you and asks “So really, what are you going to close this quarter?”
- And my favorite, because management can not translate your 12 screens of data into anything meaningful they add fields like “Gut” to screen #13, with a drop down list of percentages.
In Making the Number the authors pull it all together and connect the dots by explain how:
- A Sales Taxonomy
- A Well Designed Sales Repository
- Consistent Processes
- Stategic Sales Benchmarking
- and Sales Best Practices…
can all come together to build an effective, consistent sales organization.
I have to warn you, this book is only for serious sales professionals who are looking to build and manage effective sales teams. The first few chapters are introductory and try to ease you into the topic. By the fourth chapter, you will shut off your cell, close your office door and have your notebook out scribbling down idea after idea.
Good Luck.
Sasser
P.S. Want a second opinion? Check out Dave Stein’s Review of Making the Number.
www.salesbenchmarkindex.com
Joey Asher’s How to win a Pitch would be more accurately titled as How to Reinvigorate Your Sound Sales Strategy or How to Regain Your Contact With Reality. Asher makes no claim to have a magic formula, no claim to a 12-step process to fill your pipe. He promises work. Sales requires effort – effort to listen, understand, assimilate client requirements and communicate that match to the client. 
