The Three C’s (Our Process)

The Three Cs (Our Process)

A New Frontier in Partnered Selling and Sales Growth

Capability,
Coaching, and Continuation
are the cornerstones of our process, and we can help you reshape the way you hire, train, teach, expand, and inspire your sales team to greater performance in today’s ever-changing marketplace.

Before we discuss the cornerstones of our process, Capability, Coaching, and Continuation, we need to start from the ground up. What I mean by that is most salespeople want instant results, overnight success, and they’re looking for a way to get them there in the shortest amount of time. Unfortunately, there are countless predators, charlatans, and fake gurus who make empty promises that will lead you to instant riches if you just follow their “fool-proof” funnel or “guaranteed selling system.”

Here’s just some of what’s out there right now (and by the way, Corporate America continues to book, promote, and idolize people like this. Geez, I wonder why most people HATE salespeople…

“You’ll be empowered to create massive wealth, abundance, and entrepreneurial success, without sacrificing integrity or ethics.”

-Promises made by a convicted felon who spend time in federal prison for fraud and bilked investors out of $200MM. Hello, Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

If you’d like to be seen as the slimy, “always be closing,” snake-oil, used-car sales demon, by all means, keep learning from the Napoleonic felon, Mr. 10X, and the like. But if you’re ready to be seen as the Trusted Advisor, and to sell the right way through honest, integrity, and humility, you came to the right place. If you want to have sustained, long-term success in sales, it all starts with how you think, what you believe, and how you feel, it’s not about what you say.

The foundation of our sales training starts with The Sales DNA Test, and if you don’t know your own Sales DNA first, the training will not be nearly as effective. Our curriculum is comprised of the strategies, processes, techniques, and habits of the top 5% of salespeople and what they are doing right now to have success! As mentioned, traditional sales training will make promises of endless riches, in the blink of an eye, and they’ll tell you how you can grow your sales by 1,000%. They often repackage old, outdated information or even continue to sell the same crappy course they recorded ten years ago. No fake guru crap here, just real, honest, and valuable training that puts the customer’s needs first, not the needs of the greedy, slimeball salesperson.

Capability

You’d probably agree that we all want to be more successful in our roles as sales professionals and sales leaders. The challenge is that most of us don’t exactly know how to get there. I’m sure you’ve been through all the gurus online courses, overpriced masterminds, stadium events full of upsells, and magic selling systems built fifty years ago. Guess what, they don’t work. More importantly, selling has been easy the past few years. When things are going great, most salespeople can sit back, relax, and take orders. Well, things have changed. And if you’re in sales and you’re not ready for the next few lean years, you’re in trouble. Without knowing you or your sales team’s capabilities when it comes to selling, what exactly would you expect us to train them on and how would we ever attempt to think we could make a difference without knowing this immensely important information?

Determining the capabilities of your sales team is job number one and there are two critical elements of discovering your sales team’s capabilities to determine how to lead them to become top performers.

The Sales DNA Test

It all starts with The Sales DNA Test. What if there was a way to find out why your salespeople are underperforming? What if you could discover why your sales managers aren’t leading effectively?
What if you knew exactly how your salespeople are motivated and why?

Guess what? There’s a way…

It’s called The Sales DNA Test.

We use a sales-specific assessment (yes, they do exist) that’s been administered to more than two million salespeople in more than 35,000 companies over the past 30+ years that will uncover the exact symptoms causing your sales team’s poor sales results.

Sales Team Evaluation

Not only do we evaluate your salespeople’s abilities, competencies, and skill sets utilizing our Sales DNA Test, we’ll help you optimize your sales process, management strategies, systems, culture, and new salesperson onboarding & ramp-up time. More importantly, without having the proper systems in place, your sales team won’t be able to thrive and reach its full potential. Without knowing your bottlenecks, blind spots, and inefficiencies, how else would you maximize your sales team’s full potential?

Coaching

The greatest performers in the world have coaches. Serena Williams has a mindset coach. Tom Hanks has an acting coach. Beyonce has a singing coach. Yet, many companies don’t believe their salespeople should have a sales coach. Or even worse, their sales leader doesn’t have a coach. Ummm, hello, McFly? Anybody home?

Let’s discuss what real, professional, results-driven coaching can do for you and your sales team. There are six main criteria that make up great coaching and we’ll cover them now. One, true coaching helps them break their bad habits like procrastination, time management, call avoidance, etc. Two, it shows them how to unlock their true potential and ability. Three, it teaches them how to train their mind for peak performance. Four, it helps them eliminate self-doubt and belief systems because most of them aren’t true. Five, it instills confidence in them through developing real selling skills. And six, true coaching creates long-term results, not short-term blips of success. What’s the difference between great sales coaching and good sales coaching? A lot! Checking in periodically with your salespeople about strategy, goals, outcomes, and why they’re not hitting your made-up quota is NOT COACHING!

Real, continuous, and effective sales coaching is essential for many reasons. It helps salespeople continuously improve their performance through feedback, practice, and repetition. It also helps sales managers to improve sales processes, training techniques, and pinpoint progress and areas of improvement for their teams.

Sales Training, Coaching & Development

What’s the true cost of having an untrained & ineffective sales team? If your airline had untrained and ineffective pilots and flight attendants, how long do you think it would be in business? If your hospital had untrained and ineffective surgeons, how many patients would you have? So, what do you think happens to businesses that have untrained and ineffective sales leaders and salespeople? I think you know the answer.

If you’re not generating the revenue you want, if your sales managers aren’t leading as effectively as they should be, if your salespeople are getting the results you expect of them, there are reasons why that’s happening. But hoping it magically fixes itself isn’t what your organization needs. The lost revenue caused by an underperforming sales team will cost your company tens of millions of dollars. Period. There is nothing more important to maintaining a thriving business than having a well-trained, highly skilled, and internally motivated team of sales professionals, including your sales leadership team.

Sales Leadership Mastery

I hate to break it to you; great salespeople don’t always make great sales leaders. One of the cardinal mistakes organizations continue to make over and over again is promoting a top salesperson to a sales manager position. I cannot even quantify the destruction this has caused to an unending number of companies who thought this was a good idea for some reason. Does being an amazing Maître D suddenly qualify someone to become the executive chef next summer? Does being a superstar flight attendant qualify you to start landing planes? It doesn’t work like this in any other part of life, and it sure as heck doesn’t work in sales. Being a great salesperson and being a great sales leader require completely different skill sets, with completely different competencies, mindsets, education, training, and everything else under the sun. To somehow think that being a top salesperson qualifies someone to lead a team of sales professionals makes almost no logical sense, but companies continue to do it.

Sales leaders need to have proficiency in coaching, leading, training, skill transfer, recruiting, accountability, planning, teaching, inspiring, and a whole slew of other things in order to lead salespeople to success.

Continuation

Why don’t most diets work? Why do most people stop going to the gym? Why do 92% of people miss their goals? Because people stop doing what they’re doing to improve! Your life is pretty much the culmination of all your habits combined. So, if you think about that equation, your life equals the sum of your habits. If we extrapolate that into a sales equation, the results of your sales team are pretty much the culmination of all their habits combined. If they stop practicing, stop training, stop learning, stop role playing, stop improving, why would you think any level of sales training you did for six months would be effective!? We’re sharing this with you now, to give you the best chance for success and to help your team make more sales than you ever thought was possible. Continuous practice, repetition, and accountability is what makes the difference between high-performing sales organizations and everyone else.

As an organization, you’ve got to continue to learn, improve, develop, and invest in the growth of your team in several areas. Every successful sports team is always looking for ways to improve. And if we think about the two most basic areas of improvement, in let’s say, an NFL football team, they’re the exact equivalent of what we need to do to improve our sales organizations. Number one is the sales process (designing and mastering the playbook) and number two is recruiting (evaluating whom to draft and what free agents to sign to improve your roster).

Sales Process Creation & Implementation

It doesn’t matter how great your product or service may be, how talented your sales team may be, or how incredible your marketing team is at generating leads. Without a documented, stage-driven, repeatable, and effective sales process, you’re leaving the ultimate success of your sales organization in the hands of luck and chance. According to a study conducted by Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association, companies that had a documented, formal sales process experienced 18% more revenue growth compared to companies that didn’t. 18%! Think about that. If you’re a $20MM company, you’re losing about $4M a year in revenue because your sales team is just winging it.

Let me just share briefly what you can expect if you finally take the time to get a sales process built, once and for all. Your ramp-up time for new salespeople will be much faster. Imagine creating autonomy and self-confidence among your new salespeople from week one? Brand-new sales hires need to know exactly what needs to be done to have the best chance for success. They must know what’s expected of them, and if you don’t put them in a position to do just that, what exactly are you relying on for them to achieve greatness? Think about the time your salespeople waste on unqualified prospects, deals that have no chance of closing, and problem customers you wish you never had. That’s what happens when you let salespeople wing it. Your sales team will have higher win rates. Telling your salespeople to close better and convert more prospects into clients, when you’ve provided them next to nothing for a sales process is almost comical. Following a sales process will lead to better customer experiences, which lead to more referrals from those better customer experiences, which leads to increased revenue.

Sales Hiring Optimization

Are you having trouble hiring great salespeople? Study after study shows that hiring for sales is the 2nd or 3rd toughest position to hire for. Companies around the world have been struggling with this for years, and with the marketplace where it is today, if you can’t win the war for top talent, you’re in trouble. Every client we have wants to increase sales and they always seem to think it comes down to motivating their salespeople to do better. I’m here to tell you, that’s not going to work. As the great Jim Rohn once said, you don’t send your ducks to eagle school. You don’t train salespeople good; you find em good, get it?

The average company gets the sales hiring thing right only 23% of the time! And to make things even worse, do you know that the average bad sales hire will cost a company $1.3M dollars? But if it’s so costly, why do companies keep making the same mistakes? Because they use the wrong assessments, they ask the wrong questions, they rely on resumes, and they hire based on who they like! What if I told you instead of a 23% success rate, you could have a 92% success rate? Well, you can. Our Sales Hiring Optimization Process gets this right nine out of ten times. The tool we use, called the Sales DNA Test, has data from more than two million salespeople, in 35,000 companies, and we measure the 21 core competencies that make up a top-performing sales professional.