Years ago I was speaking with a good friend and colleague (Jeff Sturrock) about the job market for tech sales. At that time, good sales reps had a lot of portability and options. One of the things he shared with me was a framework for evaluating a new position inside or outside your company. Success will be based on the three legs of a stool. Market Opportunity – Territory – Comp plan. If any one of these legs isn’t quality, the chance of failure or maybe worse mediocrity was certain.
This is still sound advice for sales reps considering new opportunities, but it is a sound framework for designing high-performance teams. Let’s take a look at the three legs in the context of team formation and execution.
The 3 legs of your team’s performance
Now, I can hear through LinkedIn the collective “eye rolling” of sales managers everywhere. Of course, these three things are important. However, what happens in the real world, particularly with smaller growth firms, is filled with bias and opinions, rather than balance.
Most often this bias is not intentional at all. It is a lack of time, data, and/or market connection. The result tends to be unpredictable, with the disparity between successful reps and others, and high attrition (forced and voluntary). All of these devalue the company due to top-line and bottom-line impacts. Let’s review getting the balance.
Market opportunity. We often join small growth tech firms in the hope of the next big thing. It is truly magical when this happens. However, too many tech sales teams focus only on the tech with the message and market secondarily. This leads to those awful feature comparisons or evangelizing a new “sector”.
The fix – A simplified message void of jargon that your reps can convey easily in three points. These three points must be about the value your customer will obtain (how, why, and when). Then build your outbound and inbound motion around this core market message. This requires teamwork between sales and marketing and must be repeatable based on the success of multiple customers.
Territories. This is always a difficult task and usually requires more research than most sales managers are willing to pursue. What tends to happen is a rep that has had some success or was a colleague of the sales manager at a previous company, gets all the “best” accounts, while other reps get the new markets or a random wish list. Inevitably, the top performers repeat while the other reps have moderate success to failure. While it feels good for sales managers to have a few trusted reps, it is a significant weakness that over time tips the stool over.
The fix – Back when data was in a “Book of Lists” or a trade show program, it was hard to get this right. Today, however, there is a rich set of data at your fingertips to appropriately balance territories based on your ICP. ZoomInfo SalesOS for example has a wealth of information for companies and contacts that make it easier to balance each territory. Regardless if you are doing ABM or geography-based markets. Beyond the basic territory, ZoomInfo, like other platforms, allows your reps to monitor intent topics, company and employee news, organization structures, etc. There really isn’t a good excuse anymore to not align balanced territories for success.
Motivation. There simply isn’t any other way to state it. Reps will behave the way you incent them. Period. If you are looking for volume, encourage transactions. If you need “big deals”, reward those results. Too often, sales leaders take what finance gives them or just use what they had the previous year for incentive plans. This is a huge mistake and a missed opportunity to motivate new opportunities.
The fix – Identify the three most important performance metrics for your sales term (month, quarter, year). These performance metrics should align with the company goals for things like cash flow, customer acquisition, or ARR (annual recurring revenue). Once the metrics are agreed upon, spend time understanding what the reps can actually do to impact these metrics and reward that behavior. Is it more new logo prospecting, channel selling, or something else? If the goal is something each rep cannot control, it will be ignored or demoralizing. Simply make sure if the rep does enough of A, we will get B on the back end.
Easy right? Not at all, but it is necessary to work that will pay dividends. While your Q4 may be busy with closing business, make the time to do the work for next year now. Ensuring these three legs of your next FY stool is stable and balanced, will put you in a position of power. Misaligned in any of the three and you will be struggling to keep your balance throughout next year.
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