Recently I met with a top sales enablement professional whom I'll call Bob, to exchange ideas.
During the meeting I was introduced to the concept of the Three Humped Camel. Bob wishes to remain nameless as he started a new job and does not wish the camel phenomena to be tied back his prior employer.
According to Sales Benchmark Index, now 13% of salespeople are selling 87% of the business.
When I asked Bob to draw the quota distribution graph for his old firm, he drew something that looked like this.
This is obviously just a quick hand-drawn sketch from memory, but the point Bob was making is that the majority of the sales team were not making their numbers and were dispersed around 40% of quota achievement, with a smaller hump around 100% and another hump at around 150% of quota achievement.
"The salespeople who were busting their numbers were naturals and would be successful selling anywhere.
They lapped up the sales training and new tools they were given and practiced the techniques... but most of all they were great communicators and were confident in themselves and in their knowledge of the product and their industry."
"Don't get me wrong, these guys are hard workers too....any salesperson knocking it out of the park today is working their butt off." This supports Mike Bosworth's theory in his book, What Great Salespeople Do.
The top 13% oif salespeople are great communicators and great listeners. Most of the sales training and process steps for the last 20 years have served to make the best sales people better and have done little to improve performance of the core group.
The next question I asked was; of all the programs you implemented at the old firm, what were the things that actually made a difference in moving the needle i.e. moving the core group up in quota achievement?
Reinforcement following an in-classroom training event was critical. Those salespeople that worked closely with their managers to master new skills and techniques in the 3 months post-training were most successful.
Those that did not would revert back to their prior behavior and familiar tools. Key coaching point is to work on one skill improvement area at a time per month.
"We had a prior generation sales process and opportunity management system that was too complex and just didn't mesh with buyer behavior. We dumped it a couple of years ago in favor of a lightweight sales process we developed in house.
Pipeline milestones are calibrated against customer verifiable outcomes based on best practices, which gives visibility into the individual selling effort. This enabled sales managers to identify missing steps in the selling process and manage sales reps through what is a complex and lengthy selling cycle."
"The World we are operating is becoming ADD as a whole. Salespeople have very short attention spans.
If a sales tool or technique takes more than 5 minutes to learn, or a concept more than 5 minutes to watch/do in an E-Learning environment, salespeople will not use it.
"We created an accreditation framework backed by classroom and small-chunk E-Learning and in-field coaching from sales managers that enabled salespeople to manage their way through acquiring skills and conceptual knowledge.
Salespeople are able to progress from rookie to sales manager over time and at each level they are given accreditation in conjunction with achieving their sales quota."