I write a good deal about business growth strategies. Given a business growth strategy, if you posses a team that can create “Ichiro Suzukis” when it comes to sales, you are going to nail the strategy.
In 2004, Ichiro Suzuki had 262 hits as a Major League Baseball player with the Seattle Mariners. It was the most hits in a season that any player had ever accomplished in Major League baseball. He achieved the most hits ever by nailing two personal records altogether, the number of times he came to the plate (704) and his batting average (.372).
If you want to optimize your sales for a given business growth strategy, start by thinking in these terms. The more times your salespeople get to the plate with prospects, the more sales. The higher their close rate, the more sales you will get.
So, how do you get more at bats with prospects and how do you increase your close rates for those at bats?
More at bats
Getting more bats in the game of baseball involves keeping healthy, playing well enough to stay in the game, and batting early in the line up.
Achieving more at bats in sales comes from having a disciplined sales team that establishes high expectations for the amount of prospect calls they will make. Even when the marketing department isn’t able to furnish enough sales leads, the best sales teams create their own sales leads. The number of at bats is a sales discipline matter.
Higher Close Rates
Higher close rates are another story. Like a baseball batting average, there are a lot of factors that go into a great close rate external to the sales team. Most importantly, you will need to create a competitive advantage in your target audience segment. At a wider range, you can drastically improve the batting average by getting your market clarity right. Getting your market clarity right is like the entire company (other than sales) pitching your salespeople slow softballs over the center of the plate. The sales leads are warm and interested and give your salespeople the best opportunity to strengthen their batting average.
Beyond market clarity and getting the slow softball over the center of the plate for your sales batters, the salespeople still need to be fantastic hitters.
Fantastic hitters in baseball become excellent because they have innate skills and passion, study the pitchers, practice a lot, and learn from excellent coaches.
Fantastic sales batters have natural skills and the drive to succeed, however, they also do a lot of work to learn about your client base, your use cases, your product, your sales methodology, and they take pride in practicing and improving themselves.
Your sales leadership and product marketing can assist by providing the methodology, tools, and training. This is crucial, as it provides the sales staff the chance to learn and develop their sales skills for your product, but it won’t, by itself, create great sales batters. Your salespeople also need to harness discipline and passion to take the required steps to acquire the learning opportunities, practice, and get better!
Creating Teams of Good Hitters
Great offensive baseball teams are built by great, great general managers and coached by great coaching staffs. Wonderful sales teams are developed and coached by fantastic sales managers as part and parcel of a company development strategy. The excellent managers inspire the other departments to supply the market clarity and assist in training the sales team, however they also guarantee that each and every individual team member is qualified, trained, and producing sound outcomes and they are not hesitant about cutting the inferior performers from the team and getting better, high-potential players in their place!
Want more sales? Be like Ichiro Suzuki by maximizing both your sales at bats and your batting average! Even better, develop a team of people that posses a high potential to become Ichiro Suzuki!
Scott Maxwell is the founder and Senior Managing Director of OpenView Venture Partners.