The Sales Learning Curve

I am approached nearly every week by young companies that want to accelerate revenue. Many lack a sales and marketing organization to drive growth and are searching for resources to help them reach their goals. For most of these firms they are in the early stages of a new business or about to launch a new product.

While these firms are anxious to realize "hockey stick" growth rates most are actually a long way from significant growth. The reason is due to the learning curve that rests before them. A number of potential issues that require interaction with customers must be addressed and resolved before growth can occur. These issues may include product fit within specific market segments, packaging and delivery issues, selling process steps and the like.

This learning has been dubbed the Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie, CEO of Veritas, the 5th largest software company. The SLC is an adaptation from the Manufacturing Learning Curve that says a number of units must be produced in order to gain manufacturing efficiency and reduce production costs.

The same principle applies to sales development in the form of learning about market and customer driven issues and how they impact sales acceleration.

Learn more about the SLC on another blog and see if it applies to your business.

Relationships or Process?

I was recently approached by the sales director of a small B2B company that was launching a new product in the U.S.. He was searching for sales representatives that held personal contacts within the markets that his firm targeted. His reasoning was that the sales representative could open doors that would lead to new sales for his firm. Certainly, this strategy has been successfully used for decades. Sales reps nurture relationships within specific market spaces that become their equity in business.

The pattern that often emerges with a relationship based strategy is an initial burst of introductions to new prospects followed by a steady decline in activity as the representative exhausts their inventory of viable contacts. Today, the pattern is accelerated as decision makers are more transient in many industries. Even the best sales representative has limits to his network. Add buying teams, multiple locations and global organizations and the challenge to maintain relationships with all the right people becomes difficult to say the least.

We are witnessing more companies, especially smaller to mid-sized firms, embracing a commercialization process as a means to create new business. A process approach recognizes all the steps necessary to acquire new business beginning with creating awareness to consideration to preference to initial orders to filling repeat orders. There are many additional process steps that can be added. When a firm can define the process for its own business it is taking the first steps to control its own growth. Once a process is defined the dependence on specific individual sales representatives diminishes as process steps and the roles of individuals are clearly defined and can be implemented by anyone with an appropriate skill set.

The firm now has control over obtaining new business as opposed to relying on individual representatives contact network. This helps to eliminate the problem when a star sales representative leaves a firm and the ability to create new business goes with him. By defining a commercialization process you are essentially creating a business development machine that you own and control. The power to generate revenue growth now resides within your firm and not in the hands of individual sales representatives.