In an interview with Brian Haug, we discussed the importance of ensuring changes stick in a sales team. Because our salespeople are learning things every day that allows them to better connect with and serve clients, it’s critical that sales leaders take the time to download those lessons for the benefit of the team – and then ensure those lessons creates change that benefits everyone’s outreach and sales.
No surprise, Brian recommends both gathering change and ensuring it’s implemented within a CRM.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: In order to get lessons out of the heads of our salespeople, we have to set aside the time to do it. For many sales leaders, that’s ensuring we make time for the process during our weekly meetings.
R – Repeatable: Brian mentioned he’s a big fan of the power agendas have to provide consistency and accountability for his team. To make a review process repeatable, it’s critical to ensure that we’ve included the item in our agendas and that last week’s changes created change in the way our salespeople do business (updated call scripts, checklists, campaigns, internal handoff processes, etc. that live within our CRMs).
I – Improvable: This system is designed to improve sales results for the entire team, so by its nature, it is improving what they’re already doing. To ensure salespeople stay focused during this portion of a weekly meeting, it’s critical for the sales leader to keep the conversation focused away from individual performance and instead on how to ensure the problem a salesperson brings forward is solved for everyone.
This is where data from a CRM comes in – a sales leader can use contact records as forensic ammunition to ensure changes are improved based on facts and not because of hunches.
M – Measurable: In order to measure the effect of an improvement process like this, we need to ascertain the baseline on whichever area we’re focused on improving. For Brian’s team (and many others during the pandemic), simply securing meetings is a major issue. However, in order to measure the effectiveness of any change, we have to know what our current numbers are. Once a change (blended outreach, different ways of asking for the meeting, etc.) is implemented, we can measure our results against our previous baseline to ensure progress is being made.
Once a change has been captured and agreed upon, it’s then up to the sales leader to update the necessary scripts, campaigns, templates and pipeline flows to ensure those changes create lasting effect and free salespeople to do what they do best!