Insights for Smarter Sales
Solving disengagement among your sales reps cannot be understated: you don’t want to be waiting for resignations before treating, what is now, a prevalent workplace problem. According to Mike Stokes, only 20-35% of employees are engaged in their roles: as a sales manager, it’s on your shoulders to get those remaining 80-65% of sales reps back on the rails. To give you some inspiration, we’ve gathered 3 tactics you could use to combat disengagement in your sales team. Let’s have a look.
Instead of aiming for work-life balance, it’s better to help sales reps achieve better work-life alignment, particularly if they’re in the 25-45 year old bracket.
What’s work-life alignment? According to a 2022 Harvard Business Review article, work-life alignment is about how your work compliments your personal life in both a practical and psychological sense. If a sales rep feels as though their work is detracting from their life, they’re not going to be happy or engaged about working.
To work out where your mid-career sales reps stand on work-life alignment, you’re going to need to set aside a good 30 minutes to ask your reps a few questions individually.
When asking questions, you might not get the full answer on the first try, lead with openness and empathy, and you’ll uncover their pain points.
It’s no good asking why sales reps have chosen to leave when they’re out the door: while they’re still on board, you could instead ask them what’s making them stay. In SalesHitch Episode 2, sales leadership development specialist Mike Stokes spoke on how sales leaders can combat disengagement using simple stay interviews.
What are stay interviews? These interviews are used to discover what’s encouraging your reps to stay with the company, and what they’d like to see changed. They’re a great way to uncover pain points, and begin the process for company change.
If you’d like to start running stay interviews, check out the infographic below for potential questions you can ask during a 15 minute chat.
As a sales manager, you won’t always have time to give 1-on-1 coaching, a few hours a week, for an entire sales team. Instead, save time by setting up a sales mentoring program.
What is mentoring? Mentoring happens between two people, usually in similar roles, where the mentor helps the mentee refine their skills and grow their career. It can be an efficient way to help less experienced sales reps upskill, and can be very gratifying for the mentor.
According to 2018 and 2022 Forbes articles, it’s best to keep the following points in mind when setting up mentoring:
Re-engaging sales reps takes dedication, be prepared to have patience and make time to have conversations and build mentoring relationships: start by finding 30 minutes. To recap:
Harvard Business Review, 2022, How to Re-Engage a Dissatisfied Employee, by Laura Gassner Otting.
Forbes, 2018, Be One, Get One: The Importance of Mentorship, by Alyssa Rapp.
Forbes, 2022, How To Mentor With Intention, by Jae Sook Evans
Sales forecasting can be tricky to perform accurately if you aren’t used to it, whether you’re forecasting with paper, spreadsheets, or even Numerik! With economic instabilities, global crises, and supply chain issues affecting your customers’ spending, maintaining sales forecasts can seem pointless. Keep persevering! An accurate sales forecast gives you a precise path to reaching sales goals, tracking your personal sales performance, and provides an early warning system when revenue starts slipping.
In this blog, we’ll look at how you can run better sales forecasts in Numerik to ensure you make your number. Scroll down to see our video guides and get started.
You can’t become a sales forecasting pro if you can’t locate your forecast quickly. Follow the simple workflows below to find your sales forecast quickly in Numerik.
There are two ways to find your sales forecast. When you load up the app, you’ll find yourself on the homescreen with your scorecards and target cards. From here you can access sales forecasts by tapping “Forecasts” on the top right, then selecting a current or future target you’d like to forecast for. Now you can forecast revenue against your customers.
Alternatively, if you’re already in the grid, provided you're in the customer dimension, you can see your sales forecast by switching the metric to “Forecast.” From here you can adjust your forecasts.
Having your sales forecast close and quick to access makes it easier to include forecast updates into your routine. If you can find your forecast without thinking, you’ve got the right foundation.
Keeping up with your customer’s changing requirements throughout the period can turn sales forecasting into a chore. Here’s what you can do in the Numerik app to proactively stay on top of your forecasts:
Numerik’s in-app sales forecasts use (-) and (+) buttons to quickly subtract or add dollars in relative increments: great for when you’ve only got 3 minutes to mash a number in before a team meeting. If you’re needing greater accuracy, you can tap the forecast figure to manually change it.
Good sales forecasts can’t be maintained without a proactive approach. Your sales forecast can’t warn you if you’re going off course if you aren’t updating that forecast and planning preemptive actions when customers fail to meet their forecasted revenue. Salespeople who make efforts to update their Numerik sales forecasts after connecting with customers and making sales can relax knowing their forecasts are accurate and they know where they’re going.
A simple tap of the (-) or (+) buttons and glimpse at your Forecast Tracking could mean the difference between meeting sales targets or not: make efforts after each client meeting to review your forecast.
Without context, sales forecasts are nothing more than numbers: in Numerik, you can easily keep notes on all your sales activities, and forecast changes, using Posts. Noting critical forecast-related details could help keep you a step ahead, ready to jump on sales opportunities.
If you use Posts, you’ll be familiar with writing notes, uploading photos, recording video and capturing audio to save against your customers after calls, meetings, and store visits. The same workflow applies to sales forecasts.
After adjusting a customer’s forecast, tap their name and scroll down to “Actions.” There, you’ll have the option to “View Posts.” Tapping “View Posts” takes you to all the Posts recorded against the customer, and on the bottom right, you can create another.
In your Post, you could elaborate on why you’ve changed the forecast. A customer might be ready to proceed with a new quote, or show interest in ordering more. Perhaps you recently spoke to them and know they’re starting a new project. Maybe you need to note an Opportunity or a Task: an opportunity to earn more, or you need to follow up with the customer to keep on track. Additionally, if you’d like your team or manager’s feedback, you could add your manager to the post using the @ mentions feature. If it can help you plan your next move, expand on your forecast with a Post.
Sales forecasting can help you get perspective, clarity, and direction when you need it most. To build a better forecast which helps you make your number, you’ll need to include forecast updating into your routine, be comfortable making quick forecast changes, and build nuance with notes.
Next time you’re interacting with your forecasts in Numerik, ask yourself these questions:
Streamlining sales team communication requires concentrated effort, dedication, and the right tools. Unfortunately, improving communication takes time, and in sales, time is a luxury.
In this blog we’ll discuss how you can fast track sales team communication quickly using Numerik’s Posts feature.
What makes communication ‘good’ depends on context. For our purposes, we’ll look at three general concepts critical to good business communication.
The communication’s core message is easily understandable:
Core messages can usually be explained with a few sentences: if simple concepts take paragraphs to explain, have a rethink. Try reducing information down to its core message. Your message should be easily understood without using a dictionary or reading an essay!
Everyone who needs to see or hear the information receives it:
Information is useless if it doesn’t reach the recipient. Ensure you use channels which your recipients are active on. Alternatively, if the information is urgent, reach out to recipients on their preferred channel individually: adapt to what others need/respond to.
Everyone is receptive to communication:
Being receptive to communication means paying attention to what others are saying: you never know when it might be important or affect the way you operate. Receptive people make efforts to process information and keep an ear to the ground.
Numerik’s Posts are a tool for capturing customer information in a social media style which allows for easy sales team communication in a sales context. Using mixed media, reactions, comments, mentions, and the Team Posts feed, app users can communicate with colleagues in one place. For example, if a sales rep wants advice from their manager or colleagues, they can share their Post to Team Posts, where everyone can view, comment, and react to it with emojis. Additionally, users can use mentions to bring someone new into the conversation, a feature which notifies the mentioned user ensuring they don’t miss out.
Posts can help you streamline your sales team communication because they allow information to be shared flexibly and to the right people. Pictures, video, and audio give sales reps flexibility in how they communicate, rather than confining them to typing. Using mentions, and the Team Posts feed, reps can ensure their communication is being seen by the right people. Additionally, with multiple emoji reactions and comments, it’s easy to engage with your reps’ Posts to give advice and praise.
Based on the three communication concepts, let’s see what you can do to streamline your sales team’s communication using Posts.
Vague or rambling Posts aren’t effective ways to communicate a message. If your reps’ Posts are difficult to understand, or they’re struggling to communicate their message, ask them to simplify what they’re trying to say into one or two ideas.
Make sure your sales reps know how to get their Posts seen and heard. Using the new mentions feature, any user can tag their colleagues or their manager, who will receive a notification.
Communication isn’t one-way: everyone should make efforts to be receptive and interact with Posts. Build a proactive habit by encouraging sales reps to spend time reviewing the Team Posts feed, reacting, and leaving comments each day. Sales managers particularly could consider making efforts each day to react and comment on sales reps’ Posts to help increase engagement and praise reps for their work.
Don’t forget that improving communication takes consistent effort. Start gradually by selecting one area for your sales reps, and yourself, to work on for 2 weeks: it may be checking mentions, finding better ways to get messages across, or building a better Post routine.
Streamlining communication within your sales team can be fast tracked if you’re using an engagement focused tool like Posts. Cementing a higher communication standard amongst your sales team with Posts may take time: Healthline says it can take on average 66 days to form a habit. Start building better communication habits with Posts by:
If you’d like to hear more about how Posts can help your sales team, you might like to check out this blog on how Posts increase sales rep engagement.
Need a quick and simple way to drive your sales performance and get your sales tracking back on pace? Whether you’re an Excel pro, or living with a sales CRM, it’s likely you’ll benefit from a simple sales tool: the paceline.
Read on to learn how pacelines work, why they help drive sales performance, and how to build your own in 3 steps.
A paceline represents where a sales rep’s or sales team’s sales should be each day to meet that period’s sales target. It’s a sales tracking tool which can show reps and managers exactly how sales performance is tracking at the granular level: day by day.
Pacelines can be represented by a graph, or as a percentage as shown in the example below.
In your paceline, it’ll be easiest to use the Ahead Of Paceline percentage. If you’re struggling to envision the paceline, its closest relative is the world record graphic seen on Olympic swimming broadcasts:
The swimmers are salespeople, and the world record line marks where each individual should be if they want to hit that target.
Paceline: A sales tracking tool which shows salespeople and sales leaders where they or their team need to be each day to meet a period’s sales target.
Pacelines drive sales performance by showing sales reps if their current sales performance will be enough to meet their sales target.
Typically, sales teams and reps know how many sales have been made, but can’t easily identify if they’re on track to meet target, or what they’ve got to achieve each day to get there.
Dividing the target into daily goals and tracking performance against the goal creates direction and transparency, showing reps exactly what they’ve got to do. Removing the mystery from sales using a paceline helps salespeople stay agile on their feet and focused on where they’re going.
Additionally, pacelines can help sales reps recognise dips in their sales performance, acting as a warning system, giving reps time to get back on track.
Pacelines drive sales performance by acting as mini sales targets, helping salespeople stay focused on where they’re going, and get back on track when their performance dips.
If you don’t use a sales performance app with automated pacelines, you can still make one. Drive your sales by using the process below to make a simple manual paceline.
Step One:
Create your daily paceline by picking your sales target for the period, or if you’re a sales manager, the team target, and breaking it down into daily amounts. Make sure you don’t count weekends or public holidays when you/your team won’t be selling.
Example: Your selling period is 22 days long, and your target is $118,000. Your daily paceline is calculated as: 118,000 / 22 = 5364. 5364 is your daily paceline.
Step Two:
In a spreadsheet create three columns: Daily paceline, actual sales, and variance. These columns are your scorecard. At each day’s end, record your actual sales next to the daily paceline, then calculate your variance to the paceline. In three days, you’ll start to notice a pattern: are you ahead or behind the daily paceline?
Example: ($4200 sales made / $5364 daily paceline) *100 = 78% aka 22% behind the paceline.
OR..($6450 sales made / $5364 daily paceline) *100 = 119% aka 19% ahead of paceline.
Step Three:
If you’re consistently falling behind the paceline, think about what could be causing the sales performance drop. The trend could prompt you to reach out to customers who’ve been ordering less, or to begin finding new customers through referrals.
If you’re a sales manager, post daily paceline variance into your Slack, WhatsApp, or Teams chat to show your sales team how they’ve performed for the day, and the growing performance trend. Additionally, creating a sales rep leaderboard with everyone’s daily paceline variance could help spark conversations and competition.
Building a paceline can help sales reps get a better handle on where they’re at, and where their sales performance needs to be to achieve their sales target. If you have 10mins spare at the day’s end, you can easily adjust your paceline and take actions needed to improve sales results. Remember:
Pacelines can be as simple as you like, however, the recipe we’ve given above doesn’t take into account seasonality. In a sales performance app, pacelines are more complex and include external factors contributing to seasonality: keep this in mind when you’re making your own.
Motivating your sales team takes time and requires a thoughtful approach. To deepen our understanding, the Numerik team spoke with Mike Stokes, CEO at sales leadership development organization Indicator, where he shared his approach to engaging salespeople in their work and uncovering their motivators.
What drives salespeople to stick with their roles? How do you find out what motivates salespeople? What process should you use to motivate a sales team? How do you retain your best salespeople and keep them motivated? Read on to get the answers.
Salespeople aren’t compelled to stay in their role purely for a good commission. Citing Indicator’s 2022 salesperson mood of sales survey, Mike explains there are 6 reasons motivating salespeople to stay in their roles:
1st equal= Love of their company.
1st equal= Skill set development opportunities.
2nd= Company culture.
3rd= Their clients.
4th= Love of the industry.
5th= Remuneration.
Based on data gathered from New Zealand salespeople, these 6 reasons could help sales leaders reconsider how they motivate their team. If a salesperson’s love of their company and desire to develop their skills are key drawcards, what could you do to foster their engagement and up their game?
Sales leaders can’t start taking actions to boost their sales team’s motivation without understanding what motivates each salesperson. Discovering what motivates your sales team can be done quickly using three questions:
1: What is the most important thing in your career or your role (list)?
To uncover what really motivates your salespeople, you’ll need to push hard. Often, your salesperson’s top motivator won’t come out first: keep asking “what else motivates you?” and add each new motivator to the list.
Alternatively, you can phrase the first question as “what do you value?”
2: Which one of these is the most important to you (order)?
To order the motivator list, push your salespeople to explain why each motivator is important to them. Keep working together to shape the order, taking time to discuss and double check each motivator’s ranking.
3: Why is this so important to you?
Choose the highest-ranked motivator from the salesperson’s list and discuss why it’s important to them. Drilling into the “why” can help you discover exactly how your salespeople become motivated, which you can draw on to adapt your leadership style.
Mike explains there are seven common motivators sales leaders may uncover when asking these three questions, including:
Based on the motivators you collect from your sales team, you can start making decisions about how to change your sales leadership to better motivate your salespeople.
The motivation process begins at the individual level. Individually, sales leaders can talk with their salespeople to understand what motivates them. After uncovering their motivators, sales leaders can take steps to alter their leadership for each individual.
Tailoring leadership to the individual takes concentrated effort. Mike recalls an experience he had with an extremely driven salesperson. The salesperson wanted to lead their team by over 30%, while their team was motivated by seeing how their combined efforts were impacting the business. Helping the competitive salesperson quantify and track their performance against their colleagues was a key step Mike took to motivate and engage the salesperson in their role. If Mike had overlooked the salesperson’s motivators and focused on motivating the team as a whole, the salesperson may not have reached their full potential. Each salesperson is motivated in different ways, making majority-rules approaches less effective.
To complete the motivation process, sales leaders can explain to their salespeople how each individual’s work meaningfully contributes to a wider team goal. If the team goal is to earn over $30 million in revenue, how can you make every $1000 meaningful?
To retain and motivate your salespeople, sales leaders can continually improve and adapt their leadership style and work environment to suit their salespeople’s motivators. However, unless leaders regularly check-in with their salespeople, they won’t know where changes should be made until it’s too late. Mike recommends using stay interviews to regularly check in with salespeople.
Stay interviews are short individual conversations sales leaders have with their salespeople to understand what each salesperson is liking about their role, why they’re staying, and what could be changed to lengthen their stay and improve their role.
If you’d like to run a stay interview, you can use the infographic below as a guide:
Sales motivation isn’t something sales leaders can create overnight. Cultivating sustainable motivation in a sales team starts at the individual level and is ongoing. Let’s recap your main takeaways:
1: Salespeople are motivated to stay in their roles out of love for their company, potential development opportunities, company culture, their clients, love of their industry, and remuneration.
2: To uncover what motivates your salespeople, ask these questions: what is the most important thing in your career or role? Which of these is most important? Why is this so important to you?
3: To motivate all sales team members, you can start by a. Understanding what motivates each person, b. Tailor your leadership to their motivators, c. Explain how their work meaningfully relates to wider goals.
4: Retain your salespeople and sustain motivation by taking time to hold stay interviews.
This blog was inspired by the stories and advice shared in SalesHitch Episode 2 by Mike Stokes. Discover Mike’s process for building sales engagement in your sales team in this article here.
In 2021, Scott Edinger wrote for the Harvard Business Review that referral selling is one of the best strategies salespeople can use for increasing sales, more likely to succeed than other techniques, and essentially free. So, why aren’t we all using referrals to make our number each period? Unfortunately, getting referrals in B2B sales isn’t straightforward - your B2B referrals will only work if the right conditions are met, and you ask correctly. In this blog, we’ll look at what’s needed for B2B referrals to succeed, how to ask for referrals, and the “don’ts” of referral selling.
#1: Long-term relationships with happy customers.
If you want to get B2B referrals when you ask for them, you’ll need to have at least one ‘strong’ relationship with a customer. What constitutes a ‘strong’ customer relationship? These are the customers who’ve been with you long-term and have consistently experienced your initiative. With these customers, your word is your bond, and you’ve been making their job easier ever since you became their sales rep.
With this strong relationship as a foundation, when you ask for referrals, the customer is more likely to want to give back to you and spread good words: you want to be referred to potential clients in the most genuine, heartfelt, and honest way possible! Do you have long-term customers who feel this way about you?
One way to check if you’ve identified a good customer to ask for a referral is to check if your track record with them is spotless at all levels. If the customer made an order, but had frequent delivery hold ups, or their accountants had a nightmare with invoicing, it may be best not to ask them for a referral.
#2: Have relevant customer information on hand.
When you’re preparing to ask for referrals, make sure you can access your customer information. Know what they’ve been working on, the transactions they’ve made with you, and their buying process. Additionally, if you have other contacts within the customer company, check in with someone who knows your primary contact, and ask whether the primary contact is open to giving referrals.
#3: Have good timing, and pick your moment.
Before you ask a top customer for a referral, make sure to: A. Find out the best time of day to ask, and B. Check that the customer is in a good mood. It’s pointless to send a referral request out on a Friday afternoon, or on a Monday at 5pm: take care to pick a productive time. Additionally, if your customer has had a terrible week, is too busy to talk with you, or isn’t as receptive as they usually are, don’t ask for a referral. Ask for a referral when they’re in a good mood and you’ve got their full attention.
Let’s not over-complicate things. When you ask a customer for a referral, there are 3 things you should keep in mind:
Knowing what’s needed to give referrals the best chance to succeed and how to ask for them, we can look at what NOT to do.
As much as we like to think, referral selling can’t be automated: it’s a strategy which requires a personal approach based on strong relationships. To recap, you can up your referral game by:
If you’d like to learn more about what you can do to strengthen customer relationships, you might like to check out our recent webinar event with Liz Heiman.
Keeping a sales team engaged is a sales leadership fundamental: a salesperson’s willingness to get up and fight for sales must be sustained. Unfortunately, without a strategy for building sales engagement, sales leaders may struggle to retain their sales people; no one enjoys exit interviews!
However, unbeknownst to some sales leaders, despite their good intentions, it’s their behavior which can cause the most harm. In this blog, we’ll look at two clear signs you’re disengaging your salespeople, and a simple solution: the stay interview.
Prevention is the best medicine. Before we explore our cure, let’s unpack two common behaviors sales managers perform which contribute to sales team disengagement.
“To me, micromanagement highlights that a sales leader doesn’t trust their people” Mike Stokes
A micromanager is someone who manages situations, or their employees, with excessive control while fixating on small details. Micromanagement is a fairly common behavior, stemming from a very human condition: distrust.
We’ve all got a memory of a time where we trusted another person to do something for us, and it didn’t work out: why didn’t I keep an eye on them, I should’ve done it myself! Yes, sometimes it’s best to give more guidance, or do things ourselves. However, constantly overseeing others, or refusing to delegate tasks isn’t sustainable. You should trust the people you work with that they’ll do their best and give them enough guidance to achieve goals without interference.
Recalling his past, Mike Stokes, founder of sales leadership development firm Indicator, shares his own experience with micromanagement. “One of the things I used to recognize was when I’d go out on calls with salespeople as their manager, I would be too eager to jump in and fix the problem.” Despite positive intentions, Mike’s old behavior made his salespeople nervous, and prevented him from properly developing their skills. “We need our salespeople to take some initiative: you’re going to have to let them fail a few times.”
“Give them that praise. If there are things going wrong, have those discussions, but don’t forget the praise element.” Mike Stokes
Correcting a person when you’re teaching them a new skill is natural: how else would you expect them to know when they’re doing it wrong? However, Mike argues corrective feedback isn’t the most effective teaching tool. If you want to efficiently embed new behaviors, it’s better to lead with praise.
Everyone needs correction once in a while, but giving too much correction can harm a sales person’s motivation. If we’re always told we’re not doing something right, it’s much easier to give up and try our hand at something we’re more suited to. Giving feedback, whether correction or praise, is about being there to support your salespeople and develop their capability, not wear them down. “The most important thing that salespeople want from their sales leaders is they want to know they’ve got their back.”
Stay interviews are short 1-on-1 conversations sales leaders can have with their sales people to discover why they’re staying in their role, and what could be changed to improve their work experience. If a sales leader is suspecting disengagement in their sales team, a quick 20 minute stay interview is a simple way to learn what’s working, and what isn’t.
Mike explains “we are now very encouraging of stay interviews… if you can start having those conversations early, you can start to pick up on those red flags.”
Unsure where you should start? Check out the infographic and Mike’s question list below:
Starting out: I love what you’re doing, we see you as a critical part of the business and we want to keep you engaged.
Don’t wait until your salespeople are coming to your office for their exit interviews. Retain your best talent and build engagement by:
This blog was inspired by the stories and advice shared by Mike Stokes for SalesHitch Episode 2. Learn more about Mike’s process for building sales engagement in your sales team in this article here.
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Sales forecasts are critical for setting expectations, guiding team efforts and gauging performance against growth targets. While spreadsheets provide basic projections, solutions like Numerik introduce process enhancements that boost accuracy and convenience.
Let's explore fundamentals around building a sales forecast and how modern platforms streamline this essential activity.
A sales forecast estimates expected revenue or unit sales for a given period. It represents a data-driven prediction to inform operational decisions and provide performance visibility.
Effective sales forecasting delivers several key advantages:
Accurate forecasts clearly pay dividends across revenue generation, opportunity progression and capability building processes. Now let's explore core techniques.
Start by clearly defining the total sales revenue expected over your chosen timeline – whether tracking annual recurring revenue, total contract value or transactional volume. Document this formally as your official target.
Then make a list of existing customer accounts and contacts that will contribute toward achieving that revenue goal based on historical precedents or contracted commitments.
For example:
Target revenue for Jan-Mar 2023 = $30,000
Existing customers:
This consolidated first step establishes (1) the revenue target to guide activities and (2) the customer roster to strategically focus efforts for efficient progression.
Now split up your total target revenue from Step 1 and allocate specific amounts to each customer. Assign values based on:
Make sure the sum of all customer revenue allocations equals your original total target.
For example, for a $30K Q1 target:
Total expected from mapped customers = $30,000
This breakdown indicates how much revenue you expect to source from each customer account. It allows concentration of effort toward the highest potential opportunities.
Now construct a dated timeline for achieving your target revenue mapped to each customer (from Step 2). This schedule should align deal progression milestones to your average sales cycle length.
Plug in expected revenue amounts on dates when you foresee securing commitments from each customer based on historical closing rates. This highlights windows requiring pitch meetings, contract approvals, etc.
Additionally, the timeline presents opportunities to push for expanded revenue potential from strong fits by planning additional touchpoints.
For example, to hit a $30K March target:
Here is what a dated revenue timeline might look like in this scenario:
The timeline drives proactive planning to progress top opportunities through sales stages by key dates. Adjustments then redirect efforts to counter potential shortfalls.
As the sales period progresses, variances between projected and actual revenue will emerge across customers. Continually revise initial forecasts up or down per the latest result signals.
For example:
Updating initial projections preserves accuracy as market conditions shift - keeping teams focused on the best opportunities. Solution like Numerik automate this through direct data feeds that instantly reshape forecasts without manual manipulation.
Over time, fine tune processes to enhance predictive precision. But don’t permit forecasts to stagnate without regular adjustments - lack of updated visibility risks teams missing alerts that targets require urgent nudges until too late. Maintained accuracy provides clear direction even amid turbulence.
Purpose-built for sales teams, Numerik centralizes CRM data into an intuitive mobile interface. This allows effortless creation and adjustments of segmented forecasts tied directly to customer lifecycles and product categories.
Key features include:
Don’t rely on rigid spreadsheets. Elevate sales forecasts with Numerik for enhanced visibility, convenience and team alignment – driving growth targets with minimized risk.
Request a demo to discover how Numerik can transform your sales forecasting process. Or, for more sales tips, check out our blog on what to include in a top-tier sales deck.
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There are dozens of techniques sales leaders can use to improve sales team effectiveness- almost too many to count. To cut through the noise, Numerik CEO Jonathan Hubbard and I recently caught up with Mike Stokes, CEO at B2B sales leadership development organization Indicator, to get his advice.
In this blog, we’ll unpack Mike’s approach to developing sales team effectiveness by using praise and understanding the flow state.
A disengaged sales team is lethargic, unable to reach great heights, and their sales performance may be reaching a plateau. In that situation, it’s important to remember that sales team effectiveness, and the level of commitment to their work and company is linked.
In reality, few individuals in a sales team are truly engaged in their work- only 20-35%. Additionally, based on Indicator’s 2022 salesperson survey results, potential development opportunities are one of the main reasons salespeople stay engaged in their roles. Mike explains that if sales leaders want to increase their sales team’s engagement and effectiveness, they need to be given these much-wanted development opportunities: “it’s a really important thing for most people… they want to develop themselves and push themselves.”
A highly effective sales team is an engaged sales team. Fulfilling a salesperson’s need for development opportunities helps them become more efficient and engaged. To successfully develop salespeople while keeping them engaged in their role, Mike encourages embedding with praise, and understanding how to move salespeople into their flow state.
Once you’ve chosen an area to develop, Mike recommends using regular praise, rather than corrective feedback, to embed successful sales behavior. To illustrate the point, Mike shares a story from a colleague’s university days as a psychology student working with pigeons.
The students’ goal was to train a pigeon to walk in a clockwise circle. However, rather than waiting for the pigeon to walk in a full circle and then reward it, the students would reward the bird every time it walked in the right direction. Eventually, the pigeon could easily walk a clockwise circle.
The same principle can be applied to a developing salesperson: rather than wait for a big outcome from a new behavior, praise the small achievements. However, corrective feedback is still necessary: it’s simply the frequency of the feedback which needs changing. Mike suggests that for each corrective feedback, there should be five pieces of praise. The regular praise helps reinforce the successful behavior in the salesperson’s mind, helping them learn more efficiently. Besides increasing learning efficiency, the 5:1 praise/feedback ratio shows the salesperson their leader has their back, and is there to help and support them.
While developing salespeople, Mike encourages sales leaders to discover where each salesperson’s flow state lies, and to gradually develop them into a constant position in that state. Flow state refers to a state of being where you feel 100% immersed in what you’re doing, able to work at peak performance with clear focus and awareness: it’s something anyone can achieve with the right guidance. For salespeople, Mike explains that their flow state can be found in the intersection between skill level and challenge.
To achieve flow state, the salesperson must be challenged according to their skill level. Mike explains “if their skills are really high, but the challenges of their role are really low, they’re going to be bored. Opposite to that is if their challenges are really high and their skills are low, they're going to be in a high level of anxiety.”
Thinking about where salespeople lie on the boredom-anxiety spectrum can help sales leaders make better choices about how each salesperson should be managed and developed. Highly skilled salespeople in roles without enough challenge may need to be moved to a different role or handed a more difficult project or customer to manage. Conversely, if a salesperson is in over their head, facing challenges they aren’t prepared for, they may need a role change, or one-on-one coaching.
Improving the effectiveness of a sales team ties closely to the team’s engagement and their desire to improve. By enhancing sales team development with regular praise and aligning each salesperson in their flow state, sales leaders can begin increasing team effectiveness. To successfully develop sales team effectiveness, remember the following:
This blog was inspired by the stories and advice shared by Mike Stokes for SalesHitch Episode 2. Learn more about Mike’s process for building sales engagement in your sales team in this article here.
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Sales engagement is a measure of a salesperson’s commitment to their work and their company. If you want to maintain a hard-working healthy sales team, you’ll need sales engagement: without it, you’ll be holding more exit interviews than ever before.
In this blog, we’ll explore why Numerik’s Posts feature can dramatically enhance a sales team’s sales engagement, with discussion from the Numerik team and our users.
Posts are a social media style feature which allow salespeople to capture notes, videos, audio, and pictures, save them as notes against customers, and share that content into a team feed. What this creates is a melting pot, combining rep-friendly CRM customer notes taking and a WhatsApp or Slack sales chat: business productivity meets social culture. The biggest difference? Posts are free from the chore ingrained in CRM note taking and keeps the conversation within a sales context where critical sales data is literally one tap away.
According to Mike Stokes, CEO at sales leadership organization Indicator, giving salespeople the right amount of praise is a simple way to nurture sales engagement. For episode 2 of SalesHitch, Mike explained that sales managers shouldn’t wait to give praise for big achievements: small wins should be praised too. The ideal praise to corrective feedback ratio should be 5:1, a frequency which shows salespeople you care about the work they’re doing, and have their backs.
If you’re struggling to find ways to naturally give praise or interact with your salespeople, Posts could be your solution. A core principle of Posts is making celebration easy.
When salespeople share a win, no matter how small, a sales manager can instantly give praise: reacting with emojis, or writing a quick encouraging comment. Unlike your Slack chat, salespeople don’t have to scroll back for miles to find that win or praise, with each post saved under a certain customer, all communication is kept in one place.
It’s one of sales’ most unrelenting problems: getting salespeople to upload customer notes into the CRM. For most salespeople, uploading notes is a boring time-sink, nothing more than a tick-box exercise with little productive value. Consequently, CRMs create disengagement: there’s nothing more demoralizing than spending 30 mins at the end of your day retyping notes knowing no-one will read them.
Posts aren’t just a tool for celebration, they’re a customer notes record, a space for salespeople to record visits, opportunities, tasks, customer information, and anything else they’d like. Each Post is created against a customer, allowing a salesperson to view a complete customer notes history whenever they’re looking through a customer’s sales data.
Unlike your CRM, Posts are made to make note taking quick, flexible, and engaging. Salespeople aren’t limited to retyping their notes: if they’d prefer to take a picture or screenshot of their notes, record an audio clip, or take a short video, they can.
It’s easy to become disengaged if you’re feeling isolated from the rest of your company, particularly its leadership. In 2022, Indicator found that the number one reason salespeople stay in their roles is their love of the company. If you’re feeling as though company culture is beginning to impact your team’s engagement at work, it may be the time to introduce a more open and friendly approach to communication.
In Posts, communication isn’t limited to a single sales team: any approved user can read or interact with a post to share their encouragement or support.
Robbie Dale, National Sales and Marketing Manager at Farmland Foods explained that even their CEO gets involved: “The engagement at every single level is incredible. Eddie Davis our Managing Director is on Numerik, commenting, giving thumbs up and awarding trophies. You know when the senior leadership team gets involved you’ve got something fantastic.”
Sales engagement isn’t easy to generate or sustain. However, with new sales tools being released every year, and several companies being technologically behind, now is a great time to discover a tool which could make building sales engagement easier. In summary, Posts help enhance sales engagement by:
This blog was inspired by the stories and advice shared by Mike Stokes and Jonathan Hubbard in Episode 2 of SalesHitch. If you’d like to learn more about Mike’s process for building sales engagement in your sales team, you might like this article here.
The Numerik Index is your quarterly sales performance benchmark report, created to give you a wider perspective on how you stack up against your peers and all Numerik users.
We’ve been working on it for the past few months and are very excited to be giving you the first look: let’s dive in!
Watch Jonathan’s interview to discover what the Numerik Index is, why we made it, and its benefits, or scroll down to read the full summary.
The Index is a free report sent out to Numerik users each quarter which shows you a snapshot of your growth for the quarter, your company’s performance, and how you compare to Numerik’s user base as a whole.
“The idea behind it actually came from the way that school reporting works, where students are able to see how their marks compare to other students in their school and in their state.”
Here’s an example of what your Index may look like:
What each aspect means:
“It gives you that really good view of where you sit compared to your company and where you sit compared to other Numerik users.”
We decided to create the Index to help our customers understand their sales performance from a different perspective:
“At the end of the day, Numerik’s about managing the numbers, helping people succeed and improve their sales performance.”
From our point of view, the Index shows us how our system is making a difference to your performance.
“From a reps perspective, we've found it's very interesting to know how you compare to other reps. Salespeople are competitive by nature, and it’s super interesting to see your performance and sort of compare that to other users.”
In addition to giving competitive insight, the Index acts as a snapshot in time, creating a performance record. As new reports are sent out each quarter, you can begin to build up a performance history, and see your progress on a larger scale.
Keep a close eye on your inbox: your Index will be emailed to your Numerik user email address once per quarter.
Each Index includes one full PDF report and a simple infographic for sharing among your team, or wherever you’d like.
Not only does the Index show us a snapshot of rep performance, it reveals surprising sales performance trends at regional and industry levels. We’re very excited to dive into the data and explore what these trends say about the sales landscape, coming in our second release.
For our second Index release, Jonathan and Connie will break down the Index’s wider-reaching discoveries, with an extra report and commentary. They’ll explore what the Index’s findings mean for each industry, and discuss regional results to give you more context on how your sales performance stacks up. If you don’t want to miss it, keep an eye on your Inbox this October!
“Be curious about your people, what drives and inspires them. Make them better: create individualized development plans and praise any of those things that they're doing well. Provide them with the best tools to do the job, trust your team, give them an opportunity to fail. And most importantly have fun.” As he summarizes his discussion, it's clear that Mike Stokes has no shortage of sound sales advice. That’s to be expected: Mike’s the founder and CEO at Indicator, a B2B sales development organization serving Australasia.
Mike joined Numerik CEO Jonathan Hubbard and I for SalesHitch Episode #2, where he shared his approach to growing sales engagement in the modern B2B sales team based on his experience working with companies to improve their sales capability and revenue.
Watch the video below or read the summary to get Mike’s 3 ways to grow sales engagement, stories, and thoughts on reducing disengagement.
We’ll start off with a question: if your sales machine (people, technology, processes) was a boat, what boat would it be?
“Are you the America's Cup yacht of sales? Meaning do you have the best technology? Do you have the best team? Are they trained within an inch of their lives? Do they know exactly what they're doing with any certain type of material?”
Not many of us quite fall into the America’s Cup category. Perhaps you’re a “an old trusty [sailboat] you’re going to get from A to B, but you’re not going to do much else. You might be lucky to have a little technology on board, but you’re not going to win any races.”
And at the bottom of the heap: “or are you pretty random? You’re doing things all over the show. There’s no consistency. You just don’t know what you’re doing in sales.”
What does this anecdote have to do with sales engagement? It’s illustrating the idea that salespeople want to work for companies who have the best systems, technology, and processes: the America’s Cup yacht. And your responsibility as a sales leader is to find ways to build your people, processes, and technology into being the ultimate sales engine: something impossible without good sales engagement.
Sales engagement is the level of a salesperson’s commitment to their work and to their company. Without good engagement, your sales team can become lethargic, unable to reach great heights, and your employee churn rate may increase. Mike explains that 20-35% of employees are actually engaged in their work, “think about your team: four out of five of your team are not engaged in their work, which is a pretty critical number.”
However, if you have good sales engagement, you can expect, according to a Gallup survey:
Extending on these findings, Mike shares Indicator’s 2022 salespeople survey results, which revealed insights into what drives a salesperson to stay with their company:
“One of the questions we asked these sales people is what is the number one reason why they stayed or why they stay in their role. The top three are, they love the company and developing opportunities, which were actually pretty even… company culture being third.”
These results give a broad overview of what managers can keep in mind to keep their team engaged. Additionally, contrary to what we’ve all been told, Indicator’s findings show remuneration is one of the least important factors for why salespeople stay in their roles.
To begin building sales engagement, you need to understand your salespeople and what motivates them. In the same way a salesperson seeks to understand everything about a customer to help them, you have to understand everything which drives your salespeople.
Mike explains how better understanding can inform your leadership: “…when you think about what motivates them, we then need to tailor our leadership to the individual person. And then share how their work meaningfully contributes to wider goals.”
Listen to this quick clip to hear how Mike used this approach to manage a highly competitive salesperson:
But what can you do in the here-and-now to uncover those motivators? Here’s what Mike recommends:
Sit down with each salesperson in your team and find answers to the following:
When uncovering your salespeople’s motivators, Mike explains “you want them to list as many [motivators] as possible and you want to keep pushing them: Say “What else? What else? What else?” Because usually their number one motivator doesn't come out first. It comes out down the list. Usually it'll come down 5, 6, 7 [down the list], so keep pushing them around what motivates them”
Once a list has been created, go through it together and put it in order. Remember, your main goal is to uncover what drives the salesperson, which is crucial for figuring out how to engage them.
Once you’ve identified your salespeople’s motivators, you can move to the next stage: developing the individual and the team.
Mark reflects that “…for most people they want to get better and they want to develop themselves, push themselves, and challenge themselves to be better. So when you're dealing with the individuals, identify those areas of development, choose individualized development options and team options and then develop and embed with regular praise.”
Speaking on praise, Mike recalls a social experiment a colleague of his performed with pigeons as a psychology student: “they wanted to train the pigeon to walk in a clockwise circle. And part of this was instead of waiting for that pigeon to do a whole circle, and then give it some bird seed, was to praise it every time the pigeon would try and would move in the right direction, they would feed it another bird seed. So eventually they trained it to walk in a circle.”
In the same way, Mike explains, managers shouldn’t wait to praise their salespeople for big wins, but praise the little things. But how often should you praise salespeople?
“…five to one is an average. There's many different studies that highlight somewhere between four and seven, seven times to one, but, five to one, which is pretty considerable. So, five praises to one sort of corrective feedback.”
While 5:1 praise may seem quite high, Mike points out that salespeople want to know their sales leaders have their back and are ready to support them.
Something else leaders should take care to achieve is positioning their salespeople in a flow state. Demonstrating with the graph below, Mike says “...if their skills are really high, but the challenges of their role are really low, they’re going to be bored. Opposite to that, if their challenges are really high, and skills are low, they’re going to be in a high level of anxiety.”
Consider the flow state graph next time you’re developing your salespeople. To deal with salespeople in high anxiety, you may need to consider training them into their role, or moving them to a different role. And for those who are bored, you may need to think about increasing their challenges with new projects or a new role.
“...as sales leaders, we can't wait for the IT department to put technology across us. Companies that are not using technology are being left behind.”
In the boat analogy, this is where having the best sails, engines, or navigation comes in. Unlike their English and American counterparts, sales leaders in Australasia can’t miss the boat on adopting new sales tools: “Technology will make salespeople superhuman… it can absolutely reduce your isolations with your customers and your colleagues.”
Mike encourages everyone to have curiosity around new sales technologies, and that to start using a new tool, you don’t necessarily have to wait for IT. He explains that “quite often, IT engagement starts from one or two people using a particular product that grows into more and more people [using the product.]”
The two biggest ways to disengage your sales team? Micromanagement and giving too much corrective feedback vs praise.
Mike says that to him, micromanagement highlights that a sales leader doesn't trust their people. “That’s a surefire way to disengage someone. We need our people to take some initiative. You’re going to have to let them fail a few times.” Although it’s done with the best intentions, being too eager to jump in and correct a problem can have its downsides.
Mike even recalls a time when “I'd go out on calls with sales people as their manager. I would be too eager to jump in and sort of almost fix the problem, and it would just eventuate, so every time I’d go to the salesperson, they'd be nervous and it wasn't a good way to advance the salesperson.”
And don’t forget the 5:1 praise:feedback ratio!
Using exit interviews to understand what caused a salesperson to leave their role is incredibly valuable, however, Mike now advocates for stay interviews. The core idea? Using stay interviews to find out what salespeople need to stick around in the business and what excites them.
Listen to the audiogram below to hear Mike’s perspective on using stay interviews to decrease disengagement.
“When we think about engagement, it's something that we've put a lot of effort into from a Numerik standpoint.”
Jonathan explains that Numerik’s new Posts feature could be just the tool to help sales leaders engage with their salespeople, through the feature’s social feed design.
Jonathan explains that “...it’s the idea of the LinkedIn feed, where you're constantly eating data, the same principles that would be seen on Facebook too, where you’re posting something and people are liking and interacting with it.”
The core idea with Posts is to allow salespeople to capture notes, videos, audio, and pictures and be able to post it into a team feed against customers, to share their achievements and keep notes on customers. “It doesn't matter what technology you use, but there's nothing more demoralizing for a sales rep to upload call notes or notes into a CRM and never ever getting any feedback. It further strengthens their mindset that they’re just checking a box and no-one will read it.”
From what Jonathan’s seen and heard from sales leaders using the feature was that the best leaders are using Posts all the time to give praise and recognition to the team, through an uplifting comment, or a simple trophy emoji. “When reps see that instant feedback from the sales manager, it really lights the fire and shows that as a sales manager, you’re massively invested and interested in what they’re doing everyday.”
Want to get in touch with Mike or Jonathan personally for more information on sales engagement? Contact them respectively at:
mike@indicator.co.nz
jonathan.hubbard@numerik.ly
