“Sports Teams Perform Better than Most Sales Teams”Says Jack Daly

Adapted by Michael J Griffin

6 minute read

Recently the blog post from the Growth Institute showed on how to model your business, or in this blog, your sales team to perform like world class winning sports teams. Jack Daly, the blog author, says “ If most businesses learned how to run themselves the way sports teams do, I guarantee they would achieve more sales and faster growth with lower costs and operating expenses.”

Winning sports teams and winning sales teams both are focused to follow the Three P’s formula for success.

Professional Coach – Practice – Playbook

Let’s review each “P” in what a sales manager can do to lead winning sales teams.

Professional Coach

Think about how Alex Ferguson, John Wooden, Vince Lombardi, Scotty Bowman and Phil Jackson were all great coaches that led and inspired their teams to dominate their competition. Google them for the lessons you can learn and apply to your sales team. Did any of them get on the court, field or rink and play? No! They all coached from the side lines not having to rescue the game. Professional coaches don’t rescue (by stepping in and selling) their salespeople’s sales but motivate and drive them to excel in building long term client relationships, solve problems with their organization solutions, and are ethical while doing selling.

Chally Group has identified the top “Professional” sales manager competencies needs to lead winning sales teams. Let’s list them here and you decide how good you are in each. They are listed in order of importance.

Training and Coaching in a Structured Setting

Makes Joint Sales Calls to Coach on – Not to Sell!

Directs and Motivates Salespeople “with hands on”&  “face to face” interaction

Profit Conscious to Coach for Win – Win Deals

Proactive and Takes Initiative to Improve People and Process

Makes Excellent Presentations

Focused on Getting Quantitative Results

High Level of Practical Intelligence – Learns Quickly

These are the competencies that matter. If your organization need our help in assessing your sales managers or salespeople, contact me at the end of this blog.

Practice

Great sports team practice, practice, practice. “Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of salespeople in the world do not practice. Well, they practice but they are practicing on your prospects. So, it’s very important that your sales team schedule time to practice their sales strategies or it will not get done,” says Jack. How true! I have yet to find a great sales organization who doesn’t practice before meeting the prospect or customer!

Korn Ferry research says, “Sales organizations in which managers were more effective at developing and coaching their salespeople had substantially higher proportions of their

reps making goal. In fact, sales managers spend twice as much time on

internal work as they do on coaching.” How sad, how deadly! 

My observations of professional coaches of great sales teams schedule and conduct weekly practice on these activities:

Hold daily “Kick off” meetings

Meet one on one with individual salespeople at least once a week

Conduct practice role plays with their salespeople

Hold at least a monthly sales team key account strategy meeting

Go on at least one joint call/meeting a week to observe and coach salespeople on selling skills and solution knowledge

Conduct a 3-4 hour sales training with the sales team at least once a month

Have individual salesperson development plans that are reviewed quarterly

Research shows the ideal size of a B2B sales team that leads to effective “practice” should have one sales manager for every 4-6 salespeople. Too large a sales team will not allow a sales coach to coach!  Does your organization need to rethink and realign their coaching, sales team size and structure?

Playbook

Jack says “For every 100 companies that contacted me, only two companies would have a sales playbook. That’s shocking.” Ask yourself does your organization have a sales playbook? Would Alex Ferguson lead his football team without a playbook?

A sales playbook has your sales strategy for your market, documented sales processes to follow, a reasonable sales six month onboarding program,  a concrete training schedule, a CRM system that works from prospect to close the deal, and a “Balanced Sales Scorecard” for each sales team and the organization as a whole. Here are some ideas to get started build your sales playbook.

Create Sales Strategy Map that aligns the organization vision, mission, and values with the sales team goals and processes with marketing, finance and customer service. I base my strategy map on the work by Kaplan and Norton of Harvard.

Employ Sales Competency Assessments for both coaches and salespeople to benchmark where each team member is at in their development as a world class salesperson or coach. This will allow you to then develop more focused training and coaching plans and processes.

Analyse Sales Processes by mapping them and then improve them to accelerate sales cycle success.

Develop Sales Scorecards that monthly measure both Leading and Lagging Indicators of sales team performance.

Finally explore with your CRM vendor new ways to Improve your CRM Data Capture to be able to employ AI and other data mining techniques to increase sales productivity.

The Three P’s are simple and focused. Determine for each of the “P’s” what you as the sales manager need to act on to boost sales team motivation and success. Start next week!

Need my help? I have worked with hundreds of sales organizations across the Asia Pacific region. Email me if you wish to explore how my experience at ELAvate can help you dominate in your market. Our Success Stories are found on our website. Start next week practicing the three “P’s” and see your revenue grow.

Michael J Griffin
ELAvate Founder
Global Sales Coach
John Maxwell Team Founder
michael.griffin@elavateglobal.com