Opinion: Upgrade Your Sales Process

By Dave Ward

Partner

Motor Carrier Solutions

ThoughtDrivers LLC

This Opinion piece appears in the Nov. 1 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Day in and day out, your company’s sales force hits the street trying to gain customer commitment in closing new business. Day in and day out, your competition’s sales force is hitting the same street and trying to do exactly the same thing. As freight markets rebound, the winning carrier will be the one that outsells its peer group in the growth and retention of profitable business — a goal best achieved by improving the company’s sales process.

“Sales process” can be defined as “the policies, selling steps, tools and units of measure used in business development.” And while such actions as hiring, training and rewarding salespeople are equally important elements of successful sales, along with pricing and service quality, this article will concentrate on the tools of the trade, beginning with some questions to orient management’s thinking around a strategic view of sales:

• Is profitable customer growth at a level that outperforms the peer group part of your company’s strategy?

• If it is, how do you plan to achieve such growth rates given the likely scenario that the competition may be doing the same thing?

• Are you evaluating the effectiveness of your existing sales process and reaching conclusions that explain your company’s sales performance gaps?

• Are sufficient improvements being made to the sales process that support achieving profitable and accelerated growth?

• Are you evaluating and analyzing sales results and sales activity in a manner consistent with a strategy to outgrow the competition profitably?

If you believe your company is guided by a solid sales strategy, look next for weak spots in the process that affect the overall output of less-than-truckload and truckload sales.

Here are some common shortcomings:

• Revenue dollars are the predominant sales performance measurement, while equally important productivity measures such as the number of qualified prospects, time needed to close on opportunities, conversion rate of sales leads, number of accounts shipping, average account size and profitability are overlooked because these output measures don’t fall out of the company’s freight billing system the way revenue dollars do.

• Discrete opportunities within an account, e.g., specific services lanes or segments such as truckload are not identified, potentiated or separately tracked as the deal flows through the sales pipeline.

• Sales representatives are given excessively large and unrealistic account portfolios in light of a four- to six-week calling cycle. Territories become unmanageable and important prospects are ignored.

• Inadequate coding policies allow accounts to be hoarded, with no up-to-date selling or pricing activity. Excessive coding by salespersons takes accounts out of play and denies the company the opportunity to reassign selling resources.

• Increased call activity is mandated, resulting in more poor quality “customer visits” that do little to advance the closing of new business.

• Low value-added, nonselling activities detract from a salesperson’s important customer face time.

• Generic or home-grown customer-relationship management tools do little to advance the important sales process and often exhaust a sales force’s energy with excessive data-entry requirements.

• An effective sales lead process — i.e., identifying the lead, sending it to the appropriate salesperson, qualifying it and converting it to new business — is seldom seen as a useful piece of a carrier’s overall sales process.

The following are some suggested process improvements to simplify industry-specific customer-relationship management and sales force automation technology.

Always follow a sales process: Post progress against a set of proven steps that must be taken to close deals with customers. Break the pattern of making aimless visits to customers without a commitment objective. A sales force is too expensive and the calling cycle already too stretched to afford even a single visit that does not advance the closing of a deal.

Leave no customer behind: Gain visibility into each separate selling phase for every account in a salesperson’s portfolio of business. Ensure that small- and midsize accounts with better margins get equal attention. If a salesperson’s portfolio size doesn’t allow enough time for face-to-face contacts, augment the effort with inside sales support.

Drill down into the account’s information: Identify and track individual business opportunities within an account such as LTL, truckload, warehousing, etc. Make certain your company’s total wallet share for each customer is identified.

Convert leads: Implement an efficient and effective means of transmitting, qualifying and tracking sales leads from the original salesperson, and then ultimately through to conversion into new business. LTL and truckload profitability depend on addressing the capacity utilization needs of the operation, and there is no better way to achieve this than through an effective leads program.

Report results: Develop performance “dashboards” for all parties interested in tracking both sales activity and sales results. Salespeople are entrepreneurial and like to keep score, while sales managers are inquisitive and like to verify results.

Streamline data entry: Substitute data-entry time with more selling time as salespersons transmit customer interaction notes, update opportunities, post deals they’ve won, etc., through an efficient in-house support staff.

In summation, if your company’s sales investment is less-than-spectacular compared with that of your peers, examine the sales policies, selling steps, tools and measures at work on the sales organization.

If sales are the oxygen pipeline of every asset-based LTL/truckload operation, those sales warrant the proper investment in capable managers, effective technology and processes that produce peer-besting results.

Based in Pittsburgh, ThoughtDrivers specializes in business performance improvement for commercial and private fleets. The author was CEO of Ward Trucking from 1990 to 2006 and has 31 years of industry experience.