Guest Article by Anna Talerico, co-founder of Beacon9. This article was originally published on September 20, 2018.

Here are 15 questions to ask yourself about your sales organization. These simple questions quickly reveal key strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity.

 

Video transcript: Hi!  I’m Anna Talerico with Married2Growth. Let’s talk about the maturity of your sales organization. Because that usually directly translates to your sales efficiency and results. I recently launched a sales report card to help leaders understand their strengths and weaknesses. Let me quickly—really quickly—take you through these report card items so you can think about your own sales organization and how it scores in these areas.

There are 15 questions, but don’t let the number 15 fool you—the questions are really quick and easy to answer, so no hard work involved at all. I promise that you won’t even need to put your thinking cap on. These are the first questions I ask when I sit down with a sales leader who asks me to diagnose a problem for them, but they don’t know what area to drill into first. It helps me know what to prioritize and where to put our attention.

Although the questions are easy to answer, they tell me a tremendous amount about the sales leadership style, the team, culture, efficiency, and operational gaps. So, in order to keep this video short, I am just going to run through the questions. Rapid fire, here we go.

• Do you use a repeatable recruiting process?
• Are the majority of your sales hires good fits?
• Is your rep turnover acceptable to you?
• Do you have a positive sales culture that’s focused on learning, collaboration, and results? That’s a big one for me—sales culture can make or break a team.
• Do you use a sales playbook for rep onboarding, training, and development?
• Are your forecasts accurate? It can really kill your credibility, and your tenure as a sales leader if you can’t accurately forecast.
• Does your sales team follow a defined sales process? You want everyone selling the same way.
• Does your sales team use a defined sales methodology? A lot of sales leaders think they do, but it’s really more of a hodgepodge of a bunch of different methodologies, so that’s something to think about.
• When you want to see data & analysis of your team’s activity and results, can you get that information easily?
• This one I am so passionate about—because sales leaders often neglect their people, which are their most important responsibility. Do you follow a predictable cadence for team and individual meetings that includes coaching, deal strategy, feedback, and open dialogue?
• What percent of your reps hit quota? I’m hoping it’s more than 80% consistently.
• What percent of your pipeline is sourced from marketing? This shows how developed your outbound program is and can speak to the predictability of your revenue.
• Does the sales team use one or more sales productivity tools? And similarly…
• Does the sales team use one or more sales intelligence tools? A modern sales team runs on modern sales tools. And finally…
• What is your sales efficiency? It surprises me how many SaaS sales leaders don’t know their sales efficiency, their “Magic Number”.

 

Ok, that was 15 rapid-fire questions that I look at when I am evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a sales organization. If you want to know more, you can pop over to the Married2Growth.com blog and take the assessment for yourself and see your personalized results. I hope that you will, and I hope that’s it helpful. That’s it for now—thanks for watching!

 

About Founders

Founders Advisors (Founders) is a merger, acquisition, & strategic advisory firm serving middle-market companies. Founders’ focus is on oil and gas, SaaS/software, industrials, internet, healthcare, digital media and industrial technology companies located nationwide, as well as companies based in the Southeast across a variety of industries. Founders’ skilled professionals, proven expertise and process-based solutions help companies access growth capital, make acquisitions, and/or prepare for and execute liquidity events to achieve specific financial goals. In order to provide securities-related services discussed herein, certain principals of Founders are licensed with M & A Securities Group, Inc. or Founders M&A Advisory, LLC, both members of member FINRA & SiPC. M&A Securities Group and Founders are unaffiliated entities. Founders M&A Advisory is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Founders.