It’s a problem you see throughout the world of sales: there is a lack of sales leadership, defined set of processes and blueprints that give people the confidence they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. The result? A lot of salespeople waste their time and react rather than build business.
Too often, businesses are setting their sales team up for failure. They hunt for people with a supposed “Rolodex of contacts” in order to fuel the business’ sales pipeline; hoping to acquire information that is likely outdated the moment that person begins with the company. Or, they expect the talented salespeople they have, to spend all their time hunting down accurate information – as opposed to selling. What companies need is to help their sales team focus on what matters most.
At Dakota Funds, we have developed a very specific way of leveraging sales best practices to be extremely effective. In our business, we call it “The Dakota Way” which has led to successful relationships with more than a dozen boutique asset managers and more than $22 billion in assets raised in the past 10 years.
In 2010, when we built our sales team, we chose to not expect our sales team to know who to call on. Being a salesperson myself, I had the advantage of knowing who we should be calling on by channel, so I curated a list of investors, put those accounts and contacts into a CRM, assigned salespeople to certain lists, had them call on those lists and then report back on their progress.
By supplying the sales team with qualified lists of institutional investors to call on we achieved a number of key goals:
1. We got a better return on our investment on the sales team because they were spending their time setting meetings, not prospecting trying to figure out who to call on;
2. We had happier and more productive salespeople because they were spending their time on productive activities, which reduced turnover; and
3. We experienced a bigger “top of the funnel” because the sales team could cover more ground more quickly due to spending time calling on qualified buyers.
The result was that we built a bigger pipeline and eventually raised more assets because each salesperson was focused on what mattered most: setting up meetings with qualified buyers. No personal Rolodexes needed. No expectation to “go find the buyers yourself.”
It sounds incredibly simple: more productive salespeople, happier with less turnover and better results. However, if you exclude the key factor, QUALIFIED LISTS OF INVESTORS, the entire process collapses: salespeople waste time looking for investors, they get fired because they run out of time and can’t raise money and your top of the funnel is thin because your salespeople are wasting time which results in fewer assets raised.
The key to successful sales cannot be emphasized enough: stay focused on what matters most; you need to be calling on and spending time with prospects who buy what you sell. Find out how to supply your sales team with the information they need to be their best and focus on what matters most: actual selling.