What does a football coach and a Sales Operating System have in common? A lot more than you might think!
A football coach spends their time managing players to ensure they are performing at their highest potential. Coaches schedule practices to improve the expertise of the players and run team meetings to promote communication. They carefully plot and organize game plans that will hopefully get their team to a bowl game or even the Superbowl.
A Sales Operating System acts as a coach for your business. It collects, measures, and manages sales activities to help yield far greater results than ever before. They monitor sales to produce reliable profits based on observation and predictability.
Without a Sales Operating System, it can be challenging to attain consistent growth. Your company needs a SOS because:
- Poor decision making for your business could result in obsolete sales techniques
- Inadequate communication between sales members and executive leadership could hinder internal relationships
- Less time spent finding new ways to develop your business could lead to stagnation
Creating a Sales Operating System
With a functional SOS, you can expect to be up to date with fluctuations in demand and better equipped to guide your sales team when communicating amongst themselves and with clients. A SOS will also help you collect important data that will assist with managing your sales team more productively.
To create the perfect SOS, it is important to assess the effectiveness of the different approaches you have when addressing the development of your salespeople’s skills. Your sales team members are the driving force behind your business and your SOS should promote accountability and focus between you and your team.
A common approach when developing a SOS is the APDIR model. Here’s a breakdown of how that model works:
Assess: Begin by observing your sales team members and their current sales process model. By assessing the effectiveness of this model relative to the members of your team, you should start getting a pretty good idea of how your business is currently operating.
Plan: Here is where you develop a gameplan. Gather information from existing key stakeholders through surveys, polls, etc. As you have already assessed your sales team, you can use this new data to see what needs to be provided to each team member to improve their approach to sales.
Design: What is the purpose of your SOS? Do you want to drive more sales for a specific product? Do you want to reach a different demographic? Have you lost business that you want to get back? Maybe you are doing this for the sole benefit of your sales team so that they can improve. Whatever the case may be, it will be easier to tweak and implement your SOS if the goals are clearly defined.
Implement: Resist the urge to heavily commit to your new SOS before testing it. It can be exciting when you believe you have the perfect plan but devastating if your game plan isn’t quite as complete as you thought it was. Test your SOS in a pilot program and closely monitor the results. If your new and improved SOS is showing signs of improvement, implement the changes as soon as possible. If not, revisit the first two steps and take another run at designing the perfect SOS.
Run: Congratulations! Your salespeople are thriving and so is your business. As a last step, be sure to regularly assess the performance of your SOS to be sure it is keeping up with changes in the market as well as to your team.
Finally, never forget that if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. This management principle is truer today than it ever has been before and yet many businesses struggle because they make poor judgment calls due to lack of organization and poor management.
A well-designed Sales Operating System prevents this and will undoubtedly yield the results your business needs to grow.
