How Bill Walsh Would Lead a Sales Team Today

“Champions behave like champions before they are champions.” — Bill Walsh

As a lifelong Green Bay Packer fan (and yes a shareholder), the 17 weeks of the NFL regular season span the best months of the year. It’s also during this time when sports analogies in sales meetings are at an all-time high!

As I watch games unfold I often wonder how much an impact the coach has on the outcome. The coach isn’t physically running the plays, and certainly can’t control the 11 players on the field reactions to various circumstances. While sometimes I feel like anybody could coach Alabama to a national championship because of their talent, it’s hard to deny the impact a coach like Jim Harbaugh has had on Michigan.

Packer great Vince Lombardi tops the list of former iconic NFL coaches, with his quotes and stories still permeating the business world. Bill Walsh follows close behind. Walsh took over a San Francisco 49er team that finished the prior season with a 2–14 record. Replacing the culture of laziness, Walsh immediately instilled a culture of discipline, hard work and ownership in everyone, including the front office receptionists.

In Walsh’s first year, the 49ers finished the season with a dismal 2–14 record, improving to a 6–10 record the following season. In his 3rd year Walsh lead the 49ers to the first of three Super Bowl championships during his tenure. Turning around an underperforming sales team is often the greatest challenge faced by sales managers. Perhaps we can take a play from Bill Walsh’s playbook by following three key principles.

The Score Takes Care of Itself

Bill Walsh focused his team on a standard of performance (which is absolute) versus winning (which is relative to others). In the game of football many things are out of the teams’ control. However, in football and in business there are many things you can control which create predictability in your success. Running a route 10 yards is controllable every time, and Walsh expected his receivers to do that, including the great Jerry Rice. Walsh knew that if his team aimed for perfection in the controlables, things would fall into place on game day, including the outcome the game, which it often did as Walsh finished with seven winning seasons.

I started my sales career at Insidesales.com as an inbound business development rep. I was as green as could be and went into my first month nervous but anxious to prove to the company and myself I could succeed in my first job out of college.

As the first month came to a close I found my name in a good spot on the leaderboard, and having hit my ramping quota I felt high as a kite. The next morning as I came in ready to start month two, the leaderboards refreshed and I was back to zero. The exact same place I had started in month one, only now with a higher quota.

It was then I realized that if I put in the daily input (calls & emails), the output (quota) would follow. If I would just control what I could control, the score would take care of itself.

My team recently listed all of the things both in and out of our control in our sales process. Below is a small sample:

Clearly there are many things that influence our success as a sales development team which are out of our control. As an example, our ability to set meetings with prospects is highly dependent on them responding to our outreach. However, there are things that are 100% in our control which fall into one of three buckets. Your attitude, your process and your effort, or in short your APE.

The best sales teams are those who are able to control the APEs and let the score take care of itself.

If Walsh were leading a sales team today, he would aim his team for the things that are absolute, and let hitting quota take care of itself.

Sharpening Pencils Don’t Win Games

In his book, Walsh shares a story of former Los Angeles Rams Coach George Allen. Prior to the start of the season Allen took time out of his extremely busy schedule to design a more efficient system of serving food, reducing the amount of time players spent in the lunch line by a few minutes. He drew up a scheme for players who wanted crackers in their soup and those who didn’t. Allen was fired before the regular season started. While there is more to the firing than designing a cracker-less soup line, it’s an example of how sharpening pencils, or focusing on small things of little value, will not lead the team closer to actually winning.

We are all guilty of this. Spending an hour to build the perfect report in Salesforce that is going to change how you prospect, and then forgetting about in two days. Data can provide significant advantages in the sales process, but the gathering of the data seems to be the demise of so many sales reps. Too often we spend time planning, researching, scheduling, without actually executing. While those steps are important, they tend to be highly time consuming they tend to be excuses for not getting the most important things done.

In his book Fanatical Prospecting, Jeb Blount highlights Parkinson’s Law, which is if you schedule a task for a given amount of time your work expands and fills the allotted amount. We often give ourselves too much time to ‘sharpen pencils’. Sharpening our pencils gives us the potential to be great, but potential means you haven’t done it yet.

If Walsh was leading a sales team today, non-pipeline building activities would be non-existent.

Success Disease

After a few Super Bowl championships Walsh became consumed with winning another one. This pursuit emotionally and physically drained him to the point of early retirement. Walsh wouldn’t celebrate a win because at some point he knew that he would lose. Walsh’s obsession with not losing ultimately devalued winning, stripping him of his passion for football and forcing him out of the game he loved.

There are few professions that can compare with the ups and downs of sales. It’s hard to not get too high on the highs, or too low on the lows. When it rains in sales, it seems to pour. It’s often a profession with an attitude of what have you done for me lately. With constant pressure of quota, it can become easy for a sales rep to close a deal and move on without celebrating and reflecting.

Research shows that people need to feel like they are making meaningful progress towards their goals and work, celebrating the small victories along the way does this.

If Walsh was leading a sales team today, he would ensure his team enjoys the victories while not losing sight of the bigger and better things ahead.

Though Bill Walsh passed away nearly 10 years ago, his timeless philosophy can help any sales leader or rep achieve and exceed goals by controlling the APE’s, focusing on pipeline building activities, and celebrating the small wins along the way.