How to create a successful sales machine and how your team is responsible for that success
Building a Successful Sales Machine in your company is a hard and uncertain task. There’s a lot of areas and variables to check and control and more importantly, there’s no definitive answer nor a 100% correct flow to follow. Each company works its own way and even if endless research and benchmarks are done; it’s always your market, your customers’ feedback and your key performance indicator that will tell you whether your sales machine is working well.
I’m not saying that research and benchmarks aren’t necessary, they are ( very…mainly to avoid mistakes and to compare yourself to similar companies), but when another company does something and has a fantastic result it doesn’t mean that you’ll achieve the same result.
Before talking with other companies and specialist, I have an amazing suggestion. Try talking to your clients, prospects, deals you’ve lost, and also clients that have already churned. I’m pretty sure they can give you more relevant information than any other benchmark or article you’ll read on this subject. Your clients and prospects are probably happy, interested or curious about your product/service, so they will be the most fit to give you feedback on what they value most and what is essential for them. The prospects or clients you’ve lost, know better than anyone what is not ideal with your Sales Machine and why this is important to them.
Important: When I say “talk to your clients” I don’t mean only things like:
- Your NPS score.
- Satisfaction research.
- Post-sales talk.
- Huge questionnaires.
- Those post-churn surveys”Why did you cancel…”.
Those things are cliche and will barely bring any significant answers. If you want a real and honest answer, you need to ask for it straight:
“We are trying to improve our product and our Client Journey, and we’ve separated some clients and former clients so we can understand more about their feelings, impressions, and opinions about every contact they have/had with our team and platform. Can you help us improve our company?”
As a rule, people like and feel valued by this kind of approach, once you have stepped back and asked them for help. People like to help. Here at Pipefy, our post-sales team has close contact with all our major clients, to better understand how is their experience with us and how we can always continue improving to keep them as clients. Keep in mind the post-sales team has the same importance to your Sales Machine as all your pre-sales steps and teams.
Once you have collected all the relevant pieces of information for clients, ex-clients, and prospects, it’s time for a vital step: evaluate your client’s journey. The client’s journey is composed of all the steps your clients go through from the first time you approach them until he churns. Also, your Sales Machine has 100% of the responsibility in all those steps of the journey. Besides, you can also measure all your marketing and sales funnel phases using the steps your customer is going through.
So, as you can see, your sales machine starts long before the “sales” part. It begins with marketing and branding when your potential customers see you for the first time. Your Sales Machine’s first steps are the things inside of your sales funnel. This funnel has fundamental importance in the construction of your Sales Machine.
We’ll talk more about the sales funnel in another post, but for now what is important to know is your sales funnel provides the key metrics you should know about and control of the firsts steps in your client’s journey. So, it’s essential to build your sales funnel and always control how the clients are evolving because with it you can identify the bottlenecks and failures in your Sales Machine.
I’d like to go back to the Sales Machine part of this post specifically on how the construction of your Sales and Operations team has fundamental importance. Potentially even more than KPIs and Customers Journey — and I’ll explain why.
First, I would like to start the topic on the “importance of your team and culture building a Sales Machine” with a testimonial from Felipe Carvalho, our Operations Director at Pipefy. Felipe manages a team of almost 80 people, between Sales and Customer Success. Check here his thoughts about the importance of building a team with our profile:
“The core strength of our operations was building a team able to learn fast. Taking a humble approach into the process of building our sales machine allowed us to test and iterate quickly, making us move much faster than if we would have insisted in certain paths we believed would be the right ones. When you are building a business from scratch you don’t know most of the answers, knowing what you don’t know is a very valuable thing and having this in mind gave us the freedom to experiment, learn and then double down our efforts on the right paths.”
I want to point out some highlights about our team and culture here at Pipefy, and how I think they helped us to build a better and faster Sales Machine. We have ten important values at the company, and when you’re trying to create a better team capable of working with companies all around the world, growing fast, having a constantly changing environment where you need to improve seriously fast, some of this values are indispensable:
- Radical Candor: This value is about having the ability to Challenge Directly and show you Care Personally at the same time. However, why is this so important? Once you have different teams and need to sell all over the world, you don’t want to waste time with small fights or a team that has any gossip or intrigue. People at Pipefy don’t waste time on that; we are all open to admitting our mistakes and helping others improve. Conversely we have the same freedom to give a team partner feedback, as we have done with our CEO, which makes us all more efficient and humble. Since we’re talking about being humble…
- Humble to improve fast: This value is as important as Radical Candor. We understand that the whole team always be humble to receive, accept and deal with feedback (which also reflects our “Trustable” value). Once someone gives you feedback, it’s for the purpose of improving you or the company, this way you always be able to help the teams from your sales machine to get better actions, tests, and changes.
- Own the company / Don’t be toxic: this is a bit cliche in the Business world, but at Pipefy it’s highly aligned with the other values I just explained. At Pipefy, we can build and help all teams. We all think of what’s better for the entire company. For example, our billing process was a bit long and slow. Instead of complaining about the process, I sent an email to the company that processes all payments at Pipefy, scheduled a call and tried to understand how we might improve it. After I found a better solution, I included our financial team in the conversation to plan how we’d change our process.
- Keep it simple: I saved the best for last. Keep it simple is the most important value in building a sales machine. Why? Once your company has 10, 20 employees, it’s normal to keep all the process simples and to make quick decisions. However, during massive growth, frequently bureaucracy and hierarchy start to decelerate decisions and segregate people (by removing their freedom to give feedback and suggest things). If this happens to your company, beware. If your front team has no freedom to test, recommend and try new things and ideas, your Sales Machine will take even longer to be built.
We also have an important mentality here at Pipefy. It’s not essentially a value, but it’s equally as important and that is data. Please don’t make any decision based on feelings and poor opinions. If someone is trying to suggest something or introduce a new step to a process, you should first check on what this suggestion is based and whether it is valid. We’ve already talked about KPIs and how they are important to build a successful Sales Machine, and this mentality reaffirms all that.
I hope you have all enjoyed our first Sales post here. If you have any theme suggestions, please let us know below in the comments.
By the way, we are hiring…
Thanks for reading, if you want to be part of a company growing in full speed, join our team. We want to meet you.
