Which Sales Culture Defines You?
Tibor Shanto, Sales Execution Specialist, CRO, Renbor Sales Solutions
While everyone agrees that culture is a vital element of success in the corporate world, defining culture in a way that can be acted on is a bit more difficult. From a sales perspective, you can look at sales organizations as generally having either a “closing culture” or an “opening culture.” Most sales departments instinctively lean toward wanting to be a closing culture, but organizations who have an opening culture generally perform better.
By the Numbers
In B2B sales, closing ratios will always be less than 100%. We should focus as much, if not more, on opening new opportunities than closing them, but we tend to do the opposite. This is the reason many sales reps live the roller-coaster pipeline experience: they close one opportunity but fail to replace the rest.
Implementing Opening Culture
In an opening culture meeting, the focus is looking forward, not getting stuck in the present or the past. Instead of only reviewing opportunities that are in the pipeline, moving or stuck, managers preview opportunities their reps will be focusing on in the coming week. This allows managers to actively help their reps with upcoming meetings. Managers can then focus on the leading indicators that are helping change the nature of these meetings and overall outcomes. One sure sign of closing culture is when these meetings devolve into an examination of lagging indicators; all that tells us is what happened, not why or how we can change it before having to wait for the next deal.
Culture Supporting Questions
The questions managers ask also direct culture. While it makes sense that they would ask “What are you gonna close?” I rarely hear them ask “What are you gonna open?” They should be asking the latter about four times more than the former. This approach helps minimize the month’s end ritual of “close at all cost,” followed by the lull caused by a depleted or empty pipeline at the start of the next period.
The more you transition to an opening culture, the more dividends there are. Prospects that don’t close in a cycle are not gone forever. They engaged, went some distance down the journey, and while they may not have bought now, they don’t leave the planet, and can be re-engaged again as things change. Reps tell me all the time that deals they are closing now are with prospects who turned them down in the past. Not to mention the potential for referrals, other contacts, the ability to learn about an industry or function, and more.
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