Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Please complete all fields.
It doesn’t surprise me that more than 85% of top salespeople played sports growing up. The modern inside sales structure is set up as a team more than ever. Sales Development Representatives and Business Development Representatives (SDRs/BDRs) prospect and qualify, handing it off to the Sales Account Executives (SAEs) to negotiate and close. It’s a great system that’s akin to those dynamic NBA duos that pass the ball with precision, find the open man, and take the best shot. And, just as these masters of the assist are enshrined as some of the best players in history, sites like Sales Hacker are helping to give credit to all the players who help bring, close and retain customers.
So the prospect passing (i.e. “the ball”) is getting passed around more than ever. The problem is that it’s mainly getting passed from one SDR to one SAE. That ball (sales cycle) is a complicated jumble of goals, emotions, and motivations that you are trying to see if you can possibly help with hitting quotas. Let’s assume that each SDR and SAE knows their role and the product they are selling. They are also abiding by the same contact touch schedule. Even with all these standardizations, there are still individual variables in personalities that could lead to friction in the sales process.
How does this play out in real life? From interviews I’ve had with sales people at my organization ConsumerAffairs for Brands through our SalesLab initiative, we’ve had situations where prospects would only respond and conduct business with the SDR that they had initially built rapport with; they simply did not like the initial experiences they had with the SAE. In those situations, we have learned to adapt by having the SAEs sit directly with the SDR while the SDR is the voice that moves the deal to a successful close. We’ve also had situations where our SAEs show selflessness by passing off the sale to another SAE that they believe the prospect would have more rapport with.
These sorts of passes don’t appear to be the norm and unfortunately it’s probably a symptom of current existing sales metrics. If the metrics are focused on just contact and revenue quotas with nothing attributable for assists, it incentivizes our sales people to hold the ball even if they know that giving it off to someone else will more likely lead to a successful sale. Even at the SalesLab, where we are stretching the bounds on ways to utilize data collection and analysis technology along with psychological principals to help enable our sales team to better connect with our prospects, nothing is going to be faster and more efficient than the natural rapport between two people.
A sales assist metric would be helpful for the following reasons:
If the assumption is that folks are not sharing at all and are taking shots that they know other teammates would more likely get the sale on, then there really is no place to go but up on the amount of sales you close.
To make their numbers, salespeople focus on accounts that they can close within a time frame with the domain knowledge they can pull together themselves. Because of this, few go after the bigger accounts. Having more teammates can help reduce the sales cycle on “whale” prospects.
Hopefully psychometric assessments were included in the hiring process but it’s not just about trying to get all of the same types of
personalities. You’re going to want that diversity of different personalities and skills working together. Sales teams can have diverse personalities and skill sets, but they have to gel as a unit.
Measuring sales assists would reiterate the importance of the team’s metrics and goals over individual performance. Using a basketball
analogy, it’s about the final score and who wins, rather than about stuffing the stats sheet with a personal triple-double.
In terms of situations that would necessitate a sales assist, here are some situations where it would be a good idea to pass the prospect on rather than hold them:
Some prospects prefer one style of presentation over another. Others may simply like one salesperson more than another for no particular reason. You need to match these folks up with who they are most likely engage with.
Certain salespeople may have more working knowledge about a specific industry vertical or have more experience with an agency. Those with key domain expertise may be able to understand the prospects’ true needs versus a more inexperienced team member. An example would be the health care vertical as it relates to compliance such as HIPAA.
Similarities matter most when they are rare, a principle of “uncommon commonalities”. This term coined by Adam Grant, professor at Wharton and author of the book “Give and Take”, says that the similarities we share beyond the obvious ones will make the greatest impact in building immediate rapport. It allows the salesperson to both fit in and stand out at the same time.
Deciding on how sales assists are fractionally different to full attribution will be an individual team choice, but the importance of making the metric work is that it needs to be treated as a measure of primary importance. The hardest part of implementing this metric is compensation structures where a percentage of MRR is given.
With the majority of situations, there won’t be any issues:
Potential issues may arise in these two situations:
Although there could be multiple people who touch the ball, there is still one person that scores. Even if the work is evenly shared, the
person who is the main point of contact for the prospect should be the one counted for the shot.
No matter how it’s decided, it is important that sales assists are treated as a primary measure so a salesperson’s motivation is aligned
with the team objective of closing more deals. With the short-term pressures that salespeople have, they will behave by how they are
measured. If an SDR team’s primary measurement was demos accepted and not MRR, except behavior where they will maximize the number of demos accepted over how much MRR they bring in.
It is crucial to think about the psychology of all the players in the sales situation (both sellers and sell-ees) and that it needs to be
thought about above the SDR passing to SAE. Even though NBA greats like John Stockton and Jason Kidd were leaders in assists doesn’t mean that they never shot the ball! We as sales leaders need to think more in terms of assisting each other by having the right players in place for a specific project that can lead to a slam dunk successful close.
Dr. Sean Guillory is the Data Scientist at ConsumerAffairs for Brands, and holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College.
