Maximizing Sales Team Performance: Insights from a Sales Industry Veteran
Every successful business recognizes and appreciates the contributions of their top sales professionals. These individuals hold valuable insights that can guide others towards success. It is only natural for us to study and replicate their strategies across the sales team. However, some businesses make the mistake of solely relying on these top performers and overlook other areas of improvement.
What sets these successful sellers apart from their colleagues often lies in their unique qualities as individuals. One industry veteran who understands this well is Ellie Fields, the Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Salesloft. With her extensive experience in product development, marketing, and management roles at Tableau and Microsoft, she is passionate about helping people grow, launching successful products, and ensuring all the pieces fit together.
In a recent episode of the GTM Innovators podcast, Ellie Fields joined G2 Chief Revenue Officer Mike Weir to discuss how GTM teams can identify and implement improvements to help sales teams reach new heights. In this episode recap, you will gain insights into Ellie’s perspective on the challenges faced by GTM strategies and how to empower sales teams to excel.
Overcoming the Reality Hurdle in GTM Strategies
While a well-thought-out strategy is crucial for success, it is often the reality of the sales process that poses the greatest challenge for GTM teams. Ellie highlights that the chaotic nature of a seller’s day is often overlooked by sales leaders who envision a structured sales process and buyer journey. Understanding the average day of a seller reveals that they have limited time to engage and create value for buyers.
To address this challenge, Ellie emphasizes the importance of examining seller workflows to identify inefficiencies. By acknowledging and addressing the curveballs thrown by reality, order can be brought to the chaos, leading to improved performance.
Shifting to Workflow-Centric Frameworks
While data provides valuable insights, Ellie argues that sellers spend a significant amount of time sourcing information from various systems beyond just a CRM. Jumping between different solutions to gather data and then analyzing it for meaningful change can be time-consuming and counterproductive.
Ellie suggests that organizations need to adopt workflow-centric frameworks that make data usable, trackable, and visible. By streamlining the collection and analysis of data, sales leaders can gain a comprehensive understanding of their top performers and the actions that drive the best results.
Helping Sales Teams Win with an Observable Mindset
Ellie highlights the importance of observability in improving IT and software systems. However, she notes that this concept is often overlooked in sales, which is primarily a person-to-person endeavor. By adopting an “observable” mindset, organizations can analyze the selling experience and identify opportunities for optimization.
Ellie presents several key takeaways:
1. Analyze and optimize existing workflows: By examining the daily experiences of top sales performers, organizations can uncover valuable insights. Understanding what is and isn’t working allows for targeted improvements.
2. Remove obstacles to success: If administrative tasks hinder salespeople’s performance, automation and new solutions can be explored to optimize workflows. The focus should be on serving the human element of sales.
3. Replicate success factors: While not all aspects of top performers’ personalities can be replicated, their successful strategies and talk tracks can be studied and adopted by others.
4. Embrace the strength of humanity: Sales professionals bring unique qualities as humans to their roles. By empowering them to focus on high-value tasks and interactions with buyers, organizations can maximize their performance.
In the full podcast episode, Ellie Fields shares additional insights on selling smarter, the impact of AI and conversational technology on revenue organizations, and more.
To learn more from Ellie and other GTM experts, watch the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to the GTM Innovators podcast available on various platforms.
