The Four Pillars of Sales Technology – Part 1: Methodology

In this series of articles about the four pillars of sales tech, this is the Part 1 of Pillar 2.  As you might recall, the overarching question is 🡺  What is the intersection between optimal sales leadership… and the optimal use of today’s technology?

At Sandler, we see four areas that sales leaders will want to pay attention to. In an earlier piece, we looked at the best ways technology can support your team’s sales process. That’s the first pillar. In this article, we’ll be looking at the second pillar: methodology. And in future pieces we’ll take a look at sales leadership itself and at the buyer journey, which are the third and fourth pillars, respectively.

Let’s take on a question I hear a lot: “Isn’t sales process the same thing as sales methodology?”

The answer we give our clients is NO – and here’s why.
Identifying the right sales process is no guarantee that anyone on your team is executing that process in the most efficient and effective way!

Your sales process consists in the steps you follow – the “what to do.” Your sales methodology is the tactics and strategies you implement to execute that process – the “how to do it.”  With that much settled, it’s time to take a deep dive on the critical question of how your technology can best support your implementation efforts with your team – so that each person who reports to you works at optimal efficiency and produces consistent, predictable revenue for your organization.

Once you have clarified the sales process, a number of essential questions emerge for you as the sales leader. These include:

• Is the sales process built into our onboarding process? In other words, once someone is hired and onboarded, will they have internalized our sales process?
• Are we effectively training and reinforcing the sales process to both new hires and current employees?
• Do our coaching initiatives support our sales process?

Here’s the potential challenge. A lot of sales leaders tell themselves that the CRM they select will, on its own, somehow address and resolve questions like these. But that’s simply not true.

Think of it this way: A spreadsheet application, on its own, will not automatically address all of your organization’s finance and accounting decisions. Just as a spreadsheet application is a tool that can be used wisely or unwisely, the CRM you choose to use with your team is also a tool that can be used or misused. Someone needs to deploy that CRM intelligently to solve problems and achieve important goals. In the case of the CRM, that “someone” is the sales leader… and the #1 goal of that leader, we believe, is to create and sustain both a methodology and a team culture that supports the sales process they’ve identified.

That doesn’t happen automatically. It takes conscious effort over time, and the decision to lay launch and sustain multiple initiatives that make it second nature for the team to consistently implement the sales process at a high degree of proficiency – not just read about it or pay lip service to it. Taken together, these initiatives constitute a sales methodology that’s supported by the CRM (and/or any other platform used by the team).

When it comes to methodology, of course we’d love you to choose Sandler. But whatever methodology you pick, we recommend that you make it one that fits your organization like a glove, is focused on the buyer, and gives your team a viable conversational model, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all script that handcuffs them. We recommend you create a methodology that your people will buy into and use, and that you make the methodology consistent across your organization.

Next month, I’ll share some best practices we’ve picked up over the years about using technology to design and support an effective sales methodology.