Sales reps like to manage deals “their own way”

What worked at their last job may not necessarily work here!

Sales reps are confident people. Unfortunately, that confidence can makes them non-conforming and unwilling to follow your proven best practices. Every sales rep you hire is pretty sure their way works, and they don’t have a lot time or energy to dedicate to whatever best practices, processes or standards you’ve put into place. Oh, they’ll attend your on boarding training and give you the requisite lip service. But the fact that they’ve never sold your solution before doesn’t compare to the fact that they’ve “always done it this way” and in the end, they will run and record their deals however they want.

Of course, you want sales reps to leverage their experience, to recognize situations & challenges, and quickly know what to do to advance the deal. But experienced reps who “do it their own way” often create disparate customer experiences, disrupt your standard procedures, and most importantly, fail to leverage the company’s collective experience that has shown success in the past. Creativity and innovation with no boundaries create chaos and conflict – and degrades performance.

Doctors use a common language and standard set of definitions so that when one doctor diagnosis you with “X” it means the same thing to every other doctor in the world. Of course, there are nuances and variations, but there’s a common foundation! You need your sales team to use your common foundation while allowing for their nuances and variations.

Experience is great, but to leverage that experience you must first tether it to your internal sales processes and operational language, then align it to the clear definitions and criteria you want your team to use when managing deals. That means more than training new sales reps during on-boarding. It means reinforcing the language and alignment to those definitions on every deal every day.

Establish a foundation by arming your entire sales team with a common language, a well-defined process, and a clear set of definitions to support the process. Then align the myriad methodologies and experiences your sales reps bring to the table to that foundation through disciplined coaching and reinforcement on every deal. If you can do this, your customers will get a common sales experience from every sales rep, and your revenue visibility & predictability will skyrocket.