Systems Over Talent
The biggest issue with sales teams is that their revenue is completely unpredictable.
They don’t know how much revenue will be here next month, or the month after that.
When you rely on talent, it’s always a surprise. It’s like, oh, they come and go and sometimes we get big hits.
But when you have a sales system in place and you’re able to track everything, you can predict what revenue you’re going to make.
Once when you start predicting revenue you can scale your business because you can make wise investment decisions.
If I know with a fair amount of certainty that this much revenue is coming, then I can make certain expenses today to say, let’s ramp up the staff.
Let’s ramp up the branding, let’s ramp up the video editing, let’s ramp up the whatever because I have a fair amount of certainty that there’s stability in my sales pipeline.
If I don’t, then it’s always like, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
You can’t plan.
You can’t get ahead.
You end up staying stuck there because you’re not able to take calculated risk
You’re not able to plan ahead and invest into the future.
The Reason Behind Unpredictable Revenue
The root cause of unpredictable revenue is not changing market conditions.
We often think, I’m not selling because I lost this great person, because of my competitor, or because something else outside of our control happened.
The root cause of unpredictable revenue is inconsistent methodology across the sales team.
Everybody’s doing it differently at different times in different ways and they’re doing different amounts of different things in different ways.
You’re not tracking it.
We don’t know if their activity is inconsistent or if their method is inconsistent.
All this inconsistency ends up showing up as unpredictability.
The Prediction Matrix
The idea that most entrepreneurs have is, I just need to find great salespeople.
If I find a great salesperson, that’ll solve my problem.
They’ll hire some people and if they don’t sell, they assume it wasn’t a great salesperson and that’s why they didn’t sell
They’re trying to get lucky.
They think, hopefully I’ll find someone and figure this out.
If you have average people, and you have average processes you’re going to have poor performance. The worse the processes are and the worse the people are, the worse the performance is going to be.
The part that’s surprising, is that if you have above average people and average processes, you still get low performance.
Now you might get above average performance out of a person, but the team will still have low performance.
It will still have inconsistency and still be unpredictable.
Here is what we believe and what we’ve seen in our research.
If you have average people, but above average processes, you can get high performance.
That’s because you have consistency.
You have predictability.
You have universal adoption.
