Is your sales team struggling to meet targets despite their best efforts? What if there was a proven method to transform your sales management approach?
Keenan’s book Gap Selling introduces strategies for managing sales teams effectively. His approach combines thorough pipeline management with accountability measures that drive consistent results.
Discover how to ask the right questions and implement data-driven strategies.
Managing a Sales Team
Keenan offers his advice for applying the principles of gap selling to the management of a team of sales representatives. He focuses on two strategies to learn how to manage a sales team effectively: asking your sales representatives questions and keeping them accountable to sales targets.
Strategy #1: Frequently Ask Your Sales Representatives Questions
To ensure that your sales representatives are putting gap selling principles into practice, Keenan recommends frequently asking them questions about their clients and about the state of the sale. He explains that gap selling requires a more thorough approach to tracking and managing your ongoing sales when compared to traditional techniques. He argues that asking questions allows you to verify your sales representatives’ knowledge while identifying gaps in their understanding of the sale. Furthermore, by asking about the sale, managers can support their sales representatives by providing strategies and ideas to guide them through the process.
He recommends that you focus your questions on two points: whether they understand their customers’ gaps and whether they know the next commitment to secure.
1) Do You Understand the Customer’s Gap?
In a gap selling pipeline review, Keenan advises sales managers to verify that their salespeople truly understand their customers’ gap. Recall that this requires a sales representative to fully understand their customer: their present condition, ideal future condition, underlying issues, and long-term goals. Furthermore, gap selling requires the sales representative to understand the value of closing the gap as well as the costs of implementing their solution. Keenan advises managers to ask for specific data from their sales reps and to ask follow-up questions to ensure that they’ve completed a thorough discovery and evaluation.
2) Do You Know the Next Commitment?
Recall that each sale is a series of incremental smaller sales. Keenan recommends that sales managers verify their representatives’ understanding of a sale by asking them about the customer’s next commitment. What is the next incremental step in the sales process that their customer must say yes to? Managers must make sure their sales reps have a clear short-term target in the sales process to keep the deal consistently moving along.
Strategy #2: Keep Your Sales Reps Accountable
Finally, Keenan explains that successfully managing a gap selling team requires ensuring that sales reps take responsibility for setting and hitting their sales targets. This will improve the predictability and accountability of your sales operations. He gives two pieces of advice for creating this shared culture of accountability: Reward honesty and base your predictions on data.
1) Reward Honesty
Keenan argues that successful sales managers reward their representatives for being honest when they’ll likely fall short of a target. He also cautions against pressuring representatives to change their commitments or find new leads when falling short. The goal is to establish a climate of trust where salespeople can share accurate pipeline information without fear of repercussions. This transparency will give you more accurate information about expected revenue, allowing you to address problems proactively and adjust sales strategies as needed.
2) Base Predictions on Data
Lastly, Keenan advises that you can improve the accountability of your sales team by calling on them to rely on data over gut feelings when making their sales projections. Your team can’t effectively anticipate future sales unless they’re drawing on clear and reliable information. Even if your sales representative has a “good feeling” about a deal, that doesn’t mean it will go through. Ask your team to incorporate prior closeout rates and other metrics when making their predictions.
