Sales is bound to be in your CRO’s DNA. They understand the situation that your sales team are in because they’ve likely been there themselves. They understand the stresses and struggles, and the pressure exerted on them from above to generate results.
This means that maintaining an honest, authentic relationship with your CRO might sometimes be challenging when your CRO is looking to justify their team’s performance.
We want to believe that our C-suite positions are filled by people who put the health and performance of the business first, but we all know that extraneous factors can sometimes get in the way and cloud judgements.
Here are seven things your CRO doesn’t want you to know.
Sales and marketing are not aligned
When your sales and marketing departments are not in sync, your business has a problem. For example, imagine: Your sales team isn’t using the collateral provided by marketing. So, on average, 30% of their time is spent creating or repurposing content to suit their needs. Another common situation is that sales believe that marketing-qualified leads are a waste of time. Or that marketing don’t seek insight from sales, who are closest to your customer.
These are all common problems in sales-led businesses. But integrating these departments is a significant time investment, and therefore your CRO might not want you to understand quite how separate these integral teams are for fear you might initiate a mountain of work.
Your sales team is dominated by a few superstars
80%+ of your sales does not need to be driven by <20% of your salespeople. But if this is the status quo in your sales team, your CRO might be nervous to tell you.
If you over-rely on superstars, who then take their skills elsewhere or are promoted out of customer-facing roles, your business is going to be in trouble. Similarly, if you over-rely on mavericks who don’t follow due process and preach that the ends justifies the means, you’ll be setting a poor example to the rest of your sales team.
Ultimately, you do not need to hire heavy hitters or walking prospect lists to get performance. Just by moving your C or B player one step closer will provide better market coverage and results.
There’s plenty of ‘managing’, but not much ‘success’
Just because your CRO has a handle on the sales process doesn’t mean that they are driving it toward success. Management does not equal improvement in all circumstances. If your forecasting is still a guessing game and you’re receiving poor team performance insights; if your qualification is focussed on the sales process and not where the buyer is in their buying cycle, it’s likely your CRO doesn’t actually have as tight a grip of the reins as you might like.
And just to make it explicit, customers don’t care about your sales process. If you want proof, ask yourself when was the last time you heard that a customer specified they’ll only buy from you if you use a particular sales process/model in their RFP.
There are plenty of quick fixes, but few permanent solutions
New pieces of shiny innovation are being implemented, but unfortunately, these are sticking plasters in comparison to the broader, deeper and more systeming issues.
There is no diagnosis of the root cause of your challenges. No one looked at the underlying problem you were trying to solve before they invested in an enormous SaaS tech stack to support your salespeople. Ultimately, sales enablement tools in and of themselves will not solve your performance issue.
Likewise, sales training by itself changes nothing, it is a part of the solution not the full solution.
Taking the plunge and looking deeper can be scary. It can potentially bring up a whole load of issues that need to be addressed, and if your CRO isn’t willing to do this, they might not tell you that they’re ignoring the root cause.
The sales team are focussed on this reporting period, not a long-term strategic player in your business
Your CRO might be great at short-term plays, but what about long-term, strategic planning and execution? The average tenure of a CRO is now under 18 months. In other words, they do what they can do before you discover they haven’t been working on the long-term vision of the sales team.
Next, consider how your commission structure works. What behaviors are driving it? Short- or long-term?
Finally, is your sales culture to reward maximizing the opportunity overall, or to bring the revenue in now? These are red flags that could indicate that your CRO is not on top of the long play.
Sales process places too much emphasis on personal relationships
If your sales process is too dependent on personal relationships, your CRO will unlikely want to share this information with you. Why? It makes customers and your team’s lives more complex, and increases the time to – and frequency of – the sale.
When there are over eight people in every buying decision, and the customer is struggling to understand who the relationship is with: a particular member of the team, or the business, it presents a lot of friction.
If your CRO is insisting on hiring walking prospect lists, it’s unlikely they’ll want to report this.
Is sales management fundamentally broken?
If your CRO is a bad manager, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll get the truth out of them. For example, if they’re putting your sales team’s top performers into management positions, you’re: a) losing your best sales performers, and b) you’re creating managers out of people who can’t manage. A lose-lose.
What if there’s a culture of targets which are driving poor management decisions, which in turn drive poor practices e.g.
“Let’s bring those deals forward by discounting the hell out of them.”
This means that next period, there’s no pipeline. Finally, if there is no ‘coaching’; only ‘telling’, your CRO is unlikely to be getting the best results from the team.
