Find the Sales Habits That Produce Revenue
A revenue goal says where a team wants to end up and leaves open what each rep should do differently to get there. Max Bevan, our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, described how he moves a client from one to the other on a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast with Eric Housh. This post covers how he moves from a goal to a habit, how he tests the habit, and what he looks at afterward. It’s part of a group of posts that start with Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals.
Step Back From the Revenue Goal
Max’s example was a client who says they need their reps to close more revenue. He called that a great high-level goal and said it still needs a step back to ask what the habits are that create that result. The question is part of how he defines what done looks like, which is an objective picture of a successful outcome for the business, and Fixing a Broken Sales Process Without Starting Over covers that step in more detail.
Candidate Habits
Max offered several possibilities for what those habits might be. Activity levels came up, along with outbound outreach and automation for efficiency. He also mentioned calendar tools, deal rooms, and other types of tech that support and drive velocity in a deal. He said it isn’t always that straightforward, which is why the next step is to find out where the team currently stands.
Ask What Would Change
Once he knows where people are, Max starts pushing with a question: what difference would it make for the sellers to do this every time? The answers he described were a percentage increase in close rate, a larger average deal size, and better quality in how deals progress. That gives the habit a result attached to it, so the team is testing a specific change against a specific outcome.
Old Habits Count Too
Some of the habits in play are ones a team already has. Max described reps who jot notes on paper, take every call on their cell phone, and never log anything in the CRM because they don’t see the value. Changing those habits comes down to connecting the new behavior to something the rep cares about, since the habits a good process creates are the ones that make their job easier.
Test It and Watch the Data
Once a business has picked a habit and named the result it expects, Max’s next step is to implement it and test it. That means running it through UAT and training, watching the data, and continuing to chip away at improvements from there. He described the aim as getting 1 percent better every day, instead of trying to change tooling, process, and culture overnight.
The data is also what tells the team which habits to adjust. Max said everything comes down to recognizing which habits are creating which results, and changing the habits when the data points to something different. What Changes Six Months After Your CRM Finally Works covers what that looks like once the CRM is supporting it.
Max gave examples of habits and the results they might produce but didn’t give specific numbers, and he didn’t offer a fixed list that applies to every business.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.