Vital Armoury for Sales Practitioners

By Rendani Muambadzi

Sales knowledge is the ARMOURY that each one of us requires to improve our understanding, application and management of sales. Both consultants and sales managers stand to benefit from the content that is shared in this book. The first half of the book addresses common themes that sales practitioners encounter in their daily drive for sales production. Despite the industry your organization operates in, there is a common thread through most of the chapters. Readers are encouraged to join the dots between the chapters in order to empower themselves with sales armory. Employees tend to perform better when they understand how all the different objectives come together for the benefit of the organization. One of the chapters titled ‘creating a single view sales scorecard from your data sources’ amplifies this. The second part of the book tackles topical issues such as the impact of digital migration on sales production as well as thought-provoking discussions on the transition from fixed to outcome-based remuneration. Sales practitioners will take away a wealth of knowledge after reading the book and allow them the opportunity to customize some of the content for the benefit of their specific organizations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rendani Muambadzi
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780620940986

Rendani Muambadzi

I am an accomplished and highly-effective individual offering diversified industry exposure and expertise in driving and leading the differentiated operations of an organization. I have accumulated deep business management acumen over my years of service. Central to my success is acute decision-making intelligence, a keen eye for business opportunities, and ability to define new strategies that drive growth and increase profitability. This has now resulted in me narrating my experience and journey through my first published book called Vital Armoury for Sales Practitioners.

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Vital Armoury for Sales Practitioners

Rendani Muambadzi

© Rendani Muambadzi 2021

Vital Armoury for Sales Practitioners

Published by Ronoswika Publishers

Ballito Hills Estate, Ballito, Dolphin Coast,

KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

[e-mail]

978-0-620-940993

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Layout and cover design by Boutique Books

Contents

Introduction

The impact of culture in driving sales in an organization

Aligning sales strategy to support organizational objectives

Creating a single view Sales Scorecard from your data sources

The vital role of the manager in driving sales results

Focus on bottom performers through seller participation

Using sales leads effectively to increase sales productivity

Growth via external sales and workplace banking

The impact of digital migration on sales production

Outcome-based remuneration for sales consultants

Service in a world dominated by the drive for sales

Ensuring ethics-driven sales performance151

Conclusion

References

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank and acknowledge my coach, Donna Rachelson, CEO and Founder of Branding & Marketing YOU, for encouraging me to capture my thoughts and innovative approach in a book that will serve as a memoir and help other sales practitioners. Little did I know that our coaching journey would give birth to my first book.

To my three daughters, Vhutshilo, Rofhiwa and Rendani, thank you for being such wonderful kids. When I told you that I would be writing a book, you did not doubt me at all even though I doubted myself in the beginning.

To my current and former bosses, Tshiwela Mhlantla and Lee Ann van Zyl, thank you to each one of you for allowing me to be. Yes, I am a product of women’s leadership. You both nurtured me under your leadership with such care and kindness.

To the team at Boutique Books, your professionalism throughout the journey was exemplary.

To my mother, Mabel Thikhathali Nyamande, thank you for always being there for me. You have taught me to always remain in prayer and be grateful for everything that comes my way.

Introduction

Knowledgeable employees are inherently innovative in their approach. A lot of the information that employees ought to know is stored in different places and the onus is on the employees to search it out and make sense of it. You acquire some of this knowledge through work experience. The idea is to bring all this knowledge together through the lens of a sales practitioner who has worked in the corporate sales landscape for close to two decades. They say knowledge comes from reading but you also need to start co creating the content for the benefit of other sales practitioners.

The content that is covered is this book is not cast in stone and therefore allows the reader to further incorporate their own flair to solution for their respective organization. Important to note that the solution that you formulate should fit into the organizational strategy or else your efforts will be in vain. If it does not, find out from your organizational leaders if the organization has the appetite to entertain your newfound knowledge, as it will certainly drive efficiencies and business results through improved sales production.

The content of each chapter will leave the reader with a burning desire to add to the thought leadership presented in this book. It is for the reader to have the desire from within to learn as much as possible and use the newly acquired knowledge to enhance the thought leadership that is contained in this book. You need to own your narrative and craft a way forward that will allow each sales practitioner to boldly create their own thought leadership articles, that all of us, including those in other organizations, will learn and benefit from.

An organization could approach a particular thought leadership topic in a different way to what the book prescribes, and that is perfectly okay, as long as there is something you or the organization is doing to address that topic. The fun starts when you solution for your respective organizations and the desired results start flooding in. Some of the actions require perseverance from you as a sales practitioner or organization to start seeing your efforts bear fruit.

I wish you well as you journey through the chapters of this book, more importantly, use some of the tips in this book to enhance your thought leadership, and that knowledge will ultimately help benefit your organization. Immerse yourself in this book and see how your outlook on sales management takes a turn for the betterment of yourself and the organization.

The impact of culture in driving sales in an organization

1

Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, hierarchies, roles, and symbols that people accept, generally without thinking about them, and are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

The accumulation of knowledge can at times make people resistant to change or to considering a different view under the assumption that what they have learnt is the only solution to a problem. The idea of having to unlearn some ways of doing things and adopt other ways of doing new things can be daunting. We live in an ever-evolving world and the Covid-19 pandemic was the stimulus necessary to force us to think differently in solving our daily challenges in an organization.

On the other hand, you have those employees who just always want to learn something new to increase their knowledge on how to better the organization’s objectives. You are in good hands if you can team up with such employees as they can help you manoeuvre through a jungle of information, organizational processes and procedures, which do come in handy when trying something new.

Experience in an organization is invaluable and that is why it is normally a prerequisite when vacancies are posted for suitable employees to apply. Experienced employees can help you avoid pitfalls while forging through with a culture of driving sales. They are able to share with you invaluable information of a time when someone tried doing something similar and it fell flat. It might seem as though they are delaying your progress but all they are attempting to do is guide you because they are experienced enough to know where to find the resources that you will need when trying to drive this kind of culture.

However, with experience also comes a robotic kind of response. Have you heard someone tell you repeatedly that it cannot be done and the organization is not ready for it? It is not a bad thing at all but a reality that you need to deal with in an organization where you intend to bring about change or a new way of increasing productivity. As chance has it, some senior people in the organization are those who have a lot of experience and are in the twilight of their working careers. New ways of doing things do not sway them easily as they believe that they have seen it all and have an answer to every problem. An employee proposing a new way of work will not easily erode forty years of experience that an organization has. The same experience has seen them through turbulent times and it will not be easy to flex your innovative brain and expect the organization to adopt your new ways of thinking that will improve its fortunes.

Belief is also an integral part of culture and one cannot divorce it from this conversation. At the heart of belief is an opinion or something that a person holds to be true. One needs to be sensitive to this and the introduction as well as the implementation of a culture of driving sales productivity needs to be gradual.

Imagine how betrayed you felt when your mother finally told you to grow up as the tooth fairy does not exist and all that money under your pillow every time you lost a tooth was actually from her. You totally felt betrayed and it took you months to take in this new reality. You convinced yourself that the tooth fairy would come back again so that your belief system could remain intact. It was only after realizing that half your teeth were gone and there was still no money under your pillow that you gradually started letting go of the myth. This is the same gradual process you will need to be patient with when you do decide to drive a culture of sales excellence in the organization.

Values play a vital role in the makeup of an organization. They are the founding principles of what is dear to the organization and they serve as a guide to human behaviour. You cannot afford to be oblivious to the organizational values as they have stood the test of time and you are not about to change them despite your best intentions in driving a culture of sales.

Driving a culture of sales does not mean that you take a hard line on everything, as some employees might feel unappreciated by the constant push, more so while we are still feeling the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. You need to master the art of wiggling your way into the hearts of the employees in driving sales in an organization without being perceived as insensitive to the current plight.

Attitude is best described as a settled way of thinking or feeling about something. Interestingly enough, you can encounter good or bad attitude from employees in an organization. You can easily see this via a position or posture assumed by the body in connection with an action, feeling, mood, etc. Driving a culture of sales excellence will definitely mean a change in how certain things are done and this will not go down well with some employees. You will have some employees loving the changes while others are totally against them, which will make them have a not so good attitude towards what you are introducing into the organization. While attitudes are enduring, they can also be changed.

Hierarchy is a system in which members of an organization are ranked according to authority, just as organizations have supervisors, managers and regional managers amongst some of those levels of authority. That on its own means that there are a few people that you need to sensitize about the need to drive a culture of sales excellence so that you can get their buy-in.

It may seem tedious but you need to go through this process as employees by their very nature love status. They want to feel that they were consulted and not just subjected to a concept that they did not have a role in. What we often forget is the end user who is impacted by all these changes. We think that closing it off with the sponsors in the organization is all you have to do while forgetting to get a feel of the heartbeat — the end user.

Lastly, make sure that you follow the correct protocols when engaging with the different stakeholders. Your manager must not hear from another divisional manager that you have approached them requesting some help with an IT development without having discussed it first. Your manager needs to be your sponsor so that there is total buy-in from their side and they help your project manoeuvre through the corporate terrain.

There are different levels of culture but for the purpose of this book, the focus will be on the organizational culture. Below are five different types of organizational culture that you would have come across during your formative studies and I will briefly discuss each one of them.