The Sales Flywheel - mapping every area of your work
In this week’s newsletter I am going to walk you around the Sales Flywheel - a graphic that is at the heart of most of my content, and that I come back to consistently in my own work as an AE to ensure I am not just focusing on the bits of the job I enjoy.
Successful salespeople, like sportspeople, musicians or artists know that to be truly great, they need to learn and practice all aspects of their craft and the Sales Flywheel is a handy reminder of what to focus on.
The flywheel is split into two halves - external and internal.
External Tasks
The external tasks relate to your prospects, customers and any partners you might work with - people outside of your company.
These reflect your sales process:
Prospecting - helping to uncover customers who might have a need for your product or service. You’ll work alongside marketing, your events team, maybe you’ll have your own SDR - but you are responsible for prospecting into your territory.
Qualifying - deciding which of these ‘leads’ is actually a good fit for your solution and has a reasonable chance of becoming a customer. As an SDR you defaulted to qualifying in, and now as an AE you default to qualifying out.
Running Meetings - post pandemic these are likely to be online video meetings, but you will also have in-person meetings to run. You’ll prepare agendas, chair the meeting, encourage questions and guide the flow of the conversation.
Presenting - for some of your larger opportunities you will be asked to come and present to large groups of people, or you might be running a training session at one of your partners. You will need to prepare a script and visual aids, and be comfortable speaking to a large audience.
Negotiating - as your customer shortlists vendors you’ll need to work with them and your colleagues across legal, product, deal desk and your sales leaders to negotiate the right commercial and contractual deal for your company and your customer.
Closing - having been selected, you’ll need to work with your customer and your legal team to work through the contractual process, working with multiple parties at your customer to bring the deal in on the schedule you have communicated to your sales leadership.
Communicating - and through all of this you’ll need to communicate with your customer and partners through a range of channels - phone, email, in-person, text and video.
Internal Tasks
The lower half of the Sales Flywheel is focused on internal activities.
Many salespeople don’t tend to map these out at all - just being reactive to what they get asked to do which is a miss. Being good at the internal activities supports your ability to be good at the external activities.
The internal activities cover your relationship with your teammates (not just sales teammates but across all other functions - sales engineers, deal desk, customer success, legal), as well as your manager, and senior executives that might be called on for larger deal cycles.
Learning - as a salesperson you should always be learning.
Sales - learning about your company’s sales process, learning about sales methodologies and skills, learning about different sales strategies.
Product - learning about the products and services that your company provides, learning about the market that you sit in, the competitors and how their products work.
Industry - this is the most important one - learning about the customers you are selling into and the industries they work in. Understanding their vision and challenges, the problems they need help with that your solution could help solve.
Planning - great salespeople are always planning - planning a territory, planning a year, planning an account, planning a negotiation. Planning time is thinking time - and yet many salespeople never give themselves time to think.
Forecasting - much of a salesperson’s stress comes from an unhealthy relationship with forecasting. Instead of being reactive, be proactive and plan your forecast in your own time, and provide a forecast you believe in and can defend.
Communicating - and through all this communicating with your teammates, manager and senior execs through a range of channels including phone, email, messaging and in-person.
How to use the flywheel to level up your game
As a seller it can be easy to gravitate towards the three or four activities that you really enjoy doing, or that you think are the core of the job (maybe negotiating and closing), and to shy away from others that you dislike (maybe prospecting and forecasting).
But the best sellers seek out those activities they find uncomfortable and build a system around how to continually get better at them.
Take a look around the flywheel and pick out two activities that you are weaker at or typically avoid.
Block out 30 minutes each week to focus on them over the coming month to practice each activity
Discuss with your manager in your 121 and ask if they can support you around these two activities
Think of a colleague who you think is good at these two activities and ask if they will talk you through their process
After a month you’ll feel much more comfortable with these tasks. Now look for another two activities that you find a challenge - and repeat.
Keep a copy of the Sales Flywheel printed out to remind you.
See you next week!
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