Expectation-Setting Your Way to Sales Success
Good morning,
Want to get promoted faster, make your partner happy, and ensure your manager sees the great work you’re doing? Learn to set expectations. Today we’re exploring how effectively reporting on the state of your portfolio or project is a core part of success in business. Let’s dive in.
Effectively Provided Expectations are Proactively Quantified Explanations
Waiting until you’re being scrutinized by your manager because you’re trending to miss your sales targets means its clearly too late and you’ve done something wrong. The level of scrutiny you likely get when things are going well can look dramatically different than in challenging times. And that’s also a problem with managers— leaders equally need to hold their successful sellers accountable to showcase what they’ve done to win as they do to their sellers who are struggling.
So what should you as a people manager, individual contributor, and business owner do to effectively manage communications with your leadership team / key stakeholders? And before you delete this email, know that this was one of the key factors in my sales career acceleration.
Regardless if you’re crushing performance or being trounced:
Be Proactive: Connect with your management. Don’t wait. Prove to your leaders you’re on top of your business by providing a download of what themes contribute to your successes or headaches.
Quantify Forecasts: Defining the revenue impact of the key headwinds or tailwinds shows you know your business. Having a data-backed end-of-quarter forecast legitimizes your comms.
Define Risk: Regardless of where you stand, there’s always risk that needs to be mitigated. Even more so when you’re on top. Show you clearly understand existing & future problems.
Action Plan: With headwinds and tailwinds quantified, it becomes much easier to effectively prioritize and build a plan of attack. If you’re trending well, focus more on future pipeline creation and risk mitigation. If you’re facing major challenges, focus on how your quantified top initiatives that can drive revenue in the short/medium-term are being prioritized.
Again— this stuff might seem boring and might even seem too straightforward. But managers love seeing a formalized sales process because, well, it works. And sellers should learn to love it because it works for them, too. More on this in the stat below. With the average seller failing to proactively manage expectations around their books' performance, this is an incredibly easy way to stand out. It’s also genuinely productive work. Your future paycheck will thank you.
It starts with proactivity. Consider sending your leadership team a mid-quarter update celebrating the work you’ve done and the plan to close the quarter strong.
Companies with a formalized approach to working with customers have a 37% better win rate in their sales teams than companies that haven’t (source). Intuitively, this feels obvious. We all expect our sales teams to have some form of a standardized process. But why stop there? Templatize your approach & showcase your work to your leaders. Leave no doubt you’re the best possible person to manage your book of business.