Introduction

THE SHORT, TRUE story that makes up the prologue is one of the best definitions of leadership you might ever encounter. It provides the idea that a person can step up and take accountability for what promises to be a difficult outcome, and in doing so, become a leader. The drill sergeant had no intention of fighting any of the soldiers in his charge. Instead, he wanted to see who would step up, who would do what was necessary when pressed to do something difficult and unpleasant.

I have no military experience myself, so beyond the prologue and the following story from Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, you will find only sales leadership, because it is something I have practiced and studied long enough to write this book.

Ender's Game is a science fiction book about a military force that identifies very young geniuses, taking them to space to prepare to fight aliens that almost destroyed their planet. Author Orson Scott Card begins his introduction by sharing how he came up with the main idea in the book. When he read the three-volume book The Army of the Potomac by Bruce Catton, what struck Card was the fact that three different generals led the Union Army, all of them failing for one reason or another. General Ulysses S. Grant, the fourth leader, took over with the same army, the same enemy, the same leaders, the same horses, and same terrain as the generals he replaced. The difference between Grant and the others was his willingness to use the army as an extension of his will.

One of the things you notice about leaders who struggle is that they don't treat their sales force as an extension of their will. A large part of this book is going to provide you with the strategies and structures that will make your sales force an extension of your will. You cannot reach your revenue growth goals; instead, your team must meet their goals for you to meet yours. Growth isn't something that happens due to good luck, working for a great company, incredible products or services, weak competitors, or any other external factors one might credit for an increase in revenue.

Growth only comes from strong and effective leadership and a team focused on revenue growth.

The Revenue Growth Formula

The formula for revenue growth is simple and straightforward. You start with your expected revenue going into a period and subtract the churn you expect before adding in the net new revenue you expect to acquire.

The existing revenue is what you are certain to capture from your existing clients and their commitments, contracts, and orders. Because these deals were done in the past, there is little you can do about the revenue you start with going into a year or a quarter. Every business experiences churn, and some part of that churn is beyond your control. The fewer clients you lose, the easier it is to grow your revenue. That leaves us with net new revenue, the area where what you do can create revenue or cause you to stagnate. In the worst case, not creating enough net new revenue can cause you to experience what some describe as "negative growth," a euphemism for "shrinking."

The revenue growth formula is simple, but it isn't easy. There are three ways you can grow revenue:

1. Sell more to your existing clients.
2. Acquire new clients.
3. Raise your prices.

As a sales leader or a sales manager, you are responsible for the first two. You may also be charged with raising prices, but that decision may come from your executive leadership. However, if pricing is within your control, raising prices can contribute to revenue growth. Ideally, you pursue all three strategies simultaneously, especially if you have aggressive sales targets.

With a simple formula and only three levers needed, why is revenue growth difficult for sales organizations, sales leaders, sales managers, and their teams? If you've ever had the feeling that professional B2B sales is increasingly more difficult, you aren't alone. There are powerful forces at work that make revenue growth more challenging than ever. Some of these forces are external, making it something outside of a sales organization's direct control. These forces are going to require you and your team to adapt and evolve. There are also internal changes that plague sales organizations and make revenue growth difficult-or impossible.

Sales organizations unaware of these challenges will struggle to understand why revenue growth eludes them. For now, don't worry about the challenges to growth, because all of them can be addressed by good and effective sales leadership. Let's start by understanding what these challenges are so you can identify them, communicate them to your team, address them effectively, and grow your revenue.

External Challenges to Revenue Growth

The massive, disruptive, and evolutionary change in B2B sales is the result of changes in the environment that have made it harder for buyers and decision-makers to effect change in their company, as well as successfully completing their buyer's journey, with over 54 percent ending in a decision to do nothing.

The story here isn't about how sales has changed, but how buying has become more difficult for your prospective clients. Let's look at six major factors that can contribute to an inability to create revenue growth, starting with one of the greatest forces on the planet.

The Internet and Information Disparity

The internet has removed a lot of what a salesperson might have shared with the client, making much of it unnecessary. Your prospective clients can find information about your company, your products and services, and your clients on your website. In fact, if you have a functioning website, they can probably get deeper into their buyer's journey than you might imagine. Salespeople who don't create any greater value for a client than reciting facts about their company provide no value greater than a Google search or a query on DuckDuckGo.

While some "experts" suggest the client now has information parity, the truth is that the information parity is rather limited and is mostly facts about your company. The information disparity that allows the salesperson to be valuable isn't something that is easily captured on a website.

What is missing is your sales force's experience, the subtle insights gleaned through their experience over many years helping clients, and the ability to help create a paradigm shift that would cause the client to change. The paradigm shift is accomplished when a salesperson teaches the client something about themselves and replaces their outdated assumptions with a higher-resolution lens through which to view decisions about their future.

Although it is true your team has insights the client could never acquire on a website, the truth is that your clients now spend a large amount of their time pursuing better results by conducting research without the help of a salesperson.

Uncertainty and the Status Quo

Our current environment is one of constant, accelerating, disruptive change, dislocating decision-makers who feel the unrelenting speed as uncertainty. The more difficult it is to predict anything about the future other than "what's next," the more challenging it is to make decisions about the future. When you're uncertain about the future, it feels safer to avoid change, as you might make things worse. When this is true, contacts who don't want to make a bad decision often wait until they have greater certainty. Many of those who wait will find this same environment forcing them to change on a timeline not of their choosing.

The problem for the sales force is that the uncertainty created by the increasingly complex world isn't likely to change any time soon-if it ever does. If you ever wondered why the sales conversation your team has with their prospects comes in fits and starts, making progress only to go dark, it's because the prospect has learned to live with the devil they know. The reason the promising deals in your pipeline stall or die prematurely is because of the client's uncertainty.

The Unforgiving Reality of the Consensus Sale

I remember the first time I walked into a client's conference room to be greeted by fourteen people sitting around a giant table. The senior leader introduced the team as "the task force." In the past, your sales force might have called on "the decision-maker," the person with the "authority" to sign a contract and agree to pricing. Because leaders want their team to have the autonomy to buy what they need, choosing the partner they believe to be the best fit and accountable for results, leaders allow them to build consensus among their team-or increasingly, several teams.

This difficult, political, and messy process often ends in a no- decision, as some teams believe that consensus means a unanimous decision instead of a simple plurality. It is almost certain that your team has never been trained or taught to how to manage a sales conversation with many decision-makers, decision-shapers, and stakeholders. Even with a framework, it's difficult at best, impossible at worst. Your sales force is working to build consensus with a group of people who may be at odds over the decision to change, how to change, or what the right decision might be. But even more, having more people in the conversation has changed the sales...