Are your sales not where they should be? Do you even know where they should be?
Do you have a sales system in place?
Have you invested in your team with product knowledge and sales skills?
What are your sales meetings like?
It begins with Strategy.
What is your ICP? Who is your target customer? If you say Everyone, that is problem number 1. With a target, marketing can do a better job at Lead Gen. The story becomes clearer. The outcomes speak to the specific target, which attracts more leads.
Most prospects have too many choices. There are over 2000 providers of UCaaS in North America. There are 62K MSPs. There are hundreds of CyberSec/MSSPs. There are already thousands of Agentic AI companies. Your sales people have to be Trusted Advisors or at least experts at something.
Use cases are proof. They provide reassurance to the Prospect that you have helped their kind of business before with a good outcome.
Selling into Verticals means the sales team knows the lingo. They can talk Inside baseball.
What CRM are you using and why? Is the CRM there for your sales team or your management? If you are using Salesforce or worse some customer CRM project, it might be too complicated for your team to use. CRM is for the sales team to collect data. The next evolution of CRM with Conversational, where AI will insert every customer interaction – SMS, chat, email, voice, video – will be saved as a vCon and transcribed into the customer record. There are BPOs right now doing that and using that data to improve the sales interactions, teach the sales team and increase sales.
Doing this provides for the full Voice of the Customer. It gives AI data that is searchable and easy to use.
Most companies have a CRM that is for management. It doesn’t serve the sales team, so the data never gets in there. The whole point is to get the data in the CRM.
That is just one part of the system.
The sales system consists of an ICP, the Value Proposition, use cases, sales training and product training coupled with a helpful CRM – and in 2025 a dash of AI.
The Value Prop: What is your super power? What outcomes do your customer achieve? Every employee should have a similar answer.
Are you using AI? You are likely using Otter, Read, or some other note-taker. What are you doing with those notes? Is anyone learning from them? Are they dumped into the CRM or a database for AI to access them to learn from?
The notes will tell you if your sales rep is talking more or less than the prospect. Hint: they should be talking LESS. Asking good open ended questions and Listening for pain points and business objectives.
The notes will tell you what questions are being asked. Better Questions, Better Answers, Better Sales.
Like AI, the better the prompt the more useful the output from AI. The lazy prompt gets garbage.
What about your team members? Do you have hunters or farmers? Are they motivated for big wins or transactions? Most sales people are more farmer than hunter and transactional. Being task oriented means chasing small business and getting small wins often. The guy that sells airplanes cannot sell key system replacement.
Telecom sales has traditional been pushing products – usually replacement products for less money – to small businesses. Very transactional.
Now the Save You Money pitch falls on deaf ears. Save You Time. Solve Pain. This is what Buyers want to hear about.
The market has an average size of 12 employees per SMB in the US. SMB is 99.9% of the business.
85% of the 62K MSPs in the US and Canada have less than 10 employees and have revenues below $5M. They also generally do not have a dedicated sales person. The owner is the sales rep. They sell to other small businesses.
60% of sales reps in the US do not meet Quota.
Who set Quota? How did they set Quota?
What is your average sales cycle?
What is your average sales size?
Ask your CRM or your AI.
If your sales cycle is 6 months or more and your sales reps get a 3 month ramp, everyone is set up for failure. It takes 60-90 days just to learn the products, the system, the use cases, the Value Prop, the ICP. In my experience, sales reps rarely learn any of this in training or on-boarding. Dare I say that most on-boarding is with HR and setting up your email, phone, laptop and CRM. Then off to the races with you.
Are you Coaching your sales team?
Are you doing sales forensics?
Maybe you should give me a call so I can help. (813) 963-5884