“Less than 50% of B2B Sales Reps are Hitting Goals”, by CommercialTribe

CT Coach™ by CommercialTribe Is Helping Clients such as HubSpot to Boost Sales Manager Effectiveness

• HubSpot Uses CT Coach to Turn B and C Sales Reps into Impactful Members of Sales Teams, Achieving More than 20% Increase in Sales Performance

Every company sets sales goals for their reps, but the harsh reality is that most reps miss them. A fraction of the sales team (the sales team’s “A Players”) ends up carrying the load for the balance of the team because less than 50% of sales reps in B2B settings are actually hitting their goals. It’s not because companies consistently hire poor sales performers, or that their managers don’t care. It’s because for as long as there have been sales teams, developing sellers has been a black hole.

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Sales leaders have little visibility into what’s happening on the front line, and sales managers are failing to find the right path to follow. CommercialTribe’s new CT Coach solution addresses that exact challenge, and the company’s recent implementation with HubSpot provides a roadmap for how other organizations can create more effective sales teams as well.

Most sales leaders will tell you similar things about the gap between top performers and the rest of the sales team. The sales managers who work under sales leaders are usually high performing sales reps who have been elevated to the sales manager role and then asked to coach and manage the rest of the sales team. These sales managers are often caught in an uncomfortable position – responsible for continuing to generate the bulk of their team’s sales without the right tools and support to coach and train the B and C members of their sales team to become high performers themselves. And for sales leaders – who oversee sales managers – they have very little visibility into what coaching is actually happening at the sales team level, leaving them in the dark about how best to help.

B2B Sales Coaching Framework

So how do we make our managers more effective? Thinking about the best way to develop a sales coaching framework, field travel, and joint sales calls are obvious places on which to focus. After all, where else can you observe the sellers in actual selling situations to identify strengths, weaknesses and coaching opportunities?

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Once these are established as important events in a manager’s weekly schedule, sales leadership needs to establish a framework for these activities: cadence, behavioral expectations, KPI’s, and so on. Implementing this structure gives managers a playbook to follow as they look to develop their reps.

Once this framework is in place, sales leaders need to be able to track and measure these efforts. There are a few reasons for this:

1. To understand which sellers managers are spending their time with
2. To ensure managers are focused on the top of the funnel vs the bottom
3. To visualize the development progress of their team

CommercialTribe recently launched CT Coach, a product that allows managers to easily assess their sellers on specific skills, share their results with their reps for coaching opportunities, and give sales leadership visibility into the coaching efforts. Simply said, CT Coach can help sales managers record, track, and measure their reps’ selling behaviors.

Based on more than 40,000 assessments of B2B sales interactions, CommercialTribe identified 24 configurable B2B selling behaviors that impact a seller’s success in client-facing interactions. CT Coach provides team leaders with a scoring framework to consistently assess a seller’s ability in each of the individual behaviors that lead to sales success in their organization. It also provides a means to score reps and track on-going progress.

Having a tool at a manager’s fingertips while they are in the field gives them a place to record consistent, objective and actionable feedback for their reps. They can then use this information in places like 1:1 meeting to have valuable coaching conversations, sharing the results with each rep to have for reference – thereby providing a means to coach to turn those B and C players into A players.

HubSpot Uses CommercialTribe to Improve Sales Teams by More than 20%

HubSpot is the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales software company. Founded in 2006, the company has grown to serve over 34,000 customers in 90 countries and employs nearly 1,800 people across seven offices, with hundreds of sales team members worldwide. As part of a high-growth software company, executives need to bring on new talent, get them up to speed and productive, and continue improving their skills at a tremendous pace. They turned to CommercialTribe to scale.

“CommercialTribe allowed us to coach constructively and focus on the fundamentals of great sales conversations by getting back to the basics, like focusing on why setting an agenda matters,” explained Andrew Quinn, HubSpot VP Sales Productivity and Enablement.

Jaymie Sullivan, Manager North America Inbound Sales Coordinator of HubSpot added, “I think the biggest value that CommercialTribe delivers to me is the ability for me to quantify some of the intangibles that I’m looking for in new and tenured reps.” She noted, “We’ve always measured progress week to week, but prior to using CommercialTribe, that progress was much more subjective. Now I have a number to aim for when I’m coaching my teams.”

By providing them with clear insight and direction, busy sales managers can now see where and how to coach the key behaviors that move their pipeline forward. The first team to use the approach, HubSpot’s SMB team of 70 reps, saw a 22% improvement in performance.

“Sales managers are the force multiplier inside any B2B company, and they have the disproportionate responsibility to develop our reps. Yet today less than 50% of our reps get to goal. We’ve figured out a way to help,” said Paul Ironside, CEO CommercialTribe.

Taking Action

Ask any sales leader, “If you had a magic wand, what would you like to immediately improve in your sales team?” Guaranteed, a large majority of them would want to improve their sales team performance, consistently and repeatedly. Aligning on a consistent framework and focusing on the areas of biggest impact takes the guesswork out of how to achieve this.

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