Show Your Sales Boss You’re on Task

Business Development and Sales: just two different ways to refer to the same activity of getting your product into your client’s hands, right? Actually, the two are vastly different business functions in any organisation.

While business development focuses on finding growth opportunities for the organisation, sales focuses on convincing customers to purchase your organisation’s product. You can think of it as two steps of the same process. A business development professional typically finds the market and customers that are suitable for your company to pitch its product to, before a salesperson comes in to seal the deal, which generates revenue.

Skillsets Needed For Each Role

While companies like to lump both business functions together in one team especially when starting out, the skillsets required of each business function are actually very different.

Members of a business development team need to have business intelligence skills: they need to understand the market and consumers’ buying patterns, as well as have strong prospecting abilities. A successful BD professional is able to think long term and foresee which industries will become sunrise or sunset industries.

Superb communication skills are also a must-have for anyone working in business development. You need to be able to story tell and promote the brand, to pave the way for sales to work their magic. Relationship-building skills are also a necessity. This is because the business development manager is often the first point of contact with a potential customer, and therefore needs to be able to get them excited about your offerings. An excellent salesperson should also possess superior communication skills, but where a BD professional focuses on storytelling, a good salesperson must be able to persuade clients effectively. A salesperson should also be able to cultivate and deepen relationships, as they’ll be building more long-term relationships with customers.

For sales, it goes without saying that you’ll need to have excellent product knowledge. You should know your company’s products at the back of your hand, and be able to showcase relevant use-cases for the client. An often understated skill that is important in sales is account management. In other words, a good salesperson must be able to take into account factors such as the customer’s purchasing power before pitching the product to them.

Career Progression Pathways for Each Role

For business development, usually it’s a case of starting out at a junior role, before progressing to the managerial level. Due to the skill sets required of business development, such as business intelligence and prospecting skills, a person working in BD could also take on various strategic roles.

If you start off in sales, you would likely stay in the sales pipeline throughout your career. This is because the skills required of a good salesperson, such as product knowledge, are niche and take time to train. However, some of these skills are also transferable. As a salesperson would have extensive knowledge of the partner’s needs, they can also work in merchandising positions in the retail industry.

You’re probably thinking that proving your mettle as a salesperson should be relatively straightforward. After all, you’re judged by quantitative Key Performance Indicators. There's also always a biweekly or monthly report for you to show your boss that you’re hitting your sales targets.

But just hitting sales targets is superficial. In my experience as a sales manager, I need to ensure that the numbers achieved by my team members are sustainable. A good salesperson doesn’t just sell items for the sake of selling them. He or she understands what the client’s needs are, and sells them products that best suit their needs. This can’t be reflected by numbers alone, especially in the short term. 

**Common Mistakes to Avoid **

A common mistake salespeople make when trying to impress their bosses is to pick the wrong metrics. Understandably, you can never run away from performance metrics in sales, so present the right ones. It’s never a good idea to harp on the fact that you’ve visited a particular client ten times in a week. 

Good metrics include sales growth, which is the difference in sales achieved over a period of time, and customer sellthrough, which refers to the product quantity that you can sell to your customer. Average purchase demand and sales per group per location are also excellent metrics to share with your sales manager. A bonus metric would be the customer’s current inventory. This data point helps your manager to gain a better understanding of the feasibility of your partner’s portfolio. 

Another common mistake salespeople make is to plead with the client for help. This is because the commission earned is usually tied to their sales figure for that month. Hence, some salespeople would resort to begging the client to just purchase the product so that they can hit their sales targets. In the long run, the partner would lose their respect for you as a salesperson and also for the company.

Have Regular One-on-One Conversations

Have open and honest conversations with your boss. Don’t just flaunt about your achievements, also let your boss know what challenges you’re facing. Don’t just stop there either. Propose solutions to overcome these hurdles. Structure your conversations around the above three talking points.

A good salesperson should therefore be able to share with his or her boss: this is what I’ve achieved over the last month, but I am now facing this challenge where my partner’s business is down by 50% because there is a new competitor next door. Here’s my suggestion: we can hold a promotion for the next month to bring back foot traffic. In my experience, this three-step approach works like a charm.

Separate Work Conversations From Personal Development Conversations

As a manager or a team, there are two kinds of sales meetings. The first one is your regular sales updates meeting where you can approach your boss with the aforementioned three talking points. You can also pose questions to your boss regarding your performance or certain roadblocks you might be facing. In return, your boss needs to be ready to answer these questions as part of his or her role of providing mentorship.

The other type of meeting is a personal developmental meeting. During this meeting, you can share with your boss the development that is required from you. Ask your boss how he or she thinks you can achieve personal growth.

Strive to draw a clear line between business and personal development meetings.

Building Trust With Your Boss

Building trust takes time. Always go to your boss with a fact, especially at the beginning. Build trust using concrete metrics such as sales growth and sell through. Once the trust has been established, it becomes easier to have a casual conversation with your boss. You no longer need to have a three-page report at this point. You can just present three to five bullet points to your manager, knowing that he or she trusts you.

This approach also works if your boss likes to micromanage you. Your boss cannot insist on maintaining a tight rein over you if you show that you’re capable through hard facts. Micromanaging bosses also have a penchant for detail. Hence, make sure that you really know what you’re talking about.

There was this experience of mine when I worked for a very big company, and there was a certain difficult partner of ours that I was tasked to manage. At that time, this partner was a very huge partner which contributed 30% to our company’s business. However, this partner also had a tendency to hurt our brand’s reputation by doing certain things that were not aligned with our principles. For example, they would launch promotions when our company launched a product so as to undercut other distributors.

I went up to my boss with the data I collected and structured my conversation around the aforementioned three steps to discuss what we could do as a team to mitigate this problem. Eventually, I, together with my big boss, paid a visit to our partner to explain matters from our perspective. They were shocked at the severity of the matter and promised not to do it again.

The reason why this was possible was only because I had secured my bosses’ trust in me through data. Otherwise, they would have just found another person to replace me given that the client accounted for such a huge percentage of our company’s revenue!

Taking Things One Step Further

If you want to stand out from the rest of your colleagues, you first need to be managing your current portfolio very well. You need to have a good working relationship with your partners and be hitting your sales targets. Once you have these under your belt, start looking for opportunities for your company. 

Propose these opportunities to your boss. Come up with a list of potential partners your company could work with, and back these up with facts and evidence. This will bring in growth opportunities for every salesperson. I would be very impressed if a salesperson comes up to me with such a pitch. This shows that the salesperson is able to see the bigger picture, and see beyond his or her individual portfolio. 

In conclusion, I’ve been in sales for nearly two decades now. It has certainly not been easy for me, or any salesperson, for that matter, to have to continuously keep up with the demands that your boss is imposing on you, while chasing seemingly impossible sales targets. However, as long as you have a positive mindset, there’s no reason why your boss won’t take notice.

1 Numbers Aren’t Everything

Do not see hitting individual sales targets as your sole goal. A good salesperson is able to think long-term and spot opportunities for the organisation in the long term, while holding themselves to high standards of customer satisfaction.

2 Be Honest and Open 

Achievements aside, let your boss know what challenges you’re facing. Continuously propose solutions to overcome these hurdles. This is actually the best way to show your boss that you’re on the ball. 

3 Trust is Key

Leverage facts, data, and metrics for your boss to place his or her trust in you. Trust takes time to build, so don’t rush it.