4 Strategies for Achieving Sales Excellence

Steve Short can cite the numbers for Fox Pest Control. And they're large.

"When I came to Fox Pest Control, our inside sales team, our call center, was generating $25 million a year," the company's vice president of sales says, referring to 2022. "Three years later (2025), we're going to probably eclipse $50 million."

Yet the veteran sales leader also offers an admission.

"Numbers are nothing more than flags, alarms, alerts on the way to our goal," he says. "They just tell us where to look. They actually don't do anything.”

They’re important, of course. But Short, speaking at FieldRoutes' customer conference, Ignite, in a session titled "Creating a Blueprint for Sales Excellence," went on to suggest strategies that can help pest control companies optimize sales processes and, in the end, generate the numbers that drive revenue growth.

1. Define what greatness means for your business

Before a business can achieve sales excellence, that excellence will need to be defined.

"What defines your greatness?" he asks. "Maybe it is total sales. Or is it total revenue? Is it market share? You want to have more customers than anybody else in your markets. Maybe it's profit margin. Now it'd be great to have all of them, wouldn't it?"

2. Focus on behaviors, not just numbers 

While they can be misleading, numbers also only measure success, not create it, Short says. 

"The real question isn't, 'How do you measure sales excellence?'” Short says. “It's, 'How do you achieve sales excellence?' There's only one way to do it, and that's the behaviors of your team."

What employees do day-in and day-out, he says, must deliver success for a company.

"It's all about the behaviors, always has been, always will be," Short says. "Because that's the only way to change the number: You have to change what people do."

Short described leading an outbound cold-call call center where it was determined that the most successful reps' calls lasted one minute or more on average.

"Most of the calls were click, click, click," he says. "But if somebody was averaging one minute, that means they had both the sales skills to keep someone on the phone and the persistence not to give up when the person was saying, 'No, I don't want it. No, I'm not interested.'"

For calls lasting less than one minute, Short had to determine why they weren't succeeding. Did they lack the sales skill or lack the persistence necessary? 

"You've really got to analyze and listen to your people's sales pitches, what they're doing, how they're doing, so you can align the right numbers," he says.

3. Match incentives with desired outcomes 

Once numbers and behaviors are aligned, team members’ behaviors need to be incentivized. Short encourages companies to consider complex formulas.

“If you only incent one or two KPIs or one or two metrics, you get what you pay for, just one or two positive numbers” he says. “You’ve got to pick your hard.”

Once sales reps figure out the behaviors being rewarded, he says, “they push and they drive those behaviors to hit those numbers, so don’t be afraid of incenting 4-5 key metrics.”

"Find ways to incent on multiple, quantity and quality metrics,” Short says. “High close rate and high service rate, total volume and long term volume.

"But here's the thing: If my total volume goes up and my close rate goes up, guess what? There's escalators on the score for the close rate because I'm doing both. My service rate: How many of my jobs actually get serviced? If my volume is high and my service rate's high, now even more points. And then one of the things we focus on is two-year contracts. You see the quantity, the quality, the effectiveness, and the efficiency in this."

4. Provide continuous coaching and feedback

The best sales teams are built on a foundation of regular coaching and feedback. 

“If you lead people in any capacity, you are a salesperson, because the biggest and most important sale you make day-in and day-out is to change the behavior of your team, to change the mindset of your team,” Short says. “Every coaching session you have, every leadership opportunity you have, it's a sales presentation. Just embrace it.”

Short described times in his career where the sales team wasn’t permitted to see numbers, whether it was a week or a month at a time. Instead, discussions focused on the behaviors that drove the numbers.

"What behaviors are you hearing?” he asks. “It's pretty easy to do in a call center because you listen to all the calls. They're all recorded. What behaviors are you hearing that are working? What behaviors are you hearing that aren't working? How are you changing the behaviors? That's all we talked about.”

And that strategy delivered for the company. The numbers rose, he says, 100% of the time.

“We weren't managing by numbers,” he says. “We weren't saying, ‘Hey, your close rate is low. Get it up. Fix it.’ No, we were listening. ‘Hey, I just listened to this call. Here's what went well. Here's what I need you to do differently.’ 

“It's all we talked about. So the numbers skyrocketed.”

Sales excellence: A team effort

Sales team members, Short says, have control over their words, behaviors, and attitudes. 

“So if you can identify what your true definition of success is,” Short says, “identify the KPIs that identify the behaviors that lead to that success, and then manage those behaviors, change those behaviors, that's how you achieve sales excellence.”

Want to hear more from Fox Pest Control's Steve Short? Click to hear his FieldRoutes Pest in Class podcast episode with host Amanda Salvatore.