Sandler Brief: Are You and Your Sales Team Speaking the Same Language?

One big challenge we all face as sales leaders is that we may have people on our team who aren’t on the same page as we are.
 
Very often, we as the leader are speaking one language, but the salesperson who is taking part in a conversation with us is speaking a very different language. We may not even realize that that’s what is happening!
 
When we say, “How did that call go?” and they say, “You know what, it went really well!” -- we need to ask a question. What in the world does “It went really well” mean? Does it mean the same thing to them that it means to us?
 
In a situation like that, we are likely to insert our own experience and our own skills when we decode that response, without quite noticing that that’s what we are doing.  We may end up concluding something like this: “Well, they must have done so-and-so, because that’s what I would have done before I told someone that the call had gone really well.”
 
Guess what? What you would do is not what everybody would do.
 
“It went really well” is an example of what we call “wishy-washy words.” These words are wide open to multiple interpretations. People can and do put their own meaning into what they’re saying to us when they use words like this. They don’t necessarily mean to mislead us. But they aren’t speaking the same language we are.
 
Other examples of classic wishy-washy words are responses like:

• “Yes, they’re interested.”
• “Yes, they're qualified.”
• “I think that’s closable.”

The salesperson may have any number of reasons for saying things like this. But what, exactly, do they mean? We don’t know.
 
In order to have clearer communication with our sales team, we need to implement, and consistently use, a common process.
 
Think about it. It’s highly likely that the accounting team in your organization consistently uses a common process. So do the people in marketing. So do the engineers. Sometimes it seems like everyone in the organization has a common process and a common language...except the members of the sales team!
 
Here’s an interesting experiment. The next time you have your team members gathered together for a meeting, ask them to take a few minutes to write down the process for moving a sales opportunity from start to finish. Ask them each to map it all out -- prospecting, advancing the deal, selling relevant additional products and services, everything. But don’t let them see what the other team members are writing as they work.
 
When they are done, compare what people wrote down. Is it consistent? If you’re like most of the sales leaders out there, what you’re going to discover is that everyone is pursuing a slightly different approach. For instance: Some people will strongly emphasize in-person and voice-to-voice contacts, while others will lean more heavily into digital communication platforms. And each member of the team will, to some degree, be making up their own rules as they go along, and defining the terminology of the process in their own way. That will be your first tangible clue that you do not have a common process or a common language.
 
That’s a problem. Whenever we, as a sales leader, complain that we don’t have enough time, whenever we wish there were more hours in the day, we need to understand that that’s actually a symptom of a major challenge we’re facing. We are spending an exorbitant amount of time trying to manage our whole team while each individual member of the team is speaking his or her own personal language! That takes up a lot of time, effort, energy, and resources, because we are not all following a clearly articulated sales process. So we are always talking past each other. And we are wasting time, energy and attention putting out the fires that inevitably result from the miscommunication.
 
It doesn’t have to be that way.
 
If we had a common process, then we could leverage the efficiencies that come about when people learn and follow that process, regardless of whether they are conducting meetings in person or using digital platforms.  We could also coach, train, and onboard our people in a systematic way. And we could create and support a process-driven culture within our sales organization, creating and strengthening muscle memory so that everyone is following the same sales process and communicating about the steps of that process in the same way.