18 - The Sales Maturity Model: From Survival to Unstoppable Growth

In today's episode, we discuss the sales maturity model, a tool that any SMB can use to determine its level of sales capability and what will be need to reach its growth and scaling targets. 

The four stages of the sales maturity model we explored were sales survival, sales personality, sales architecture, and the unstoppable stage. In the sales survival stage, the owner or founder is responsible for selling to cover costs and building the business.

Salespeople are hired in the sales personality stage based on their personality, and the sales operation follows the belief and interpretive approach of individual salespeople.

The sales architecture stage is a top-down approach developed and supported by senior management, requiring forecasting discipline overseen and reported at the senior leadership team level. The standard of measurement is one's ability to forecast future income at salary bet level across the sales team.

As we explored how to scale businesses, it became clear that we need to have a predictable and safer way of doing it than relying on individuals. Governance-level monitoring done by senior leadership to provide an auditor of sales can help in this regard, while sales leadership can offer detailed sales management and KPI tracking.

Scaling a business involves sales management more than salespeople. One competent sales manager with two or three sellers will do in three years what five or six salespeople will take ten years to do. We need a sales architecture stage with sales leadership that creates weekly meetings as a strategic tool for building sales capability. Additionally, we need to create a learning infrastructure covering domain knowledge, business acumen, and specific selling skills that equips our sellers to create a quality dialogue and develops them into strategic product features.

Finally, we explored the unstoppable stage, at which salespeople become incredibly effective and the team becomes a source of innovation. Continual improvement comes from the sales team, and sellers become dedicated to personal bests, with the company benefiting from their drive to improve. Reaching this stage requires investing in building stage three sales architecture, while the unstoppable phase is bottom-up with continuous improvement coming from the sales team.