Pricing exceptions. Deal desk escalations. CRM system workarounds. Qualification overrides. Last minute forecast recasts. Sales process bypasses.
Most Sales Operations teams will see plenty of these things over time. And it’s very easy to chalk them all up to “personnel” problems…
Some rogue sales rep thinks the rules don’t apply to him because he was a superstar at his last gig. A new sales manager is letting her team get sloppy in the last week of the quarter. A new purchasing person is making ridiculous demands. Somebody is trying to game the forecast to cover their bacon.
And someone else is refusing to use the CRM system properly because clicking the correct dropdown is a totally unreasonable burden that robs them of two seconds they could be using toward moving yet another deal to “no decision.”
Sometimes, of course, these explanations are exactly right.
People do dumb things. Salespeople take shortcuts. Customers make unreasonable demands. Managers occasionally look the other way because quarter-end is approaching and suddenly all those carefully designed governance processes seem more like…well…suggestions for less urgent times.
But when exceptions start occurring repeatedly, across multiple people, customers, deals, or situations, it’s probably worth considering another possibility…
Maybe people aren’t short-circuiting the commercial systems because they’re lazy or stupid, but because the systems are deficient in some way.
Process exceptions or deviations from what’s expected are often tell-tale signs or signals of deeper issues. They can be little flashes of evidence that the orderly commercial environment that we designed in the conference room isn’t lining up particularly well with the messy one that’s playing out in the real world.
Take pricing exceptions, for example…
If salespeople routinely need approval to sell below the recommended prices, we might conclude that our salespeople are just feckless negotiators who fold like a cheap lawn chair every time a buyer even raises an eyebrow.
Or…we might suspect that the pricing recommendations are inaccurate.
Maybe the segmentation model is too broad. Maybe different customer types are looking at different competitive alternatives. Maybe the offering delivers materially different value across different applications. Maybe market conditions have shifted in a big way while the pricing structure has remained frozen in time.
Deal desk escalations can tell a similar story…
If seemingly ordinary deals constantly require special consideration and handling, perhaps the standard offer structure doesn’t match how customers actually want to buy. Maybe contract terms are too rigid. Maybe volume breaks are badly calibrated. Maybe we’ve created three standard packages for a market that really needs five different ones.
CRM workarounds can signal that we’re asking for the wrong info at the wrong time. Qualification overrides can signal that our definition of a good opportunity is stale. Last minute forecast recasts can indicate that our stage definitions don’t correlate particularly well with actual buying behavior.
And if exceptions suddenly cluster around a particular product, customer type, geography, or competitive zone, something big might be shifting beneath the surface. Maybe end-user demand is softening. Maybe upstream supply is drying up.
Or maybe a desperate competitor has decided to get big…or go broke trying.
The point is that before dismissing every exception, system bypass, or process workaround as just being some combination of selfishness, stupidity, or poor supervision, we need to think of them as diagnostic signals.
We need to track the exceptions. Categorize them. Look for patterns. See where they cluster. Watch for changes in frequency and magnitude. Look for recurring themes and rationales. Drill down to root-causes.
Then we can start asking the more useful and productive question…
Not, “Why won’t these lazy, stupid people just follow the system?”
But rather, “What are all these exceptions trying to tell us about the system?”
Diagnosing Sales Problems
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Driving Consistent Sales Execution
How do you ensure that your sales teams are always following the most effective processes, using the right messaging and differentiators, and driving opportunities forward in a consistent and predictable way?
