Greatness can be nothing unless it’s lasting.
An equal challenge is how to make such a process or technology stick with salespeople, who have short attention spans and would rather talk than write. Sales forces have stared down implementations and used passive resistance to outlast scores of multi-million dollar CRM and training initiatives.
Formula for Failure — What Won’t Work
• Declare that, “We have a sales problem.”
• Implement CRM as a fix.
• Hire a big consulting firm to define your sales cycle (be sure to spend seven figures and take a year). Display the results in a large binder.
• Buy what looks or feels good or what came with your new CRM system.
• Pay less than competitive rates to recruiters.
• Make the form or CRM input very comprehensive (i.e., long), and ask everyone for input.
• Run your training at your sales meeting; make sure that it’s the first time your managers have seen it.
• Train your own trainers to save money.
• Hope for adoption, make threats, use guilt, and cheerlead for results.
• Use revenue as the only metric.
• Excuse veterans from compliance.
Management Commitment: They’re Watching You to See If You Are Still Watching Them
This is obvious, of course, but what does it mean? Beyond the customary announcements of top management, it means consistency of execution. Busy salespeople will wait to see if this is just another “theme of the month.”
It may seem unnecessary to emphasize that managers must actually attend and help to lead training sessions, but we have seen organizations where this expectation clearly was not set. Every salesperson is watching his or her manager during any rollout for body language, faint praise, passive resistance, or cynicism.
Every failure by management to reinforce the process will cause the fabric of discipline to begin to tear and competitive advantage to slip away. I once passed one of my managers in the hall and asked him about an action item we had agreed on months earlier. He said, “You don’t forget about these things, do you?” It was one of the best management compliments I ever received.
Fortunately, the new Web-based tools allow managers to see who is actually using the process on a daily basis. The Fort Hill Company, founded by Cal Wick, has built software so that managers can track action item completion and training follow-through by individual, complete with dashboard and graphics.
“You need to check-up periodically and let them know that you are looking. A quick e-mail or some online feedback will put them on notice that you are checking and that you expect execution,” Wick says.
According to Wick:
Up until now, most training programs concentrated exclusively on what happened in the classroom. What happened afterwards was a “black hole.” In fact, what usually happened was something like this: Sales training put on a course to teach new skills and approaches to optimizing the sales process. In the concluding session, attendees were asked to write a goal for applying what they had just learned. They did. Then they put it in their notebooks, put the notebook on the shelf, and went back to doing what they had done before.
Technology is changing that.
As with the other technologies we discuss, a followthrough system alone is not a solution. To maximize the value of follow-through management technologies, managers and training professionals need to pay attention to what is going on. They need to use the system to track behavior and provide encouragement, recognition, or correction as necessary.
When that is done, postcourse follow-through technology increases the impact of sales training and the value companies realize as a result.
Moreover, adoption needs to be incorporated into comp plans and performance reviews of all managers for it to really stick.
One of Cal’s clients, AstraZeneca wanted to increase the amount of coaching its sales managers did, so it ran a program called “Breakthrough Coaching” but did nothing to ensure that managers followed up on what they had learned. Not surprisingly, not much changed in the field.
So the company went back to the drawing board and developed “Breakthrough Coaching II.” The big difference this time was that the company put a rigorous system of follow-through in place to make sure that what was taught was used.
Every manager who attended the program was required (1) to set two goals for improving their coaching and (2) to report on progress five times over a 10-week period. Area and regional managers had access to the follow-through technology so that they could see who was doing what they were asked and who was getting results.
The change was dramatic. Salespeople were polled three months after their managers had attended the program.
• 48 percent reported increased frequency of coaching interactions with their managers.
• 59 percent experienced a shift to a more coaching style of interaction.
• 61 percent felt that their managers were more effective or much more effective as a result.
One summed it up this way: “I am now receiving coaching even when the situation is positive. I used to feel like I only received coaching when I needed to improve on something. I feel like my manager is more in touch with what I am doing.”
If you want something to stick, you have to make sure that it is reinforced. The real work begins when the course ends.
It Takes One to Two Years — Do You Have That Long?
Our first step as managers is to expand our time focus. For an individual, research shows that it takes about 21 days to form a habit. For an organization, it takes one to two years of consistent and persistent reinforcement to create organizational habits.
You can get awareness in two hours through a book or a speech. You can start to build skills in a two-day training program. But it may take two years for your salespeople to figure out that you’re going to stay with this and for them to actually see the results when they use it versus when they don’t.
Real World and Relevant
A successful class alone will not ensure adoption. But a bad one will ensure failure. Word of mouth on the first class will make or break the effort.
The first step toward making a new process stick is to make the training relevant. Canned programs won’t work anymore. The best training actually involves working live deals in class. Similarly, in technology rollouts, salespeople have to see how it helps them with their everyday jobs.
If you use a case study, salespeople will never see their flaws. However, if you have them working their own deals, they see their own flaws — no one has to point them out. This self-discovery of pain creates the curiosity required to start developing new habits.
In our workshops, the first thing we do is add up the dollar volume of all the opportunities/accounts we’ll work in class. Then we discuss how we’re going to create better strategies and action items to make that either a bigger number or increase the probability of reaching that goal.
The transformation is startling. All of a sudden, it’s no longer a training class. It’s actually working on live deals — their competitors, their products, their issues, and their pipeline — and giving them something they can use at 8:30 tomorrow morning. When we focus on deals that are relevant to them, we have very few prisoners in class.
Tailored to Your Unique Sales Process
Before training begins, it is important to define your unique sales cycle and potential action items—built and designed by your people and owned by your managers. This not only makes the process of technology relevant, but it also gains the buy-in of front-line managers, who are the key to adoption.
The worst thing you can have is a sales manager, with arms folded, passing judgment on a new program while you’re training the troops. How can such a manager object to a process he or she designed?
Usually front-line sales managers, especially the intuitive ones who are not process-oriented, are hungry for a process to make their people more independent and to give them a coaching tool to keep deals in control. Tying the methodology and their sales process together by phase relates to what they do every day. Real deals mean that the results can be seen immediately. The question that must be answered by the reps is, “Was it worth my time?”
Keep the Tools Simple
The next step is to make any account management or opportunity management planning tool extremely concise. Processes that require salespeople to fill out a 12-page form are destined to fail.
If the integrity of the logical work flow of the tool is not preserved, or if there is excess redundancy, when the tool is integrated with your CRM, you can almost guarantee a failed CRM and a failed methodology.
In a pivotal meeting for us a few years ago, for which I will always be grateful, Phil Wilmington, then senior vice president of worldwide sales for PeopleSoft, said, “We need a one-page sales tool.”
I said, “Well, you have the author and owner here. Which of the six P’s would you take out?”
He looked at it and said, “None of them. I’ve got to have them all in order to win.”
“Well then, we don’t have a methodology issue. What we have is a management issue,” I said.
The challenge was discipline. But we did take the razor to our process and drove it down to one page of output and three simple input screens.
It has to be simple, but it also has to be effective. A blank piece of paper is simple, but it’s not powerful enough to help you lead a team. And a 12-page document certainly would be complete, but no salesperson is going to slow down enough to use it.
Successful, Credible Instructors — No “Facilitators” Allowed
The next step is to have credible instructors. People who stand up in front of experienced salespeople have to have walked in their shoes, or they will not earn the respect of those people. Lightweight “facilitators” without experience or worn-out salespeople whose experience is not current will not be credible.
In today’s marketplace, any instructor has to be involved in sales and have the executive presence to be able to customize the process to the client. Unbelievably, there are legions of sales trainers out there who have never carried a bag or covered a territory. There are ex-product reps out there trying to teach competitive hunting, and there are hunters trying to teach account management. There are ex-reps out there training who have never coached a deal.
Obstacles to Adoption
The character and discipline of an organization are defined by the excuses it allows. And people have no shortage of reasons why change is not needed or why they don’t have time for it.
Top 10 Most Common Adoption Subversion Excuses
1. We’ve had a new sales manager every two years — I can wait this one out.
2. I’m too busy to coach deals.
3. I’m ahead of quota. They won’t fire me.
4. I’m a veteran. That stuff is for rookies.
5. I handle the big account. They won’t fire me.
6. If I take time to do that and don’t make my numbers, they’ll fire me anyway.
7. Let’s see if my manager has the guts to insist on doing this.
8. I have too much administrative work and no time to coach.
9. Why do we need strategy sessions? We talk to the reps all the time.
10. We’ve tried this before. This too shall pass.
New Metrics — New Accountability
So what does the future hold? One of the best practices to making processes stick is creating new sales metrics — other than just revenue. Focusing on revenue only as a measurement is like driving in the rear-view mirror.
What is needed are metrics that measure accounts, deals, and salespeople along the way and spot out-of-control performance while there is still time to make changes. Metrics have not been an area of focus, outside of training departments, for the last few years. Salespeople respond well to being measured against goals. And metrics drive visibility and accountability, which ultimately drives discipline.
A great book for illustrating the potential effects of new metrics to achieve greater productivity is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.
He writes about how Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s baseball organization brought new thinking into how to evaluate which factors predict success for a player. This enabled the team to get high performers for less money and build a perennial winning team without the superhigh payrolls that don’t always ensure success.
The “gut-feel” metaphors and stereotypes used by the major league scouts were replaced by new criteria. Beane and his Harvard economists had analyzed what really predicted success in baseball performance — walks taken, onbase percentage, and slugging percentage. They challenged established statistics such as errors — how can you have a statistic based on something you were supposed to do? They saw that the best way to avoid an “error” is to not try, or to be in the wrong place, or to have poor range.
The effect on the scouts and the rest of the league is a classic story of resistance to change management and the difficulties of challenging the intuitive, gut-feel, but untested factors that baseball scouts have used for years.
The power of new metrics changed baseball thinking and performance forever.
As we discussed in the section on technology, a critical best practice is to tie the methodology and customized best practice sales cycle back into the forecast.
New metrics are needed during the coaching phase. There are questions that coaches need to ask salespeople that will challenge assumptions, find blind spots, identify competitive counterstrategies, and drive toward a more successful sales plan.
We have recently implemented with some of our clients a coaching feedback system called Sales Prophet — an analysis of the analysis — that gives a manager’s confidence rating of the major questions in the sales plan as a result of the strategy session. The sales executive can then see how and why the forecast has been adjusted by front-line management. This results in fewer surprises and greater confidence in the forecast, as well as a greater win ratio.
As a result, there is also a watershed shift in accountability. Rather than seeing who has filled out forms, the question becomes which managers have strategized and coached their deals? And if not, why not?
Metrics drive visibility and accountability, which ultimately drive discipline.
Coaching and Forecast Follow-up Metrics
The Internet has created the possibility of getting greater feedback on the pipeline at a minimum of expense and time from the field reps.
While a good coaching session is the foundation of forecast accuracy, a manager needs to separate coaching and forecasting techniques. Coaching must be value-added. It needs to provide new ideas to help qualify, advance the strategy, gain access, challenge assumptions, or brainstorm new ideas. Coaching should expose blind spots for the rep’s benefit — not expose his or her shortcomings. These sessions could take an hour or some could take a day depending on the size, importance, and complexity of the deal.
Forecasting reviews should be quick and very focused. They should be driven from the key question areas just discussed: Why will you win? When will it close? What is the source of urgency? What has to happen between now and when it closes? Forecast reviews should take no more than 30 minutes per opportunity. If nothing has changed, five minutes.
A manager should be able to take truthful answers and create a consolidated forecast to pass along. Based on the estimated close date of the opportunity, we have helped a number of our clients track the effectiveness of the coaching session and the progress of the deal. First, we can find out if the deal closed at all, if it closed faster than expected, if it closed for more or less than the expected amount, or if we qualified out.
We can ask if the new sales process or technology was helpful or not and, if so, how. We also can determine whether a strategy review was conducted by the sales manager and if it was helpful or not. (This involves more accountability and visibility for the front-line sales managers.) This is also an opportunity for the reps to say where they need help and more follow-up training.
Deal-Tracking Survey
One of the new metrics introduced at Apple to help determine the effectiveness of its training initiative was an Internet survey of over 400 deals that had been coached in strategy review sessions. The beauty of the survey was its efficiency. The survey consisted of a half-dozen questions that branched further only under certain conditions. It didn’t take much time to complete.
Rather than just ask why they won or why they lost, it prompted the sales reps about how well they understood the elements of their sales process in the deal. For example, how well did they understand the decision-making process? Did they understand the client’s strategic issues? Did they detect a pain that was a source of urgency?
It also asked if the reps had conducted a strategy session with their managers, and if so, was it helpful?
With this metric, managers were able to see that their win ratio when they used the process was significantly higher than when they didn’t. They also identified specific areas where salespeople needed more training, which could be done by e-learning modules or reviews.
A very useful outcome was that managers learned that their people weren’t qualifying out of enough bad deals. They rewrote their qualification criteria to focus on their more winnable deals.
The last outcome was to identify which managers were conducting strategy sessions and which were not. Interesting phone calls followed. Greater visibility had pushed accountability to the front-line sales managers, where it belonged.
Performance Reviews — More Than Just Deal Competence
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is reserving employee performance feedback for the typical annual review.
I am still amazed at how many companies don’t consistently use performance reviews at all and how many sales organizations use the standard one provided by HR as a way to review salespeople. Based on the effectiveness of most canned reviews, one can understand why.
The best practice is to write performance reviews for salespeople that include the skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to execute your best practices sales cycle. Otherwise, reviews usually are a waste of time.
But there is more to overall performance than deal competency and personality. In addition to competence and chemistry, many salespeople fail because of a lack of commitment, lack of character, lack of communication skills, or lack of cognitive ability to think quickly on their feet.
Deal competency alone may be less than half of overall sales competency, and this can only be measured by observation by sales managers and documented in a performance review designed specifically to measure performance in the field. Figure 9–2 presents a useful diagnostic tool for identifying performance problems in both deal management and the other important elements of overall performance.
Written tests and training session “smile sheets” only measure awareness and acceptance. Assessments on behavioral “smile sheets” only measure awareness and acceptance. Assessments on behavioral traits and other things just measure potential. Win-loss reports and numbers just measure deal competency. Only a manager can tell whether the salesperson is competent, as well as committed.
Salespeople become unmotivated because their goals are out of reach, they have lost belief in the company, they have lost belief in the products, or maybe they have personal distractions or have lost confidence all together.
We find that a large number of salespeople fail because of a lack of character. They are not trustworthy. They think selling is a manipulative game. They are not honest with their clients, they are not honest with their managers, and they are not honest with themselves.
Some of them have other businesses on the side. Some of them are not honest with their managers about where they stand in their deals. Some of them set expectations too high, hoping they’ll be gone by the time the price has to be paid.
In order to build trust with a client, a person first has to be trustworthy. It’s not a matter of what they do; it’s a matter of who they are. This goes back to the hiring profile and can only be identified after the hire by performance. Obviously, a 360-degree assessment is even better because teammates and customers sometimes will spot this before the sales manager will.
Numbers alone are not always adequate. A sales rep can make his or her number and still lose a lot of business based on the territory’s potential. I’ve seen hot markets where a chimpanzee in a three-piece suit could make quota.
Conversely, I’ve observed one of the best salespeople I know do everything right and still struggle for a year. A good performance review spotted the problem (we had changed his territory twice — he had been setting up deals that other salespeople closed). Performance observation saved a future star who went on to become an extremely successful performer and manager.
What about Motivation?
To me, there are two sources of motivation— inside-out and outside-in. One lasts; the other doesn’t. I think real motivation comes from inside:
• A quality solution or product that they feel really helps a customer — one that the customer will thank them later for selling to them.
• A solution that can win. It doesn’t have to be superior; it just has to have relative strengths that they can focus on the right prospect without stretching the truth. It must be one in which they can have contagious conviction. Salespeople have to have a playable hand. They can only make up so much gap.
• Good compensation — competitive, no-caps, fair, high-upside. In most companies with successful sales forces, a salesperson is often the most highly paid person in direct compensation. And management thinks that this is wonderful because the stock would be sky high if the company had 20 more of them. And never, never cut it in the middle of a year unless somehow you think 100 percent sales force turnover is a strategy. (It’s happened.)
• Trips. It’s not just the trip; they can afford the trip. It’s the peer and management recognition. And it’s being able to go to your spouse and tell them you won them a trip to a very nice place. Visions of warm climates seem to drive salespeople though the snows of December.
• Personal standards and drivers. Ambition, ego, self-image, fear of poverty, achievement mentality — I’ve seen them all work.
• Working for good management that they can trust and the opportunity for personal growth.
• Achievable goals. Make ’em stretch — but an unattainable goal will demotivate a sales force faster than anything.
• A support organization that will help the sales force create a great buying experience for the customer and make them feel good about what they sold.
If you don’t have these things, a motivational speech, cheerleading, or a merchandise contest won’t help. If you do have these things, you don’t need the others. Focus your speakers on achieving the preceding.
Primary Intelligence has an excellent “Sales Confidence Index” survey that actually measures confidence of sales forces in the preceding factors. If your salespeople don’t believe in your company and your solutions, then they can’t sell them with conviction, and you may not know until too late without third-party feedback.
Win-Loss Reviews — The Silver Bullets of Truth
Another great metric is a win-loss analysis by a third-party organization. The words of the client as to why you won or lost are the silver bullets of truth.
Companies such as Primary Intelligence create win-loss reports that are invaluable and must be conducted by an outside third party. These reports collect information and feedback as to why you lost so that you don’t make the same mistake over and over again. This information is pure gold (and you are going to pay for it in one way or another) and needs to be refreshed on an almost-daily basis.
It will help salespeople learn from win-loss reports if they first accept that all losses are the result of being outsold. Some will say that they were just in the wrong deal. If this is the case, and they stayed until the end, they were outsold.
In the case of the “lesser product” excuse, if they sometimes win with the lesser product due to superior selling, then they must have been outsold. If price is the excuse for the loss, why didn’t they find that out earlier?
It has been said that there are three things that can happen in a deal: You can win, walk, or get outsold. In reality, there are four. You can also lose to no decision after wasting resources.
You can create your own win-loss reports, but the answers are almost always predictable. “We won because of superior salesmanship” or “We lost because of price and product.” You might as well have them preprinted.
The only caution or filter required to make the best use of this information is to remember that customers are making an emotional and political decision in the end. However, when they give answers about their decisions, they will say that the decisions were logical and rational.
The key is knowing how to dig down into the political and emotional dynamics of the deal. An effective third-party company calling on the customer will uncover incredible things about preparation, personality, politics, competitive strategies, failure to link into issues, and misreading of accounts. They are a treasure trove of corrective information.
Sustaining advantage requires continuous improvement and change, not a static solution in which strategy can be set and forgotten.
Speed has become an important element of strategy.
Execution, rather than awareness, is at the heart of making winning a habit. Speed and consistency of execution and innovation are the path to sustainable competitive advantage (see Figure 9–3).
Feedback from all these sources and metrics should cause sales forces to continuously evaluate personnel, sales messages, product offerings, value propositions, and customer loyalty. If these are well implemented and used effectively, the result is a move from inconsistent, up and down results to perpetual advantage.
We discussed in an earlier chapter how Col. John Boyd revolutionized military thinking and maneuver warfare. His acronym for competitive cycle speed in a fighter plane and then a military unit was the OODA loop. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and act, and it changed everything.
Winning pilots or winning generals get information faster than the opponent, process it faster, and react more quickly according to principles to gain an advantage in every situation. It isn’t the plan but the speed and effectiveness of the adjustment process that gives them the advantage.
Speed and accuracy of information drive speed and accuracy of strategy, which drive competitive advantage. The battles of Napoléon, Nelson, Jackson, and Patton, as well as many marketing campaigns, all teach us this lesson from history.
New technologies can enable the right metrics and adjustment processes without requiring additional input from sales reps to slow them down.
If you can measure in less than one year which salespeople can drive a complex sale, if you can detect and correct deals that are out of control at each phase of the cycle, if you can improve messages in response to the competition within 48 hours, if you can improve your sales cycle model and hiring profile with every win or loss — then you and your sales organization can get ahead, stay ahead, and achieve perpetual advantage. Somebody’s going to do it right first. Will it be you?
1. Establish realistic expectations with upper management.
2. Assess your individual and organizational pains.
3. Compare these pains with your vision — identify your performance gaps.
4. Prioritize your initiatives:
• Build a management team that shares your vision.
• Upgrade quickly those who can’t or won’t improve.
• Define your own best sales cycle model.
• Build a new hiring profile for reps; repeat upgrade.
• Re-examine your messaging positioning.
• Train on the methodology using your unique sales cycle and live accounts.
• Only then automate your process, giving reps what they need to win.
• Build your methodology into your forecast, performance reviews, compensation, and hiring profile.
5. Execute change while selling; you can’t stop to rebuild.
6. Document some quick wins to build belief and trust.
7. Reinforce coaching discipline to make winning a habit.
8. Introduce new metrics for accountability, continuous improvement, and perpetual advantage without slowing the reps down.
| Transformation Scorecard | |||||
| Best Practices, Transformation | Importance | Execution | |||
| Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) | Agree, but we never do this | We sometimes do this | We often do this | We do this consistently | |
| Individual | |||||
| We conduct sales-specific performance reviews for salespeople that include the specific skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to execute our best practices sales cycle. | |||||
| Opportunity Management | |||||
| Training is relevant and involves working live deals in class. | |||||
| We have a coaching feedback system from strategy sessions that is a part of our forecast. | |||||
| We have a presentation and messaging feedback system to measure presentation effectiveness. | |||||
| Account Management | |||||
| We have a closed-loop sales and marketing system that integrates sales, service, marketing, and design. | |||||
| Managers attend and help lead training sessions. | |||||
| Managers can track action item completion and training follow-through by individual. | |||||
| Industry/Market | |||||
| We have a top-management commitment to full integration of all sales processes — training, compensation, rewards, hiring, and tools. | |||||
| Our feedback and innovation processes keep our competition reacting to our initiatives. | |||||