How does a sales organization measure its true potential anyway? Making quota is an arbitrary measure; it just keeps your job in most places. But how much of the pie could you have gotten if you had performed to your full potential? What if each rep had made goal? What if all the reps had won every deal they pursued? Why don’t they? What if discounts had been one percent less? What if new people got up to speed faster? What if they knew when to qualify out of bad deals? What if new products had been launched better? What if you had retained all your best reps? What is the gap between what you did do and what you could do?
And if there is a gap between what you know to do and how your organization is actually performing, then what is causing this weakness in execution, and how can you get better?
My first book, Hope Is Not A Strategy, generated more than 150 speeches and gave me the opportunity to evaluate hundreds of sales organizations worldwide. In meeting with these sales executives, three recurring themes surfaced:
(1) common knowledge is not always common practice,
(2) some sales executives are satisfied with merely catching up to the state of the art 15 years ago because it’s what they are comfortable with, and
(3) very few sales organizations are closed-loop continuously improving systems—instead, they improve in fits and starts.
There often seems to be a gap between what companies know to do and how they consistently perform. Although there are processes in place, many have fallen into disuse. Moreover, what sales managers really want to know is, how do we compare? What are the differences between what we’re doing and the best practices of great sales organizations? How do we make anything stick? Finally, what innovations do we need to get ahead? And then how do we stay ahead?
This was all so natural when I was a sales rep. But now, I’m a manager and the challenges are all different. How do I get it out of my head and into their heads?
I just accepted a job managing a 100 person sales force that has consistently missed their forecast and quota quarter after quarter.
Though some of our people have good individual selling skills, they lack strategy. I’m not always sure they are in the right accounts or selling to the right people. There is no consistent process.
There’s a CRM (client relationship management) tool in place, but no consistency of usage. Most salespeople use one tool for overall strategy, another for pain and linkage, and still another for account analysis — all from different vendors. Some don’t use anything.
None of them are integrated and most of the time, forecasting is done on spreadsheets.
As a whole, our salespeople are short-term, opportunistic, revenue-focused, beginning every quarter thinking about the quarter at hand, rarely planning ahead. Most deals are ignored by the managers until they’re in their last 90 days, sometimes less. Consequently, we lose and don’t really know why.
We are a public company, so the ability to realistically forecast revenue is important. More than once, sloppy forecasting has forced managers to throw hugely discounted deals at customers before they’re ready to buy. Last quarter, our CEO was embarrassed by a bad quarter caused by deal slippage and the stock dropped 20 percent. We can’t let that happen again.
Some people do the right thing sometimes, but there is no consistency or discipline. There’s no process or best practices in place for our most talented people to repeat their performance on a regular basis.
How do we make winning a habit around here?
Sales managers are unique among managers because they are almost always evaluated by four levels of performance:
1. Are you executing well enough what you already know how to do?
2. Are you at least executing the best practices of others in your industry?
3. What “next practices” and innovations can you do right now to get ahead of your competitors?
4. What feedback and continuous improvement processes will make these initiatives self-correcting organizational habits that drive perpetual advantage?
So what are the universal tools that executives apply to sales managers? That’s easy — more pressure, flog the forecast, cheerlead, and maybe a little more money.
This is what most do, but not what the best do. They do it differently. To discover how they do it, you will need to take a little journey with me through this book. We will look at your practices, the practices many of our clients have used successfully, and the practices that are executed well by the very best in the business. And as we do it, we will explore a transformational map that can institutionalize those practices that you most need right now.
So let’s get started. To begin, see if you can find yourself anywhere in the dozen most common problem areas that sales managers face.
The Deadly Dozen: The 12 Biggest Pains Sales Managers Feel Today
When we talk to sales executives and managers at organizations and ask where they are weak, their responses generally fall into 12 categories.
1. Unclear Sales Process, No Common Language
“It takes forever to discuss an account around here. It takes almost an hour just to tell the ‘story’ and then I’m not sure if we’ve covered everything or have a clear strategy. We don’t know what we don’t know. There’s got to be a more efficient and effective way to strategize deals on a global basis.”
2. Missed Forecasts—Happy Ears, Surprises
“We understand that a positive mental attitude is good, but it can interfere with sound judgment. Some of our salespeople and managers are habitually overoptimistic about their chances of winning. How do we make sure that deals are being coached and evaluated by our more experienced managers?”
3. Qualification, Chasing Bad Deals
“We agree that there’s a fine line between qualifying out and quitting. Everyone in sales knows that you don’t get into a deal you don’t think you can win. But who decides what is winnable? We don’t have agreed-upon criteria that constitute an unworthy deal.”
4. Selling Too Low—We Can’t Sell to Executives
“We have heeded the words of marketing and moved our offerings from ‘products’ to ‘solutions,’ requiring our salespeople to sell higher in the organization. The solutions have moved up to the strategic level, but many of our salespeople are still selling products and transactions too low in the organization.”
5. Lack of Effective Messages, No Differentiation
“Our salespeople and marketing department don’t talk. In fact, most of the time, they don’t even like each other. Sales reps receive tons of brochures, but have to sift through it all to find the right message. And the broader the product line, the longer it takes new salespeople and product launches to get up to speed.”
6. Competition—Lost Sales Opportunities
“We’re getting outsold and surprised in too many deals. By the time we get to the presentation, we’re in reaction mode. It seems like the competition is getting in control earlier.”
7. Commoditized Pricing—We Need to Move Up the Value Chain
“Too many of our salespeople are transactional. They don’t look at the bigger picture. Their attitude is to just get the deal off the table instead of growing it into a larger solution sale.
We’re not building value in our solution early in the buying cycle, and as a result, procurement is treating us like a commodity in the end. Plus, for years, we have trained our clients how to buy from us at the end of a quarter.”
8. Selling to the Wrong People—Politics and Relationships
“My people have taken courses on pain discovery and linking solutions, but they spend too much time doing this with people who don’t really have much influence when it comes to selecting a vendor. They’re not finding out who the real decision makers are. We’ve even been blindsided by people we didn’t know were involved in the decision.”
9. Silo Selling, Poor Team Selling
“Too often, we have multiple reps from different divisions calling on the same client. Our customers want one point of contact, but our salespeople at the local level can’t see the big picture. Our divisions don’t even talk among themselves, and that leads to conflicting strategies and embarrassment.”
10. Account Selection/Segmentation Investment
“We don’t know how to decide in which accounts to invest. It doesn’t make sense to cover them all equally. Which ones can we dominate? Who can we grow and who do we just maintain? Which ones can we partner with? Which ones are a waste of our time? How do we decide?”
11. Poor Deal Coaching
“My salespeople are not getting the strategy help they need from my front-line sales managers. Either they don’t have time or don’t know how to coach deals. This affects our win rate and forecast accuracy.
We promoted our best salespeople to be managers, but the skills are different, and they get no real training.”
12. Poor Discipline, No Consistency
“We’ve tried several initiatives in sales training and CRM with moderate success, but we’ve had a hard time making anything really stick.”
SiriusDecisions, a sales effectiveness research and consulting firm, says:
It is all too common to see senior executives look at a longer sales cycle as something that can be controlled solely by changing internal behavior; for example, teaching their salespeople to sell more aggressively.
But in a world where buyers have more power than ever before, a sales cycle doesn’t elongate because a sales team forgets how to sell; it elongates because buyers have changed the way they buy, and sales and marketing together as a tandem don’t adapt.
In its “2005 Sales Benchmarking Study,” Sirius Decisions defines the top five sales challenges as:
1. Need to be more effective selling to senior-level buyers
2. Need to do a much better job at generating both leads and new business
3. Need to do a better job forecasting effectively
4. Need to improve industry knowledge
5. Need to adopt a more formal “way of selling” (sales methodology)
John DeVincentis and Neil Rackham sounded the early warning years ago in McKinsey Quarterly: “Almost everywhere, transactional sales forces have unsustainably high cost structures; consultative sales forces don’t sell deeply enough to win business; and would-be enterprise players lack the cross-functional capacity to create enough value to cover the huge costs of this approach. Most sales forces are in no-man’s-land.”[1]
While some progress has been made, many sales forces still face the same challenges today.
Now that we have defined the problems, what are sales managers doing to solve them and achieve consistent sales performance? While we obviously haven’t talked to every sales force, we have talked to hundreds, as well as leading consultants who have surveyed hundreds more, to identify many of the best practices in sales effectiveness.
It is helpful to think how sales executives have approached the problem in the past compared with how we must address the problem in the future.
From the industrial revolution, when professional selling was born, to the 1970s, sales training was based on price, product, and personality. The first major change came with the birth of consultative selling for discovering needs and creating preference and action with individuals.
1970s: First Generation—Training Courses
In the 1970s, sales training and methodology consisted of a large number of small vendors in a fragmented market. The sales training at that time consisted of point solutions, mainly aimed at skills—Xerox professional selling skills, presentation skills, time management, and discovery and linkage skills from individual companies.
Prior to 1970, in addition to product training, sales training consisted largely of motivational speeches and awareness in one- to two-hour bursts, which had a wide range of effectiveness but usually a short shelf life.
1980s: Second Generation—Curriculum Coordination
In the 1980s, since the market was highly fragmented, sales managers and training executives realized that they needed more than one training course—they needed an entire curriculum of training courses. This was so especially after companies moved from selling products to selling solutions. The birth of consultative selling, linking solutions to business issues, was the standard of this decade.
During that time, vendors often would be asked to meet with their competitors to build a coordinated curriculum for their clients, sometimes internally branded under the client’s label.
1990s: Third Generation—Integration
As buyers moved to companywide solutions, selling to multiple buyers on a committee required competitive and political opportunity strategy management in addition to basic skills courses of how to win individual preference.
Also in the 1990s, sales training moved to an era of tailoring and integration. Buyers wanted materials and processes customized to them and integrated into their CRM systems, training programs, and compensation plans.
Sales managers realized that if they didn’t manage the interferences from the rest of the infrastructure, they would be training salespeople to do one thing while paying them to do another—with obvious dismal results.
Inconsistent attention was still being paid to adoption and change management issues, resulting in spotty execution.
2000: The Future: Fourth Generation — Perpetual Advantage
Improved metrics and visibility into the pipeline—along with integration with sales infrastructure, better deal and performance coaching by front-line managers, and a feedback system that refreshes competitive messaging every 48 hours or less — can result in a closed-loop sales and marketing system.
Only with such a closed-loop system—one that integrates sales, service, marketing, design, and perpetual innovation — can you achieve perpetual competitive advantage.
Only then can we lengthen the average 24-month employment span of sales executives.
Some of these are new ideas; some are not. Some of these pains have been around for a long time. So then why are they still pains? You already may be aware of these best practices, but the real challenge is, “How well is your organization actually doing them?”
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
If there are gaps in your sales performance in comparison with your potential, how much change do you need? Do you need better execution, continuous improvement, or a major transformation? The answer, to some degree, depends on whether you are new to the organization, how it has performed in the past, your own expectations, and those of your management.
In talking to several executives who have successfully achieved quantum leaps in sales effectiveness, we have found that they have used similar approaches to define, prioritize, and execute the changes needed in their sales organizations.
After the sale of American Management Systems (AMS), a Fairfax, Virginia-based consulting firm, to CGI, Donna Morea was named president of the newly formed U.S. subsidiary, one of our principal Peter Bourke’s accounts.
Prior to the merger, AMS and CGI had very different sales organizations. AMS was highly centralized and organized by industry—CGI was highly decentralized and organized by geography.
Donna’s approach to changing the new organization to a more sales-driven culture concentrated on three legs of a stool.“We focused on (1) how we sell, (2) who we sell to, and (3) what we sell,” she said.
The first focus area centered on the need to adopt consistent and proven sales disciplines across CGI-AMS (the how). Second, Donna pushed the organization to adopt a new approach to segmenting the market (the who), with the goal of focusing the majority of CGI-AMS’s account management and business development resources on a smaller number of strategic accounts. Finally, she worked with her leadership team to “overlay” the geographically oriented organization structure with an industry focus-enabling CGI-AMS to articulate a clear go-to-market strategy for each of its core industries (the what).
The result was less focus on pure one-off customer consulting and more focus on their core competencies and industry solutions where they already had deep expertise and a solid track record of performance. This was more profitable and lower risk. In the “how” leg of the stool, they adopted new processes for account and opportunity management. They also redefined roles and responsibilities for the sales teams to reduce the “swarming” approach used in the past.
To make this new sales culture “stick,” Morea said she had to get leadership to embrace the new vision initially on faith and ultimately through experience.
“Those were the ‘noble’ means,” she said.“The ‘less noble’ means included money. We had a fund that we set aside that included discretionary money for our most important opportunities.To get the money, they had to learn and use the process and the tools.”
“We wanted to inspire people,” Morea said.“To sell the vision, it was really important for us to find some quick wins using these principles. It’s amazing what a little bit of success can do to convince the skeptics.”
“I figured 10 to 15 percent would be early believers and sign up.Then, another 60 to 70 percent would follow a win. But there will be 10 to 20 percent who never sign on, no matter what,” she said. “The 60 percent majority is made up of good people. Once good people see that you have good tools, they will behave rationally. Good people understand that good tools will help them execute.You’re never going to get everyone.”
Performance reviews—ensuring that sales managers were reinforcing the new culture and coaching—were introduced, and an internal coach, available at large, was added. The internal coach’s job was also to monitor the forecast for sales phase changes and to make sure strategy sessions were being conducted at the right time.
The new sales culture is a success. And the company recently closed a $350 million government contract.
The first step is identifying the gaps in your performance potential and execution. On a scale of 1 to 3, rate the following pains as they apply to your organization:
| Sales Effectiveness Gap Analysis (1 = Not a pain; 2 = Somewhat a pain; 3 = Major pain) | |||
| Sales Pain | |||
| Unclear sales process, no common language | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Missed forecasts—Happy ears, surprises | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Qualification, chasing bad deals | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Selling too low—We can't sell high enough to execs | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Lack of effective messages, no differentiation | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Competition—Lost sales opportunities | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Commoditized pricing—We need to move up value chain | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Selling to the wrong people—Politics and relationships | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Silo selling, poor team selling | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Account selection/segmentation investment | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Poor deal coaching | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Poor discipline, no consistency | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Other pains: | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
A vision is important, but the last thing that we suggest you do is organize a committee and spend several months thrashing out a vision statement. It shouldn't be that hard.
Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford, in his excellent book, The Knowing-Doing Gap, describes mission statements as one of several substitutes for action, and they can be if you dwell on them too long. Lou Gerstner, when he took over IBM, shocked everyone when he stated, "The last thing we need right now is a vision statement." He knew that the company had to stop the bleeding first.
Bill Hybels, who has grown Willow Creek church into a megachurch near Chicago, says that "a vision is a picture of the future that produces passion."[2]
When we work with sales organizations in this area, we simply ask them for descriptive statements about their organization as it is now and how they would like it to be three years from now from the point of view of (1) customers, (2) competitors, and (3) the sales force.
After talking about each one and eliminating some, the usual revelation is "Why not?" Good visions are usually achievable, but a stretch. The next step, of course, is to translate this into goals, objectives (which are measurable and date-driven), strategies, and, finally, action items and owners.
The greatest vision statement of the last century was John Kennedy's declaration in 1961 that the United States would have a man on the moon and back by the end of the decade. It happened on July 20, 1969.
The purpose of this book is to help you create a vision of what you could achieve by sharing best practices of other great sales organizations, as well as the process for making it happen and a process for making it stick.
Every sales executive is playing a game of "beat the clock." One of the important variables in your approach to improving sales effectiveness is the relationship between the sales leader and the CEO. If the board and the CEO recognize the depth of the sales problem, and you are a new hire, you need to set expectations that this will take one to two years for a full transformation. If you can't get that commitment, don't take the job. Of course, you will have to show progress along the way.
And you can't go in and fire everyone immediately. You have to fight the battleship while you fix it. But if you don't have a firm resolution and change things proactively, the organization can absorb you like a bullet into butter.
If, on the other hand, your company is a public company and the CEO is managing the company to the analysts' expectations, or if venture capitalists are involved, don't believe for a minute that you can avoid showing quarter-to-quarter improvement. When financial strategy drives sales strategy, the result is usually short-term thinking and sub-optimization of full sales potential. This is a reality of life.
When we were selling to PeopleSoft in 1998, we met with their executive team just as a period of rapid growth was beginning to slow.
While the meeting was about sales effectiveness, we gave them this warning: " Next year, you'll grow by 50 percent, but your stock price will fall in half. And there is nothing that you are willing to do about it." They were stunned.
The reason we could make such a bold prediction is that we had seen it many times in the software industry.
The previous year, they had grown by 80 percent, but competition had finally matched their technological advantage in their core products. But PeopleSoft had planned on an 80 percent growth again and had planned expenses accordingly.
So, as predicted, sales grew 50 percent, expenses grew 80 percent, profits took a hit; the stock fell hard.
Most companies would die to have a 50 percent growth in the coming year and would make a lot of money. But who in an organization is going to go in and tell the analysts that their growth is going to slow next year? The hit on the stock price was twice as hard as a surprise than it would have been earlier.
Letting the analysts set your sales goals is a prescription for new horizons on your career path.
The executives we've worked with who have made dramatic improvements in sales effectiveness are able to prioritize the gaps in their performance and balance short-term quick-win initiatives with longer-term infrastructure changes.
Although sales improvement initiatives obviously can be conducted simultaneously rather than sequentially, in general, they approached their priorities in the same order.
You may choose priorities differently, but we share the experiences here of three successful executives who have achieved significant sales improvements as a benchmark.
Terry Turner is a veteran sales executive who has experienced changes in buying habits in three different industries—manufacturing, supply chain, and now, education. He is currently senior vice president, sales and marketing, for Harcourt Assessments.
«This was my third time transforming a sales force and each one has been different.
At Harcourt, the way the buyers buy in this industry had changed, but the sales force had not. Sales had been taking orders for existing clients on educational assessment tests and developing and informing clients about new products. The industry changed from sales to local school districts to highly competitive test adoptions for entire states — a much more complex sale for higher stakes.
In the initial assessment, we knew we needed to change the selling culture from product-driven to sales to customer-experience-driven. We were more focused on protecting turf and guarding silos than on winning or building relationships with clients.
As Jim Collins says in Good to Great, we had to get the right people on the bus or where we were going didn't matter. And we also had to get some people off the bus. I knew to start with sales management to have the most immediate impact. If I hired new salespeople who went to work for managers selling the old way, we would get nowhere.
I replaced most of the front-line managers with people I knew from my network who shared the same values, sales process, and hiring profile. People who are cynical or indifferent about change will kill your efforts with passive resistance or poor attitudes.
The second step was to change our sales messaging to more accurately convey our strengths, benefits, and differentiators rather than features.
The third step was to redefine our sales process to give everyone a playbook defining what a good sales effort looked like and what questions, information, and action items were needed in each phase. This training gave the reps a roadmap for managing a complex sale and the managers a common set of expectations for selling and coaching.
We also changed our team structure, roles, and responsibilities. We are blessed with outstanding products and people who have a great deal of expertise in educational testing. Many of them came from client backgrounds. Teaming them with professional salespeople to lead the team has allowed us to leverage our talents by getting the right people owning the right parts of the sales cycle.
The fourth step was to start redefining and reinforcing a new culture for selling and servicing customers and building relationships. This impacted every division of the company, so I needed upper management's support to handle the inevitable power struggles. We also turned over around a dozen reps out of about a hundred who were unable to change or grow.
In the next year, we will focus on improving the foundation selling skills of discovery, linkage, presentation, and objection handling. Now that we have the right people and the right strategies, next follows execution-level skills.
I initially set management expectations that it would take over a year to realize any progress. I gained influence and bought time with upper management when they saw the types of sales managers I brought in. Then, after the sales process training, we won several large deals where the new process was acknowledged to have played a significant part.
We are now focusing on the necessary coaching and metrics to make the process permanent.»
Another example of how managers set priorities to achieve dramatic sales improvement comes from Lexmark:
When I spoke at Lexmark in 2002, I could tell that Bruce Dahlgren, the vice president and general manager, understood sales performance and how to make it happen. He knew that the strategy of building an installed base of printers—and their related supplies—needed to be complemented by unique service and solution offerings. Simply put, they had to build more value.
Lexmark was previously the IBM printer division and had remnants of that culture. But Dahlgren changed the way the company sold with new people, new process, and new positioning for his solutions. And he reinforced it with coaching.
Rather than simply moving printers and ink, Dahlgren’s team focused on the larger strategy of “Print, Move, and Manage,” a spectrum of industry-focused solutions aimed at helping Lexmark customers address real printing and document process challenges. That meant more consultative selling and new roles for some people.
“Turnover had been at around 25 percent before, and we kept it there for a couple of years,” said Dahlgren.“But we were much more purposeful at bringing in a new profile of salesperson able and willing to sell solutions. Now the turnover rate is down to 3 percent.”
With the right people and processes in place, Dahlgren turned the attention of his management team to account strategy development and coaching.
“My managers had a challenge merely finding the time to coach,” Dahlgren said.“So I looked at their administrative workload and eliminated several reporting activities that weren’t really needed.We had to convince finance, but it freed up the time.The other thing we did was to designate every Monday as a coaching day in the office. Each manager reviews each major account and the action items for the week compared to our plan.
We also wanted to send the message that I actually read the forecasts and account plans. This let them know that our focus on coaching was not some half-hearted initiative they could ignore and hope would go away.”
“At Manhattan Associates, one of the things we’ve done right is that we have always had a mantra that ‘everyone is in sales.’ It’s in our DNA—to do whatever it takes to best address the needs of our customers and to continue to deliver ongoing value,”
“When I began this job, other than cultivating a sales culture, my focus was probably on people first.We are a culture that believes in very strong processes, methodology, and a common language.
Now, we focus on business execution.We focus on lots of things in the beginning and middle of a sales cycle that you have to execute well in order to put you in a winning position on ‘game day.’
We do manage the sales process with technology. It’s important, but not one of our top three items. Instead, we focus first on our people and the domain expertise they provide to our customers; second is the value proposition our solutions provide; and third we focus on our management people who are here to ensure successful execution. Then we focus on leveraging technology to further improve and extend the capabilities and deliver for the above.
For example, before we built our sales and marketing and implementation tools, we focused on raising our value proposition to a more strategic level. You have to ask the right questions first and really understand the business problems trying to be solved. Once you get all of the questions, the tools are the easy part.
Before, the sales reps just had to get the solution consultant to the presentation. Now the sales reps do so much more in the discovery phase—leading up to the presentation— to ensure that everyone is ready for game day. The scope of our offering is such now that one solution consultant can’t be expected to bring 100 percent of the domain expertise to the table single-handedly. So much of the strategy for success and overall coordination happens before the demo.
As far as coaching is concerned, we prioritize it. Most of our people have the expertise and can coach a deal, but doing it day in and day out has to be part of your culture.”
1. Assessment—Where Are We Now?
There are two approaches to assessing benchmark strengths and weaknesses. You can use experience and intuition, or you can do a more formal assessment. Or, depending on the amount of time you have, you can do both.
Some weaknesses are immediately obvious to a new manager, and you can begin taking action right away. Sometimes, however, when you have been there a while, the real weaknesses in a sales force may be harder to detect. I’ve been in evaluations where it was obvious that the management had a gut feel for what they needed but really didn’t know because they hadn’t measured it.
This book should help you with an overall organizational assessment scorecard. Assessing individual sales rep talent can’t really be done effectively until you have defined your ideal sales cycle and the skills and competencies that this demands.
The quickest and most effective way to start is with a win/loss analysis by an outside third party. This will give you the quickest feedback on why you are winning or losing and where your fastest returns for improvement lie. All this can and should be completed within 90 days to determine your initial priorities.
2. Start with People—Managers First
To put it simply and starkly: If you don’t get the people process right, you will never fulfill the promise of your business.
Front-line sales managers are the key to any sales initiative. Most managers fail because they stick with poor performers too long. Without sales managers who share your vision and values and who can and will reinforce your process, new hires will be like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
Most successful sales executives have a following of loyal lieutenants whom they can call on in these situations. For those who have burned their bridges, this takes a while longer.
Once front-line managers have defined a new hiring profile for reps, they can begin upgrading the talent, replacing those who can’t or won’t change.
3. Next Is Your Sales Process
If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
Third-party methodology vendors can give you a jumpstart in this area, but the outcome should be your own unique best-practice sales cycle for your company and your industry. Your sales technique should include the concepts from the methodology and form the basis of your training effort.
Defining your sales technique also will secure buy-in from your sales managers because it is their own work. The entire coaching discipline hinges on their reinforcement. It should be in both their performance review and comp plan, or you will get no more than a passive effort.
This can become a huge overkill project if you let it. It should be done in less than a week.
4. Positioning—What Do We Say About Us?
Would you persuade, speak of interests, not reason.
As outsiders, when we review sales messaging, we often find unfocused “me too” messages that sound exactly like the competition. Too many features, too few benefits, lack of focus on solutions for buyers, and poor differentiation — all delivered in brochure format to the sales force.
An objective, and often brutal, evaluation of your techniques in this area usually is needed to make sure that you are not “eating your own dog food.” The vice president of marketing’s buy-in here is essential to avoid defense and denial.
5. Creating a Winning Sales Culture — Align the Infrastructure
Priorities in this area include alignment of the new sales process with the rest of the sales and marketing infrastructure.
Unless compensation, rewards, roles and responsibilities, support, and policies are aligned with the new selling process, you will simply increase frustration by training salespeople to sell one way while the rest of the organizational systems incent them to act a different way.
Sometimes your new process may drive new roles for some people. These must be defined clearly and sold internally. Finally, the whole organization needs to support a selling culture as one team. This is where the support of the CEO is not an option.
6. Execution—Level Selling Skills
Some sales managers prefer to address individual selling skills first and then move to competitive strategy. Others prefer to make sure that they are selling to the right accounts and the right people before they focus on developing the skills necessary to create individual preference. Many companies have used two different vendors simultaneously to address these competencies.
These individual-level skills include discovery, listening, probing, linking solutions to pains, vision creation, presentation and writing skills, objection handling, time management, and negotiating, among others. Who needs and who gets this type of skills training should come from the performance review, which should come from your ideal sales cycle. The application of the skills should fall out of your sales strategy for that account. The result is more realistic strategy-based execution skills training rather than generic classes.
Using a single vendor allows a completely integrated strategy and training approach. Whatever the priority, though, both skills and strategy are needed to identify the key decision makers and win their hearts.
7. People and Process First — Then Automate
Why is technology so low on the list of priorities? Because if you take a bad process — combined with weak people — and automate it, you will just accelerate mistakes and frustration.
Joe Galvin, of Gartner, Inc., states: “Sales culture dictates to a large degree technology adoption and that technology alone will not change behavior… Sales productivity will be improved by sales technologies only when it is deployed into a sales culture of leveraging its potential.”
The graveyard of failed sales force automation initiatives has taught us that refining your processes first—selling the right messages through the right people—should precede any sales force automation effort.
8. New Metrics and Feedback for Perpetual Advantage
A transformation demands sustainable change. Too many initiatives wane after the first few months. Sales messages quickly lose effectiveness due to competitive responses. It shouldn’t take a year to find out whether or not a salesperson can cut it, and by the time a deal hits the forecast, it is usually out of control.
Permanent process change to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition requires faster feedback and newer metrics than ever before.
Since not all sales improvement efforts are alike, setting your priorities depends on where your sales force is and where it needs to be. Based on the successful transformations we have observed, we have built an assessment tool to help you compare your organization with the best practices of top sales forces.
Quality is not an act. It is a habit.
Once you agree that your sales force is in need of improvement, where do you start? How do you assess your sales organization in addition to just revenue? How do you identify your weaknesses?
The principals of our firm, all successful sales executives themselves, have worked with more than 250 leading sales organizations worldwide. Together, we have identified five universal areas of sales effectiveness — Talent, Technique, Teamwork, Technology, and Trust — and how they differ at each of the four levels of sales strategy: Individual, Opportunity Management, Account Management, and Industry/Marketplace. In Chapter 9 we discuss essential elements of achieving and maintaining Transformation for permanent change.
Although most sales organizations execute best practices in some areas, rarely do they achieve best practices in all areas. And certainly, these are not all the best practices in selling, but they should be enough to get you ahead of your competition and closer to your true potential as a sales force.
The result is a scorecard that we have developed to provide sales managers with a gap analysis of their organization. Through this scorecard, we’ll show you how you compare with some of the best sales forces in the world.
Here we will briefly introduce the criteria. In later chapters we will go into much more depth.
Talent
The first step in sales effectiveness is finding the right people. Selling in a complex sale requires a unique combination of sales competencies. Most of the sales managers we talk to say that fewer than 20 percent of their salespeople can consistently manage a complex sale independently.
Most people interview based on two things: performance and personality. But there isn’t a salesperson out there who can’t craft a good résumé and sell a one-hour interview. So what do you look for? Every interview is a selling event. Without a good hiring profile, which has been written and tested, how will you know what a good salesperson looks like when he or she walks in the door? Most people who think they have a good mental picture of what they are looking for would be stunned by their inconsistencies if they actually wrote them down.
Technique
There are hundreds of companies that teach sales skills — presentation skills, objection handling, closing, etc. But the one skill many salespeople lack is the ability to effectively connect their solutions to the prospect’s business problems.
In addition to a greater understanding of the client’s pain, refinements and techniques continue to advance in the areas of controlling politics, competition, and the decisionmaking process.
Innovations also have occurred in both deal coaching and overall performance coaching, as well as in the area of forecasting.
Teamwork
The salesperson’s contacts and calendar are a starting point, but they are not enough to manage an opportunity. To lead in a complex selling environment, you have to be able to communicate the plan to the rest of the team. You have to have a stakeholder analysis that identifies who is involved, what role they play, what their pains are, and how much power they have. It’s not enough for salespeople to keep it in their heads anymore.
Also, the relationship between manager and salesperson needs to move from inspector and loner to one of coach and strategist. In the rare accounts where partnering is a possibility, the team also can include the client.
Everyone on your sales team who touches the account needs to know what’s going on, what the strategy is, and must collaborate on execution and refinement of the plan.
Technology
Unfortunately, most client relationship management (CRM) applications haven’t lived up to their promise—especially in the area of direct business-to-business (B2B) sales force effectiveness. And, if implemented badly, CRM technology actually can build a barrier between you and your best clients.
The first CRM applications for direct sales were contact managers, designed to capture the salesperson’s “little black book” (today, it’s their personal Outlook file) in case they left the company. In the complex sale, however, there is more to it than just contact information. The real valuable corporate asset isn’t names and addresses — it’s the customer relationships.
Nevertheless, information is an essential tool to create a better customer experience in the hands of the right talent, using the right process, with that objective in mind.
Trust
Everyone talks about “relationships,” when what they really mean is trust. You have to build trust in your company, your people, and the quality of your solutions so that you can win repeat business with less effort and lower cost. This is the currency of account management.
What people really want is someone who knows their business. Tell them something about their company they don’t know — don’t just read information off a screen. You have to show the connection between your solutions and their issues and then sell up the chain of value. This is where salespeople themselves contribute their greatest value.
Partner is the most abused word in selling today. Buyers want more than lunch and a human brochure. They don’t really need professional friends. What they want are people they can trust to solve their business problems. This means that salespeople need to know as much or more about their customers as they do about their own products.
Sales strategy should fall out of marketing strategy (I think I heard this in business school), but it rarely happens to any great degree. Which accounts you invest in should be a part of your industry and marketing strategy. And an opportunity needs to be worked in light of what is going on in the rest of the account. How much time we spend with individuals should be a function of their role in the opportunity decision and their power in their organization.
The result, unless you are in a small account, should be an integrated four-level strategy that focuses every resource on your sales team and the client organization for maximum leverage. Unfortunately, though, it usually doesn’t happen this way.
As we move from selling to individuals to selling to departments that have a more complex decision-making process, each of the four levels of selling strategy requires different talents, techniques, technologies, teamwork, and messaging. The outcome is a unique strategy for that account, in that industry, that leads to the final outcome — trust.
A brief definition of the four levels will help us to define one dimension of the scorecard, which we will then explore in greater depth in following chapters as we move through the Five T’s of Transformation.
Industry/Market
Not every industry buys the same benefits or makes decisions in the same way. Focusing on specific industries allows you to become more consultative in your sales approach and to differentiate yourself with focused benefits, differentiators, messages, and solutions. This approach yields not only competitive advantage but also less “commoditization” at negotiating time.
Smaller companies often focus on a single industry. And the added cost and travel of a vertical approach to multiple industries necessitates economies of scale. Some companies approach this by teaming industry experts with competitive salespeople. In rare instances, extensive relationships and industry expertise can be combined in one individual — the industry networked consultant, the highest level of competency in selling.
Account Management
Few companies can afford to dedicate entire teams to all accounts in an industry. Choosing which ones to invest in requires purposeful segmentation and the clear setting of objectives in order to achieve incremental returns. Without a clear account plan, salespeople will wander the halls, building “goodwill” that never translates into additional revenue.
Opportunity Management
For some industries, such as capital equipment or consulting, opportunities are discrete buying events or evaluations. In others, they are opportunities to expand a flow of products through a channel, such as consumer packaged goods through a retail chain.
In either case, opportunities need to be inventoried and evaluated in light of all activities in the account and in the pipeline in order to combine our efforts and leverage our relationships.
Individual-Level Strategies
In larger organizations, “companies” themselves don’t relationships. Individual-Level Strategies In larger organizations, “companies” themselves don’t buy anything. Committees made up of individuals usually make decisions in a complex sale. People make up their minds first individually, and then they politically rationalize them or compromise them in the committee based on the decision-making algorithm.
Different stakeholders play different roles in the decisionmaking process and have different amounts of power within their organizations. Once you have determined which votes matter, you need an individual strategy to win their hearts or win without their vote. Building preference with everyone equally is inefficient and ineffective.
This scorecard is not for measuring what you know to do. Instead, it is for measuring your execution and consistency, for that is where sales effectiveness and competitive advantage lie. Within each cell are one or more best practices and, therefore, potential areas for focused improvement.
Once you have identified the gap between where you are and where you need to be, you must decide which areas are easy and which are hard to implement and then prioritize your initiatives.
We will discuss each column in a separate chapter. At the end of each chapter is an assessment, where you can score your own organization. (If you would like to see how your organization compares with others—you can take the survey online at www.complexsale.com.) In addition, it might be helpful to see how your sales managers and the rest of your management team would score your sales force to see if their opinion differs from yours.
In Chapter 9, we will discuss change management issues and the metrics needed to make any initiative a permanent change in process and behaviors.
| Sales Effectiveness Scorecard | |||||
| Talent | Technique | Teamwork | Technology | Trust | |
| Industry/market | |||||
| Account management | |||||
| Opportunity management | |||||
| Individuals | |||||
John R. DeVincentis and Neil Rackham, “Breath of a Salesman,” McKinsey Quarterly #4, page 42, 1998.
Bill Hybels, Courageous Leadership (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), p. 32.