Today’s reps must constantly keep up with an increasingly complex selling environment in which customers only want to talk about price. This has placed added emphasis on sales managers to acquire and fine-tune their coaching skills to make sure they’re adequately coaching reps for this environment. And while we know that coaching has always been a critical component to our sales teams’ success, keeping managers on top of their coaching game is easier said than done.

But why exactly is it so hard?

First, managers have more on their plates than ever. They’re not only trying to make sure their team is highly skilled and motivated, but they’re focusing on driving process adherence, generating forecasts, designing territory plans, managing special projects, and the list goes on. Mangers often feel like they’re working in an environment of reactive “firefighting” and struggle to prioritize responsibilities and determine which activities are the most valuable use of their time.

Secondly, managers are also brushing up on their own skills, as they often need to help ‘unstick’ stalled deals that fall off the tracks in late stages of the purchasing process. Here, our managers are being called on to use a different-in-kind skill set to navigate around deals in creative ways and push them across the final yard to the finish.

Finally, the world of selling is always changing.  Both our reps and our customers have greater access to information and technology than they did just two years ago – with new CRM add-ons, tablet technology as selling tools, new social media sites, and the overbearing reliance on the internet, curating through a fire hose of information is undoubtedly an overwhelming part of our daily activities. Nevertheless, data from our 2012 research revealed that star reps are leveraging technology and information-gathering in new ways that even the SEC didn’t expect. Read More »

The mission seems simple enough: engage customers with additional parts of our business.  We know there are additional ways to be partnering with these customers that can benefit both parties.  However, it always feels so difficult, often times, nearly impossible.  There seems to be these constant barriers to effectively cross-selling to our customers.  What gives?  If only we had the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) to help us.

Well, we aren’t claiming to be the IMF, but at the SEC we have been able to capture insights from our members about why cross-selling is so hard and what we can do to change that.  First, the rep-level impediments to cross-selling:

• The short-term focus versus the long-term focus
• Lack of knowledge of other products and divisions
• The giving up of control
• Time and effort spent coordinating with another division
• Lack of rewards for cross-selling

It’s certainly not an exhaustive list, and I’m sure you might want to add a few more.  But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is that there are some serious rep-level barriers to making cross-selling happen, effectively. Read More »

(This post was originally published by the Market Research Executive Board and the Communications Executive Council but we have updated it from the sales perspective…)

For many years I looked to Bill Lumbergh from Office Space as my “what not to say” as a manager tutor (“I’m gonna need you to…”).

But we now have an updated list of phrases that should never pass a manger’s lips thanks to workplace expert Liz Ryan.  She recently blogged the 10 things only bad managers say.  Among the most groan-inducing:

• “I don’t pay you to think.”
• “Who gave you permission to do that?”
• “In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all.”

What’s the common denominator behind these infuriating catchphrases? Clearly, it’s an overbearing approach to management, which is guaranteed to stifle any agility, innovation or creativity. Years back, this might have been deemed a minor irritant – a trivial complaint that employees’ whimsical ideas weren’t being taken seriously. But as more and more deals today become stuck in ‘no decision’, we’ve got to rely on creativity and innovation in order to get them to close. Read More »

We’ve all seen this situation play out: one of your average salespeople calls you with great news. “It turns out the Smith account finally called me in! They’re ready to move forward and want us to present next Wednesday!”

We all know what this is. It’s the dreaded bake-off, where three other vendors, including the favorite, will attend, pitch, and essentially help the customer to squeeze more discount from that favorite. (Whether or not the best reps show up is another question I’ll handle in a future blog – turns out they do go, but play by a wildly different set of rules).

But here’s the irony of the situation – while you coach this salesperson to get in earlier while the customer’s needs are being defined and they’re motivated enough to do something, you’re likely setting this rep up for failure. The SEC’s brand new research examines precisely what the best reps are doing to “get in early.”   Read More »

(This is the second post in our series on sales organizations’ emerging use of social media as a channel for shaping demand.)

Social media is a key ingredient for reps to be able to get in earlier and help shape demand. Proactive engagement in digital communities can be effective in sales, but reps will be even more successful with support from their organization. Even without a full social media strategy you can still support individual reps entering the landscape. In the second of our social media blog series we look at some simple things your organization can do to start making your reps’ online presence more professional.

LinkedIn is becoming a prerequisite to online professional engagement. Your organization can use a basic checklist to ensure reps all have a minimum online presence in this forum.

There are two reasons why organizational involvement is a good thing:  1) Introducing your reps to the world of social media is a helpful start for those who don’t know how to get into it and 2) a central perspective will allow you some control to align your reps’ personal brand with your company brand.

So what does a good social media profile look like? It must be: Read More »

While few would disagree that standardization of a process is critical to a company implementing CRM and pipeline management, many still struggle to balance standardization with the need to customize guidance to an individual’s unique needs.

During pipeline reviews, managers are often left to compare individual pipelines to company averages (e.g. average opportunities per stage, average time per stage, or average close ratio).  And that presents a challenge to managers, as the guidance they give to their reps is based on what others do.  This means pipeline coaching conversations often sound like this – “well, on average, reps in our segment should have 3X their goal in their pipeline at all times to ensure they’ll hit their goal.”

But when you look at how individual sales reps manage their funnel, every rep is different.  They have different average deal size and close ratios, and they spend different amounts of time on deals in different stages.  So the number of opportunities they would need to have in each stage to hit goal would vary widely.

Not only does the lack of customization make the data and coaching seem irrelevant from a sales rep perspective, managers are equally limited in their ability to prescribe credible and customized action to reps based on how each of their reps uniquely manage their funnel. Read More »

With more access to information than ever before, it’s become clear that customers no longer “need” supplier input to make informed purchase decisions.

SEC research shows, on average, customers are 57% of the way through their purchase decision before they make first contact with a supplier—which more often than not means the only thing suppliers are left to compete on is price. With that in mind, the ability for reps to get in early and shape customer demand has become a necessity in today’s world of sales. But how does your organization support reps’ efforts to shape demand?

We know that high performing sales reps have been doing this on their own for quite some time, but it’s been unclear as to how exactly they’ve been going about it—until now.

Our 2012 research shows that high performers’ success at shaping customer demand is attributed to four distinct behaviors, one of which is conducting non-traditional customer due diligence. By surfacing in-depth information about opportunities from outside experts, internal subject matter experts, operations teams, other sales people, partners, customer stakeholders, etc., the best reps cultivate a deep understanding of accounts. High performers then engage customers in the formative stages of their learning process with tailored insight developed from this understanding. Read More »

How many of us have started off a customer conversation with the following question, “so, Mr. or Mrs. Customer, what’s currently keeping you up at night?”?

Let’s all hold hands and officially mark today’s date as the death of this question.  In our survey of thousands of customers that dug into what drives their loyalty, they have explicitly told us they don’t value this approach. What’s more, they’re tired of answering this question for every single supplier that walks through the door.

Customer expectations for the sales experience have shifted in recent years.  They expect salespeople to have a perspective on what should be keeping them up at night, not just fire question after question at them.   Read More »

Sales organizations are waking up to the numerous benefits of iPads and tablets, and are just realizing how the technology can help reps in their day-to-day activities.

In a recent member poll, 75% of respondents are already using tablet technology or plan to do so in the next 12 months. While this signals that members see the potential of tablets in Sales, the jury is still out on how effective this technology will be as a sales tool and what risks or drawbacks may be involved.

During our recent webinar on iPads® and Tablets as next-gen sales tools, Ben Calfee, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at LexisNexis, and Shelley Lawrence, Ph.D, Director of Sales Operations at ENDO Pharmaceuticals, shared their initial experiences with iPads and tablets.

The discussion covered topics including:

• Tablet evaluation and pilot programs
• Potential uses for the technology
• Early results and sales force feedback
• Ongoing tablet support and long-term plans

Here are some excerpts from the Q&A: Read More »

You know that your best sellers succeed by teaching customers something new about their business. But what sales messages are your sellers sharing with customers and prospects? And how do you know when you have an insight versus a catchy but fleeting idea?

Our most recent findings from this year’s new research study, Getting in Early: Shaping Demand through Pre-Funnel Engagement, reveal that many companies struggle to discern thought leadership from true insight. They often arm their sellers with newsworthy sales messages that grab customer attention but have little lasting impact, and alone are insufficient to create a sense of urgency that translates to customer action.

While we all know and agree that insights are the key to successful selling in a complex environment, companies struggle to generate commercial insights and to know what good insight should look like.

So what exactly is insight anyway? Read More »