I was talking to the global VP of Sales of a member company  the other day, and she said something that made me think of, arguably, the biggest social phenomenon of the 21^st century – the power of social networking , and the role it plays (or could play) in the world of Sales.

The member said, “I love what my twenty-eight-year-old MBA graduates bring to the table, I just can’t stand the way they communicate.”

At the risk of stereotyping, I’d agree that Millenials are generally more informal and bold than the corporate world would like, but they are also more willing to share and listen to each other.

This makes me wonder, in an age when one can have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook and can summarize “War and Peace” in less than 140 characters on Twitter, why wouldn’t sales organizations encourage these informal networks among its sales force for collaboration and sharing of customer insight? 

A study done by The Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia found that networks play a critical role in organizational excellence by feeding organizational innovation, creating sources of competitive advantage, and improving staff engagement and quality of work life. 

So, why not capitalize on these benefits by giving employees an outlet for sharing their knowledge and experience? And, more importantly, why not use this channel to push frontline knowledge to the top? Read More »

By Todd Burner

If you asked 10 of your best customers why they would want to be in your key account program, would you get the same answer from each customer?

And would you get an answer that included any reason other than “access to a bigger discount?”

What seems like a question that should produce a single, consistent, non-discount-focused answer can, in reality, generate a wide range of answers from customers (this helps explain why key account programs get torn down and rebuilt every 3 to 5 years due to underperformance).

The problem with most key account programs comes down to this: suppliers can’t say what’s in it for their customers beyond a bigger discount, and therefore neither can their customers.

When building a key account program, most companies make the mistake of thinking about what they want to get out of the key account program as opposed to thinking about what’s in it for the customer. 

The benefit for the sales organization is clear: more revenue.  Organizations then go looking for customers where “we should be able to sell them a lot more stuff,” and leave it to the customer to figure out what’s in it for them.

The key to building a successful key account program is communicating to the customer a clear and compelling value proposition as to why they would want to be in your key account program. Read More »

In a post last week, I revealed some of the very preliminary findings from our ongoing study of sales manager performance, and now I wanted to share one additional finding that has come to light.

After analyzing the data, we have identified one management behavior that proves to be absolutely poisonous and must be avoided at all costs. Not a huge surprise, but “playing favorites” is something every manager should avoid.

The survey question assigned to this “playing favorites” behavior was worded much more diplomatically – in fact, it was “[manager] places bets on certain individuals and then spends most time and resources with them.” But it has emerged as a great tell of whether or not a manager is fostering big problems within their team.

Thus, here’s some easy advice – when trying to gather feedback on your managers, always ask whether or not somebody is perceived to be playing favorites. Chances are, there is an easy explanation, but since perceptions are everything when it comes to working with people, the appearance of playing favorites is something that needs to be avoided at all costs.

Gamblers of the world, unite!  Did you know you can place bets on the outcomes of almost any reasonably well-known event?  There are what’s called “prediction markets” for everything under the sun – a quick search on Google for “Prediction Markets” gives nearly 1,030,000 results, with companies offering contracts on sports, financial markets, politics, and what not.

Browsing through Intrade, one of the many online prediction market companies out there shows what issues are making news and the likelihood of these events playing out in the future:

1)   ‘Obamacare’ health care reform to become law before midnight ET 30 Jun 2010 — Last Price = 52.0*

2)   Tiger Woods to play in PGA Tour event before 30 Apr 2010 — Last Price = 60.1*

3)   Crystal Bowersox to win American Idol (Season 9) — Last Price = 20.0*

4)   Dow Jones to close on or above 9,500 on 31 Dec 2010 — Last Price = 65.0* Read More »

By Andrew Kent

When you think about it, everything you do as managers boils down to one thing: getting other people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.  And getting people to change is hard. 

Fortunately, in the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, the best way to motivate people to change is BEER.

As managers and leaders, we often make two big mistakes in change management:

• Putting the “management” before the “change.”  This happens when we focus on convincing people to adopt an initiative, without having taken care of unaddressed barriers or flaws in the initiative’s design—for example, trying to boost adoption of a hard-to-use CRM system.
• Convincing the rational brain but not the emotional brain.  Most change management communication focuses on the reasons why the change is necessary for the business, and how it will benefit the individuals.  Unfortunately, people make decisions with their right brain, and no amount of rational convincing will motivate someone to change long-standing habits and behaviors.

With St. Paddy’s on my mind this week, I’ve put together a framework to overcome both these challenges that would make any green-wearing reveler proud.  For any change management initiative, simply think of BEER: Barriers, Enablers, Expectations, and Reasons: Read More »

(This is a guest post from Charlie Dorrier on the SEC Solutions team.  Solutions helps members generate customized insights, tools, and training programs to improve the overall performance of the sales force.) 

Stop for a second and think about the individual sales people on the front line of your organization.  Picture their faces and the diverse set of styles and messages that emerge in front of customers.  It’s a powerful vision that motivates many of us to be in sales in the first place: the collective voice of a sales force, driven by a single objective but made up of many different parts.

This vision is also terrifying.  Mass chaos comes to mind:  lost deals, missed opportunities, isolated information, and sometimes unsatisfied customers.  The chaos needs a little order.  And your organization needs to learn from the front-runners.  

I recently heard a sales manager sum it up very well:  “I’ve got 15 people on my team and there are 500 reps I never really see – I’m not sure I know exactly what drives success in our organization.”  By studying in aggregate all of the individual approaches to selling, a sales organization can learn a lot from itself.  Read More »

2005 was the year the Council first investigated how sales managers should coach their direct reports. At this point in time, we had never heard of credit default swaps and while everybody said they were worried about inflation, unemployment numbers were low and members were relatively sanguine about the prospects for continued growth. The pressure on the sales force was really centered on trying to accelerate the sales cycle. Buyers themselves were often looking to add capacity and were generally willing to cooperate with efforts designed to speed up decision-making.

Today, things couldn’t be more different from an economic perspective and the sales force is more worried about closing the sale than trying to accelerate the sales cycle per se. And so, we have returned to the topic of sales management this year and are investigating what new requirements are being placed on sales managers.

While we are still collecting data from our sellers in terms of the behaviors they observe from their manager, we do have some early observations. First, sales reps continue to score their managers low in terms of the coaching they provide. Fully 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching as opposed to the other behaviors that a sales manager will need to demonstrate, such as planning, assessing risks, championing new initiatives or even delivering bad news to senior management. Read More »

Last week, Boeing scored a major coup when Northrop Grumman withdrew from a contest to provide the U.S. Air Force with a new fleet of tankers after the Pentagon refused to revise elaborate rules that appeared to favor Boeing’s smaller, 767-based tanker over the larger Airbus A330 that Northrop planned to bid.

Turns out that Boeing managed to get the US Air Force to rewrite the bid to take into account the life-time expenses of operating the aircraft, as well as the cost to retrofit Air Force runways and hangars to accommodate the new tankers, potentially penalizing Northrop since the larger A330 would burn more fuel and wouldn’t fit into current parking spaces.

Although most of us aren’t bidding on decade-long, $35 Billion tanker orders, we’re likely facing many of the same challenges as Boeing and Northrop: customers with a limited view of their needs, multiple decision makers and influencers, buyers who try to commoditize our offer, and internal politics.  Read More »

Most large sales organizations have teams working full-time trying to achieve a globally standardized sales process.  These teams develop all kinds of methodologies to attain the coveted “common language” – Six Sigma techniques to denote the smallest of errors, communication plans, voice of the customer studies, productivity audits, and training materials to name a few.

But how much of these efforts are a waste of time?

Portions of our most recent work show that sales process can be over-done, and the ROI of perfecting ‘the science of sales’ may be lower than ever: 

1)  Following a formal sales process actually has zero correlation to the success of a Challenger sales rep™, the dominant way to be a star performer in this environment.  In fact, it’s better to be agile. Standardizing activity can be a hindrance.

2)  Mere completion of scripted sales process activities doesn’t necessarily provide better pipeline visibility. Leading edge forecasters have found tracking customer reactions (rather than your actions) far more predictive. Read More »

I’ve always wished the Winter Olympics included some sort of a Decathlon. Isolated mastery of skis, skates, or curling stones is impressive, but in my view, the truest tests of athleticism are cross-functional. Show me the athlete who can bobsled down a hill, play three periods of hockey, and then cross-country ski back up!

In sales we of course expect our front-line managers to epitomize multi-functional excellence – so perhaps there is an opportunity here for comparison. Let’s dig into the Olympic history books to learn a bit about how sales managers can be more successful in their own daily decathlons. Read More »