For many years, the Council has been preaching the mantra of having sales managers spend at least 3 hours a month on coaching and developing each direct report. This year’s work on sales manager effectiveness has dramatically re-confirmed that advice.

It is once again true that the average amount of time a manager spends with their direct reports is the best, single predictor of the quality of the relationship. Once somebody spends a material amount of time with their manager, it is then more of a matter of what happens in that time.

The alarming part is that 47% of reps report receiving under the magic 3 hours and 6% of reps report receiving no coaching at all. Thus, for many sales leaders the simple advice is to start by inspecting how some managers spend their time. When you don’t see an average of 3 hours occurring, then you should try and engineer an occasion where you can observe the manager and the rep work together.

Sometimes you will find that the rep has no great desire to spend time with their manager. Depending on the rep’s performance level this might be an acceptable reaction, though not one you would like to encourage. This is when you might want to consider moving reporting relationships.

A lot of the time, the issue is simple lack of staying power. The weekly pull-ups are too easy to push off since something else will always seem more urgent. This is where a simple coaching pulse survey can work wonders as it permits periodic inspection and sends a clear message that senior managers value these interactions. Read More »

I’ve had a lot of members over the last couple of weeks ask me essentially the same question – “How should we measure and evaluate our efforts to build Challenger™ reps?” 

The actual measures will be different depending on your go-to-market model and the length of your sales cycle, but there are several universal measurement principles that can be applied to any business:

Measuring Adoption:

Adoption is a tricky metric to measure, because of two challenges:

1. Just because a rep says they delivered a pitch, doesn’t mean that they delivered it well
2. Just tracking what sales did gives you little insight into how a customer reacted to that sales interaction

In light of those two challenges, consider the following two ideas:

Periodic internal “spot checks” from either the management team or some other vetting team (comprised of people who are deemed “the best” at delivering the pitch) would be subjective, but helpful – you could then cross reference that with reps’ actual sales results. 

For a concrete example of this, see the process and scorecard that Britannia developed for measuring coaching interactions.  You can take the principles of this scorecard and apply it to reps and Challenger behaviors. 

Another member that has done a lot of work around “teaching” is W.W. Grainger.  Grainger doesn’t necessarily measure whether a rep delivered a teaching pitch, but rather that the customer completed a diagnostic that complements the sales pitch.  This could only mean the teaching pitch was delivered well – because otherwise a customer would never care about completing the diagnostic.  For similar ideas about measuring customer reactions and “customer verifiers,” review our Improving Sales Predictions study.  Read More »

By now, my assumption is that most readers of this blog have had at least some exposure to the work the Sales Executive Council has done this past year on the profile of the winning sales rep.  If not, it’s probably worth a minute of your time to read Karen Freeman’s summary of this work in her previous post: Why Sales Challenger?.  Across the past year we’ve been on the road sharing this work with members and I’d like to provide some insight into how those conversations have played out.

This work was specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?

Adding to what we can glean from Karen’s post, this quantitative effort uncovered five profiles of sales reps:  The Challenger™, The Relationship Builder, The Hard Worker, The Lone Wolf and The Problem Solver.  And our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist.

Now, as we dig into these profiles across different industries, The Relationship Builders that we found (the clear underperformers) are, in a sense, a “one trick pony” – squarely focused on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likeable and generous with their time. This is very much a service mentality. 

And it was usually at this point in member conversation around this work that we would get some potential pushback – typically in the form of “but relationships are important to our success”.

Well, regarding the winning rep—The Challenger—the SEC’s work does not suggest that these reps don’t/can’t build strong relationships. In fact, the high-performer challengers found in the sample were above average on all of the “relationship building” attributes.  They just don’t hang their hat on those attributes like a relationship builder would. Put another way, it’s not their major.   Read More »

(This is a guest blog 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.) 

It’s a constant challenge we hear from members every day:  “we’re trying to get our sales teams to spend more time with customers, but there’s SO much other stuff that gets in the way.”  Internal reporting, forecasting, order tracking, competitive research, aligning internal resources – there is no end to the list of “stuff” that makes it hard for sales reps to actually spend time meeting with their customers.

SEC Solutions maintains a constant pulse on the areas where sales teams are spending time across the sales cycle.  Known as the B2B Sales Index ^TM  , this tracking mechanism allows us to provide clients with clear answers when they ask questions like “how much time do other companies in our industry spend in direct contact with customers?”

And as you might expect, the answer to that question is different today than it was just four or five years ago.

The following bullet points summarize some of the most recent trends in the B2B Sales Index^TM, comparing time spend in 2007 through 2009 with the same data from 2004 through 2006.

• Sales reps spent 20% LESS time conducting initial meetings with customers and presenting the value proposition.
• Time spent following up on sales calls with customers was down 32%. Read More »

Everything we’ve learned about changing customer demands over the last two years points to two undeniable facts:

1)     The overall sales experience must feel demonstrably different than your competition, and

2)     The opportunity to demonstrate that difference happens in a very short timeframe (most likely, the first 2-3 minutes of your first conversation with a customer).  In other words, to quote our friends at Corporate Visions, Inc., “your brand rests on the lips of your sales reps.”

The timeframe for sales experience differentiation is very short, but many support mechanisms were conceived as a means to achieve scale for a big direct sales force.  Think for a minute about the way your Sales Ops team is organized, its responsibilities, and the tools they create to support your biggest sales objectives.  Most likely, they are built to support an entire sales cycle.  The central organizing theory is very often the sales process itself.

But most sales processes aren’t very different from one another – in fact, many are off-the-shelf vendor solutions.  How well can that support the need for a highly differentiated conversation? Read More »

By Andrew Kent

I recently spoke with a member in the furniture industry who told me, “sustainability is our differentiator.  If our customers know why it’s important to care about green issues, we should win 100% of those deals.”

Until recently, most businesses assumed that being green and making money were diametrically opposed.  Making products more ecologically friendly was seen as a cost, not an opportunity.

Today however, this logic is fast becoming irrelevant.  With permanently higher energy prices, China’s push for clean energy, and growing awareness of the dangers of carbon pollution (such as ocean acidification and global warming), the best companies are recognizing that sustainability and growth go hand-in-hand.  Indeed, many companies we talk to are ramping up their efforts to promote their products as “green.”

Unfortunately, too many companies look at green products through a features and benefits lens.  The standard pitch is, “We’re green, so buy from us!”  That pitch may work if your customers are particularly noble.  But for customers who care only about the bottom line—e.g. most of them—the greenness pitch falls flat.  In today’s intensely cost-obsessed economy, a product’s greenness is rarely enough to make up for the typically higher upfront price.

But this does not mean that green investments are a waste of effort.  On the contrary, it means that Sales has the key role to play in making sure sustainability investments pay off.  Because remember, it’s not what you sell—it’s how you sell. 

Read More »

(This is a guest post by Whitney Satin of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for senior marketers.) 

History is ripe with famous feuds: the Capulets and Montagues, the Hatfields and McCoys, Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Burr.  Enter Sales and Marketing to the fray: often at odds, though truly dependent on one another for the successful operation of any given company.  If early results from our sales and marketing alignment diagnostic are any indication, the two groups have managed to find at least some common ground: commercial messaging is crucial … and it’s something we’re not very good at it.

The pain points are many.  On the one hand, sales reps say that the messaging and positioning they get from Marketing is largely irrelevant.  More often than not, reps bypass Marketing’s collateral altogether, opting instead to create their own campaigns they believe will more quickly move customers through the purchase funnel.

On the other side of the floor, marketers often gripe that Sales fails to tailor messages to address the unique needs of different customers.  Once armed with a pitch, reps go on autopilot—or so the theory goes.  This results in missed opportunities to make the company’s given solution truly resonate with customers, which ultimately translates into missed revenue.

Finger pointing aside, it’s safe to say we must have a pretty broken machine when it comes to delivering consistent messages across the slew of interactions we have with our customers.  From advertising to product information to tradeshow collateral, the opportunities to send mixed messages are many and, as companies explore social media facets, still growing.  Read More »

You count on your star salespeople. They’ve delivered the number time and time again, so you know you can lean on them in a pinch. But how do you know when you’re leaning on a star too much?

In a prolonged pinch like the recent global recession, we ask more from our salespeople than ever. It is perhaps unsurprising then that 73% of reps believe that their sales goals are unachievable. This is a cause for concern; we all know that nothing deflates sales rep morale like an unreachable goal.

To combat this risk, conventional wisdom teaches us to watch for the tell-tale signs of employee burnout – particularly with star performers who are  exceptionally prone to overextension. 

But according to Duke University (and U.S. Olympic) Men’s Basketball coach Mike Kryryzewski, all of this pooh-poohing of star performers is nonsense. Kyryzewski (a.k.a. Coach K) has faced a media onslaught in recent months for the unusually high minutes-per-game his stars log.

The questions are not unfounded: of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s four “most-played” basketball players this year, three are at Duke. In fact, all five of the most-played athletes in ACC history have played under Coach K, leading some analysts to attribute Duke’s chronic NCAA tournament underperformance in recent years to late season fatigue.

Contrarian though it may be, Kryryzewski’s take on the issue – which he says he’s learned from years of experience – is simple:  When the going gets tough, your stars want to play. That’s a big part of why they’re stars. The best thing you can do as a leader is let them play. Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge | Drivers of Sales Performance

Many SEC members have been asking us how to get their contact center staff to up-sell and cross-sell customers while they’re on the phone with them.  For the most part, this interest is driven by a desire to allow the field sales organization to focus on more complex selling activities by getting other, lower-cost, channels focused on the transactional sales.  

But a huge majority of these same members report that they struggle to make headway and that these efforts to turn the contact center into a sales channel end up stalling out.  

SEC’s sister program, the Customer Contact Council, recently looked at the best levers for getting service reps to up-sell and cross-sell.  Their study of 1300+ contact center reps across more than 50 companies helps explain why most companies stumble in their efforts to drive sales through the contact center. 

The two big reasons are:

1) Sales productivity is driven by a different set of levers in the contact center: Senior leaders tend to think that the two most important levers to pull in building sales capabilities are to build a sales culture/environment in the contact center and to increase the organization’s emphasis on monetary rewards. 

The CCC’s research, however, shows that the “sales culture” effect is nominal, at best.  Meanwhile, an over-emphasis on monetary incentives can actually harm sales performance for customer service reps.   Read More »