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In my last post I talked about how changes in customer behavior have made our growth goals harder and harder. Specifically, customers may be more open to buying a vision, but getting a deal to completion has gotten a lot more challenging, and less predictable. And our biggest leverage point for helping navigate customer organizations to get a deal done? Managers.
The first-line manager has arguably always been the most important (and least-defined) role in a sales organization. But recent changes in customer behavior, coupled with the shift to solution selling, have changed what matters most for managers. So here’s the new story of manager excellence.
As a reminder, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding over 1,000 managers – to explain the primary drivers of manager excellence.
Our first finding is no surprise: managers need to be good at the fundamentals. These are things like integrity, reliability and listening, which are important to any manager, not just sales managers. Luckily, it turns out most managers are good at these. For the 3.5% of our sample who failed at the fundamentals—they’re probably not cut out for a job in management.
More interesting are the sales-specific activities that matter most. These fall into three high-level categories, with the impact on performance in parentheses:
- Selling (26.6%) – being personally effective at selling, particularly the Challenger™ behaviors
- Coaching (28.0%) – helping others improve, particularly with tailoring and asserting control
- Owning the Business (45.4%) – when managers run their territory as if it were their own business
Owning the Business breaks down into two parts:
- Resource Allocation (16.2%) – driving process compliance and taking corrective action.
- Sales Innovation (29.2%) – collaborating with the rep to find new ways of solving deal-level problems. (Importantly, innovation is emphatically not about creating a new value proposition, or inventing a new set of capabilities or product features.)
So you can see the two most interesting findings here:
1) Coaching is not the most important activity a manager can do. Don’t get me wrong, coaching is very important. It will always be important. But isn’t it interesting that a whole new category of manager activities – sales innovation – emerged from our analysis as just as important, if not more so?
For context, here’s how we think about the difference between coaching and sales innovation:
- Coaching corrects or reinforces known rep behaviors, often using Socratic method to help the rep self-realize what the manager already knows.
- Sales innovation identifies new paths to customer success – neither the rep nor the manager knows the correct answer, they’re working together to figure out a way forward.
Coaching—driving performance around known behaviors—is perfect in a world characterized by a predictable path to success. Innovation—driving performance through unforeseen obstacles—is best suited to a world of dynamic and unexpected events.
2) Improving sales innovation skills has nearly twice the impact of improving resource allocation skills. In our conversations, we heard most members are placing a pretty big bet on resource allocation, directing managers to more efficiently manage their limited resources through better territory management, deal qualification, and sales process compliance.
If you live in a world of knowable needs, findable business, and predictable customer behavior, then lock down process, and coach to it. And for many of us, that’s a pretty accurate description of our world five or six years ago. But that’s not the world most of us are living in today.
To grow in today’s environment, driving efficiency around the known must give way—in part at least—to an ability to collaboratively innovate to the unknown.
As one member told us: “If we had religiously followed our sales process last year, our 3 biggest deals would have never gotten done.”
There you have it. Some pretty big conclusions from a big manager survey. Don’t worry, we’re not quite finished – next post we’ll dive into the subcategories of sales innovation and how to get your managers better at it. Yes, it can be done!
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on July 3, 2010
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Very interesting! Fully agree. We have observed the same correlations in many of our affiliates worldwide. Would be interesting to investigate more how the company culture influence in successfull “business ownership”.
Global SFE Manager
on July 4, 2010
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Interesting. We actually define the coaching role of the manager to focus on making the sales representative a better sales person. This would involve an understanding of the customer’s unique needs and the ability to find a solution to address them. Yes – this is a collaborative process and will often require innovation if the solution is not apparent or previously provided, but this is not necessarily something new.
on July 12, 2010
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[...] the SEC has lots of support for encouraging it in your sales organization. For more, start with one of SEC’s blog posts on the [...]
on July 13, 2010
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[...] my last blog post, I explained how our research shows that the most important sales-specific skill a manager can have [...]
on July 27, 2010
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This article and the supporting research are on the mark. However, process, when done right, enables innovation by making the lower-level activities repeatable with minimal mental bandwidth required, freeing mindshare to focus on creatively solving those deal-stopping challenges.