Unless you’re stuck on a remote island with no means of communication with the outside world, you have likely witnessed the recent public outcry for President Obama to display more emotions when dealing with the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As the media continues to debate the pros and cons of rational versus emotional decision-making, I started thinking about how much discussion I’ve seen around emotions recently in the business world.

Recently, two of our sister programs conducted independent studies on completely different topics  yet came to a similar conclusion that emotional arguments often trump rational ones.

-    The Customer Contact Council focused their study on identifying the drivers of customer effort as a way to mitigate customer disloyalty in the service channel. The study revealed that customer effort is largely driven by how customers feel during their service interaction versus what they do.  The breakdown is one-third “do” and two-thirds “feel.”

-    The Communications Executive Council studied what makes different stakeholders more likely to actively support the company and found that “emotional connection” with a company far outpaced all other factors, including actual company experiences, corporate citizenship, and business strength.

So, what about Sales? When trying to close a deal, are we missing the point by focusing on such practical arguments as “we offer the highest ROI” or “we have the lowest prices” instead of targeting customers’ right side of the brain?   Read More »

As many of you know, we’ve spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance.  Along the way, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding  over 1,000 managers – and you’ve seen bits and pieces from this analysis here on this site already. 

Now it’s time to start telling the whole story about what we found, not just nuggets of data analysis.   

When we took a hard look at the data, we found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently to succeed in today’s environment.  We’ve started presenting the information in day-long sessions and executive breakfasts around the globe (SEC members, click here to register for one of our upcoming events or teleconferences on the subject).  As you can imagine, there is too much to be communicated in one post, so I’ll use a series of posts to cover our major conclusions.

The top line from our research?

2010 is all about growth.  That’s not news, as we all know it’s not OK not to grow this year.  But changing customer behavior has made growth a real challenge.  Everyone also agrees that sales managers are the vital linchpin for driving a return to growth in 2010.

While coaching is absolutely crucial to sales manager success, it turns out that when it comes to growth, there is a whole other category of manager activity even more important than coaching.

Therefore, what is that category of manager activity that most drives growth?  We call it ‘Sales Innovation.’   Read More »

Sometimes the things you don’t find in a study turn out to be as interesting as the things you do find. One very consistent “non-finding” concerns the effectiveness of the classic ROI message. We’ve asked customers to rate the effectiveness of the ROI pitch they hear and assessed reps and managers on their effectiveness at delivering this pitch, trying to link the effectiveness back to a variety of commercial outcomes.  To our surprise, we’ve never found the delivery of the ROI message to have any significant explanatory power.  And since zero correlation means no causation, this is a finding that deserves some exploration.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with business owners at a software company, who developed a new way of thinking about certain data problems.  Though customers generally agreed that this was a better way to handle the data problems, the solution spanned many departments, and the software company couldn’t convince customers that the hypothetical returns were worth the extra coordination efforts. Failure to generate a positive emotional response likely explains our non-finding with regards to the effectiveness of the ROI pitch.

It’s not that customers aren’t influenced by ROI calculations; it’s just that few people make complex business decisions based entirely on somebody else’s ROI calculations. Senior buyers are pretty savvy people – they know their own ability to derive a set of returns that will look sufficiently attractive. They also likely recognize that they are constantly pitched things that they are already inclined to like.

In other words, buyers become perfectly cynical about value at the point at which the entire conversation becomes dominated by claims about value. It’s a subtle notion, but the hypothetical existence of value simply doesn’t challenge the customer.

This finding has profound implications for how Sales needs to think about building and delivering messages, and reinforces many of our findings around commercial teaching:   Read More »