By Andrew Kent

As our research on sales rep effectiveness reveals, unquestionably, your best sales reps are those who challenge customers.  And a key component of challenging customers is asserting control over the conversation.

But that language of “challenging” and “being assertive” can be a bit intimidating. The fear is, if we tell our reps to act like “challengers,” they’ll just act like jerks; if we tell them to be assertive, they’ll be aggressive. 

Even more surprising than the need to challenge customers was our finding that reps who focus on relationship building were the lowest performers.  At companies where personal relationships have been the primary basis for sales for years, this finding can be quite shocking.

Of course, challenging a customer doesn’t mean making them feel like an idiot—it means challenging them to be better.  And relationships do still matter—it’s only that building personal relationships can no longer be a salesperson’s primary talent.  

It’s easy to see how that message can be misinterpreted, and further proves the point that the language we use matters.

So then, how do you tell reps to be Challengers without sending the wrong message?  Read More »

A question I’ve been getting from a lot of members lately is simply “how do you measure the value of the Sales Operations function?” 

There is no easy answer to this one. Sales Ops is a function in constant flux, which means measuring the value of it can be a challenging task. After all, there are many different ways Sales Ops can deliver value to the organization.

One of the most common areas in which Sales Ops can demonstrate its value is sales force capacity.  The Ops group typically looks for ways to reduce the amount of time the sales force spends on low-value activities. So, if you calculate the dollar amount of every hour of sales force time and measure the number of hours of capacity you are able to free up, you can then quantify the value Sales Ops has created. 

Be mindful, however, that this is not a sustainable, long-term measurement effort. At some point you will have offloaded and outsourced all of the sales force’s low-value activities and will reach the point of diminishing returns.

The other area in which Sales Ops can deliver measurable value is by understanding the drivers of high performance and standardizing them throughout the organization with tools and processes.  Here, Sales Ops can demonstrate its value by quantifying the difference between high performers and core performers, and then tracking the improvement in performance that occurs as a result of the tools they’ve implemented. 

When using this performance improvement-based approach to measure Sales Ops’ value, be wary of several potential roadblocks.  Many Sales Ops teams fail to demonstrate quantifiable value because they end up building tools that don’t deliver the performance bump they expected.  Why is this? Read More »

Common wisdom in (American) football is that “defense wins championships.”  However, focusing on a defensive – and here I mean reactive – strategy with customers is a losing game plan.  With top-level pressure to grow our business in 2010, we can no longer maintain a “what can we do for you today?” approach.

Why?  The answer lies with our customers, who are expecting (and responding to) a more proactive interaction with sales people.  In fact, SEC research has found that customers value a sales interaction that “reframes” the way they are thinking about a problem, or introduces them to a new challenge that they hadn’t considered. 

What this shows us is that we need to call a few offensive plays with our customers.  So, what are the right plays to call?

1. Shift resources away from bad to good customers – even before approaching customers, you need to have a solid understanding of which customers you should be focusing on.  These are the customers who will actually pay you back for your investments.  The problem is doing that without putting your current revenue at risk.

SEC Members, see how Square D segmented their customers beyond typical volume/revenue metrics, and how TNT developed a “downtiering” process to gradually pull resources away from customers that no longer merit the investment.  Read More »

As sales teams round out the second half of 2010, we’ve been receiving a growing number of member requests for resources on negotiation tactics. This makes sense – our research shows that top performing reps are more comfortable discussing money and asserting control of over deals than their peers.

To help inspire your teams to defend margins through these tough times, I’ve pulled together stories of some of North America’s least-known but most-skillful negotiators. 

1. The Red Paper Clip Guy – Starting with a single red paper clip, 26-year old salesman Kyle McDonald bartered his way to a 2-story farmhouse in Saskatchewan through a series of creative trades involving a ballpoint pen, a doorknob, a camping stove, and a snowmobile.

• See our resources on manager innovativeness to bring deal-level creativity to your own organization.   Read More »

In baseball, the best managers manufacture runs out of seemingly thin air.  To be sure, scoring runs is a complex blend of effort from many different parts of the team and the larger organization. 

The general manager, for instance, can help by putting the best players on the field and investing in the development of young talent.  The players can execute better by taking more batting practice or studying different pitcher tendencies (insert joke here about performance-enhancing drugs).  The coaching staff can help by teaching new hitting techniques or putting together the perfectly balanced lineup.

But as Cubs fans know well, it’s all too common to see two or three stranded runners in one inning.  The inning starts out great – two singles and you’re sitting with runners on first and third, nobody out.  Double play here, strikeout there…inning over.

What do the best managers do?  They call the timely hit-and-run.  Or call for a well-placed bunt to move a runner into scoring position and out of double play danger.  They innovate on the fly – and produce runs that otherwise would have been left stranded.

Sales is no different.  Despite our best efforts, we find ourselves stranding lots of deals.  A member told me the other day “we’re great at getting baserunners to second base but we just can’t seem to get them home.”  Read More »

Think about how many times and ways a customer says “no”…

There is the “matter-of-fact no” ( I am not interested in this offer);  the “no-without-no” (I’ll contact you myself when I am ready to make a decision);   the “passing-the-buck no”  (The decision is out of my hands now);  the “maybe-yes no” (I’ll have to check my calendar) and the “restraining-order no” (For the last time, no).

While searching for more examples (and for my own amusement), I Googled “how to say no.” As I looked through the more than 206,000,000 results, I learned how to say NO in over 520 languages and how to come up with 100 Excuses to Say No (my favorite one: “because my subconscious says no”).

The all-mighty Internet taught me how to say no to bosses, relatives, friends, co-workers and pushy sales people, but it had little to say about how to push back on customers.  Is that because we’ve been brainwashed that the customer is always right?

Maybe…But, unless you’re running a charitable foundation, saying no is a critical skill, especially now. In the current economy, customers feel entitled to more discounts, more customization and less risk, and they don’t hesitate to ask for more.    

One of the main reasons why salespeople find it hard to say no to customers is because they don’t know how people will react to it. Fortunately, it is fairly easy to predict a customer’s reaction if you know what type of customer you’re talking to: 

Read More »

By Andrew Kent

Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material.  Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.”  And especially find all instances of the phrase “we work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.”  Then hit the delete key.  Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “we are exactly the same as everyone else.”

See, unlike Journey, you and your competitors aren’t “worlds apart.”

The more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same.  PR expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the 98 most common sales, marketing, and PR buzzwords used in company communications, and the results are hilarious and devastating.  Here are the top 10:

It’s eye-opening, really.  By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 205,900 companies all think they’re it.  75,500 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top.”  30,400 think they’re “unique.”  “Solution” also makes an appearance at #7—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again.

So if everyone’s saying they’re the leading solution, what does the customer think?  “Great—give me 10% off.”  Read More »

Most of us have been training reps on questioning techniques for years, but have seen limited results.  

And here’s why– it’s not that reps don’t know what questions to ask, or how to ask them…it’s that they’re not even trying to ask questions.  They’re trying to close the deal. 

Most companies believe the best way to improve needs discovery capabilities is to build reps ‘ questioning skills – but skills are not the problem. The bigger barrier you must overcome is reps’ unwillingness to ask questions.

In today’s world of complex solution selling, we’re selling bigger, more complicated solutions that reach across multiple departments within customers’ organizations. And this complexity introduces a whole host of new challenges to closing deals.  

There are hundreds of reasons why deals could go off the rails…and that makes reps afraid. Reps aren’t asking the right questions for fear of introducing or uncovering additional obstacles that could give the customer a reason to say No. 

Rather than adding even more risk to the equation, reps just try everything they can to close the deal and sort all that stuff out later.  A member recently referred to this as “drive-by selling.”  Close now, and ask questions later.  Read More »

Through our research of what drives customer loyalty (willingness to buy, willingness to continue buying, willingness to recommend), thousands of our members’ end-customers have told us that the thing they value most…is for a supplier to challenge their thinking.

Customers value a supplier that provides them with a different way of thinking about their business and how to compete more successfully.  Essentially, customers want to be taught.

But it’s not enough to teach customers simply because they value it.  You’ve got to get PAID for it.  The last thing you would want is to teach customers to value something that your organization is not uniquely positioned to solve.  One of our members accurately described that as “teaching the customer into the desert.”

Instead, you need teaching that reframes the way the customer assigns value.  Teaching that leads customers to value the areas where you uniquely outperform your competitors.  Teaching that leads to a commercial result.  Hence the term we’ve coined here at the Council, commercial teaching.

Now, to teach in this manner, you first have to have the knowledge around how you’re uniquely different from your competitors.  After all, it would be impossible to lead customers to value your unique strengths if you don’t even know what they are in the first place.  Read More »

By Andrew Kent

As heavy-handed as this may sound, no matter how hard companies preach the value of planning, sales reps still don’t do it.  According to one of our members, reps’ natural talent at persuasion may be exactly what’s getting in the way.

We all know that the best salespeople spend more time doing pre-call prep: account planning and researching customers—in fact, SEC research quantitatively proved this a full seven years ago.  And yet after all these years of trying to get reps to plan, members still tell us that sales planning is one of the top 1-2 areas in which reps struggle most consistently.

This has always boggled my mind somewhat.  Personally, I would be terrified to go into a sales call without having done my homework.

But that terror at unpreparedness doesn’t seem to be felt by many sales reps, and a sales executive at an Australian telecoms firm recently told me something that I think explains why.  He called it the “paradox of gift”:

Salespeople are naturally gifted at persuading others and thinking on their feet.  They just have a natural ability to wiggle out of dicey situations, or at least they think they do.  And stories of when they do are the stuff of legend around the office.

But while this confidence may help them pull a sale out of a seemingly impossible situation, it also leads them to over-rely on their natural abilities and under-prepare for calls.  The attitude is, “I’m so good that I don’t need to plan—I’ll just go with what the prospect gives me and get them to bite on something.”

And that’s the paradox of gift: ironically, the more you believe in your ability to get out of any sticky situation, the more likely you are to get into those sticky situations in the first place. Read More »