(This is a guest post by Ken Revenaugh, VP of Sales Operations at Oakwood Worldwide. Prior to joining Oakwood, Ken served as Director of Sales Operations at Exhibitgroup Giltspur and FedEx-Kinko’s. His areas of expertise include Sales Ops Management, Talent Development, and Sales Process Design.)

Is storytelling appropriate in business? Is there a place for incorporating an engaging tale in the commercial world? I believe there is, but after sharing my ideas about storytelling in the boardroom and beyond for the past year, I encountered many who disagree.

I am no longer surprised when someone sends me a disparaging note expressing disgust when I encourage incorporating a fairytale or fable to get a key point across in a business environment. Critics say, “Business is moving way too fast to endorse storytelling; it’s a waste of time.” True enough – no one has time to waste.

This year, the familiar red holiday coffee cups at Starbucks have a matching sleeve that reads: Stories are Gifts – Share. Anecdotally, I realized that many people are doing just that – sharing their stories. So, I decided to conduct a little (albeit unscientific) study.

I have been tracking the number of stories I hear per business day for the past three months. You may be surprised to know that I made at least two hash marks in my notepad each day. On average, my colleagues shared 10 stories per work day. The all-time high was 48 stories.

The day I heard nearly 50 stories taught me a lot. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

It’s not easy to come across the right combination of technical skills and personality that make a successful Sales Ops employee. There isn’t an obvious talent pool to recruit from, as many different fields provide employees with skills that come in handy in a Sales Ops role. And as an emerging function, in many organizations, Sales Ops often lacks a compelling career path to attract and retain this talent.

An executive in our SEC Sales Ops Discussions Forum asked how other organizations source and develop Sales Ops employees. Here are a few takeaways from the ensuing discussion:

Where to Find Them

• Sales Process Consultants. Typically armed with strong project management skills, the ideal candidates from this group often have selling backgrounds—which help them establish credibility with the field.
• Product Management. One SEC member finds that people attracted to this area are generally process-and detail-oriented and are able to hit the ground running on data and reporting activities.
• IT. Business Analysts with roots in IT have a solid foundation for building processes. At the same time, they are prone to stay on top of how the latest technology can facilitate efficiency.
• Finance. One member has had the best success with former Finance employees who often bring a lot of analytical firepower to the Ops team. Those trained in Financial Planning & Analysis are uniquely qualified to take on leadership roles.

How to Keep Them

• Diversify experience. Rotate Sales Ops talent between tasks—e.g., tool development, incentive management, etc.—until they find the best fit for them.
• Create a career ladder. Make sure your talent has the opportunity to advance. One member’s Sales Ops team was hurt by not having enough management levels, and a number of high performers fled to other departments within the organization.
• Support success. Set clear expectations and goals for Sales Ops talent, and link those to rewards. These could be monetary, or include recognition programs.

SEC members, to view the rest of this discussion, click here. You may also be interested in checking out our compilation of Sales Ops job descriptions or our Sales Ops Organizational Profiles study.

I’m beginning to worry we are unwittingly getting caught in an arms race with customers.  More than ever, it takes a village to sell effectively.  A member recently told us that lack of internal people resources forced them to outsource $25,000 worth of RFP support.  Now, it was for a $30 million deal – so if it closes in their favor, it’s obviously money well spent.  But multiply that by every deal you’re currently hunting – and you better make sure you’re hunting the right deals, huh?

Requirements for more consensus before deal closure coupled with endless customization requests naturally put stress on sales cycle lengths.  And the shift towards selling more complex solutions has always required more support involved in a given deal – at the customer organization, yes, but also internally. 

But that support used to seem easier to manage.  We could automate a lot of internal processes to make sure reps could maximize time in front of customers. We could coordinate a lot of internal coordination to help – separate service teams, centralized contract teams, legal, pricing, etc – and that was especially convenient because it was support we didn’t have to own (and, therefore, pay for).

Lately, though, the way customers are responding to our sales efforts – looking to dump any form of risk back on us – requires more people on our ledgers.  Read More »

A couple of months back, my colleague Andrew Kent wrote a post around what not say in your pitch deck, and that got me thinking in terms of what you should say.

Luckily, we periodically run customer surveys where we ask our members’ customers to tell us whether or not certain brand statements resonate with them. Unluckily, the reports are generally sobering: only 19% of brand statements resonate with more than 50% of customers. Most of the time, customers simply don’t agree that a given statement represents the company more than it does one of its competitors.

Worse, there also turned out to be a long list of “true but unimportant” statements with which customers agreed, but that did not appear to drive preference (that is, there was little to no correlation between how companies were scored in these attributes and between whether or not the customer stated a preference for the company). Somewhat challengingly, these statements tended to be about delivery and fulfillment. The message to companies here is that there is no unique virtue to having made it easy to order your products through various channels: customers assume that all their suppliers can do this.

But things get more interesting when we looked at what does drive preference. And here a few things stood out: Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Are sales leaders in your organization constantly on the road? Is your organization geographically dispersed? We all recognize it’s important for employees to feel a connection with their leaders, but many sales executives struggle to make their presence felt where they can’t be in person.

Our sister program The Communications Executive Council recently received a question in its Employee Communications Forum from a sales executive eager to hear about how other companies drive virtual engagement with leadership. Most organizations are using the Internet and other visual media to bridge the gap — here are a few of the takeaways from the thread: Read More »

Back in 2007, pilots and ground crew swear they saw a UFO hover above gate C17 at O’Hare for several minutes before disappearing back into the sky.  The FAA wrote it off as a “weather phenomenon.”  Regardless of what you believe, the story has spawned a joke among frequent travelers to O’Hare that explains why a UFO would just sit and hover over gate C17 at O’Hare –– their flight had arrived 20 minutes ahead of schedule and had to wait for their gate to open up.

The joke highlights just one of seemingly endless numbers of frustrations that come with frequent travel.  But with a strategy and a little planning ahead, road warriors can make traveling less painful.  I’ve logged somewhere around 400 flights since 2007, and thought I’d share some lessons that I learned the hard way. Read More »

This is the time of year when many are thinking about what goals they’re going to commit to. And part of this process also involves a consideration of the metrics the organization needs to measure and report on. This is always a tricky thing since the number of metrics is endless and you don’t want to settle on a dashboard that simply reports on what has happened and that offers no insight into how things are developing.

The solution is to try and model out the sales process and provide different individuals with numbers that will make it easier for them to deliver against their commitments:

• For reps, the metrics will be tend to be around the pipeline and will want to contain a mechanism for evaluating the quality of the opportunity as well as the usual pipeline metrics that are more focused on volume.

• Similarly, managers will want to have access to aggregate and trend information so that they can help achieve the desired outcomes. We would always recommend that any manager dashboards also include some softer measures, assessing the development needs of individual reps, as well as a measure of the quality of the relationship between the manager and the rep.

That said, I do believe that there are some metrics that absolutely every sales leader should know and track since they provide crucial clues as to what is happening. This is a personal list, and so I’d love for people to chime in and nominate some of their favorite metrics and why they like them.

Read More »

If you haven’t ordered a copy of the Corporate Executive Board’s Executive Guidance for 2011: Achieving Intelligent Growth, take my advice and do it now.  Since launching the order site for Executive Guidance, more than 6,500 copies of the book have been ordered by your peers and more than 1,000 executives have signed up for one of the upcoming Webinars in December.  Copies of the book are free, as are the Webinars.

As you may know, our parent company, the Corporate Executive Board, provides research and advisory services to several dozen corporate functions—from CFOs to General Counsel to CMOs, CIOs, heads of HR, etc.  Executive Guidance, a deliverable authored by our Chairman and CEO, Tom Monahan, is essentially our synthesized “point of view” for corporate leaders for the year.  For lack of a better description, it’s our elevator pitch to CEOs and their leadership teams—and it’s a good read.

Read More »

By Andrew Kent

The next time your CFO tries to take the cost-savings axe to your travel budget, tell him (or her) that for every dollar it adds to the bottom line, cutting travel will cost $12.50 to the top line.  That’s according to a new study by Oxford Economics USA, “The Return on Investment of U.S. Business Travel.”  In fact, the study showed that conversion rates were more than 2.5 times higher for in-person meetings than those conducted by other means.

To be fair, the study was commissioned by the US Travel Foundation, so it’s not exactly a neutral source.  But even if you question the exact ROI number, is it that hard to believe that visiting customers face-to-face is important for business?

There are two main reasons why business travel matters, in a way that can’t just be replaced by phone or video conference: Read More »

Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for the manager dive-n-catch. You know, the deal that is saved at the last minute or put back on track after a major derailment.

But at what point do heroics outweigh rep learning, especially those valuable learned-it-the-hard-way moments?

Even the most progressive coaching organizations struggle here. You have a perfect mix of conditions for the manager takeover to be the rule rather than the exception: former star reps as managers, high pressure conditions, variable comp on the line, a rep struggling through a new skill, a situation the training room didn’t seem to account for….

We recently profiled Siemens Water Technology for a really interesting approach they’ve put in place to get reps doing rapid-fire calls to learn new skills. In fact, SEC members can hear them tell the full story on December 1.

As part of that story, Siemens shared how they’ve created a clear distinction between typical manager ride-alongs and manager coaching trips. Check out the chart for the detail:  Read More »