CSOs are trying to change their sales forces.  I’ve attended many national sales meetings, leadership meetings, strategy sessions and the like over the past several weeks, and the common theme that emerges from them is, simply, “change.”

Why?  Because sales leaders know that using past approaches – approaches that may have been successful before – will no longer work in today’s selling environment.  Given many factors (the economic slow recovery, anemic buying, customer risk aversion), sales people need to be working with customers in a new and different way.

But how confident are you that if you want change, you’re going to get it?  Read More »

Sales Ops in 2011 faces a number of situations that has the function questioning its very mission and purpose. This identity crisis is stemming from:

1)     Many groups spending the last 10 years becoming master project managers without any form of master strategic vision

2)     The cost of supporting a complex sale dramatically increasing, thereby changing the nature and scale of enablement required

3)     Perhaps now more than ever, a rep can absolutely nail the prescribed account strategy, and still lose the deal.  The perfectly refined playbook Sales Ops has nurtured for years increasingly feels insufficient for navigating the complex sales environment.

The first two problems are rooted in the same place: the strategic mission of most Sales Ops groups was never fully clarified.  The initial charter was most often a reactive response to some fire that needed putting out.  The sales force got bogged down in too much admin so the sales org brought in a few people from operations to run six sigma analyses.  Or goal was missed three quarters in a row – enter in a few finance people to work on forecasting – and, poof, you have a Sales Ops organization.

Over time, the group grew in direct proportion to new projects it was assigned – its scope and definition for success necessarily evolved.  This hodgepodge evolution pigeonholed the team as project managers.  Read More »

(This post was originally written for the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing).

Last month we shared with you the 10 trends every sales exec must know in 2011. Are you also wondering what your counterparts in Marketing are worried about? Our sister program for marketing executives has started to see a few early trends for 2011 – here’s what they are:

1) Growth from new customers.  In 2009, flat was the new up.  In 2010, it was about getting back to growth, and generally that involved getting your best customers to give you new business.  In 2011 it’s time to go back to growth from new customers—and probably not the same ones you lost before.  This in turn means B2B marketing focusing on lead gen, content marketing, marketing automation and intelligence.

2) Global reorganization.  Speaking of growth from new customers – in many cases those customers are in new markets, given the much faster rate of growth expected in emerging markets overall.  This often means reorganizing the function; we’re seeing a focus on centralization to make sure expansion in emerging markets follows a central strategy. 

3) Social media breaks through for B2B.  At the end of 2009, we had almost every B2C company asking us what they should do about social media.  By the end of 2010, many had figured out their strategies.  We’re seeing the same trend in B2B now: 2011 is the year social media goes from a few experiments to a real strategy in B2B.

Of course, we’re not necessarily talking about B2Bs tweeting; I believe B2B organizations in particular have a real opportunity to build the kinds of communities their customers crave.  Every time I hear a success story about social media in B2B it seems to involve a dedicated community of customers who work together on projects or discuss common issues.  Read More »

If you’re in Sales, it’s kind of assumed that you get along with people. Or, more precisely, you know how to get your way around things. And this surely includes getting your own organization to fulfill some promises you’ve made to a customer. After all, you’re all on the same team, right?

In reality, that’s a lot harder to do than people assume. When it comes to landing that mammoth deal you’ve been working on for the last six months—a deal that involves half the departments and business units in your organization to come together—you see cracks begin to emerge. What you came away promising the customer suddenly seems hard to fulfill. In our experience, you probably find yourself in one of these two sinking boats:

1)   The interests of a single department or business unit outweigh the interests of the overall organization: Like individuals, departments and business units are interested squarely in meeting their yearly goals and objectives. If something doesn’t help them meet their goals, it’s unlikely they’re going to want to pitch in.

2)   Non-customer-facing functions lack customer focus and deemphasize customer need fulfillment: In the absence of a customer-facing role, functions tend to focus heavily on established processes and systems. If the deal doesn’t comply with the processes they’ve set, they are not on board.

So where does that leave you in all this? More importantly, what do you tell your customer? Yes, you can probably cajole your way out of it without damaging the business, but on how many deals?  Read More »

I was running a member meeting in London this past week when a rather interesting conversation about career pathing and certifying reps on competencies broke out.  I wanted to share highlights from the conversation and get your feedback, so please share your thoughts in the comments field below!

Now, just to clarify, I’m talking about certifying reps on sales skills – I’m not talking about industry certifications or product certifications.  But instead, certifying that reps can demonstrate the behaviors they are asked to master (things like questioning, needs diagnosis, etc) and that they can use them to achieve measureable business results.

In the middle of the certification conversation, a member asked if we should even be certifying reps on selling skills…he asked, “Shouldn’t we always expect people to be looking to grow their skills and take them to the next level?” Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

This is a great quote from funnyman Bill Cosby—and it relates quite a bit to sales reps. Sure, people-pleasers may come across as more accommodating, but when it comes down to closing deals, passive reps won’t pull in the best numbers.

Star reps are assertive and remain in control of negotiations. Yet many sales leaders are anxious about telling reps to be more assertive, worried they will end up veering too far on the spectrum toward aggressive.

So, how can your company help reps to be more assertive? A key ingredient is building their confidence. And, it’s easier than you think—it just takes some advance planning.

Think about how flustered you get when asked a question out of left field and have no response. The same goes for reps in a negotiation; they can’t win the tough conversations by thinking on the fly. When tension with a customer spikes, most reps will revert back to people-pleasing instincts—but if they’ve built a negotiation strategy in advance, they’ll have the confidence to not back down. Read More »

Note: This posting was written by Matt Dixon & Brent Adamson for the Harvard Business Review.

Download the diagnostic as a PDF.

Download the full-size image.

Every leader knows that the compensation plan plays an important role in recruiting and retaining the best talent. But what these executives often don’t realize is that how they communicate about pay can be as important as the plan itself.

We saw dramatic evidence of this in a study conducted by our sister program, CLC Compensation, which looked at sales comp. The perceived fairness of the pay (that is, whether it was determined equitably, consistently, and predictably) had a 20% greater positive impact on reps’ commitment to their job than their satisfaction with the pay amount itself. A fair payment scheme, it turned out, was a more powerful motivator than a generous pay scheme.

When it comes to using compensation to boost performance, then, sales executives should focus less on the payouts themselves and much more on improving reps’ belief in the fairness of the process used to determine those payouts. But how?

Read the rest of this post on HBR.

(This is a guest post by Ken Dutkiewicz, Director of Global Learning and Development at Steelcase Inc. Ken has more than 20 years of experience in the sales training and development function.)

I’ve worked for Steelcase for more than three decades – much of that time in sales or sales training roles.  Steelcase has always had research about office environments and how people work, but in all my years of sales involvement, I’ve never seen us quite nail the marriage of our organizational knowledge and our customers’ needs. 

I thought we were getting close when we started working with concepts from the book Escaping the Price-Driven Sale by Tom Snyder and Kevin Kearns, who say:

“People value what they say and their own conclusions more than they value what they are told.”

“People value what they ask for more than what is freely offered.”

This helped reinforce for us that insight is extremely important.  But we still hadn’t figured out how to get customers to ask for more information. The SEC’s Challenger Rep™ profile was the missing link.  

After I learned about Challenger reps at an SEC meeting, I realized that ours sales reps lacked the ability to teach customers.  In fact, our average sales rep would say that teaching is something our learning and development organization does. 

Once I made this connection, it was clear what I needed to do from a sales development perspective.  Read More »

Selling to groups is like herding cats—by the time you get one stakeholder corralled, two more have wandered off. One wrong move can turn an already arduous affair into a disastrous waste of time.

Our 2011 research initiative, Navigating the Sales to a Faster Close, is focusing on what makes groups tick and how to successfully influence the way they arrive at a decision. Besides talking with our members, we’ve also gone outside the traditional business world and taken a look at findings from psychology on how groups work.  Turns out, there are a number of basic truths about group decision dynamics that salespeople need to be aware of.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned so far: Read More »

87% of training is forgotten within one month.  That’s because most reps attend training and then go right back to what they were doing before.

For reps to truly improve skills, they certainly have to apply new skills over time…but they also need to take the time to reflect and deconstruct whether their attempt at applying that skill was successful or not.

Last month, Peter Long, Sales Training Consultant with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) joined us for a teleconference where he discussed the importance of ensuring reps have the opportunity to analyze how well they’re applying any new skills taught in training.  In fact, BCBSM built a “12-Week Implementation Program” that alternates live-fire skill application with group debriefings of what went right and wrong.

For BCBSM, their initial debriefing sessions gathered the newest reps with the least tenure and were facilitated by the sales management team. (SEC Members, check out the full case study to learn the nuts and bolts of BCBSM’s approach).

They found that one of the keys to unlocking value from a program like this, is to make sure reps are coming prepared to the group debriefings with the right battle stories.  Read More »