Here at the SEC, we just emerged from our most extensive annual research process. In fact, we had our first meeting on “Rewriting the Sales Playbook: How High Performers Win the Consensus-Based Sale” here in Washington DC last week – and what a session! (Members: be sure to register for an upcoming session and the overview teleconference on June 1).

One of the most eye-opening experiences during the research process was spending significant time talking with our members’ top performers. We literally wanted to get inside the head of the best reps in the world, and these stars didn’t disappoint.

We’ll detail the findings in the coming weeks, but needless to say, these stars think about selling in fundamentally different ways than core performers. They target very different opportunities, based on very different criteria, and engage completely different stakeholders in completely different ways. In fact, most of them laugh at conventional wisdom on the sales process, opportunity fit criteria, use of sales collateral, and the use of customer coaches inside an account. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

It’s hard to get key account programs right. First, companies must figure out which customers to elevate to key account status (a challenging task in and of itself)—but most organizations stop there. Key account selection is often a ‘once-and-done’ event, and customers that have been designated as key accounts remain in that position for years.

Despite changing markets and performance, most companies treat key accounts as tenured positions. There are a variety of reasons for this—a fear of jeopardizing relationships and revenue. Account Manager loyalty that skews their relationship assessment. The feeling that they just can’t “give up.”

The reality is that keeping low-performing customers in your key account program wastes more time and profit than it brings in.

What’s the solution? Firing, or deselecting key accounts.

Though it sounds like a risky strategy, there are ways to accomplish key account deselection without putting revenue at risk. Read More »

There are probably no individuals more time oppressed in your sales force than your sales managers.  And a perennial focus for sales organizations is making sure that managers have enough time to spend on high-value activities.

A big problem standing in the way is admin. In fact, our sister research organization, the Communications Executive Council, profiled how The Home Depot sized up the problem.  They created a dummy manager inbox on their email system and let it run for one month.  Guess how many emails were waiting there, unopened?

3,000! And if you estimate that it takes about a minute to read each of those emails, they cost 50 hours of on-the-job time – and that’s not even factoring in the time to type a response!

So are your managers buried by too many administrative requests? Read More »

Sales organizations know that account planning is important, yet their efforts at it are often sporadic and unfocused. There are many steps in the account planning process and though they all are important, there are a select few that reps and their organizations perennially get wrong.

Assess your organization and make sure that your sales force isn’t falling prey to these five major account planning pitfalls.

Pitfall #1. Reps prioritize their accounts incorrectly

There are two ways your account prioritization can fall short. First, your sales force approaches each account with equal enthusiasm. What’s the problem here? Well for starters, your reps will under-invest in some first-rate accounts and then waste time on others that will fail to generate returns in the long run.

Next, the revenue criteria you use to prioritize accounts may not be robust enough. Using overly simplistic criteria to weight accounts will lead to wasted resources on accounts who never intended, nor had the capability, to do business with you in the long run.

What to do: See how Square D by Schneider Electric prioritizes accounts.

Read More »

A few years ago we shared an interesting member case study on how the monthly rep pipeline – typically used for tactical, deal-level discussions – could be elevated and transformed into a strategic tool for long-term skill development.

After all, a rep’s pipeline data tells you a lot more than how individual deals are progressing. This data also tells you how a rep is spending their time, how they’re prioritizing their opportunities and, most interestingly, where their biggest skill gaps are.

I’d like to propose that a similar result could be achieved if we started aggressively auditing and aggregating customer objections – instances that few of us record, but our reps bump up against every day.

Imagine what would be possible if you had a list of the top ten customer objections your organization faces, and you captured a tally mark in your CRM system every time one of them popped up in a rep conversation.  Some interesting trends might emerge.   Read More »

(This is a guest post by Kayleigh O’Keefe of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications professionals.)

Organizations need to constantly adapt to meet the demands of continuously changing business environments. Communication teams are doing their part by driving employee support of change initiatives and keeping morale high. The most common tactics we’ve heard involve building the visibility and credibility of leaders.

We’re learning that companies can’t drive agility with inspiring words from the top. Instead, they need to build an environment that encourages action from the bottom up. That’s why the best communicators are knocking down barriers to communication and encouraging employees to embrace and share new ways of thinking and working.

Admittedly, Communications cannot build a change-ready organization on its own. It can, however, play a significant role by focusing on three key drivers of employee agility.   Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

While I haven’t done a lot of fishing lately, there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from this old proverb. Let’s look at it from a sales perspective. If a manager tells a rep what to do, the rep probably will do well in a call. If a manager coaches a rep on how to perform effectively, the rep will likely retain the knowledge, improve their skills, and ultimately contribute to the greater success of their team.

Most managers realize the benefits of coaching reps (e.g., improving team performance up to 19%)—yet they too often resort to simply telling them what to do.

So, how can you get managers to be better coaches? An executive in our Sales Talent Management Forum recently posed this question, starting a dialogue between members. Here are a few of the takeaways from their discussion: Read More »

(This post is the third and final piece in our three-part series about creating compelling sales messages.)

In my last post, we continued on our journey to craft a sales message that can move customer conversations beyond price and position the buying decision in favor of our solution as a supplier.

To recap, the Council suggests using a 3-step process to create this kind of sales message: Challenge Assumptions, Brainstorm Organizational Competencies, and Identify Your Differentiators.

We’ve already tackled steps 1 and 2 in previous posts – In this post, let’s talk about the third and final step: identifying your differentiators.  Here, the purpose is to prioritize those competencies underappreciated by customers where you outperform the competition.  The desired outcome is to uncover differentiators that are pressing enough to alter customer behavior.

Follow the identification process and activities presented below to vet your list of competencies (a list uncovered by completing the activities in Step 2) for true differentiators.

It’s worth repeating once again that our suggestion is to get key senior sales executives, a few high performing front line managers and sales reps, marketing folks, finance folks (anyone that would and should have a say in this matter) together in a room, and work to conclusion on the following activities:   Read More »

There’s been a lot of member interest of late (on our web site, in our discussion forums, etc.) about sales force competencies.  In fact, it scored so high on a recent topic poll that we studied competencies as part of our most recent study, Boosting Sales Training Stickiness.

In that study we learned a couple of interesting things related to measuring and certifying competencies, which I wanted to share with you (and please use the comments section below to tell us how you certify competencies in your organization).

Measuring and Assessing Competencies:

Quite a few organizations use certification as a measure of sales force competencies. The level of rigor that companies put into their certification varies though.  The three most common types of competency certification we see are:   Read More »

(This post was written by Amy Gallo for our Finance and Strategy Practice.)

If you have a bad boss working under you, you are probably well aware of it. You’ve likely heard complaints, or seen poor employee survey results, or simply noticed that their employees are not happy.

Managing a bad manager is a particular challenge because poor performance directly affects, and can cause disengagement in, others.

Fortunately, like most bad habits or behaviors, being a bad boss is changeable. In fact, for many, being a people manager is not intuitive and they need to be taught or shown what it means to be good at it.

If you’re managing a bad manager, here are four things you can do:

1. Identify the bad behaviors. Understanding exactly what the manager is or is not doing will help you support them in getting better. Take the complaints you are receiving and identify patterns and consistent behaviors that are contributing to the problem.

If there isn’t a lot of noise, but you know something is wrong with a manager, talk to his/her direct reports to get input. Ask for specific examples that you can share with the manager to illustrate the issue.   Read More »