The fast lane to having unengaged, dissatisfied sales reps is through a sales manager community that focuses solely on outcomes.

As a rep, there’s nothing worse than dreading your one-on-ones with your manager, as you’re likely to only hear, “Your conversion rate is way down.  What’s the problem?  Aren’t you following the process?”

That’s what we refer to as ‘spreadsheet coaching’, and it’s focused only on business results, not behaviors.

As I prepare for the Council’s upcoming teleconference on coaching in today’s buying environment (SEC Members, register for the webinar here), I’m reminded of a best practice we profiled that describes how a company managed to work around this challenge by developing a clever coaching roadmap. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Traditionally, CRM has been thought of as a tool for reporting and storing information. But, this limited view causes companies to miss out on a wealth of valuable customer intelligence.

Leading companies are overhauling their CRM systems to tap into previously unused customer information and enable the organization to share new insights across the front line.

John Sabino, head of Commercial Operations at NBC Universal, shared details about NBC’s new CRM strategy. NBC created a system that gets inside reps’ heads and enables them to easily share and consume customer information by implementing:

1. Enhanced search functionality

2. Collaborative content improvement

SEC members, get the details on NBC’s next-gen CRM strategy and read excerpts from our conversation with John Sabino.

If I asked whether you’d like your reps to make more money on deals in shorter amounts of time, I’m assuming your answer would be something like “Yes, of course we’d like that, but it seems a little too good to be true.”

Reps closing more profitable deals in shorter lengths of time no longer has to be a pipedream though…not with the advent of Deal Desks.

Deal desks are a new-in-kind function that advise and support field sales on deal economics. By assisting with and/or approving pricing, discounting, and other non-standard terms and conditions, deal desk functions can prevent reps from unknowingly diluting deal profitability or spending a disproportionate amount of time structuring complex deals.

And the results speak for themselves…companies that have implemented deal desk functions show an increase in deal profitability and a reduction in sales cycle time, meaning their reps are indeed making more money in less time.

We had the opportunity to speak with Leo Stevens, VP of Global Sales Operations at Life Technologies, and Simon Hill, Global Deals Enablement at NetApp, Inc., about their experiences managing deal desks. Read More »

The elevator door opens, and there stands your dream prospect…it’s the chance you’ve been waiting for to close that huge deal. But that chance only lasts as long as the elevator ride itself, so you must be ready to quickly and succinctly get your point across.

The ‘elevator pitch’ has long been a staple in Sales’ lore. We’ve all heard the stories of the elevator pitch that got a rep a meeting with the senior decision-maker or helped close that big deal.

But new technology in elevator systems could make the elevator pitch a thing of the past…

New elevator systems now have the capabilities to route riders, sometimes according to rank and seniority. Read More »

For fourteen years the SEC has carefully tracked what distinguishes best-in-class sales excellence. In all those years and across all the various research we’ve conducted, a relatively precise set of standards has risen to the top.

Chief among these many standards is the degree to which sales teams effectively challenge their customers to think about their business in fundamentally new ways. That, we believe (and our extensive data tell us), is the best predictor of sales success.

To help our members assess just how well they truly challenge their customers, we’ve built a new tool: The Anatomy of a World-Class Challenger Selling Model. This tool helps management teams assess their current state of practice against what we have come to understand as best practice.

Here’s a glimpse into some of the criteria… see how your organizations stacks up: Read More »

It’s no news that sales executives rarely work with a single buyer. Even if they manage to get one person on board with the new vision, the champion of that vision (regardless of their seniority) still must gain broader organizational support.

One company told us that, in a recent sale, they were able to talk directly to the CEO who fully supported their solution.  However, when the CEO tried to push the solution in the company, it turned out he had to present it in front of the board which significantly complicated the decision process.

What’s even more troubling is that suppliers are rarely invited to be part of the decision-making – most deliberations happen behind closed doors. This means that the stakes of choosing the right stakeholder within an account have never been higher.

Many sales organizations have long been telling their reps to look for a customer advocate or “coach” – someone inside the customer organization who can provide guidance on how purchase decisions are made and, ideally, who is willing to help the supplier navigate that process.

From hundreds of conversations with members we constructed the ideal advocate/coach profile that reps are told to target. The ideal customer contact is one who: Read More »

The decision of how best to deploy inside sales involves several considerations: what’s the cost to serve, what do reps prefer, etc. There are all valid considerations, of course, but that’s actually not where you start when answering this question. To figure out how best to deploy inside sales, start where you should ALWAYS start – by figuring out what the customer needs.

And the best way to figure out what the customer needs? Asking the customers themselves.

At first glance, that advice may sound crazy.  After all, if we ask our customers, they’ll tell us they want EVERYTHING – a field rep to be there in person and an inside sales rep to respond quickly – and they want the LOWEST PRICE POSSIBLE.

The key to getting around that is to ask customers in the right way. Of course everything is important…but some things are more important than others.  One of the best ways to make sure you’re separating nice-to-have’s versus need-to-have’s is to ask people to choose between different options – force them to make tradeoffs.   Read More »

(This is a guest post by Matt Hoffman of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Customer Service and Contact Centers.)

When speaking with members recently, one question has come up again and again:  “What does the rise of the Millennials mean for how we think about rep performance?”

The Millennials, the generation of people born between 1980 and 2000, are the newest, youngest employees in sales and service organizations.  While Millennials are generally given credit for being tech-savvy, they are also typically portrayed as entitled, self-centered brats.  Consider some of these descriptions of Millennials from a 60 Minutes profile:

• “They grew up laden with trophies just for participating.”
• “This generation only takes yes for an answer”
• “Narcissistic praise hounds are taking over your office!”

Ouch.

The members that we spoke to about rep performance wondered what they needed to do to get the best performance out of this new generation.  If the stereotypes are true, then sales and service organizations would need to reexamine how they hire, develop, and manage their reps.

Fortunately, a complete overhaul of management does not appear to be necessary.   Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Odds are high that your company is wasting valuable training dollars. Within 30 days, reps lose a whopping 87% of what they learned in training—and 61% of reps are unsatisfied with their company’s programs to improve business and sales skills.

The most common reasons why traditional sales training fails are 1) rep resistance to learning new skills, and 2) on-the-job barriers that disrupt opportunities to practice them. Teaching skills through textbook learning just isn’t enough. Progressive companies realize that the real learning happens when reps can practice skills in the field, discovering for themselves what does and doesn’t work.

Gen-i, a B2B telecommunications company, designed their Sales Academy to minimize reps’ rejection of training and to provide ongoing opportunities to apply their newly acquired skills in real-world situations.  Their start-to-finish framework led to a 77% increase in reps satisfied with the program.

We talked to John Woodyard, the creator of Gen-i’s Sales Academy, about how they make training stick by: Read More »

“Oil companies need holes, not drills” - Old Sales & Marketing Saying

By Andrew Kent

The utilities business faces a looming crisis—if not today, then in the decade or two to come.  Simply put, the industry’s current business model is set up such that smarter use of its product threatens its profits, and this tension between supplier and customer can’t go on forever.

But utilities companies need not view this as a threat.  On the contrary, leading utilities are already capitalizing on one of the biggest megatrends in Sales today: the need to make more money by selling less stuff.

The root of utilities’ problem is this: their ability to grow depends on selling more kilowatt-hours each year, but consumers and society have an urgent need to use less—and are waking up to the fact that they actually can.  Peter Fox-Penner writes in the Harvard Business Review (July-August 2009): Read More »