Designing effective competency models is a critical part of an organization’s talent management strategy, but it is easier said than done.

Companies often create competency models with vaguely defined behaviors. Or many fall into the trap of telling reps what they shouldn’t be doing, without pinpointing what they should be doing. And in some cases, firms revise competency models on a very infrequent basis and as a result, emphasize selling behaviors that are outdated and fail to account for changes in customer buying behavior.

The first step to avoiding these common challenges is clearly defining what exactly the right selling skills and behaviors are in your sales competency model.

Competency models not only outline what skills and behaviors are important to your business and industry, but also help focus coaching efforts as you develop your sales force.  So getting these models right is essential to your talent management strategy.

The Council recently developed a list of seven distinct competency model design principles. Here are three from the list that I think are of utmost importance:   Read More »

At last week’s annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” the keynote address was delivered by Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the well-known book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Dr. Cialdini’s work on persuasive techniques is always an interesting read for sales professionals, but what made his speech especially timely and relevant for the summit was that it was about persuasion during times of greater information overload and uncertainty.

Faced with more information than ever before, stricter budgets and approval processes, and greater internal consensus requirements, customers are increasingly uncertain about making purchases today.

According to Dr. Cialdini, people exhibit several possible responses when faced with decisional uncertainty:

• Freezing—a reluctance to act or make a choice until the uncertainty is resolved
• Loss Aversion—a tendency to prefer choices designed to prevent losses over choices designed to obtain gains
• Heuristic Choices—when choices are made, they are based on a single, relevant factor rather than a set of relevant factors

It’s no easy feat for sales forces to contend with customers exhibiting these behaviors. Reps can help customers overcome their decisional uncertainty and hesitancy though, by using some key principles of persuasion and influence. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Shelley West of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

Our second annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” took place in Las Vegas last week.  Over the three-day event, I had the privilege to be a part of many fantastic presentations, events, and member conversations, all focused on arming Sales and Marketing professionals with the ideas, strategies, and tools to deal with the newly empowered B2B customer.

One presentation, in particular, offered a very unique perspective on the purchase process – our colleagues at the Procurement Strategy Council (PSC) offered us a peek behind the curtain at how procurement professionals view the world today.  I have to admit, it felt a bit like I had snuck behind enemy lines.  After all, it’s fair to say that many in B2B Sales and Marketing(including most of those in the room with me in Las Vegas) think of Procurement as price-haggling, value-killing, nickel-and-dimers.  And that’s what we say when we are being nice.

But, as it turns out, from PSC’s point of view, there is actually some emerging opportunity for sales forces to work with (rather than against) Procurement to close more mutually beneficial deals. Read More »

“Consensus isn’t particularly new here in Scandinavia – it’s a way of life! And by the way, what’s a playbook?”

This line from a member of the Sales Executive Council’s growing Nordic cohort during a recent conversation sums up the last few months quite nicely. Over that time, I’ve had the pleasure of joining three multi-member sessions in London, Stockholm, and Amsterdam and countless one-on-one discussions all over the continent to review our newest research findings on Rewriting the Playbook: How High-Performers Win the Consensus-Based Sale.

Initial reactions across the EU region have been remarkably consistent: yes, building consensus is a necessary “evil” in achieving favourable customer outcomes – especially in a region as culturally and geographically diverse as Europe – but is the need for consensus really increasing? Isn’t it all relative to the customers and markets we’re already selling into?

As we dug into that question at the Council and began to share our findings with members, the answer emerged as an unqualified “Yes” – the requirement for consensus really is on the rise. Consider the following:   Read More »

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas. Despite the pull of the pool and the blackjack tables, I am currently sitting in the Grand Ballroom of the Bellagio hotel at the second annual Sales and Marketing Summit, hosted by the Sales and Marketing Practice of the Corporate Executive Board. More than 400 members are here with us to learn more about how to get “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision” – the theme of this year’s Summit. We have a full agenda packed with presentations based on the combined work by the SEC and our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council.

The Global Director of CEB’s Sales and Marketing Practice, Haniel Lynn, opened the conference by talking about stressed out rats. No, that isn’t a typo – rats. Before I explain, let me provide some context.

One of the reasons more than 400 Sales and Marketing professionals are joining us in Las Vegas this week is because customers have been making their jobs pretty difficult over the past few years. Customers are buying differently, and not just differently, but smarter. This is putting a lot of stress on Sales professionals and Marketers who are trying to figure out what is going on and are feeling the pressure to change.

But as we all know, change isn’t easy, especially under pressure. Enter the rats. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Yi Kang of the Marketing Leadership Council,our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

The PhDs are hired, the software installed, the data collected, and now the rest of the company waits eagerly for profit to climb – why shouldn’t it, now that we have advanced analytics? The popular book/movie Moneyball shows us that the Oakland A’s hit a homerun using sabermetrics like this, so then why can’t we? After all, if Billy Beane only had one Paul DePodesta, shouldn’t we do even better with an entire geek squad?

We all secretly wish for a magic weapon to vanquish competition. Where better to place our faith than in an analytical model churning out intimidating, neat lines of data? It’s a perfect deus ex machina to get out of a sticky situation.

However, as with anything complex, we forget that it’s one thing to own analytical infrastructure and another entirely to be able to use it well.

Regardless of whether you’re advanced enough to implement agent-based modeling or you’re just taking baby steps beyond bar and pie charts, a few ground rules remain the same when it comes to acting on analytics: Read More »

A couple of years ago, somebody forwarded us a very interesting YouTube video…of Neil Rackham presenting some of our Challenger work to a group of his clients.

This obviously came as a surprise to us since we’d never met Neil before, but we were honored that Neil, author of SPIN Selling and the person generally considered to be the “professor emeritus” of professional sales, found the Challenger work worthy of sharing with his own clients.  So we shot him an email to see if he’d be interested in meeting up to talk about the research, discuss sales issues, etc., and he accepted.

That was the start of what’s turned out to be a fantastic relationship with one of the leading thinkers in the world of sales.

For those of you who’ve visited the website for our forthcoming book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (on sale November 10^th from Penguin), you’ll see that Neil wrote the foreword to the book (in fact, you can download it on the book’s website).

It’s a great read—not simply because of the compliments he gives the Challenger work (Neil refers to it as “the most important advance in selling for many years”), but because of the grand arc of sales history that he paints and where he places the Challenger story in the evolution of the profession. Read More »

We see this happen all the time—a rep walks into a customer’s office, hands them a company brochure, and spends the next 30-minutes telling the customer all about their product’s features and benefits (many of which are of little significance to the customer’s business).

Not surprisingly, this type of approach often fails to capture the customer’s attention.

In today’s world of increased deal scrutiny and higher consensus requirements, features-based selling no longer works. In fact, SEC analysis reveals that teaching delivered during the sales experience has the largest impact on customer loyalty, more than product, company, brand, and service delivery combined.

The best companies recognize this and reverse the flow of their customer interactions—they adopt a Commercial Teaching approach that ‘leads to’ rather than ‘leads with’ information about their products and services.

One of the companies we spoke to in the course of our research, W.W. Grainger, is doing exactly this— Read More »

Finding a new sales manager for your team is never easy – but that’s only half the battle. After you spend all of the time and effort selecting a new sales manager, how can you bring them on board effectively to make sure your sales team runs at full speed?

According to our sister program for heads of Learning and Development, it turns out that more than half of all new managers struggle in their new roles. Even more, the stakes are high of first-line sales manager failure – according to one member company, the average cost of a failed manager is nearly $4 million.

In order to set managers up for success, we’ve seen heads of Learning and Development start their managers off on the right foot by 1) structuring an approach to guide their transition into role 2) building a foundation for healthy relationships with their direct reports and 3) identifying an early “quick win” to establish managers as results-oriented leaders.

From a sales perspective, we’ve seen Dimension Data and CertainTeed create successful onboarding “boot camps” for new hires. While these best-practices are intended for front-line sales reps, you can use similar tactics to onboard new managers to the team.

As your managers approach their role in the immediate term and beyond, keep in mind these important keys to sales manager development needed for the success of their teams:   Read More »

If there’s one thing we can all likely agree on, it’s that at some point in the sale, you’ve got to find and get in front of the senior decision maker at the customer’s organization to get a deal done.  At a lot of member companies we work with, this very commonly takes the form of a “target the customer’s executive-suite” strategy.

In other words, let’s track down the customer contact that will own the decision, or at the bare minimum, figure out the people within the customer organization who can get us access to that person.

We’ve done some recent work at the Council that sheds interesting light on the effectiveness of this strategy.  In a survey of senior decision makers across several hundred of our members’ customer companies, it turns out, the thing senior contacts at customer organizations care about in any large deal is NOT a potential supplier’s solution.

Instead, the number one thing that these senior contacts care about is, in fact, their own company’s buy-in around that solution.   Read More »