Is your sales force experiencing increasingly stalled business, extended cycle times, and inaccurate forecasts? If so, it’s time to revisit your sales process and take a hard look at how your customers buy.

Traditionally, companies have taken an inward approach to developing their sales processes—they typically only consider internal senior management requirements that make management and forecasting easier (or so they thought…). Unfortunately, the glaring problem with this approach is that it does not take into account where customers actually stand in the sale.

For most reps, following the traditional sale process is all about providing certain tools and information to the customer to quickly move them to the next step in the sales funnel. However, reps miss a key step here–they take for granted that customers are ready to move on and often end up outpacing them in the deal. As a result, many companies find their reps’ books of business bogged down with deals stuck in limbo. Read More »

In the Sales world, the start of a new year often brings with it a fervent roll out of new compensation plans. It’s the one activity that garners the most interest from all quarters of the sales force. After all, a good compensation plan can drive the right behaviors, and retain and attract top talent.

The compensation plan design process itself is anything but simple though. Its scope overlaps with the domain of multiple functions—Sales Ops, HR, Finance, and Legal being the most vocal participants and stakeholders. Each, with often competing interests, claims ownership of sales compensation design. It’s no wonder we see compensation plans often stray away from the broader business goals of the organization.

Who then is best suited to own sales compensation? Read More »

When faced with a tough business challenge, have you ever wanted the advice of someone that’s been in your shoes?

Across the past year, SEC members have asked more than 400 questions and received nearly 2,000 answers from peers on the SEC Discussions Q&A forums.

Below is a collection of the most popular discussions that took place across 2011 – these questions shed light on the issues that were top of mind to sales executives throughout the year, and the in-depth answers provided by peers provide helpful perspective on how organizations are tackling these sales-related challenges.

Top 5 Questions from the Sales Ops Forum: Read More »

A recent blog post on Harvard Business Review titled, “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore,” was unfortunately very relatable.  The core of the article explored how business conversations have evolved into bits of nonsense (e.g., “synergy”, ”value-add”) that make understanding each other much more of a challenge than anything else.

We all fall victim to the excessive use of acronyms from time to time.  And while I too find myself guilty of using a lot of acronyms, I also related to something else in the piece, because its description ties perfectly to research produced by both the SEC and our sister program, the Customer Contact Council:

“Another term that has lost its meaning is ‘Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.’ …Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a [hotel] a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, ‘Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.’  The best way to start would be to take down that sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do…”

While this was a retail customer setting, the same principle holds true for sales and service organizations.  Attempting to exceed customer expectations is a losing battle. You’ll unnecessarily spend resources trying to delight your customers, when research shows that doing so has only a marginal impact on customer loyalty.   Read More »

The Council frequently refers to a new breed of high-performing reps–Challenger Reps–in our blog posts and research. But do you find yourself wondering—how do I actually build Challenger reps? Because the three key Challenger skills (teaching, tailoring, and asserting control) are tacit skills, typical approaches to upskilling often are insufficient.

Classroom training alone fails to deliver impact because tacit skills are difficult to describe in written materials such as job aids or a how-to manual, and manager coaching also can be inadequate because it’s hard to explain intangible concepts.

Instead, to truly internalize these skills, reps need practice. We’ve all heard a lot about experiential training, but does it actually work?

The answer is yes, tacit and intangible skills are best taught through experiential training. But it must be the right kind of experiential learning. You cannot risk reps practicing new skills with a customer and, as a result, we often see companies using role-plays.

But, how ‘real’ are our role-play programs? Read More »