There are a myriad of different B2B customer segmentation approaches being used out there, but they can essentially be boiled down to three basic methodologies that seem to be the most widely used and also the most actionable:  Industry/Firmographic, Customer Tiering & Needs-Based Segmentation.

Let’s compare the benefits of using them, and also some of the challenges our members experience when trying to implement these segmentation approaches in their organizations:

1) Industry/Firmographic – This approach is to the business-to-business world as demographic segmentation is to the business-to-consumer world.  If we think of demographic segmentation as helping organizations group consumers by shared characteristics (like age, gender, ethnicity, income level and zip code), then we can picture industry/firmographic segmentation as helping organizations characterize customers by industry attributes (such as its competitive environment and fixed costs, or simply size and geography). Read More »

Our research on the Challenger Rep has taken hold in many organizations and with many sales leaders.  Many of these organizations sell directly to their end customer.  But there are many sales organizations out there that sell indirectly through partners and distributors (and of course those that have both direct and indirect sales channels).  How do the Challenger concepts relate to them?

Here, the questions often come at a fast and furious pace: “How does Challenger work in the indirect environment?  Who should I be teaching for differentiation?  How do I manage this effectively if we want to implement the Challenger approach?”

At the end of the day, here’s the big issue underlying all these questions: a lack of control of your partner’s sales force.  It can be a lot to expect them to sell your products and solutions in a differentiated way.

Now, it would be easy to say that it’s impossible to do or that we shouldn’t spend the time and the money.  But, there’s a major reason we shouldn’t do that: customers still require unique perspective on their business and need their assumptions “challenged” (in fact, this drives 53% of customer loyalty).

Knowing that we can’t ignore this changing sales environment, what can we do? Here’s a few ways to overcome the hurdles of implementing Challenger in the indirect channel:   Read More »

If, like me, you are a keen football fan (or soccer fan, for those in the US) – then you may be aware of a small job vacancy here in England. That’s right, the job of the England Football Manager!

For those unaware of the current debacle, Fabio Capello (famously successful Manager at Real Madrid and AC Milan) recently resigned from his position as Manager of the English national side with less than four months to go until the European Championships.

In between sifting through all the press articles and dreaming that I had the qualifications to fill the vacancy, I was reminded of a recent call with an EMEA member in the Chemicals industry who was articulating the importance of managers.

One of the most striking aspects of our conversation – and the link to the fate England – was when we were talking about the costs associated with a failed manager.

The member said, “The first-line sales manager is what makes or breaks you. A hiring mistake could cost us $3 million to $4 million in lost sales.” (Incidentally, here in England, it cost the English Football Association (FA) approximately £6million per annum.)

Given this critical vacancy is yet to be filled, it seemed like a good time to revisit the key credentials sales organisations need to look for when hiring managers and perhaps provide some tips to the English FA along the way. Read More »

Does your company use Salesforce.com as your CRM? If so, you’re going to want to read this.

CRM, like many other initiatives companies roll out, is often plagued with adoption problems. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because, as valuable as CRM is to sales organizations, entering data into the system can be a pain for sellers. So not only do companies need to pick the right CRM system for their organization and make sure their reps see value in using it, but they also need to make it easy for reps to use.

One way Salesforce.com users are combating this issue is by supplementing their Salesforce interface with apps from Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Not only can apps (also often referred to as plug-ins) do a lot of the heavy lifting for reps when it comes to data entry, but they can also increase the functionality, efficiency, and effectiveness of your CRM system as a whole.

Here are four of the hottest Salesforce apps that companies are integrating into their systems: Read More »

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

I was recently at the Satmetrix Net Promoter 2.0 conference in lovely San Francisco learning how companies big and small across a variety of industries employ this method of collecting customer feedback.

For the uninitiated, Net Promoter Score (often referred to as NPS) is a way of assessing a company based on just one question: “How likely are you to recommend ABC Company to a friend or colleague?”  on a scale of 0 to 10.  Those who answer 0-6 are “Detractors,” 7’s and 8’s are “Passives,” and 9’s and 10’s are “Promoters.”  Net Promoter Score is determined by subtracting Detractors from Promoters.  The system is based on the joint work of Bain & Company, Inc. and Satmetrix.

Honestly, I am not really sure what I think of NPS – can you really figure out what you need to know about how your company is doing with just one question?

As questions go, it seems like a good one, but is it enough?   Read More »

You may have heard the increasing buzz from your marketing department about “IMA”, or “inbound marketing automation.” But what exactly does it mean? And why all the hype?

To give you some context, inbound marketing is about optimizing the availability of your content.  Marketing automation refers to the use of technology to automate marketing tasks, such as lead tracking or scoring, and to distribute content to prospects based on their actions. For instance, if a prospect registers on your site and downloads a specific white paper, your marketing team can send related communications the prospect may also be interested in.

Together, you get inbound marketing automation (IMA).

So what are the implications of IMA for you and your sales force?

The goal of IMA is to enable marketing to help provide sales more qualified leads. Marketers can use it to track a customer’s activity, and send more tailored communications based on materials prospects download or access from your site or emails over time. When the potential customer’s actions indicate they have formulated a need and are ready to talk to a rep, marketing can alert sales to reach out to the prospect.  Read More »

In a world where uncertainty and complexity is a constant reality, managing transformative change has become a new normal for a growing number of sales organizations. To make matters worse, companies aren’t experiencing just one change at a time – a survey from the Communications Executive Council tells us that companies have gone through an average of 3.5 substantial changes over the past 2 years. And that’s a lot, considering it takes employees an average of 24 months to recover from a single corporate change.

Whether it’s restructuring, senior leadership transitions or integrating a new sales force, employees are faced with changes that cause them to be constantly stressed out. Yet another data point to make you cringe: this change-fatigue-driven stress creates a 9-10% drag in employee performance.

And as we continue to consider our sales organizations’ ability to stay ahead of a complicated selling environment regardless of internal turmoil, this performance gap is a huge red flag when it comes to future growth.

But if your sales organization is about to stomach another transformative change, the outlook does not have to be so dismal. To get ahead of this downward spiral, we’ve seen progressive companies find successes in enabling the employee to be the “locus of control”.

Put another way, both known and unknown changes can cause less of a blow when we use tactical strategies to put our front-line staff in the driver’s seat. Read More »

The next time you head out to sell a solution to a customer, think about it from this perspective – this may be the first time your customer is ever purchasing this solution.  So why do we frequently let the customer tell us how the sale should proceed?  And even if they have purchased this solution before, it’s likely been years… and many of the players and much of the internal politics are now different.  Do they know the best path forward?

Now think about it from this perspective – as sales professionals, it’s our JOB to sell these solutions, day in and day out, to a wide range of customers, each with a very different set of circumstances.  There isn’t much we haven’t seen go right and go wrong.

All of those lessons learned are incredibly valuable, and can be used to coach the customer on how the sale should proceed.  Help them avoid mistakes, prepare for obstacles or objections, and make their purchase experience smooth and easy.  We call this Commercial Coaching.

We first uncovered that the best reps out there are coaching their customers through the sale in our latest work on the New High Performer Playbook.   Star reps are not out there indiscriminately talking to anyone, they’re very purposefully seeking out Mobilizers to help them build the case for change and build consensus.  But once stars find a Mobilizer, they don’t just hand over the reins and walk away – they very actively coach the Mobilizer through the consensus building process.

If you haven’t seen the Mobilizer and Commercial Coaching work yet, you’ll want to start there.  But if you are ready to start building your own versions of the tools, then this blog post is for you.

These are some lessons we’ve learned from members across the last several months as they’ve taken these ideas and tools and adapted them to their world. Read More »

Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, authors of The Challenger Sale, were recently featured in Sales & Marketing Management, where they explained the logic behind the controversial notion that complex B2B sales is more about confidence and less about relationships.

Here are excerpts from the Q&A:

SMM: There has been a lot of debate online about the theories you propose in your new book. Before we get to those, however, why did the world need another sales book?

BRENT ADAMSON: When we set out on this project, we never had any intention to write a book. At the Corporate Executive Board, we spend all of our time researching the world of sales as deeply as we can to understand what great looks like. The thing that sets this apart from a lot of sales books that are out there is that everything in it is data driven. It is driven off a huge amount of quantitative research that you rarely see in the sales industry and particularly in the sales book industry. Most of the books out there, when you read the author bios, tell you that it’s “based on my 30 years of experience of carrying a bag and running big sales accounts and bagging the elephant or winning the whale,” or whatever it is they do. I mean no disrespect, but that’s just not how we think about sales. We study sales very meticulously from a quantitative and qualitative perspective to understand what great looks like.

When we landed on this Challenger work, we talked to heads of sales at our member organizations. The thing that struck us as so different about this work is that it really was changing – radically in some cases – the way people thought about how they were currently operating. When you look at this data and all that it implies, it takes so much conventional wisdom and stands it on its head and tells us that much of what we’ve been doing is, in fact, incorrect. It was the right story for the right time.   Read More »

Here’s a pair of surprising statistics: 60% of our members tell us that they would love to establish a formal skills certification process for their teams, but guess how many have actually done it?

Only about one in every four (see page 43).

So the big question on our mind is – what seems to be the hold-up?

Establishing a certification process for Sales is not easy, particularly for front-line salespeople. In fact, many of the most robust certification programs we’ve seen from companies like HP, British Airways, and Kohler are not geared toward sellers at all! The focus instead is placed on the certification of line management, a critical challenge in its own right, but one that does not address what to do with all the sales people being cycled through our training and onboarding curriculums.

Fortunately, there are some early lessons from the few but brave member companies we have seen embarking into the world of sales rep certifications. We’ve summarized the top five here:   Read More »