While few would disagree that standardization of a process is critical to a company implementing CRM and pipeline management, many still struggle to balance standardization with the need to customize guidance to an individual’s unique needs.

During pipeline reviews, managers are often left to compare individual pipelines to company averages (e.g. average opportunities per stage, average time per stage, or average close ratio).  And that presents a challenge to managers, as the guidance they give to their reps is based on what others do.  This means pipeline coaching conversations often sound like this – “well, on average, reps in our segment should have 3X their goal in their pipeline at all times to ensure they’ll hit their goal.”

But when you look at how individual sales reps manage their funnel, every rep is different.  They have different average deal size and close ratios, and they spend different amounts of time on deals in different stages.  So the number of opportunities they would need to have in each stage to hit goal would vary widely.

Not only does the lack of customization make the data and coaching seem irrelevant from a sales rep perspective, managers are equally limited in their ability to prescribe credible and customized action to reps based on how each of their reps uniquely manage their funnel. Read More »

Solutions bias is the tendency to jump to a solution without fully root causing a problem.  We spend 80% of our time focused on the solution, but only 20% of the time really understanding the problem in the first place.  And because of that, we often end up building solutions to the wrong problem.  Or solutions that only address a small part of the problem.

We see it play out again and again across all parts of a sales organization – whether we’re developing or cascading sales strategies, selecting metrics, creating new sales tools, or building training.  And regardless of your role in the process – whether you’re the one building the strategy or the one responding to a request for tools or training – there’s a simple process you can use to help overcome solutions bias.

The process is very much like lean six sigma – only you don’t need years of six sigma training (or a six sigma blackbelt) to use it.  There are six steps in the process:   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 »

CRM – it’s a topic that’s guaranteed to derail any meeting with a 15-minute side-bar into why our reps don’t use it.  CRM is so frustrating because very few companies have been able to crack the code and really build a CRM system that is a core part of how they go to market.

There are many reasons why CRM fails…Incomplete data.  Duplicate data.  Inaccurate data.  Too many fields.  Too time consuming.  Not user-friendly.  Redundant.

These are all reasons why CRM is often viewed as a burden and why reps don’t use it.  Although each of those problems must be addressed, there’s a bigger problem that they often mask and it can be traced back to one simple question – why would a rep want to use the CRM?

From the rep perspective, how much better is using the CRM than their own way of selling that they’ve built over their career?  They view CRM as a necessary evil, whose mandatory fields are needed to get resources or help their manager send forecasts up the ivory tower.

Very rarely do reps use the CRM because they believe it actually helps them sell better. And therein lies the problem.

As you’re thinking about investments in CRM in 2012, look at every potential investment through that lens.  Here are some additional questions you may want to ask yourself: Read More »

It’s budget season, and with that comes that annual ritual of making business cases for various investments.  I’ve gotten quite a few requests lately about the ROI of skill development initiatives…everything from the overall impact of training/development in general to more specific questions about the impact that comes from very specific types of training (such as account planning or presentation skills).

These questions are difficult to answer directly for a number of reasons.  Part of the ROI is dependent upon what skill you’re building as well as the level of reps’ competency with that skill at the start of development.

Ongoing coaching also impacts return on development efforts.  Every company and every individual starts at a different level of skill, making the return on investment highly variable.

However, there are a few things you can look at to get closer to an answer.  Some of these approaches will help you fight for budget dollars now – others will give you ideas on how to better measure the impact of training you’ll be running in 2012. Read More »

The idea of a specialist or technical engineer is a tremendous strategy – let’s have sales reps or account managers out there focused on uncovering opportunities and building relationships, and then when the deal gets really into the weeds (or into products/services that require deep technical knowledge), let’s bring in the expert.

And while that strategy looks great on paper, there are a number of ways it can break down, turning your specialists into reactive order takers rather than people shaping demand and building profitable solutions.

So what causes the strategy to break down? Well, the answer lies mainly within how reps choose to leverage their specialist.  Here are the most common reasons why the specialist strategy often goes awry, and what you can do to overcome them:

1) Qualify, Qualify, Qualify

Core reps throw EVERYTHING over the fence at their specialist.  If it smells like an opportunity, they put it in the pipeline, book a meeting with the specialist and the customer, and forecast it to close.  To average reps, every opportunity is a great opportunity – why would we NOT want to pursue this?! Read More »

I’ve been getting a lot of questions on Sales and Marketing Integration of late, ranging from highly strategic questions like “how do Sales and Marketing get more aligned?” to more tactical questions like “who should own the lead generation process?”

The SEC has studied Sales and Marketing Integration quite a bit over the last few years, and whatever the question, the answer almost always leads back to two things:  Ownership and Leadership.

Ownership:

In every organization, there are some activities where ownership is clear (e.g. compensation and goal setting is most commonly owned by Sales, mix modeling is typically owned by Marketing, etc.).  However there are many capabilities that fall into a “grey area” where ownership is not always so cut and dry and require closer alignment between Sales and Marketing.

Last year, we set out to understand how dozens of B2B companies view 20 Sales and Marketing capabilities that fall into those “grey areas.”  We wanted to understand how companies view the importance, effectiveness, and ownership of the 20 capabilities and how that relates to the organization’s ability to achieve commercial outcomes like consistency of message, effective funnel management, increasing share of wallet, market share growth, customer loyalty, and so on.

And as we shared with you in a previous post, what mattered most is that Sales and Marketing agree on who OWNS each capability to begin with. 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 »

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 »

I’ve been getting a large number of M&A-related questions lately, specifically on how to integrate two different sales forces, the challenges posed by new or changing roles and responsibilities of reps and managers, as well as the shuffling of accounts that normally accompany a merger. To help, I’ve compiled here some key learnings gathered from members who have integrated two different sales forces into one.

There’s not much here regarding the HOW – and that is by design – the idea of this is to validate what you’re doing as well as identify some areas were you could be putting a little more rigor.  At that point, we have resources (tools, templates, processes, etc) we can share with you to help you execute more efficiently and effectively in all of these areas.

At the highest level, you should think of M&A challenges on three levels:  customer, rep, and manager. And interestingly, of those three levels, the place most companies struggle isn’t the rep level—where they focus all of their time and energy—it’s the manager level.

Let’s review some of the key considerations you must take into account for each level:   Read More »