Over the past several years, I have had continuous conversations about the Challenger Sales Model with companies of every size and from every industry.  This research is literally transforming the way that sales leaders think about supporting and enabling their sales organizations.

For those unfamiliar with this research, after analyzing several hundred sales professionals, we found that your sales reps/account managers fall into one of five behavior/skill profiles:

1. The Hard Worker
2. The Problem Solver
3. The Challenger
4. The Relationship Builder
5. The Lone Wolf

And the key finding?  One of these profiles – the Challenger – dramatically outperforms the other four, especially in higher complexity sales environments.

While it’s good to KNOW which profile is winning, the challenge for sales leaders (no pun intended) is HOW do we BUILD more challengers?

For my next conversation, I’ll be hosting a webinar with SAVO on May 8 – where I’ll discuss why Challengers win and how companies can build the Challengers they need to drive customer loyalty and higher growth.

While most companies have a well-established account planning process in place, few include the critical step of involving customers, especially in the early stages when expectations are set (rather, they involve customers only toward the end when results are reviewed).

Leading companies, on the other hand, build their account planning process around customer involvement.  We’ve captured best practices from three companies that demonstrate how to include customers in the account planning process – ranging from a multi-day meeting to a ten-minute conversation.

I’ve included summaries of these practices below and I’ve ranked them from top-to-bottom in terms of the amount of effort required for both supplier and customer.

Read More »

“Do we know which accounts we need to focus on?”

“Are we deploying our resources in the most efficient way?”

“Are our non-sales resources aligned effectively to support the sales effort?”

These are some of the common questions we receive from members on the topic of sales coverage.  And while there isn’t a “best-in-class” organizational structure (your organization’s size and structure depends on your sales strategy), there are best practices to ensure that whatever organizational structure you currently have is set up optimally.

(SEC Members, check out our brand new sales organizational structures benchmarking.)

These best practices fall into three major categories: Read More »

“Never make forecasts, especially about the future”
-Samuel Goldwyn

While the quote in the title is tongue-in-cheek, in Sales, forecasting is a fact of life.  And many members lament that the quality of their sales forecasting is lacking.  Information isn’t always entered by the sales force – and if it is, it might not be accurate – and even then our ability to analyze the information may not be up to par.

So to help us out, I went to the definitive source on financial tracking and analysis – the CFO suite.  I sat down with Myles Vander Weele, Executive Advisor with our Corporate Finance practice, to talk about sales forecasting from Finance’s perspective.

According to Myles, forecasting is a critical responsibility of Corporate Finance.  They work to figure out what the organization is capable of and then set targets to track actual performance against those expectations throughout the year.   “Since forecasts are assumptions,” says Myles, “Finance continuously checks to determine how the business is performing relative to those assumptions.”

And, getting sales forecasting as accurate as possible is critical to a well run business.  As Myles explains, “Sales forecasts help the company make better decisions on how to manage spending and what expectations they should be setting with investors.”

However, relatively speaking, forecasting Sales is difficult. Read More »

Sales organizations are looking to improve key account performance, and many are focused on developing the skills of their Key Account Managers (KAMs) as the answer.

But that’s not the best place to start. In fact, when we looked at the drivers of KAM effectiveness, a KAM’s skill level came in last place.

Why? Because the complexity of the customer relationships your KAMs manage relies upon more than just an individual’s skill level.

Instead, the two drivers of a KAM’s effectiveness that matter more are:   Read More »

ZOPA is an acronym for “Zone of Potential Agreement”—this is the range in which a deal can be closed that is mutually beneficial for both customer and supplier.

To illustrate a ZOPA by example (see Figure 1), let’s say that a buyer is interested in a particular vintage car that is offered by a private seller.  The seller wants at least $20,000 (because of the price they paid plus all the maintenance they put into the car over the years). The most the buyer is willing to spend on that car (because they can get a similar car from a dealer) is $24,000.

So the ZOPA in this case is between $20,000 and $24,000, and hopefully buyer and seller can agree to a price in between that each finds valuable.

While this is a fairly straightforward example of a negotiation, in B2B sales, the ability to negotiate effectively is a critical skill…and understanding ZOPA is a key component of that. Read More »

There seems to be an almost unlimited array of smartphone apps out there, and many are geared to the business traveler.  Here is a sampling of my favorites—the apps I most often use while out on the road, all of which can be downloaded for free.

The apps are organized by common (at least in my case) travel challenges.

Challenge #1: “Wait, so for how long is my flight delayed?”

App that can help: FlightAware

If you’re traveling after the first flights of the day, the time of your departing flight is likely to be determined by when the plane you will fly on arrives from another airport.  Many times, the departure boards don’t accurately reflect this.  So ask the gate agent for the flight number of the arriving flight for your plane, and FlightAware lets you track that flight live while it’s in the air.  You can search easily by flight number as well as flight route (departing and arriving airports).

***Note – don’t stray too far from the gate area even if your arriving plane is delayed.  The airline might switch planes to get your flight off earlier.

Challenge #2: “I hope there’s more than a snack machine near my gate!” Read More »

J.C. Penny, the American retailer, is getting a new boss.  Ron Johnson will become their new CEO in November after having led Apple’s retail store operations for the last decade.  Mr. Johnson is credited with the success of Apple’s retail store operations – and the results speak for themselves.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

• More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year.
• Apple’s annual retail sales per square foot have soared to $4,406. Add in online sales, which include iTunes, and the number jumps to $5,914. That’s far higher than the sales per square foot and online sales of jeweler Tiffany & Co. ($3,070), luxury retailer Coach Inc. ($1,776), and electronics retailer Best Buy Co. ($880), according to estimates.
• Needham & Co. puts Apple stores’ profit margin at 26.9% in an industry that typically has profit margins hovering around 1%.

These results are impressive, but not surprising. Why?

Because Apple, through their training and support, enable their retail staff to sell the way customers want to buy. Read More »

It’s the classic paradox of account management – once a customer becomes important enough to demand a single point of contact (generally a Key Account Manager or KAM), the complexity of that customer relationship is too much for one person to manage by themselves!

Success here is determined by your company’s ability to support your account managers with a team-based selling approach.  We analyzed ~ 300 Key Account Managers (defined as having at least national scope and less than three accounts under management) and found that the single biggest factor to their success – beyond their skill level – was the level and quality of support the KAM was receiving from their organization in their efforts to serve the account.

In other words, you can have the best KAMs in the world – but if they don’t have a team (either direct reports or dedicated cross-functional liaisons) effectively supporting them, you’re harming the KAM’s ability to serve and grow the account.

For many organizations, this presents a significant challenge. If the notion of an account “team” is nothing more than a group of people across your business who are loosely coordinated to serve an account, then it’s like trying to control chaos.  Your KAMs will spend most of their time on internal coordination, rather than customer value-generating activities.

In our study Deepening Customer Relationships, we looked at best-in-class account management programs and found that there are three key attributes to a well-running team-based selling model:   Read More »

There are probably no individuals more time oppressed in your sales force than your sales managers.  And a perennial focus for sales organizations is making sure that managers have enough time to spend on high-value activities.

A big problem standing in the way is admin. In fact, our sister research organization, the Communications Executive Council, profiled how The Home Depot sized up the problem.  They created a dummy manager inbox on their email system and let it run for one month.  Guess how many emails were waiting there, unopened?

3,000! And if you estimate that it takes about a minute to read each of those emails, they cost 50 hours of on-the-job time – and that’s not even factoring in the time to type a response!

So are your managers buried by too many administrative requests? Read More »