Customers today are engaging sales reps later and later in the purchase decision. Our research shows that the typical purchase decision is 57% complete by the time the customer reaches out to a supplier. By that point, the customer has already decided:

• The problem that needs to be solved,
• The course of action that needs to be taken,
• The list of suppliers they might buy from,
• What they want to pay. (potentially)

All that’s left for the rep to negotiate is price. Average salespeople don’t mind this because it means much of the hard and messy work of needs diagnosis and building customized solutions has, in fact, already been done by the customer. High performers, though, reject being relegated to an “order fulfillment” role and instead head upstream—WAY upstream.   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 »

As many Sales Executive Council members know, we’ve been hard at work on a book about our Challenger research.  It’s been an exhausting (but rewarding) 10 months since we first finalized the agreement with our publisher (Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Group USA) and began putting pen to paper.

Now, with all of the T’s crossed and I’s dotted, we’re just waiting for hard copies to arrive and are looking forward to November 10^th, when the book officially goes on sale.

With all of the excitement in advance of the book launch, I think it’s easy for us to lose sight of why we wrote it in the first place. Really, at the end of the day, there are three things that drove us to do this:   Read More »

Note: This posting was written by Matt Dixon & Brent Adamson for the Harvard Business Review.

Download the diagnostic as a PDF.

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Every leader knows that the compensation plan plays an important role in recruiting and retaining the best talent. But what these executives often don’t realize is that how they communicate about pay can be as important as the plan itself.

We saw dramatic evidence of this in a study conducted by our sister program, CLC Compensation, which looked at sales comp. The perceived fairness of the pay (that is, whether it was determined equitably, consistently, and predictably) had a 20% greater positive impact on reps’ commitment to their job than their satisfaction with the pay amount itself. A fair payment scheme, it turned out, was a more powerful motivator than a generous pay scheme.

When it comes to using compensation to boost performance, then, sales executives should focus less on the payouts themselves and much more on improving reps’ belief in the fairness of the process used to determine those payouts. But how?

Read the rest of this post on HBR.

Note: This post was written by Matt Dixon, Simon Frewer, & Andrew Kent for the Harvard Business Review. Sales Challenger readers first read about this research in Andrew’s post, Spend Less Time Selling, published on January 11, 2011.

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This just in: salespeople are spending less time actually selling to customers, and more time on internal activities, than they were just five years ago.  But before you pine for the “good old days” when reps spent more time in the customer’s office than in yours, what if we told you that having your reps spend less time face-to-face with your customers might actually be a good thing?

At SEC Solutions, we’ve been tracking how reps spend their time since 2003. Our B2B Sales Index contains data on the sales process activities and time signatures of more than 10,000 sales reps across all major geographic markets and industries.  Recently, we took a look at how the time signature of sales reps has changed over the past five years.

When we compare rep time spend today with what it looked like five years ago, it’s clear that the sales world has undergone a dramatic shift.  Time spent on pre-sales and post-sales activities are both up by 15%.  Meanwhile, time spent on non-sales (i.e., admin) work is up a whopping 21%.  And all of this has come at the expense of actual selling time in front of the customer, which is down a full 26%.

Read the rest of this post on HBR »

Note: This posting was written by Matt Dixon & Brent Adamson for the Harvard Business Review.

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Most sales organizations have invested more time and effort in the past 5 years in improving managers’ coaching of reps than they did in the previous fifty. This makes perfect sense: our research shows that no other productivity investment comes close to coaching in improving reps’ performance.

But not all reps who get coached, even by good coaches, do better. In fact, our research shows that sales coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong reps. And our work suggests that management targets the wrong reps all the time.

Left to their own devices, sales managers often skew their coaching efforts dramatically toward the “tails” — the very best and the very worst reps on their team.  They engage with poor reps because they feel they must in order to meet territory goals, and they work with their best reps because, well, it’s fun.  Few managers can resist the lure of reliving their glory days by passing along their wisdom to the one or two reps who remind them most of their younger selves.  To combat managers’ tendency to coach just laggards and leaders, companies implement elaborate systems to allocate coaching equally across the sales force. They imagine that “all boats will rise” as a result.

Unfortunately, our data show that both managers’ coaching tendencies, and companies’ response, are misguided.

Click here to read the rest of this post on HBR.

If you haven’t ordered a copy of the Corporate Executive Board’s Executive Guidance for 2011: Achieving Intelligent Growth, take my advice and do it now.  Since launching the order site for Executive Guidance, more than 6,500 copies of the book have been ordered by your peers and more than 1,000 executives have signed up for one of the upcoming Webinars in December.  Copies of the book are free, as are the Webinars.

As you may know, our parent company, the Corporate Executive Board, provides research and advisory services to several dozen corporate functions—from CFOs to General Counsel to CMOs, CIOs, heads of HR, etc.  Executive Guidance, a deliverable authored by our Chairman and CEO, Tom Monahan, is essentially our synthesized “point of view” for corporate leaders for the year.  For lack of a better description, it’s our elevator pitch to CEOs and their leadership teams—and it’s a good read.

Read More »

Recently, I’ve had a couple of conversations with members about some of the words and titles we’ve chosen to convey our research findings—most notably, the “Challenger” sales rep (the big finding from last year’s SEC study on rep effectiveness) and “Sales Innovation” (the big finding from this year’s manager effectiveness study). 

In discussions I’ve had about the Challenger™ term, some members have asked whether it might have been more appropriate to call these reps “the new relationship builder”—after all, this is what the Challenger represents, isn’t it?  Whereas the classic relationship builder is focused on pleasing the customer, the Challenger is focused on making the customer professionally more effective in his or her job.  Isn’t that just a performance-based relationship? 

Similarly, in this year’s study, I’ve been pressed to explain how “Sales Innovation” is truly distinct from “deal-level coaching.”  Isn’t this really what the innovative manager is doing when he or she partners with a sales rep to “un-stick” a deal?

I don’t necessarily disagree with either of these arguments since they are both sound points of view based on a firm understanding not only of Sales, but of SEC content.  But, should we go back and rewrite those studies with terms like “new relationship builder” and “deal-level coaching” so they’re more agreeable to members and don’t run the risk of rubbing people the wrong way?  Absolutely not.

Why?  Because one of the most important things to do in challenging conventional wisdom—whether through a research study like those produced by the SEC, inside your own organization or with your own customers—is to be controversial.  Mind you, you need to have good reason (i.e., robust data and sound logic) to be able to challenge conventional wisdom…but data and logic alone won’t get it done.  Words matter and the story you tell matters.   Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review. If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy. You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer.

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved.

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer.

One thing this article pushed us to do was to think about the prescriptive advice we would give companies who want to pursue this low-effort journey. It’s not easy summing up more than four years of research around effort, what causes it and what leading companies are doing to eliminate it, but we managed to come up with the following list of five things that low-effort companies do (and are different, we have found, from what most companies do):     Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge | Drivers of Sales Performance

Many SEC members have been asking us how to get their contact center staff to up-sell and cross-sell customers while they’re on the phone with them.  For the most part, this interest is driven by a desire to allow the field sales organization to focus on more complex selling activities by getting other, lower-cost, channels focused on the transactional sales.  

But a huge majority of these same members report that they struggle to make headway and that these efforts to turn the contact center into a sales channel end up stalling out.  

SEC’s sister program, the Customer Contact Council, recently looked at the best levers for getting service reps to up-sell and cross-sell.  Their study of 1300+ contact center reps across more than 50 companies helps explain why most companies stumble in their efforts to drive sales through the contact center. 

The two big reasons are:

1) Sales productivity is driven by a different set of levers in the contact center: Senior leaders tend to think that the two most important levers to pull in building sales capabilities are to build a sales culture/environment in the contact center and to increase the organization’s emphasis on monetary rewards. 

The CCC’s research, however, shows that the “sales culture” effect is nominal, at best.  Meanwhile, an over-emphasis on monetary incentives can actually harm sales performance for customer service reps.   Read More »