(This post was originally written for the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing).

Last month we shared with you the 10 trends every sales exec must know in 2011. Are you also wondering what your counterparts in Marketing are worried about? Our sister program for marketing executives has started to see a few early trends for 2011 – here’s what they are:

1) Growth from new customers.  In 2009, flat was the new up.  In 2010, it was about getting back to growth, and generally that involved getting your best customers to give you new business.  In 2011 it’s time to go back to growth from new customers—and probably not the same ones you lost before.  This in turn means B2B marketing focusing on lead gen, content marketing, marketing automation and intelligence.

2) Global reorganization.  Speaking of growth from new customers – in many cases those customers are in new markets, given the much faster rate of growth expected in emerging markets overall.  This often means reorganizing the function; we’re seeing a focus on centralization to make sure expansion in emerging markets follows a central strategy. 

3) Social media breaks through for B2B.  At the end of 2009, we had almost every B2C company asking us what they should do about social media.  By the end of 2010, many had figured out their strategies.  We’re seeing the same trend in B2B now: 2011 is the year social media goes from a few experiments to a real strategy in B2B.

Of course, we’re not necessarily talking about B2Bs tweeting; I believe B2B organizations in particular have a real opportunity to build the kinds of communities their customers crave.  Every time I hear a success story about social media in B2B it seems to involve a dedicated community of customers who work together on projects or discuss common issues.  Read More »

When talking with members recently about their current challenges, lots of conversations have centered around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

But how can you make people want to share your content and advocate on your behalf?

It turns out two Wharton professors already looked at what makes people share, with an investigation of what makes people share New York Times articles.  Independent readers described articles using a number of adjectives, and then the professors looked at how likely the articles were to be in the list of top shared articles.

Short answer?  The most shared articles are those that inspire awe.

(In case you’re interested — number two: things that inspire anger, three: practical utility, four: emotionality, tied for five: anxiety and surprise, bringing in the rear: positivity.  Things that inspire sadness are much less likely to be shared.  You can find much more in the – ironically – widely shared New York Times article about the paper here).

So what does it mean to be awe-inspiring?  In the New York Times, this generally meant it was a complicated, intellectual article about science, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”  As one of the authors says, “You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

At the highest level, here’s how the authors defined awe-inspiring: “Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.”  Read More »

In my last post, I explained how the most important sales-specific skill a manager can have right now – much more important than resource allocation and just inching out coaching – is sales innovation.  But innovation and creativity are not words we frequently use in Sales (at least not in a good way).   So what do we really mean by sales innovation, and how do we get it?  I’ll answer that here, and sprinkle in some links to relevant cases that SEC members can access.

Let’s start by talking about the military.

In the Army, there’s an old saying that applies equally well to Sales:  “No plan survives engagement with the enemy.”

No matter how carefully one plans for battle, the reality on the field will inevitably present in a different way.  And as a result, over the years, army leaders have adopted a style of leadership known as Commander’s Intent.

Commander’s Intent is just that:  a clear, concise statement of the specific goal a commander is looking to achieve. Something like:  “Capture and hold that hill until reinforcements arrive.”

In this approach, Army leaders have stopped giving step-by-step instructions on how to actually go about capturing the hill, because they’ve learned that once the team gets out in the field and engages in battle, they have to quickly adapt to the situation on the ground in unanticipated ways.

Not surprisingly then, the field leaders who excel in the Army have to be creative, innovative, and adaptive to survive. 

Now, Sales is not exactly like war, but it is a series of (hopefully friendlier) battles to win ground over competitors.  And given that these days those battles are less predictable than ever before, it makes sense that deviating from the plan is now increasingly necessary.    Read More »

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In my last post I talked about how changes in customer behavior have made our growth goals harder and harder.  Specifically, customers may be more open to buying a vision, but getting a deal to completion has gotten a lot more challenging, and less predictable.  And our biggest leverage point for helping navigate customer organizations to get a deal done?  Managers.

The first-line manager has arguably always been the most important (and least-defined) role in a sales organization.  But recent changes in customer behavior, coupled with the shift to solution selling, have changed what matters most for managers.  So here’s the new story of manager excellence.

As a reminder, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding over 1,000 managers – to explain the primary drivers of manager excellence.

Our first finding is no surprise:  managers need to be good at the fundamentals.  These are things like integrity, reliability and listening, which are important to any manager, not just sales managers.   Luckily, it turns out most managers are good at these.   For the 3.5% of our sample who failed at the fundamentals—they’re probably not cut out for a job in management.

More interesting are the sales-specific activities that matter most.  These fall into three high-level categories, with the impact on performance in parentheses:

• Selling (26.6%) – being personally effective at selling, particularly the Challenger™ behaviors
• Coaching (28.0%) – helping others improve, particularly with tailoring and asserting control
• Owning the Business (45.4%) – when managers run their territory as if it were their own business

Owning the Business breaks down into two parts:     Read More »

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In my last blog post, I introduced the idea of sales innovation, and how it is the most important thing a sales manager can do to drive growth.  I left you hanging about the specific activities inherent to sales innovation–and I promise to get there–but to really understand the concept, we need some context.

This story starts with why growth is so hard right now: changing customer behaviors.  There has been a lot of change in customer situations–increased price pressure, decreased budgets, etc –but while these changes may dissipate over time, we see a few trends that we think are here to stay:

1. More customer stakeholders involved with the deal
2. Customers pushing risk onto suppliers
3. Rise of third party consultants auditing deal agreements

What this means at the 10,000-foot level:  it is getting harder and harder to get a deal to close.  Looking closer, you can see that it’s getting harder in a very specific way that relies on the manager.

It helps to think about the path of a sale in two main stages:

• First, selling a customer on a vision
• Second, getting them to buy an offering customized to their specific needs

Think about it:  with every sale, we begin with the customer in some sort of status quo—uncomfortable as it may be, given the tough economy of late—then, through the recognition of a need, the customer agrees on a vision.   Read More »

As many of you know, we’ve spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance.  Along the way, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding  over 1,000 managers – and you’ve seen bits and pieces from this analysis here on this site already. 

Now it’s time to start telling the whole story about what we found, not just nuggets of data analysis.   

When we took a hard look at the data, we found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently to succeed in today’s environment.  We’ve started presenting the information in day-long sessions and executive breakfasts around the globe (SEC members, click here to register for one of our upcoming events or teleconferences on the subject).  As you can imagine, there is too much to be communicated in one post, so I’ll use a series of posts to cover our major conclusions.

The top line from our research?

2010 is all about growth.  That’s not news, as we all know it’s not OK not to grow this year.  But changing customer behavior has made growth a real challenge.  Everyone also agrees that sales managers are the vital linchpin for driving a return to growth in 2010.

While coaching is absolutely crucial to sales manager success, it turns out that when it comes to growth, there is a whole other category of manager activity even more important than coaching.

Therefore, what is that category of manager activity that most drives growth?  We call it ‘Sales Innovation.’   Read More »

We’ve just finished talking with over a hundred members for our new study Building Managers for a Return to Growth, and one of the themes we saw was that there is an unprecedented amount of change happening in sales organizations.

Why?  Well, it’s not necessarily by choice.   Given a mandate to grow but faced with resistant customers, sales organizations realize they need a new playbook.  More companies than ever are re-examining value propositions, go-to-market models, territories and customer interactions.  And they’re recognizing the importance of new rep skills for selling in a complex environment.

But, of course, change is hard.  One of my favorite articles on the subject is from business magazine Fast Company, titled Change or Die.  In it, medical specialists talk about the challenge of getting patients to change behaviors – stop smoking, drinking, eating too much, reduce stresses, and exercise more.

It turns out those five behavioral issues account for 80% of the healthcare budget in the US.  Often, those bad habits lead to expensive heart procedures.  But these are generally only temporary measures; those who receive treatment are told to switch to a healthier lifestyle before heart disease kills them.  After two years, guess how many had changed habits?

10%.  That’s a pretty sad number.

But it shows that even when patients face a shorter life, old habits die hard.

Thankfully, the article provides some answers as well.  Some change efforts have been successful in the medical world.  What can we learn from them (both personally and professionally)?  Read More »

As we dip our toe into the waters of the blogosphere, one of the biggest questions we faced for the blog itself was:  what to call it?  Those of you who’ve spent some time with our materials know that we spend an inordinate amount of time on page titles alone so it was a spirited discussion here in the researcher dungeon. 

(Side note: if you look at our study Deepening Customer Relationships, the titles of the first five pages are: “The train has left the station,” “I thought I meant more to you,” “Through bad times and good,” “Two sides of the same coin,” and “Taking the next step.”  Intriguing enough for a closer look??)

But once we came up with Sales Challenger, the discussion was over.  Why?  Well, the Sales Challenger really encapsulates the two major goals we are trying to achieve with this blog: Read More »