Salespeople are famously competitive and they’re often looking to improve upon how things are being done. This is partly a matter of personality, but mostly it’s a matter of needing to continuously adapt to changes in what customers want and how the competition responds. This means that the frontier of practice in sales organizations constantly changes and that the bar is raised every year.

One of the Council’s most popular pieces of work—the Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Organization—is our effort to track these changes in Sales.

In the Anatomy, we take everything we learn from members and our research, and use it to document the state of practice in Sales today – it’s a succinct guide to what it means to be a world-class sales organization.

Members most often use the Anatomy to set or refine the vision of how they want to develop their sales organization. It can be used as a standalone document or taken as a diagnostic, in which people must prioritize between the different attributes.

We’ve just published our sixth version of the Anatomy and the changes we made to the sections, attributes, and the wording of the attributes themselves reflect the growing sophistication of the sales function. Read More »

This year our sister program for heads of marketing ran a study aimed at understanding customer purchase decisions. As part of that study, we asked 1,512 customers from 18 participating companies questions about their decision process.

This survey produced a very surprising finding that not only underlines the competitive nature of B2B sales but also provides an easy way of assessing your sales force’s effectiveness.

First, as background, we asked respondents to indicate how far they had advanced in the purchase process before contacting a supplier’s sales force. It turns out that, across companies, customers are 57% of the way through the purchase process before ever contacting a supplier.

The data also revealed that your average purchaser does not contact very many suppliers. Across companies, customers typically consider no more than three suppliers at the early stages of a purchase (though procurement departments might in order to bring rigor to the process). And by the final stage, the number of suppliers considered falls to 1.7…so not even two companies.

That means that there is essentially a frontrunner and somebody who is being included merely to provide a point of comparison.   Read More »

This is the time of year when thoughts turn to lobster rolls, straw hats, and sun burns. But, during summer, my mind also turns to reading, which can facilitate said sun worship; it’s too hard to just sit there.

As usual, the business press produced a bumper crop this year and I’m hoping that the following five books will prompt some reflection and encourage everyone to share their favorite reads as well. Last year, we got some great suggestions from readers and we are hoping for the same this year.

This is a fairly idiosyncratic mix of books covering a variety of themes (and a couple of them might not be the easiest thing to read on the beach), but here are my top five suggestions for summer reading:   Read More »

As part of our research last year about gaining commercial alignment, we asked sales and marketing executives to force-rank their priorities.  Somewhat surprisingly, ‘lead generation’ appeared toward the end of that list, with sales executives ranking it as an even lower priority than their marketing counterparts.

Now this may be an indictment on the quality of the leads.  But in this day of LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and any number of networking applications showing you exactly where people work, I wonder if we’ve set the bar too low.  The challenge for marketers and account managers is around generating introductions – nobody continues to simply need a list of prospects.

The bar for an introduction is much, much higher and requires some real commitment on the prospect’s part.  The willingness to take a quick call is, in and of itself, a pretty good qualifier for a prospect.

Refocusing the commercial organization to think about introductions (and not just leads) has some major implications: Read More »

In the course of our research on sales effectiveness, we regularly survey customers to learn what they think of their sales experiences. One of the metrics we track is the primary method of communication: are customers spending more time in-person with your reps or does the lion’s share of their communication happen virtually— over phone, via email, or other social media?

In general, sales forces are still overwhelmingly focused on in-person interaction, so they are often surprised to learn just how much of their sales communication actually occurs virtually. In fact, we’ve found that when it comes to new sales discussions, there’s a 50-50 split between in-person and virtual communications.  What’s more, when the relationship has developed and it’s become more about staying in touch and keeping things on track, that ratio shifts even further, with only about 25 percent of interactions occurring in-person.

So, whether they know it or not, it’s clear that most B2B companies already have something of a virtual sales force.  Our findings suggest that companies are probably not assigning sufficient importance to other forms of communication that, while less information-rich, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Read More »

A couple of months back, my colleague Andrew Kent wrote a post around what not say in your pitch deck, and that got me thinking in terms of what you should say.

Luckily, we periodically run customer surveys where we ask our members’ customers to tell us whether or not certain brand statements resonate with them. Unluckily, the reports are generally sobering: only 19% of brand statements resonate with more than 50% of customers. Most of the time, customers simply don’t agree that a given statement represents the company more than it does one of its competitors.

Worse, there also turned out to be a long list of “true but unimportant” statements with which customers agreed, but that did not appear to drive preference (that is, there was little to no correlation between how companies were scored in these attributes and between whether or not the customer stated a preference for the company). Somewhat challengingly, these statements tended to be about delivery and fulfillment. The message to companies here is that there is no unique virtue to having made it easy to order your products through various channels: customers assume that all their suppliers can do this.

But things get more interesting when we looked at what does drive preference. And here a few things stood out: Read More »

This is the time of year when many are thinking about what goals they’re going to commit to. And part of this process also involves a consideration of the metrics the organization needs to measure and report on. This is always a tricky thing since the number of metrics is endless and you don’t want to settle on a dashboard that simply reports on what has happened and that offers no insight into how things are developing.

The solution is to try and model out the sales process and provide different individuals with numbers that will make it easier for them to deliver against their commitments:

• For reps, the metrics will be tend to be around the pipeline and will want to contain a mechanism for evaluating the quality of the opportunity as well as the usual pipeline metrics that are more focused on volume.

• Similarly, managers will want to have access to aggregate and trend information so that they can help achieve the desired outcomes. We would always recommend that any manager dashboards also include some softer measures, assessing the development needs of individual reps, as well as a measure of the quality of the relationship between the manager and the rep.

That said, I do believe that there are some metrics that absolutely every sales leader should know and track since they provide crucial clues as to what is happening. This is a personal list, and so I’d love for people to chime in and nominate some of their favorite metrics and why they like them.

Read More »

Very few poems deal with the worries of the working day. Poets seem to prefer writing on grander subjects such as love or a major case of depression, and who can blame them?

But often times I like to think that poets can be sellers, and vice versa, especially since a lot of selling comes down to perfect positioning and perfect messaging: what exactly does a prospect need to know to make a decision? And what’s the best way to communicate the value?

So, I went looking for some appropriate “sales” poems and found some terrific motivational ones. The most obvious – and my favorite – happens to be IF by Rudyard Kipling (this is just the first stanza):

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

But my very favorite poem for salespeople comes from a less well-know New England poet: Robert Francis. Here he’s writing about baseball, but I find it to be an inspiring metaphor for selling (especially around the need to be somewhat subtle when pitching). You certainly want to have an impact but you also can’t afford to be so obvious that nobody can remember what’s unique about your offer:  Read More »

For the most part, organizations are run with the expectation of driving greater efficiency and productivity. Retailers are expected to improve their revenues per square foot, hotels and airlines strive to improve their yields per seat/rooms, and the mantra is one of constantly doing more with less.

But it is worth remembering that this dynamic is not universal. As William Baumol famously highlighted, a string quartet always has and always will need 4 people, no matter what they earn. Inherently, the complexity of true art requires a certain degree of inefficiency.

And in my opinion, companies should remember this principle when measuring the relative efficiency of their own sales force.

We are increasingly hearing companies cite that reps have become relatively less efficient on a per head basis, even as the rest of the company makes a lot more revenue per head.

The implication is that the direct sales force might need some pruning and that people aren’t pulling their weight. Lean selling is the antidote that’s often prescribed. After all, the rest of the corporation is being run with fewer people so why should the sales force be exempt from this dynamic?

But a fundamental flaw in this judgment is failing to account for the amount of time and “art” it typically takes a rep to complete a new sale. For selling, and complex solutions selling in particular, it requires a slow interaction which ebbs and flows between groups of people who are trying to generate value for each other. Read More »

Our recent work on manager effectiveness – where we did a large quantitative survey about manager skills, attributes, attitudes and activities — found robust correlations between how managers are rated by their direct reports and how they’re rated by the company.   In other words, most of the time, reps and the company will rate a given manager the same way:  both good, or both bad.

However, the correlations aren’t perfect.  Sometimes, there is a significant disconnect between how what the rep says and what the company says. We’ve started to generate a picture of where these disconnects come from.

First, there are reps ‘incorrectly’ assessing the manager, which comes in two forms:

1)   Rep performance issues:  Reps who have performance issues can resent the manager for holding them back.  Interestingly, for companies we have been tracking for a while, this effect tends to go away as the rep realizes the manager is helping them perform better. These managers typically need some appreciation for the hard job they’ve been asked to do.

2)   Long-beloved managers: There are well-loved managers who have been around a long time.  Reps love them, but the company can often more clearly see the skills they lack.  While they might not always have the competencies to progress to the next level or be the highest achievers, they do a lot for the organization and the company should recognize the loyalty that these managers engender in reps.

More problematically, there are cases when the organization ‘incorrectly’ assesses the manager, again in two forms:   Read More »