Sales leaders are acutely aware of how painful a wrong hiring decision can be.  When you calculate the fully-loaded cost of recruiting, onboarding, training, coaching, and compensating an employee who ends up chronically struggling in role, the numbers can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands in sunk costs.

Of course for sales roles, there is a double-whammy as well. In addition to the direct hiring and training costs that are lost, there are often even greater indirect, opportunity costs that arise when an underperforming rep’s territory goes under-covered, and its revenue potential goes unrealized.  In some industries, these costs can quickly skyrocket into the millions.

The point is, hiring right matters a lot. It matters in general, but it especially matters in sales. And while there is no sure-fire way to accurately pinpoint superstar seller potential for every position you fill, we’ve seen many sales organizations becoming more systematic in their approaches. Read More »

Here’s a pair of surprising statistics: 60% of our members tell us that they would love to establish a formal skills certification process for their teams, but guess how many have actually done it?

Only about one in every four (see page 43).

So the big question on our mind is – what seems to be the hold-up?

Establishing a certification process for Sales is not easy, particularly for front-line salespeople. In fact, many of the most robust certification programs we’ve seen from companies like HP, British Airways, and Kohler are not geared toward sellers at all! The focus instead is placed on the certification of line management, a critical challenge in its own right, but one that does not address what to do with all the sales people being cycled through our training and onboarding curriculums.

Fortunately, there are some early lessons from the few but brave member companies we have seen embarking into the world of sales rep certifications. We’ve summarized the top five here:   Read More »

Do you ever feel like your salespeople forget almost everything you coach them on? There are few things more frustrating than a seller repeating the same mistakes over and over, no matter how hard you try to show them the better way.

Why does this happen?

An easy conclusion to draw might be that our salespeople are simply hard-headed. As one sales trainer recently joked to us, “The term ‘adult learner’ is HR-speak for ‘excruciatingly-slow learner.”  And while there may be some merit to this suggestion, our research also tells us that there is another side to this story. While salespeople may at times be slow – or even outright resistant – to behavior change, many managers may also be coaching in all the wrong ways.

Here’s how:  A little known fact is that there are two very distinct types of sales coaching – Deal-Level and Skill-Level. Both are important, yet data from our Coaching Pulse Survey consistently shows that most of us over-prioritize Deal-Level coaching at the expense of Skill-Level. This may have worked in years past, but it becomes highly problematic in the age of Challenger Selling.

Here’s why: Read More »

Consumers aren’t the only ones who may be overspending their bank accounts. A growing body of research from our sister program for Corporate Communicators (CEC) suggests that repeated organizational shuffling across the past few years may have exhausted the “Engagement Capital” many business leaders have to work with (think of engagement capital as the degree of optimism an employee holds about past, present, and future events at their company).

Simply put, many of us are pushing internal changes through on disgruntled workforces that no longer have the stomach for it. We are morale-ly bankrupt.

Here are some of the facts as they play out for Sales…

First, more than half of our reps have probably experienced multiple, major changes in the past year – such as a new manager, a different role, a merger with another company, a new sales process, or a restructured team.

Second, these changes are stressful, and stress costs money. In fact, more than 60% of salespeople say that their level of workplace stress has increased in the past two years, and this may be creating an overall drag of as much as 9% on performance.

But why is the stress of change having such a debilitating impact?  After all, change happens right? Salespeople should be able to deal with it. But it turns out that it’s not so much the magnitude, but rather the frequency of change that is a problem. Read More »

For the past few years, we’ve been talking a lot about how to revamp an underperforming value proposition.

And for the past few years, sales leaders have been telling us – again and again – thanks, but no thanks. It’s not that revitalizing their flagging sales messages is not a top priority. It’s just that all the ways to do it sound so hard!

To be fair, re-vamping a value proposition is not for the light of heart. Consider some of the typical questions and discussion topics it requires: What do we stand for? Why are we in business? What makes us unique?

These are the fluffy, hold-hands-with-your-colleague type of questions that can get you canned when you’re tied to a number and you were expected to deliver it yesterday.

One Head of Sales Training summed it up nicely:  “The only thing worse than having to spend three days on an insane spiritual quest for a new value prop…is having to do it with marketing in the room screaming at you the whole time.” It’s no wonder so many of our members have such an allergic reaction to the idea. For most it’s a non-starter.

And in all honesty, we can’t blame you. Read More »

Two-thirds of member organizations that we work with have some sort of sales competency model in place. But, when was it last updated?

Now that’s a very interesting question. While our sister program for HR execs recommends re-evaluating your competency model every 1-3 years, we’ve found that very few organizations actually find time to do this.

So what this means is that many of us have competency models that were built in a different architectural period. They are still functional, and many of them have good bones, but given the changes in today’s selling environment, these models may lack a few critical design features that we would all expect to see in the age of the Challenger Rep™.

In short, our competency models need a quick renovation.

Now to be clear, this isn’t about ripping out asbestos or renting a backhoe…rather than a major overhaul, most of us just need a fresh coat of paint and some updated appliances to get our competency models up to speed. Okay, if we’re completely honest, a few of us may desperately need a new addition…

But the fact of the matter is, we know infinitely more today than we did a few years ago about what it takes to be a high-performing sales rep. Many of the very relationship-building behaviors that were in vogue when we last updated our competency models have proven insufficient for driving customer loyalty. It’s not that relationships aren’t important. They’re just not enough anymore.

So then, how do we make our competency models more current?   Read More »

Over the years we’ve seen a lot of sales training programs crash and burn. Just last year 28% of members rated their existing programs as entirely ineffective.

In general, training programs seem to go off the rails for many different reasons — poor internal marketing, lack of manager buy-in, and overly generic curriculums created by outside vendors. But across all of these failed cases, one common theme seems to exist: a consistent lack of high-quality, real-world opportunities for application of new skills. Phrased simply, most sales training programs are too safe, too easy, and way too far removed from a rep or manager’s day-to-day reality.

The problem seems to arise from the fact that most training programs – either explicitly or implicitly –aim to cultivate awareness. The belief is that if reps and managers can be exposed to new skill, knowledge set, or proposed behavioral change, they will be so compelled by its inherent logic, they will be driven to reverse their hard-wired habits. This of course is rarely the reality.

So what would be a better goal for sales training programs? A growing number of members tell us they are focusing on building muscle memory as a desired outcome.

What does this mean? Read More »

A few years ago we shared an interesting member case study on how the monthly rep pipeline – typically used for tactical, deal-level discussions – could be elevated and transformed into a strategic tool for long-term skill development.

After all, a rep’s pipeline data tells you a lot more than how individual deals are progressing. This data also tells you how a rep is spending their time, how they’re prioritizing their opportunities and, most interestingly, where their biggest skill gaps are.

I’d like to propose that a similar result could be achieved if we started aggressively auditing and aggregating customer objections – instances that few of us record, but our reps bump up against every day.

Imagine what would be possible if you had a list of the top ten customer objections your organization faces, and you captured a tally mark in your CRM system every time one of them popped up in a rep conversation.  Some interesting trends might emerge.   Read More »

Another quarter-end is fast approaching, and as always, some of your reps are on the fence. They’re one deal away from crossing goal, but most of their remaining opportunities are coin tosses. It’s hard to predict whether that last bit of revenue will come in, or where it will come from. So what’s the best strategy for shaking loose a few more deals in these situations?

As deals enter the late stages of the pipeline, we all tend to make assumptions about what it will take to compel our prospects to complete the purchase. Some of these assumptions are valid; but others may narrow our thinking. For example, many reps assume that they’ve reached critical mass once they’ve talked to 3-5 stakeholders. But customers tell us a different story. They say their typical decision-making group has around 8-10 members.

So how do we help reps avoid these types of oversights?   Read More »

Every couple of months, we get a call from a member who’s in the sticky situation of needing to make mid-quarter adjustments to quotas or compensation plans. There’s a variety of reasons why companies land in these situations. Sometimes a new product launch isn’t as well received by customers as hoped.  In other cases, the sales force lands upon an unanticipated spike in customer demand. And sometimes an average performer unexpectedly becomes a superstar.

But regardless of the causes, goals and pay plans that are out of sync with rep performance can create big problems. If adjustments aren’t made, someone’s bank account will be broken – either the rep’s or the company’s.  The adjustments may be messy, but the alternative is far worse.

But contrary to common belief, quota and comp plan adjustment don’t always have to be jarring. We’ve seen a number of companies navigate the process with minimal disruption. The key, they tell us, is to always focus on communicating two things to the sales force: Read More »