(This post is the second in a three-part series about creating compelling sales messages.)

In my post last week, we began a journey to craft a sales message that can move customer conversations beyond price and position the buying decision in favor of your solution as a supplier.

To recap, the Council suggests using a 3-step process to create this kind of sales message: 1) Challenge Assumptions, 2) Brainstorm Organizational Competencies, and 3) Identify Your Differentiators.

While last week’s post focused on Step 1 of the process, in this post, let’s talk about the second step – brainstorming organizational competencies.  Here, the purpose is to gather relevant competencies (or core company strengths) that are validated by business data and personal experience. The desired outcome is a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s competencies and supporting facts.

What you want to do is build consensus around your internal competencies before considering customer needs or the competition. This sequencing helps you find the value in what you do best and take vague value statements and mold them into a refined list of true company competencies.   Read More »

(This post is the first in a three-part series about creating compelling sales messages.)

“I’ve tried everything with customers, I talked about their needs, I tried using smart questions, I pitched features & benefits of our offering, I even led with our company’s values…and no matter what, the conversation keeps coming back to price…”

This is an all too familiar challenge voiced by sales reps across company and industry.  There’s no debate that the world of business-to-business sales has changed dramatically in recent years. Companies are looking to sell bigger, more complex (and therefore more expensive) solutions…while customers are looking to squeeze every penny possible out of their suppliers.

The key question at play here: does a sales message exist for our company that can move customer conversations beyond price and position the buying decision in favor of our solution?

At the SEC we believe so, but you have to work to find it…

To build a compelling sales message, you need to understand what truly differentiates you as a supplier—those core competencies that the competition cannot easily imitate and which provide unrecognized value to your customers (at the Council, we refer to this as Commercial Teaching).  Armed with your differentiators, you’ll be able to leverage these in the sales interaction to positively change customer perceptions about the value of your solutions.

The Council suggests using a 3-step process to create this kind of sales message:   Read More »

87% of training is forgotten within one month.  That’s because most reps attend training and then go right back to what they were doing before.

For reps to truly improve skills, they certainly have to apply new skills over time…but they also need to take the time to reflect and deconstruct whether their attempt at applying that skill was successful or not.

Last month, Peter Long, Sales Training Consultant with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) joined us for a teleconference where he discussed the importance of ensuring reps have the opportunity to analyze how well they’re applying any new skills taught in training.  In fact, BCBSM built a “12-Week Implementation Program” that alternates live-fire skill application with group debriefings of what went right and wrong.

For BCBSM, their initial debriefing sessions gathered the newest reps with the least tenure and were facilitated by the sales management team. (SEC Members, check out the full case study to learn the nuts and bolts of BCBSM’s approach).

They found that one of the keys to unlocking value from a program like this, is to make sure reps are coming prepared to the group debriefings with the right battle stories.  Read More »

From our quantitative analysis of the hallmarks of world-class coaches (Click Here: Portrait of a World-Class Coach), we know that coaching offers the greatest leverage when targeted at the core of your sales force.  Essentially, you get more pop by “moving the middle” instead of focusing on your low or star performers. 

Now, does that mean that managers shouldn’t focus on the high performers on their team at all? Should managers just leave stars alone to do what they do best?  Definitely not.  In fact, a member recently used an interesting analogy to describe this. He brought up the point that even Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, has a coach that helps him work on his swing.

But there’s also an argument to be made about how the coaching your stars receive should differ from your core reps.  And to what outcome(s) “coaching to the stars” should focus on.

There are lots of sales managers out there that have star reps on their team that can probably “out-sell” them.  After all, not all star reps make good managers, and not all star reps want to be managers.  But that does not mean these reps can’t (and don’t want to) learn anything from their managers. 

Managers need to push to make sure the right kind of value is created for these high performing team members.  Value that’s focused on helping them achieve even greater heights, and making sure they stay engaged…ultimately leading to retention.  The old adage, “people don’t leave bad organizations, they leave bad managers” absolutely applies for stars as well.

So how can managers work to retain these high performers?  What are these folks looking for from their managers during coaching sessions?  Read More »

For those of us on a calendar fiscal year end, how well we perform in these last few weeks of the fourth quarter can define how successful 2010 will be for us.  It certainly can be a very exciting time.  However, as the sheer amount of activity increases, and the pressure builds…it’s important not to let the flurry of Q4 (and the feeling of being time oppressed) keep you from the basics that set you up for success in the first place.  

So here’s an important reminder for reps and coaches alike:  don’t forget to ask customers good, quality questions. 

What does the DNA of a good question look like?  Here are some helpful tips & advice about what comprises good customer-facing questions:

Tip #1: Prompt a reaction with your questions, don’t just ask for information
Questions should ask customers to DO something (e.g. make a tradeoff, consider a scenario, etc) – or help you understand the process in which they would do something.

Good: Provoke a reaction using prompting phrases:  “Would I be correct to assume…”, “If this were to happen, what…”, “If you had to do without…”, “How would you know if…”, “If you had to choose between the two…”

Bad: Just asking for information: “How many?”, “How much?”, “Who are all the stakeholders?”, “Is there budget?”, “Is it important?”  Read More »

I recently read an article by James Ledbetter of Slate Magazine entitled, Death of a Salesman. Of Lots of Them, Actually: The troubling disappearance of salesmen and how it helps explain America’s economic woes.

In summary, this article discusses not so much the disappearance of sales jobs in recent decades, but the dramatic slowdown in sales job creation.  Specifically, it references job decline in different sectors (mainly, in the Automotive & Pharma industries) and also cites the internet as an “irreversible” force causing sales job decline.

He makes a few points that I found interesting…  Read More »

Through our research of what drives customer loyalty (willingness to buy, willingness to continue buying, willingness to recommend), thousands of our members’ end-customers have told us that the thing they value most…is for a supplier to challenge their thinking.

Customers value a supplier that provides them with a different way of thinking about their business and how to compete more successfully.  Essentially, customers want to be taught.

But it’s not enough to teach customers simply because they value it.  You’ve got to get PAID for it.  The last thing you would want is to teach customers to value something that your organization is not uniquely positioned to solve.  One of our members accurately described that as “teaching the customer into the desert.”

Instead, you need teaching that reframes the way the customer assigns value.  Teaching that leads customers to value the areas where you uniquely outperform your competitors.  Teaching that leads to a commercial result.  Hence the term we’ve coined here at the Council, commercial teaching.

Now, to teach in this manner, you first have to have the knowledge around how you’re uniquely different from your competitors.  After all, it would be impossible to lead customers to value your unique strengths if you don’t even know what they are in the first place.  Read More »

How many key accounts can one person handle?  It’s a hard question to answer and it depends on a number of variables: deal complexity, sales cycle time, team size, specific customer attributes…the list goes on. 

Here’s some quick data that will at least give you some perspective on how other SEC members have structured around this question.      

As background, the Council recently hosted a webinar aimed at helping members reinvigorate their key account management programs.  During the session we were able to do some surveying and found:

• Nearly half of the members that joined us described the state of their key account programs as in the process of restructuring.

And this isn’t just restructuring to maintain the status quo, it’s restructuring to create growth in the near term: 

• 47% of members polled are expecting a 5+% growth rate from their key accounts in 2010 alone (and 28% are expecting 10+% growth), compared to core accounts.

So, what tweaks can you make to your key account programs to achieve those kinds of growth numbers this year?     Read More »

By now, my assumption is that most readers of this blog have had at least some exposure to the work the Sales Executive Council has done this past year on the profile of the winning sales rep.  If not, it’s probably worth a minute of your time to read Karen Freeman’s summary of this work in her previous post: Why Sales Challenger?.  Across the past year we’ve been on the road sharing this work with members and I’d like to provide some insight into how those conversations have played out.

This work was specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?

Adding to what we can glean from Karen’s post, this quantitative effort uncovered five profiles of sales reps:  The Challenger™, The Relationship Builder, The Hard Worker, The Lone Wolf and The Problem Solver.  And our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist.

Now, as we dig into these profiles across different industries, The Relationship Builders that we found (the clear underperformers) are, in a sense, a “one trick pony” – squarely focused on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likeable and generous with their time. This is very much a service mentality. 

And it was usually at this point in member conversation around this work that we would get some potential pushback – typically in the form of “but relationships are important to our success”.

Well, regarding the winning rep—The Challenger—the SEC’s work does not suggest that these reps don’t/can’t build strong relationships. In fact, the high-performer challengers found in the sample were above average on all of the “relationship building” attributes.  They just don’t hang their hat on those attributes like a relationship builder would. Put another way, it’s not their major.   Read More »