What if I told you that the long-standing beliefs driving your customer engagement strategy actually turned out to harm you in the long run?

Imagine the surprise of sales and service execs when they found out that, in the service channel, going above and beyond when serving the customer doesn’t pay off. The break-through research from our sister program—the Customer Contact Council—dismantled many of these universally held beliefs about customer loyalty.

Finding #1: Customer service organizations should care first and foremost about mitigating disloyalty—customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal.

Finding #2: The primary thing service organizations can do to mitigate disloyalty is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. In other words, make it easy for the customers to solve their problems.

Finding #3: It is not only that the problem is resolved that matters, but also how.  The customer’s perception of how much effort they put in is about two times as influential as the actual actions taken by the customer.

(SEC Members, read more about these findings in Are You a Low-Effort Service Organization?)

Fascinating, isn’t it, especially if you think about the implications these findings have for your sales strategy.  Do sales organizations need to worry about eliminating unnecessary effort for customers? As it turns out, they do.   Read More »

There has been a lot of buzz around Challenger Reps recently. We’ve just announced the publication of our brand-new book The Challenger Sale; our SEC Solutions® team is successfully delivering a comprehensive Challenger Development Program to a growing number of companies; and, we’ve just learned that the name ‘Challenger Rep’ has been successfully registered so now we get to proudly put the ® symbol next to Challenger Rep®.

What this tells us is that more and more Sales organizations are looking to develop Challengers in their sales force. So, with that in mind, we wanted to share a few implementation lessons we’ve learned from companies who have already made the first strides in hiring and building Challengers. Read More »

Whether you are delivering sales training or receiving it, you have likely encountered a scenario where you are excited about the new skills you’re learning and ready to give them a shot but, as soon as you face an actual customer, things go south.

For example, let’s say you have just learned new questioning techniques that you want to try out but the customer interrupts and says, “Hey, I get what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it.  But we’ve been researching this for months and we know what our needs are, so can we skip ahead to the price?”

And you’re left thinking, “Shoot!  That’s not how the role play went!”

So what now? If role plays aren’t correctly simulating our customer interactions, do we just give up on them all together because they will never fully replicate what happens in the field?

We’ve seen several smart ways companies improve the effectiveness of their role plays and they boil down to these three principles. Read More »

In today’s world of complex solutions offerings, one thing we’ve all learned is, solutions are not only hard to sell, but they’re also hard to buy.

Many of the standard purchase processes customers have relied on for years got blown up as companies looked to clamp down on “unnecessary” spending during the economic downturn – departmental budgets got slashed, spending thresholds for sign-off authority were reduced, additional corporate purchasing reviews were established.  In fact, things have changed so much, many customer stakeholders are no longer sure how to get a deal done at all.

Yet, when we looked at what salespeople do in customer interactions, nearly two thirds rely on customer interactions to get information about the buying process. Our latest data shows it’s mostly core reps that are driven by the need to extract information from the customer about:

• what individuals are looking to achieve?
• how the purchase is going to get done?
• how everyone connected is across the organization?

To be fair to core reps, this is probably good information to have.  But still, if you look at the list of questions a second time, notice how each is centered around getting insight from the customer, rather than providing it.

How successful can a core rep be, if their primary engagement strategy is to pump customers for information that the customers themselves don’t have?   Read More »

It’s no news that sales executives rarely work with a single buyer. Even if they manage to get one person on board with the new vision, the champion of that vision (regardless of their seniority) still must gain broader organizational support.

One company told us that, in a recent sale, they were able to talk directly to the CEO who fully supported their solution.  However, when the CEO tried to push the solution in the company, it turned out he had to present it in front of the board which significantly complicated the decision process.

What’s even more troubling is that suppliers are rarely invited to be part of the decision-making – most deliberations happen behind closed doors. This means that the stakes of choosing the right stakeholder within an account have never been higher.

Many sales organizations have long been telling their reps to look for a customer advocate or “coach” – someone inside the customer organization who can provide guidance on how purchase decisions are made and, ideally, who is willing to help the supplier navigate that process.

From hundreds of conversations with members we constructed the ideal advocate/coach profile that reps are told to target. The ideal customer contact is one who: Read More »

In one of my recent member conversations, a VP of Sales was quite frustrated because his reps never seem to be on the same page with their customers – “Just when we think that we are ready to shake on a deal, the customer pulls away. How do we know where the deal really stands?”

Some companies choose a traditional route of tracking sales reps’ actions to gauge a deal’s progress – have reps made X number of calls to the customer, have they sent the proper collateral, have they taken the right subject matter expert on a customer visit.  This approach could work, if not for these two big problems.

• First, it’s highly prone to rep bias – it’s relatively easy for reps to overestimate the impact of a particular activity on the customer (just as it’s relatively easy for the rep to exaggerate the quantity and quality of the activities themselves).

• Second, and more importantly, there are many things that influence customer buying decisions other than rep activities – competitor activities, market forces, end-user demand, internal stakeholder priories, etc. All these have a profound influence on customers’ decisions—often in ways that are completely non-transparent to our sales people.

So, what’s left? How do we really know where customers are in their buying process and whether the deal is moving forward?   Read More »

If I asked you why being in Sales is a tough job, I’m sure I’d hear many reasons ranging from selling increasingly complex solutions, to having less customer face time, to, here’s a good one, not knowing who to sell to.

Unfortunately, the reality is that a buyer is no longer just a C-suite decision-maker holding a checkbook. Now, the traditional buyer is more akin to the Frankenstein monster, consisting of multiple cross-functional stakeholders, purchasing consultants, and committees brought into the buying process. [See finding # 1 in our Ten Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know in 2011]

In fact, our hot-off-the presses customer data suggests that sales reps drastically underestimate the number of stakeholders involved in an average deal.  [See our latest findings from the 2011 customer data]. One member shared with us that the average number of stakeholders involved in each deal has increased by 3.5 people since 2006.

What does it mean for the supplier? Well, it simply means that group buying is on the rise and that access to these groups is rarely granted.

Organizations’ most typical response to overcoming this challenge has been to identify influential stakeholders and turn them into advocates, hoping that they will steer the group in the right direction.  I hate to break it to you, but advocates don’t work like that. In fact, out data shows quite the opposite… Read More »

Coaching seems to be an ever-green topic that is unlikely to generate any controversy.  At this point, we’d be hard-pressed to find organizations that underappreciate the value of coaching. After all, the Council’s five years worth of data prove that:

• Coaching is a trademark that differentiates a star manager from an average one.
• Coaching can improve sales performance by as much as 19%.
• Coaching drives salespeople to work harder and increases their intent to stay.

Yet, coaching continues to be one of the areas where managers consistently underperform.

• According to our most recent data, 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching than other manager behaviors (e.g., planning, assessing risks, championing new initiatives, etc.).
• Additionally, an alarming 47% of reps report receiving under the magic 3-5 hours of coaching per month and 6% of reps report receiving no coaching at all.

While the first stat can be blamed on manager quality, the second data point is not entirely the manager’s fault.  Let’s do some simple math:  with the average span of control of 1:8, the expectation is that managers will spend up to 40 hours per month coaching. Desirable? Yes… Realistic? Not so sure…

If we want our managers to spend more time coaching, we desperately need to offload some responsibilities from their plates. Easier said than done.  Our traditional answer has been to relieve managers of some admin duties. 

An alternative answer could be to “outsource” some coaching responsibilities to a dedicated group of specialist coaches who are more passionate and, sometimes, better equipped to deliver high-quality feedback.  After all, why do we assume that direct managers are always best positioned to coach?   Read More »

Think about how many times and ways a customer says “no”…

There is the “matter-of-fact no” ( I am not interested in this offer);  the “no-without-no” (I’ll contact you myself when I am ready to make a decision);   the “passing-the-buck no”  (The decision is out of my hands now);  the “maybe-yes no” (I’ll have to check my calendar) and the “restraining-order no” (For the last time, no).

While searching for more examples (and for my own amusement), I Googled “how to say no.” As I looked through the more than 206,000,000 results, I learned how to say NO in over 520 languages and how to come up with 100 Excuses to Say No (my favorite one: “because my subconscious says no”).

The all-mighty Internet taught me how to say no to bosses, relatives, friends, co-workers and pushy sales people, but it had little to say about how to push back on customers.  Is that because we’ve been brainwashed that the customer is always right?

Maybe…But, unless you’re running a charitable foundation, saying no is a critical skill, especially now. In the current economy, customers feel entitled to more discounts, more customization and less risk, and they don’t hesitate to ask for more.    

One of the main reasons why salespeople find it hard to say no to customers is because they don’t know how people will react to it. Fortunately, it is fairly easy to predict a customer’s reaction if you know what type of customer you’re talking to: 

Read More »

The topic of sales competencies and rep development has been coming up quite frequently in our recent conversations with members.  Some sales leaders are getting more frustrated with training’s failure to make behavior changes “stick”; some have started realizing that the new economy calls for a new set of skills that is largely lacking in reps; and some are simply looking for ways to boost rigor around training to increase the likelihood of success.

All good reasons to be talking to us, especially as we’ve learned that nearly two-thirds of all sales reps (61%) are unsatisfied with the business and sales skill training provided by their companies.

The bad news is we know that training alone has a relatively small impact on improving productivity – only 22%.  The good news is companies that take a more comprehensive development approach— integrating training, coaching, and real-world experience—have seen a 4 fold increase in productivity up to 88%.

We’ve set out to find what it is these companies do differently and will be tackling this subject of training and rep development over the next few months. Here’s what we have learned so far:

1) Do not limit rep development to just classroom learning.  Our research shows that reps forget 87% of training content within 30 days. Most of the actual learning and skill improvement happens as reps repeatedly “apply” and “perfect” new knowledge and skills on the job with continuous support and reinforcement from their managers.      Read More »