Let’s face it—it’s hard to get sales metrics right. Not only is it important to measure the right metrics so that you have an accurate picture of how your sales force is performing, but you also need to get your sales people to care enough about metrics to use them. After all, it’s not unusual for reps to look at a dashboard packed with data and say, “OK, what am I supposed to do with this?”  This is why it’s paramount to present metrics to reps in a way that provides both insight and actionable next steps for improving their performance.

On our recent webinar Getting the Most from Your Sales Metrics, one of our panelists, Scott Kolar, VP of Sales Operations for LexisNexis, uses an interesting analogy to get reps to understand how to use metrics: approach metrics just like a professional golfer approaches the game of golf.

Professional golfers (and athletes in general) continuously look for ways to get better at what they do and constantly measure various aspects of their performance to do it. As Scott put it, “Think of a PGA tour player—ultimately they need to shoot a good score and that’s what counts in the end. It’s just like a sales person, ultimately the need to hit their goal.” Read More »

There’s been a lot of member interest of late (on our web site, in our discussion forums, etc.) about sales force competencies.  In fact, it scored so high on a recent topic poll that we studied competencies as part of our most recent study, Boosting Sales Training Stickiness.

In that study we learned a couple of interesting things related to measuring and certifying competencies, which I wanted to share with you (and please use the comments section below to tell us how you certify competencies in your organization).

Measuring and Assessing Competencies:

Quite a few organizations use certification as a measure of sales force competencies. The level of rigor that companies put into their certification varies though.  The three most common types of competency certification we see are:   Read More »

CSOs are trying to change their sales forces.   I’ve attended many national sales meetings, leadership meetings, strategy sessions and the like over the past several weeks, and the common theme that emerges from them is, simply, “change.”

Why?  Because sales leaders know that using past approaches – approaches that may have been successful before – will no longer work in today’s selling environment.  Given many factors (the economic slow recovery, anemic buying, customer risk aversion), sales people need to be working with customers in a new and different way.

But how confident are you that if you want change, you’re going to get it?  Read More »

I was running a member meeting in London this past week when a rather interesting conversation about career pathing and certifying reps on competencies broke out.  I wanted to share highlights from the conversation and get your feedback, so please share your thoughts in the comments field below! 

Now, just to clarify, I’m talking about certifying reps on sales skills – I’m not talking about industry certifications or product certifications.  But instead, certifying that reps can demonstrate the behaviors they are asked to master (things like questioning, needs diagnosis, etc) and that they can use them to achieve measureable business results.

In the middle of the certification conversation, a member asked if we should even be certifying reps on selling skills…he asked, “Shouldn’t we always expect people to be looking to grow their skills and take them to the next level?”  Read More »

Q1 is the time of year when I get an influx of requests to chat about account planning. Most members want to know how to tweak their account planning process to make it more effective. 

I was meeting with an energy company a couple weeks back, when that same question came up.  We had some extra time so we started white boarding some ideas about their account planning process.  The exercise ended up being so valuable, I’ve used it a couple times since with great success, and wanted to share it with you today. 

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why would a customer want to account plan with you? 
2. What are all the ways account planning can go wrong? 

I’ll  handle each question in order:

1) Why would a customer want to account plan with you?  Answering this one can be tricky – the key is to list out the benefits of account planning from the CUSTOMER’s perspective.

Putting this list together will help you build a value proposition that gets your customers excited about account planning with you.  And in case you missed that subtle point – the key word in that sentence was with.   Read More »

(This is a guest post by Ken Revenaugh, VP of Sales Operations at Oakwood Worldwide. Prior to joining Oakwood, Ken served as Director of Sales Operations at Exhibitgroup Giltspur and FedEx-Kinko’s. His areas of expertise include Sales Ops Management, Talent Development, and Sales Process Design.)

Is storytelling appropriate in business? Is there a place for incorporating an engaging tale in the commercial world? I believe there is, but after sharing my ideas about storytelling in the boardroom and beyond for the past year, I encountered many who disagree.

I am no longer surprised when someone sends me a disparaging note expressing disgust when I encourage incorporating a fairytale or fable to get a key point across in a business environment. Critics say, “Business is moving way too fast to endorse storytelling; it’s a waste of time.” True enough – no one has time to waste.

This year, the familiar red holiday coffee cups at Starbucks have a matching sleeve that reads: Stories are Gifts – Share. Anecdotally, I realized that many people are doing just that – sharing their stories. So, I decided to conduct a little (albeit unscientific) study.

I have been tracking the number of stories I hear per business day for the past three months. You may be surprised to know that I made at least two hash marks in my notepad each day. On average, my colleagues shared 10 stories per work day. The all-time high was 48 stories.

The day I heard nearly 50 stories taught me a lot. Read More »

I’m beginning to worry we are unwittingly getting caught in an arms race with customers.  More than ever, it takes a village to sell effectively.  A member recently told us that lack of internal people resources forced them to outsource $25,000 worth of RFP support.  Now, it was for a $30 million deal – so if it closes in their favor, it’s obviously money well spent.  But multiply that by every deal you’re currently hunting – and you better make sure you’re hunting the right deals, huh?

Requirements for more consensus before deal closure coupled with endless customization requests naturally put stress on sales cycle lengths.  And the shift towards selling more complex solutions has always required more support involved in a given deal – at the customer organization, yes, but also internally. 

But that support used to seem easier to manage.  We could automate a lot of internal processes to make sure reps could maximize time in front of customers. We could coordinate a lot of internal coordination to help – separate service teams, centralized contract teams, legal, pricing, etc – and that was especially convenient because it was support we didn’t have to own (and, therefore, pay for).

Lately, though, the way customers are responding to our sales efforts – looking to dump any form of risk back on us – requires more people on our ledgers.  Read More »

I’ve had a couple interesting conversations with members recently about saying ‘No’ to customers, and it got me thinking…can reps turning down business be a risky, but successful strategy to get to a better outcome? Or is it just sales suicide? 

The first conversation was with the president of a business unit, his head of Sales, and his CMO and we talked about the challenge of solutions selling.  We were discussing how a big part of the challenge is getting reps to “hit pause” on an immediate order to better understand the entire scope of the project before building a proposal, allowing reps to build a bigger solution across multiple product lines and even multiple business units. 

The CMO shared a story where that strategy worked, and summarized it like this – “the customer was trying to buy something from us, yet we were making them wait to give us their money.  That can be a powerful posture.”  

The quote itself I found interesting, but the “can be” in that sentence is critical – it’s all about your posture.  Done poorly, and you’ll look like you’re just trying to sell the customer more stuff.  Done well, and you’ve got a powerful opportunity to change the way the customer thinks about you as a supplier.   Read More »

By Andrew Kent

As our research on sales rep effectiveness reveals, unquestionably, your best sales reps are those who challenge customers.  And a key component of challenging customers is asserting control over the conversation.

But that language of “challenging” and “being assertive” can be a bit intimidating. The fear is, if we tell our reps to act like “challengers,” they’ll just act like jerks; if we tell them to be assertive, they’ll be aggressive. 

Even more surprising than the need to challenge customers was our finding that reps who focus on relationship building were the lowest performers.  At companies where personal relationships have been the primary basis for sales for years, this finding can be quite shocking.

Of course, challenging a customer doesn’t mean making them feel like an idiot—it means challenging them to be better.  And relationships do still matter—it’s only that building personal relationships can no longer be a salesperson’s primary talent.  

It’s easy to see how that message can be misinterpreted, and further proves the point that the language we use matters.

So then, how do you tell reps to be Challengers without sending the wrong message?  Read More »

A question I’ve been getting from a lot of members lately is simply “how do you measure the value of the Sales Operations function?” 

There is no easy answer to this one. Sales Ops is a function in constant flux, which means measuring the value of it can be a challenging task. After all, there are many different ways Sales Ops can deliver value to the organization.

One of the most common areas in which Sales Ops can demonstrate its value is sales force capacity.  The Ops group typically looks for ways to reduce the amount of time the sales force spends on low-value activities. So, if you calculate the dollar amount of every hour of sales force time and measure the number of hours of capacity you are able to free up, you can then quantify the value Sales Ops has created. 

Be mindful, however, that this is not a sustainable, long-term measurement effort. At some point you will have offloaded and outsourced all of the sales force’s low-value activities and will reach the point of diminishing returns.

The other area in which Sales Ops can deliver measurable value is by understanding the drivers of high performance and standardizing them throughout the organization with tools and processes.  Here, Sales Ops can demonstrate its value by quantifying the difference between high performers and core performers, and then tracking the improvement in performance that occurs as a result of the tools they’ve implemented. 

When using this performance improvement-based approach to measure Sales Ops’ value, be wary of several potential roadblocks.  Many Sales Ops teams fail to demonstrate quantifiable value because they end up building tools that don’t deliver the performance bump they expected.  Why is this? Read More »