I’ve had a lot of members over the last couple of weeks ask me essentially the same question – “How should we measure and evaluate our efforts to build Challenger™ reps?” 

The actual measures will be different depending on your go-to-market model and the length of your sales cycle, but there are several universal measurement principles that can be applied to any business:

Measuring Adoption:

Adoption is a tricky metric to measure, because of two challenges:

1. Just because a rep says they delivered a pitch, doesn’t mean that they delivered it well
2. Just tracking what sales did gives you little insight into how a customer reacted to that sales interaction

In light of those two challenges, consider the following two ideas:

Periodic internal “spot checks” from either the management team or some other vetting team (comprised of people who are deemed “the best” at delivering the pitch) would be subjective, but helpful – you could then cross reference that with reps’ actual sales results. 

For a concrete example of this, see the process and scorecard that Britannia developed for measuring coaching interactions.  You can take the principles of this scorecard and apply it to reps and Challenger behaviors. 

Another member that has done a lot of work around “teaching” is W.W. Grainger.  Grainger doesn’t necessarily measure whether a rep delivered a teaching pitch, but rather that the customer completed a diagnostic that complements the sales pitch.  This could only mean the teaching pitch was delivered well – because otherwise a customer would never care about completing the diagnostic.  For similar ideas about measuring customer reactions and “customer verifiers,” review our Improving Sales Predictions study.  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 »

Everything we’ve learned about changing customer demands over the last two years points to two undeniable facts:

1)     The overall sales experience must feel demonstrably different than your competition, and

2)     The opportunity to demonstrate that difference happens in a very short timeframe (most likely, the first 2-3 minutes of your first conversation with a customer).  In other words, to quote our friends at Corporate Visions, Inc., “your brand rests on the lips of your sales reps.”

The timeframe for sales experience differentiation is very short, but many support mechanisms were conceived as a means to achieve scale for a big direct sales force.  Think for a minute about the way your Sales Ops team is organized, its responsibilities, and the tools they create to support your biggest sales objectives.  Most likely, they are built to support an entire sales cycle.  The central organizing theory is very often the sales process itself.

But most sales processes aren’t very different from one another – in fact, many are off-the-shelf vendor solutions.  How well can that support the need for a highly differentiated conversation? Read More »

By Andrew Kent

I recently spoke with a member in the furniture industry who told me, “sustainability is our differentiator.  If our customers know why it’s important to care about green issues, we should win 100% of those deals.”

Until recently, most businesses assumed that being green and making money were diametrically opposed.  Making products more ecologically friendly was seen as a cost, not an opportunity.

Today however, this logic is fast becoming irrelevant.  With permanently higher energy prices, China’s push for clean energy, and growing awareness of the dangers of carbon pollution (such as ocean acidification and global warming), the best companies are recognizing that sustainability and growth go hand-in-hand.  Indeed, many companies we talk to are ramping up their efforts to promote their products as “green.”

Unfortunately, too many companies look at green products through a features and benefits lens.  The standard pitch is, “We’re green, so buy from us!”  That pitch may work if your customers are particularly noble.  But for customers who care only about the bottom line—e.g. most of them—the greenness pitch falls flat.  In today’s intensely cost-obsessed economy, a product’s greenness is rarely enough to make up for the typically higher upfront price.

But this does not mean that green investments are a waste of effort.  On the contrary, it means that Sales has the key role to play in making sure sustainability investments pay off.  Because remember, it’s not what you sell—it’s how you sell. 

Read More »

I was talking to the global VP of Sales of a member company  the other day, and she said something that made me think of, arguably, the biggest social phenomenon of the 21^st century – the power of social networking , and the role it plays (or could play) in the world of Sales.

The member said, “I love what my twenty-eight-year-old MBA graduates bring to the table, I just can’t stand the way they communicate.”

At the risk of stereotyping, I’d agree that Millenials are generally more informal and bold than the corporate world would like, but they are also more willing to share and listen to each other.

This makes me wonder, in an age when one can have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook and can summarize “War and Peace” in less than 140 characters on Twitter, why wouldn’t sales organizations encourage these informal networks among its sales force for collaboration and sharing of customer insight? 

A study done by The Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia found that networks play a critical role in organizational excellence by feeding organizational innovation, creating sources of competitive advantage, and improving staff engagement and quality of work life. 

So, why not capitalize on these benefits by giving employees an outlet for sharing their knowledge and experience? And, more importantly, why not use this channel to push frontline knowledge to the top? Read More »

(This is a guest post from Charlie Dorrier on the SEC Solutions team.  Solutions helps members generate customized insights, tools, and training programs to improve the overall performance of the sales force.) 

Stop for a second and think about the individual sales people on the front line of your organization.  Picture their faces and the diverse set of styles and messages that emerge in front of customers.  It’s a powerful vision that motivates many of us to be in sales in the first place: the collective voice of a sales force, driven by a single objective but made up of many different parts.

This vision is also terrifying.  Mass chaos comes to mind:  lost deals, missed opportunities, isolated information, and sometimes unsatisfied customers.  The chaos needs a little order.  And your organization needs to learn from the front-runners.  

I recently heard a sales manager sum it up very well:  “I’ve got 15 people on my team and there are 500 reps I never really see – I’m not sure I know exactly what drives success in our organization.”  By studying in aggregate all of the individual approaches to selling, a sales organization can learn a lot from itself.  Read More »

Welcome to The Sales Challenger, a new blog brought to you by the Sales Executive Council (SEC). For those of you who don’t know SEC, we are a membership-based organization for senior sales leaders and their teams from the world’s largest B2B companies.  Our value proposition to members, in short, is to provide leading-edge insight on what the most progressive sales organizations are doing to tackle today’s most vexing sales challenges.

While longtime members will fondly recall the days when they received their SEC studies in the mail (you will still find many of those shiny green tomes on sales executives’ bookshelves around the globe), we’ve found over the years that the sales world moves a little too quickly for executives’ needs to be addressed simply through 6-month-long research projects.  While these big studies will always be a core part of what we do, we’ve begun to invest in a number of capabilities to speed up our ability to share insight with members.

We’ve created platforms to put members in touch with one another quickly and efficiently (check out the Sales Ops Forum, our moderated community of more than 3000 sales operations professionals exchanging views and peer-to-peer advice on a wide range of issues) and have now launched The Sales Challenger to allow us to quickly and informally disseminate what we’re learning to sales leaders.  

We will refresh this blog several times per week, so come back often and, by all means, share your comments—positive, negative or otherwise.  In terms of content sections, look for the following:

• The Buzz –our point of view on emerging and newsworthy issues and trends
• From The Road – anecdotes from our recent meetings and calls with members
• Sales Insights – breakdown of our ongoing and existing research
• Practical Advice – tips and tricks to make you more effective in your day-to-day job
• Diversions – light, fun (more random) topics

Until next time, happy selling!