As economies went into freefall roughly two years ago, executives across different functional areas converged on a short set of priorities.  In fact, you might say just one priority – survival.  That meant shedding costs and doing anything possible to drive cash flow, quickly.  But as markets pulled back from the brink, functional heads returned to a (more normal) pursuit of their individual agendas, from social media adoption to staff development.

As we talk to heads of Sales, Marketing and Communications about 2011, I see a swing back to handling a common enemy – this time, ongoing uncertainty.  Uncertainty isn’t terribly attractive to most, but executives seem to be accepting it as part of the new normal and are trying to figure out ways to live alongside it.  That presents a little differently depending on your role in the organization. 

• In Sales for example, the problem is that deals are getting “stuck” with customers whose response to uncertainty is indecision. But it looks like most sales teams aren’t doing enough to make deals easy for customers, abandoning them prematurely in the sales cycle.
• For marketers, the challenge lies in figuring out – and then using to their advantage – changes in the way customers think about purchasing (triggered by the uncertainty customers face).  Coping mechanisms like in-the-moment comparison and peer feedback are driving psychology few companies fully understand, but must.
• Communicators are trying to help their organizations deal with uncertainty.  Specifically, as companies try to become more agile and responsive, the premium on moving information and aligning the organization increases.  But those are new-ish areas to most Communications teams.

How is uncertainty affecting you and your organization?  What are you planning to do about it?  Our research makes it clear that early movers in moments like this stand to gain disproportionately. I hope you’re one of them.

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 »

(This is a guest post by Vanessa North of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications professionals.)

I just got back from a glorious ten days in Croatia and now that I’m back, I am noticing more than ever the constant bombardment of information, emails, & instant messages that distract me from doing any true thinking. 

Matt Richtel has coined the term the “three-day effect” when you are away from all technology and distraction.  After three days you start to relax, sleep better, and lose that nervous twitch of checking your blackberry every 3 seconds.  This is probably why the average weekend just doesn’t feel long enough; you get close to relaxing and then get pulled back to reality with a thump.

The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times per hour.  Think of what that means in terms of how much information that you are subjecting yourself to on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder we hear, “I haven’t had time to think” so often.  

It is only when you actually stop reading and taking in new information that you can sit back and really think what it all means, and actually process it.  By constantly rushing from one idea to the next without giving ourselves the time to think, we aren’t giving ourselves time to know what we really think.  I’m probably not the only one who sits there and has revelations when I’m on holiday.  You realize opinions you never knew you had.  You make life-changing decisions (or at least come up with the ideas for them).  In short, you think.

So as companies are striving to add more channels to reach their employees from all angles– are we actually doing more harm than good?   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 »

Don’t get me wrong: I love working with heads of Sales.  But every now and then, something crosses my desk that reminds me of how much we can still learn from other functional executives.

And what could be more cross-functional than 2011 budgeting and planning?  If you’re one of the many sales leaders reviewing recent budget projections and saying, “You want me to do what with what?!” then I’d encourage you to read on for a bit of good news from an unlikely source.

As it turns out, our sister research program that supports CFOs is strongly advocating that companies shift more resources to activities directly tied to sales growth in the near term.

Now, before you dismiss that idea as too farfetched for your penny-pinching CFO to get behind, consider these key findings that will help you speak their language:

Only 46 companies from the Fortune 1000 have experienced “Intelligent Growth” across the last 20 years.  Our team defined “Intelligent Growth” as:

• Above median EBITDA margin and Sales CAGR versus industry peers
• Simultaneous growth of Sales and Margins for >50% of the time
• No sales growth stalls (that is, an 8+% drop in sales CAGR coupled with an actual sales CAGR of <2%) between 1990-2000 and 2001-2007

Impressive, but so what? 

Well, these 46 companies have proven exceptionally adept at turning past economic troughs into “value creation hot spots,” generating +5% Total Shareholder Return above industry median during the previous two recessions and achieving lasting competitive advantage.

Again – impressive. But how’d they do it?  Read More »

No one ever said introducing and changing sales behaviors is easy work. For our latest study, we’ve been looking at better ways to get sales training to stick, and indeed, it’s tough business.

While the whole idea of grassroots change management is no secret, it’s tough to execute in a sales environment.  So it comes as no surprise when new sales training is rolled out, the top-down change management playbook is often used with heavy emphasis on the sales manager as the change agent.

Consider for a minute what needs to happen for a successful sales training rollout… It involves some degree of rep agreement with the new method, at least in principle. Next comes some degree of actually trying the new method. And finally, and at best, full adoption.

Now as you think about gaining buy-in at each of these steps, what are the greatest sources of influence you’ve seen in your organization? Sharing the results of a pilot, senior leadership visibly supporting the new method, manager coaching and reinforcement, best practice sharing sessions, right? We all know the usual change management paces.

But in thinking through how to actually change behaviors, our research has us considering other sources of influence.  One of the more intriguing ideas we’ve considered is the underbelly of the sales organization itself – rep to rep exchanges: the airport conversations, the emails, the general chatter.  These conversations are where your initiatives certainly make, or potentially break, themselves.

And yes, this should be thought of as a real channel that can be leveraged, even if it’s the same channel that’s responsible for spreading inappropriate jokes and YouTube videos around the office. Read More »

By Andrew Kent

Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material.  Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.”  And especially find all instances of the phrase “we work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.”  Then hit the delete key.  Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “we are exactly the same as everyone else.”

See, unlike Journey, you and your competitors aren’t “worlds apart.”

The more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same.  PR expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the 98 most common sales, marketing, and PR buzzwords used in company communications, and the results are hilarious and devastating.  Here are the top 10:

It’s eye-opening, really.  By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 205,900 companies all think they’re it.  75,500 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top.”  30,400 think they’re “unique.”  “Solution” also makes an appearance at #7—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again.

So if everyone’s saying they’re the leading solution, what does the customer think?  “Great—give me 10% off.”  Read More »

For the most part, organizations are run with the expectation of driving greater efficiency and productivity. Retailers are expected to improve their revenues per square foot, hotels and airlines strive to improve their yields per seat/rooms, and the mantra is one of constantly doing more with less.

But it is worth remembering that this dynamic is not universal. As William Baumol famously highlighted, a string quartet always has and always will need 4 people, no matter what they earn. Inherently, the complexity of true art requires a certain degree of inefficiency.

And in my opinion, companies should remember this principle when measuring the relative efficiency of their own sales force.

We are increasingly hearing companies cite that reps have become relatively less efficient on a per head basis, even as the rest of the company makes a lot more revenue per head.

The implication is that the direct sales force might need some pruning and that people aren’t pulling their weight. Lean selling is the antidote that’s often prescribed. After all, the rest of the corporation is being run with fewer people so why should the sales force be exempt from this dynamic?

But a fundamental flaw in this judgment is failing to account for the amount of time and “art” it typically takes a rep to complete a new sale. For selling, and complex solutions selling in particular, it requires a slow interaction which ebbs and flows between groups of people who are trying to generate value for each other. Read More »

When talking with members recently about their current challenges, lots of conversations have centered around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

But how can you make people want to share your content and advocate on your behalf?

It turns out two Wharton professors already looked at what makes people share, with an investigation of what makes people share New York Times articles.  Independent readers described articles using a number of adjectives, and then the professors looked at how likely the articles were to be in the list of top shared articles.

Short answer?  The most shared articles are those that inspire awe.

(In case you’re interested — number two: things that inspire anger, three: practical utility, four: emotionality, tied for five: anxiety and surprise, bringing in the rear: positivity.  Things that inspire sadness are much less likely to be shared.  You can find much more in the – ironically – widely shared New York Times article about the paper here).

So what does it mean to be awe-inspiring?  In the New York Times, this generally meant it was a complicated, intellectual article about science, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”  As one of the authors says, “You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

At the highest level, here’s how the authors defined awe-inspiring: “Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.”  Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review. If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy. You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer.

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved.

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer.

One thing this article pushed us to do was to think about the prescriptive advice we would give companies who want to pursue this low-effort journey. It’s not easy summing up more than four years of research around effort, what causes it and what leading companies are doing to eliminate it, but we managed to come up with the following list of five things that low-effort companies do (and are different, we have found, from what most companies do):     Read More »