Greetings from sunny Las Vegas. Despite the pull of the pool and the blackjack tables, I am currently sitting in the Grand Ballroom of the Bellagio hotel at the second annual Sales and Marketing Summit, hosted by the Sales and Marketing Practice of the Corporate Executive Board. More than 400 members are here with us to learn more about how to get “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision” – the theme of this year’s Summit. We have a full agenda packed with presentations based on the combined work by the SEC and our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council.

The Global Director of CEB’s Sales and Marketing Practice, Haniel Lynn, opened the conference by talking about stressed out rats. No, that isn’t a typo – rats. Before I explain, let me provide some context.

One of the reasons more than 400 Sales and Marketing professionals are joining us in Las Vegas this week is because customers have been making their jobs pretty difficult over the past few years. Customers are buying differently, and not just differently, but smarter. This is putting a lot of stress on Sales professionals and Marketers who are trying to figure out what is going on and are feeling the pressure to change.

But as we all know, change isn’t easy, especially under pressure. Enter the rats. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Yi Kang of the Marketing Leadership Council,our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

The PhDs are hired, the software installed, the data collected, and now the rest of the company waits eagerly for profit to climb – why shouldn’t it, now that we have advanced analytics? The popular book/movie Moneyball shows us that the Oakland A’s hit a homerun using sabermetrics like this, so then why can’t we? After all, if Billy Beane only had one Paul DePodesta, shouldn’t we do even better with an entire geek squad?

We all secretly wish for a magic weapon to vanquish competition. Where better to place our faith than in an analytical model churning out intimidating, neat lines of data? It’s a perfect deus ex machina to get out of a sticky situation.

However, as with anything complex, we forget that it’s one thing to own analytical infrastructure and another entirely to be able to use it well.

Regardless of whether you’re advanced enough to implement agent-based modeling or you’re just taking baby steps beyond bar and pie charts, a few ground rules remain the same when it comes to acting on analytics: Read More »

A couple of years ago, somebody forwarded us a very interesting YouTube video…of Neil Rackham presenting some of our Challenger work to a group of his clients.

This obviously came as a surprise to us since we’d never met Neil before, but we were honored that Neil, author of SPIN Selling and the person generally considered to be the “professor emeritus” of professional sales, found the Challenger work worthy of sharing with his own clients.  So we shot him an email to see if he’d be interested in meeting up to talk about the research, discuss sales issues, etc., and he accepted.

That was the start of what’s turned out to be a fantastic relationship with one of the leading thinkers in the world of sales.

For those of you who’ve visited the website for our forthcoming book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (on sale November 10^th from Penguin), you’ll see that Neil wrote the foreword to the book (in fact, you can download it on the book’s website).

It’s a great read—not simply because of the compliments he gives the Challenger work (Neil refers to it as “the most important advance in selling for many years”), but because of the grand arc of sales history that he paints and where he places the Challenger story in the evolution of the profession. Read More »

If there’s one thing we can all likely agree on, it’s that at some point in the sale, you’ve got to find and get in front of the senior decision maker at the customer’s organization to get a deal done.  At a lot of member companies we work with, this very commonly takes the form of a “target the customer’s executive-suite” strategy.

In other words, let’s track down the customer contact that will own the decision, or at the bare minimum, figure out the people within the customer organization who can get us access to that person.

We’ve done some recent work at the Council that sheds interesting light on the effectiveness of this strategy.  In a survey of senior decision makers across several hundred of our members’ customer companies, it turns out, the thing senior contacts at customer organizations care about in any large deal is NOT a potential supplier’s solution.

Instead, the number one thing that these senior contacts care about is, in fact, their own company’s buy-in around that solution.   Read More »

Anyone who’s ever rewired their home knows what an arduous task it can be. Especially, if your home was built for a different decade—every outlet must be removed and receptacle replaced.

Sales leaders face a similar dilemma today. Many realize their sales organizational structure is out-of-date and needs to be modified (or in some cases completely overhauled) to better meet customers’ needs, drive continued internal efficiencies, and stay competitive in the market.

In response to this growing trend, the SEC is in the process of benchmarking sales organizational structures of companies across industries and geographies. Below are some of our initial observations from the research:   Read More »

(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

As the function responsible for the moment of intersection between markets and products, services, and brands, Marketing is under intense pressure to adapt – not only to the ways customers want information, but also to the increasing ubiquity of data.

In our conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders around the world, the consistent theme we’re hearing is one of agility – marketers and their teams need to be able to tackle a wider variety of tasks and responsibilities in order to take advantage of fast shifts in the market.

Want to develop a more agile team? Read on for some tips gleaned from our conversations:

1) Develop a T-shaped workforce. These are employees with one deep area of expertise, but also a wider breadth of skills/knowledge.  This is important in a world in which roles are more ambiguous/complex, and staff need to collaborate with other roles/functions (and therefore need to understand them).  Having a T-shaped workforce also helps shift people about, an important organizational capability in times of turbulence.   Read More »

As many Sales Executive Council members know, we’ve been hard at work on a book about our Challenger research.  It’s been an exhausting (but rewarding) 10 months since we first finalized the agreement with our publisher (Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Group USA) and began putting pen to paper.

Now, with all of the T’s crossed and I’s dotted, we’re just waiting for hard copies to arrive and are looking forward to November 10^th, when the book officially goes on sale.

With all of the excitement in advance of the book launch, I think it’s easy for us to lose sight of why we wrote it in the first place. Really, at the end of the day, there are three things that drove us to do this:   Read More »

As we have recently discussed, there’s a lot of buzz surrounding tablet technology and its role in the sales world. Given the increasing interest in this topic, the Council decided to further explore sales organizations’ early experiences with these new devices.

We recently launched a survey to members about tablet technology use in the sales force, and it revealed some fascinating things. 35% of survey respondents already use tablet technology at their firms, while 40% of survey respondents plan on rolling out tablets at their organizations within the next 12 months.

So why all the hype? Well, tablet technology can have both internal benefits to the sales organization, such as instant access to information and overall mobility, as well as external benefits in customer interactions.

Read More »

Heads of Sales Ops made a curious decision back in 2008 during the depths of the Great Recession.  Facing a precarious budget situation, leaders had to decide how best to survive despite having limited tools to measure their function’s own effectiveness, which hampered efforts to make a business case for maintaining (let alone growing) resources.

Conventional wisdom might have assumed the best strategy for Sales Ops was to close ranks, specializing in core areas like process, tools, and data analysis.  The argument: with a comparative advantage in certain competencies, it’s better to focus on perfecting the few.

The natural follow-on question would then be: what responsibilities can I shed to allow focus on the right set of things?

At first glance, evidence seems to confirm this as the direction most companies chose.  The SEC recently surveyed close to 100 organizations on sales ops trends over the last three years.  Nearly 1 in 5 organizations report shedding former key responsibility areas like training, compensation, and forecasting.

Below the surface area, though, it’s clear that winning organizations chose a very different strategy, one that extends Sales Ops’ reach rather than closing ranks.   Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

India and China have two of the fastest growing sales labor markets, and it comes as no surprise seeing as many companies are focused on expansion into these countries.

Executives continue to be optimistic about top-line growth in Asia, as well as the economic outlook for the region. In recent research, we found that 91% of polled executives expect their revenues in Asia to be higher in the next 12 months, and most also expect higher GDP growth in China and Asia.

Not surprisingly, senior executives also are anticipating higher sales and higher sales headcount in Asia, especially in China and India.

But, finding sales talent in these markets is easier said than done. Because the markets are vastly different, it’s critical for organizations to understand potential employees’ value drivers, such as—What are they looking for in a job? What does individuals’ job search behavior like?

We recently conducted an analysis of the sales labor market in India and China, through which we discovered several interesting talent and value proposition trends, including:   Read More »