In today’s consensus-driven sales environment, we all agree that engaging the right customer contact is a critical linchpin in deals progressing forward. While we know the best reps lead with insight to challenge customers’ assumptions, who your reps challenge can drastically change the course of a deal. So who are the right customer stakeholders to work and how can we help our reps find them?

Sales managers and trainers typically advise our reps to find a ‘coach’ or ‘advocate’ to help move a sale forward within a customer organization – preferably someone who is willing to talk, provides critical information, and who can network the rep with other stakeholders, among other qualities. And once reps find this individual it’s a clear path to the corner office and a closed deal, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that asking reps to go and find this kind of customer stakeholder is like telling them to find a unicorn. SEC analysis found that the combination of attributes that make an ideal advocate exist in less than 1% of individuals – while customer stakeholders may show some advocate qualities, they just don’t have it all. Read More »

We hope you’ll read this and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. In 2011, the SEC had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and intimate roundtable discussions with leading CSOs, and examined hundreds of thousands data points.

Given this, we’d like to share the fundamental shifts we expect to play out in increasingly significant ways in 2012.

Granted, it’s not a MECE list – there is overlap and implications shared throughout these trends, but we hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, disagree if appropriate, and highlight trends you expect to see that we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input! Read More »

This year our sister program for heads of marketing ran a study aimed at understanding customer purchase decisions. As part of that study, we asked 1,512 customers from 18 participating companies questions about their decision process.

This survey produced a very surprising finding that not only underlines the competitive nature of B2B sales but also provides an easy way of assessing your sales force’s effectiveness.

First, as background, we asked respondents to indicate how far they had advanced in the purchase process before contacting a supplier’s sales force. It turns out that, across companies, customers are 57% of the way through the purchase process before ever contacting a supplier.

The data also revealed that your average purchaser does not contact very many suppliers. Across companies, customers typically consider no more than three suppliers at the early stages of a purchase (though procurement departments might in order to bring rigor to the process). And by the final stage, the number of suppliers considered falls to 1.7…so not even two companies.

That means that there is essentially a frontrunner and somebody who is being included merely to provide a point of comparison.   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 »

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 »

Remember the Seinfeld episode where George worried about having “hand” in a relationship?  George felt that he lacked any control in the relationship with a woman he was seeing.  To Kramer he exclaimed, “I have no power. Do you understand? I need hand. I have no hand.”

Well, we often hear Key Account Managers sounding like George.  In our case, Key Account Managers are concerned that the balance of power with key accounts is skewed too heavily to the customer.  Especially nowadays with customers more and more entrenched in a “status quo” mindset, many of us are frustrated by the lack of revenue growth coming from our key accounts.

A typical response is to focus on the individual – hire or promote or train the best people to manage your most important customers.  And while talent and skill level are important, we actually found that the quality of support you provide your key account managers matters more than their skill level in determining the account manager’s effectiveness.

So, how can we best enable our key account managers to identify and take advantage of commercial opportunities with our key accounts? 

It’s a matter of developing the right tools and processes and putting them to use.  The Council has captured a number of best practice examples, and here are some of my favorites:  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 »