(This is a guest post by Rick DeLisi of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Customer Service and Contact Centers.)

New Year’s observation: If there’s anything longer than the line at the bar/buffet line/dessert table in December…it’s the line at the gym/health club/Weight Watchers’ meeting in January.

‘Tis the season to resolve.

If your quest for the new year is to drop a few holiday-induced L-B-S’s…the best advice I’ve ever heard is, “Write down everything you eat during the course of the day.”  Turns out that simply training your brain to become hyper-aware of how many unnecessary calories we each consume every day is the “trigger” to kick-start a whole new mental process, that ultimately makes you eat less, and lose weight.  (BTW, 45 minutes a day on the treadmill ain’t gonna kill ya either, pal!)

But if your resolution for 2012 is to create an even greater customer experience at your company, here’s a small piece of friendly advice that will similarly trigger a new mental process for you and your entire team. It’s a matter of eliminating one simple phrase from your everyday vocabulary.  It’s not a phrase that sounds harmful at any level (in fact, when you use it, you probably think you’re doing something positive). But if you stop using it (although it’ll be hard at first), many amazing things will happen.

Stop saying, “the customer.”   Read More »

The Council frequently refers to a new breed of high-performing reps–Challenger Reps–in our blog posts and research. But do you find yourself wondering—how do I actually build Challenger reps? Because the three key Challenger skills (teaching, tailoring, and asserting control) are tacit skills, typical approaches to upskilling often are insufficient.

Classroom training alone fails to deliver impact because tacit skills are difficult to describe in written materials such as job aids or a how-to manual, and manager coaching also can be inadequate because it’s hard to explain intangible concepts.

Instead, to truly internalize these skills, reps need practice. We’ve all heard a lot about experiential training, but does it actually work?

The answer is yes, tacit and intangible skills are best taught through experiential training. But it must be the right kind of experiential learning. You cannot risk reps practicing new skills with a customer and, as a result, we often see companies using role-plays.

But, how ‘real’ are our role-play programs? Read More »

As we’ve continued to meet with sales leaders across the globe about our research on the Challenger Rep, we always get a variety of reactions and responses as they think about how the research relates to their own experiences, teams and organization.  And quite often, a leader will make a statement about how Challenger correlates to their sales metrics – comments such as “You know, our metrics around activities don’t reinforce Challenger behaviors, they are more aligned to Hard Worker behaviors” or “my highest activity reps aren’t my highest performing reps.”

In fact, our 2011 Sales Metrics Benchmark Survey shows that 30% of respondents measure “customer appointments made per rep per month” as a rep performance metric.  But does this metric necessarily align to the Challenger behaviors?

It’s one of many interesting insights and questions our members ask when they see the research on the five sales rep profiles, including: Read More »

When it comes to talent management, it’s critical for organizations to bring the best talent into their sales forces.

We know from our research on high performing rep skills that companies’ best bet is to bring more Challenger Reps into the sales force – Challengers are four times more likely to be high-performers than Relationship Builders in complex selling environments.

But we’ve seen most sales organizations continue to use traditional relationship-based skills and competencies to screen and select new hires. After all, conventional wisdom tells us that the likable candidate who charms interviewers is bound to be a successful salesperson.

This hiring approach inevitably brings an unpleasant surprise, though. Why? Because if a rep relies on the same relationship-building behaviors they used to close a deal as they do to approach an interview, they’ll soon find that their long-term likelihood to succeed is bleak.

So how do companies actually find sales rep candidates with the Challenger skill set in the marketplace? 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 is a guest post by Bill Skaggs, Global Director of Sales Excellence at Solae, LLC. Bill has more than 30 years of experience in the sales excellence and enablement function.)

Our company, Solae, has embraced the SEC’s rep behavior profiles research since it was introduced several years ago and has actively begun developing the Challenger behaviors in our sales force.  Over a number of years, our Go-to-Market process and selling tools had been defined and refined to sell complex solutions to our targeted customer base.  The definition of “Challenger” reps and the data to support the actions of these high performing Account Managers appeared to be the missing piece to bring all our marketing strategy, account strategy, and tactics to the execution at the account.

In good style, we had our SEC Executive Advisor bring the concepts to our global management team.  There was great enthusiasm and excitement for training the global commercial teams on this research. We designed material and workshops to introduce and train the behaviors of high performers during the regional meeting that was kicking off a new fiscal year.

Reality hit when the behaviors were introduced in the regions though. Outside of North America, the Challenger behaviors ran into some roadblocks.   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 »

With the Challenger Sale cracking Amazon’s top 10 sales & marketing book list before the book is publicly available, we’ve been getting lots of questions here at the Sales Executive Council about the research. Without fail, the top question is “what is the ROI of the Challenger Selling Model?”

Let’s put aside anecdote for a minute – we have lots of stories explaining how the Challenger Selling Model has worked at our member organizations – but let’s get down to what we know about Challengers: 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 »

There has been a lot of buzz around Challenger Reps recently. We’ve just announced the publication of our brand-new book The Challenger Sale; our SEC Solutions® team is successfully delivering a comprehensive Challenger Development Program to a growing number of companies; and, we’ve just learned that the name ‘Challenger Rep’ has been successfully registered so now we get to proudly put the ® symbol next to Challenger Rep®.

What this tells us is that more and more Sales organizations are looking to develop Challengers in their sales force. So, with that in mind, we wanted to share a few implementation lessons we’ve learned from companies who have already made the first strides in hiring and building Challengers. Read More »