Unless you’re stuck on a remote island with no means of communication with the outside world, you have likely witnessed the recent public outcry for President Obama to display more emotions when dealing with the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As the media continues to debate the pros and cons of rational versus emotional decision-making, I started thinking about how much discussion I’ve seen around emotions recently in the business world.

Recently, two of our sister programs conducted independent studies on completely different topics  yet came to a similar conclusion that emotional arguments often trump rational ones.

-    The Customer Contact Council focused their study on identifying the drivers of customer effort as a way to mitigate customer disloyalty in the service channel. The study revealed that customer effort is largely driven by how customers feel during their service interaction versus what they do.  The breakdown is one-third “do” and two-thirds “feel.”

-    The Communications Executive Council studied what makes different stakeholders more likely to actively support the company and found that “emotional connection” with a company far outpaced all other factors, including actual company experiences, corporate citizenship, and business strength.

So, what about Sales? When trying to close a deal, are we missing the point by focusing on such practical arguments as “we offer the highest ROI” or “we have the lowest prices” instead of targeting customers’ right side of the brain?   Read More »

With an increasing number of indicators suggesting that the world economy is slowly heating up again, many sales leaders are facing a very different talent market than we had in 2009.  And this could be a very big problem.

Here’s the way I see it:

1.) We’ve trimmed our sales teams down to the bare minimum, asking salespeople to deliver the same results with substantially fewer resources.

2.) We’ve let go of many of our low and average performers, leaving a talent bench that is comprised of a greater proportion of stars than ever before.

3.) Meanwhile, the stars in our sales force are precisely the ones most difficult to engage and retain.

Indeed, the statistics suggest that many of our stars in fact do not intend to stick around. Ongoing research by the Corporate Leadership Council, our sister program for HR execs, suggests that one in four top-performers plan to walk out the door within the next 12 months. Sales specific data cuts show that 10% of salespeople were already making phone calls and sending resumes to other employers as early as September of last year. As one member summarized to us, “We’re sitting on a powder keg of sales personnel churn, and the only thing keeping it from exploding is a weak labor market.”

Our guidance? Keep close tabs on your employee churn numbers, particularly for your stars. As I suggested in my previous post, double-down on efforts to engage high-performers by providing them with continuing stretch opportunities. And avoid these common mistakes with your stars:  Read More »

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 »

2005 was the year the Council first investigated how sales managers should coach their direct reports. At this point in time, we had never heard of credit default swaps and while everybody said they were worried about inflation, unemployment numbers were low and members were relatively sanguine about the prospects for continued growth. The pressure on the sales force was really centered on trying to accelerate the sales cycle. Buyers themselves were often looking to add capacity and were generally willing to cooperate with efforts designed to speed up decision-making.

Today, things couldn’t be more different from an economic perspective and the sales force is more worried about closing the sale than trying to accelerate the sales cycle per se. And so, we have returned to the topic of sales management this year and are investigating what new requirements are being placed on sales managers.

While we are still collecting data from our sellers in terms of the behaviors they observe from their manager, we do have some early observations. First, sales reps continue to score their managers low in terms of the coaching they provide. Fully 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching as opposed to the other behaviors that a sales manager will need to demonstrate, such as planning, assessing risks, championing new initiatives or even delivering bad news to senior management. Read More »

Most large sales organizations have teams working full-time trying to achieve a globally standardized sales process.  These teams develop all kinds of methodologies to attain the coveted “common language” – Six Sigma techniques to denote the smallest of errors, communication plans, voice of the customer studies, productivity audits, and training materials to name a few.

But how much of these efforts are a waste of time?

Portions of our most recent work show that sales process can be over-done, and the ROI of perfecting ‘the science of sales’ may be lower than ever: 

1)  Following a formal sales process actually has zero correlation to the success of a Challenger sales rep™, the dominant way to be a star performer in this environment.  In fact, it’s better to be agile. Standardizing activity can be a hindrance.

2)  Mere completion of scripted sales process activities doesn’t necessarily provide better pipeline visibility. Leading edge forecasters have found tracking customer reactions (rather than your actions) far more predictive. Read More »

As we dip our toe into the waters of the blogosphere, one of the biggest questions we faced for the blog itself was:  what to call it?  Those of you who’ve spent some time with our materials know that we spend an inordinate amount of time on page titles alone so it was a spirited discussion here in the researcher dungeon. 

(Side note: if you look at our study Deepening Customer Relationships, the titles of the first five pages are: “The train has left the station,” “I thought I meant more to you,” “Through bad times and good,” “Two sides of the same coin,” and “Taking the next step.”  Intriguing enough for a closer look??)

But once we came up with Sales Challenger, the discussion was over.  Why?  Well, the Sales Challenger really encapsulates the two major goals we are trying to achieve with this blog: Read More »