The rise of big data has been a double-edged sword for some. While customers have embraced data as it allows for easier price comparisons, their persistent focus on short-term savings has created new challenges for sellers—mainly, by undercutting the power of storytelling.

A member we recently spoke with shared how increasingly data-driven customers in the electronics industry have become so focused on price that they often lose sight of their vision and initial objectives behind a purchase.

“It’s like trying to buy a painting based only on numbers and price comparisons–which is impossible–when in fact it’s the story behind the painting that sells,” he said, describing the whole situation.

His experience refers to a growing phenomenon we are seeing in sales today: customers’ increasing use of data and rational reasoning in the purchasing decision (This, in fact, was one of the trends we believe every Sales Exec must know in 2012).

In today’s tough economy, everyone wants to get the most for their money. It’s natural for customers to try to break down deal components and compare apples to apples. And if customers want to do it that way, isn’t it natural for sales reps to respond using data and numbers too?

But therein lies the problem. The customer’s persistent focus on price and short-term savings distracts them from the real issue at hand—the long-term strategic value of your solution. Read More »

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

Each year, the Marketing Leadership Council (MLC) surveys our members about their top challenges looking ahead.  As we read the tea leaves in this year’s survey results, here are our thoughts on what’s creeping into (or storming) the B2B marketing consciousness for 2012.

1) Voice-of-Customer 2.0. Marketers are grappling with what kinds of customer data are most important to collect and how to make hay out of the data. Early hypothesis from the MLC team: marketers are over-investing in collecting and analyzing data about the customer, and not enough in gathering information and insight about customer context, which is critical for generating commercial insight (see #5 below)

2) Skill Set Reset. There’s a creeping sense among B2B CMO’s that their marketing teams are in need of a capability overhaul.  With the rise of “no man’s land” in the mid-funnel and rapid changes in how buying centers are making purchase decisions, out-of-date marketing skill sets are being laid bare.

As one example of B2B marketing teams aggressively managing the skill set transition, consider the example of Cisco starting to “badge” and reward its marketers on their social media impact.

Ask yourself: how sweet/spooky would it be for 20% of your pay to rest on your social graph? 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 »

At last month’s annual Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, the SEC handed out our 2011 B2B Sales Awards. We were thrilled to celebrate the achievements of some of the most progressive organizations in the SEC membership. Awards were given in three categories: Adoption of Insight, Excellence in Sales Operations, and Commercial Achievement.

Without further ado, the recipients of this year’s sales awards were…

Adoption of Insight Award Winner: Treasury Wine Estates

The Adoption of Insight award is given to a company that is particularly good at taking action. This award recognizes an organization’s ability to take good ideas and turn them into actual tools, processes, and approaches that change behaviors. And we were very pleased to present this award to Darren Campbell, General Manager of Field Services at Treasury Wine Estates.

Treasury Wine Estates has a long track record of consistently turning ideas into action – the company is very far down the path of Commercial Teaching, and they’ve also done extensive work executing on our past Coaching research. The Treasury team took one of our most popular coaching best practices—Symetra Financial’s sales process-aligned coaching roadmap—and created their own version of it.

When accepting the award, Darren shared the six things that he believes help an organization accelerate insight to action: Read More »

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

Our second annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” took place in Las Vegas last week.  Over the three-day event, I had the privilege to be a part of many fantastic presentations, events, and member conversations, all focused on arming Sales and Marketing professionals with the ideas, strategies, and tools to deal with the newly empowered B2B customer.

One presentation, in particular, offered a very unique perspective on the purchase process – our colleagues at the Procurement Strategy Council (PSC) offered us a peek behind the curtain at how procurement professionals view the world today.  I have to admit, it felt a bit like I had snuck behind enemy lines.  After all, it’s fair to say that many in B2B Sales and Marketing(including most of those in the room with me in Las Vegas) think of Procurement as price-haggling, value-killing, nickel-and-dimers.  And that’s what we say when we are being nice.

But, as it turns out, from PSC’s point of view, there is actually some emerging opportunity for sales forces to work with (rather than against) Procurement to close more mutually beneficial deals. Read More »

We see this happen all the time—a rep walks into a customer’s office, hands them a company brochure, and spends the next 30-minutes telling the customer all about their product’s features and benefits (many of which are of little significance to the customer’s business).

Not surprisingly, this type of approach often fails to capture the customer’s attention.

In today’s world of increased deal scrutiny and higher consensus requirements, features-based selling no longer works. In fact, SEC analysis reveals that teaching delivered during the sales experience has the largest impact on customer loyalty, more than product, company, brand, and service delivery combined.

The best companies recognize this and reverse the flow of their customer interactions—they adopt a Commercial Teaching approach that ‘leads to’ rather than ‘leads with’ information about their products and services.

One of the companies we spoke to in the course of our research, W.W. Grainger, is doing exactly this— Read More »

What if I told you that the long-standing beliefs driving your customer engagement strategy actually turned out to harm you in the long run?

Imagine the surprise of sales and service execs when they found out that, in the service channel, going above and beyond when serving the customer doesn’t pay off. The break-through research from our sister program—the Customer Contact Council—dismantled many of these universally held beliefs about customer loyalty.

Finding #1: Customer service organizations should care first and foremost about mitigating disloyalty—customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal.

Finding #2: The primary thing service organizations can do to mitigate disloyalty is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. In other words, make it easy for the customers to solve their problems.

Finding #3: It is not only that the problem is resolved that matters, but also how.  The customer’s perception of how much effort they put in is about two times as influential as the actual actions taken by the customer.

(SEC Members, read more about these findings in Are You a Low-Effort Service Organization?)

Fascinating, isn’t it, especially if you think about the implications these findings have for your sales strategy.  Do sales organizations need to worry about eliminating unnecessary effort for customers? As it turns out, they do.   Read More »

Throughout the year the Council’s research team talks to hundreds of senior sales executives to discuss key challenges they’re facing.  In recent months, there has been a marked increase in conversations that revolve around the complexity of working with third-party purchasing consultants hired by customers.

For some industries this isn’t a new trend at all.  In fact, in certain manufacturing environments, working with purchasing consultants has been a part of doing business for decades.

However, for other industries, this trend is a more recent phenomenon, and the use of purchasing consultants has been steadily increasing in the past year.  An example would be the pharmaceutical and health care industry, where department chairs at larger hospital and health care systems (that have little business background) employ purchasing consultants to help them make large, complex purchases from an array of potential suppliers.

Regardless of how recent or old this trend may be in your industry, the key question that organizations struggle with here is…how do we engage these folks? Do we forge strong relationships with these consultants and look to partner with them?  Or should we view them as the enemy and do our best to work around them and engage as many key customer contacts as possible without their knowledge? Read More »

J.C. Penny, the American retailer, is getting a new boss.  Ron Johnson will become their new CEO in November after having led Apple’s retail store operations for the last decade.  Mr. Johnson is credited with the success of Apple’s retail store operations – and the results speak for themselves.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

• More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year.
• Apple’s annual retail sales per square foot have soared to $4,406. Add in online sales, which include iTunes, and the number jumps to $5,914. That’s far higher than the sales per square foot and online sales of jeweler Tiffany & Co. ($3,070), luxury retailer Coach Inc. ($1,776), and electronics retailer Best Buy Co. ($880), according to estimates.
• Needham & Co. puts Apple stores’ profit margin at 26.9% in an industry that typically has profit margins hovering around 1%.

These results are impressive, but not surprising.  Why?

Because Apple, through their training and support, enable their retail staff to sell the way customers want to buy. Read More »