Buyers are outpacing supplier capabilities and becoming more efficient at pressuring on price—at least that’s the recurring theme the SEC is hearing in our recent conversations with members. But what’s enabling this behavior today’s buyers, and more importantly, what does it mean for your sales strategy?

The recent member conversations we’ve had suggest that customers have become more sophisticated at buying over the last several years due to:

• Economic pressures that have forced buyers to become increasingly risk averse and focused on cost—In response to the economic  uncertainty in the marketplace, customer organizations are relying more heavily on group buying, professionalized, process-driven procurement teams, and third-party consultants to help mitigate risk through well vetted purchases with higher levels of savings .
• Increased access to information— Internet access and vast technological advances over the past decade have created a much more transparent buying environment than what existed in the past. Customers can now easily find and access information about their industry, the competition, your product/solution, and your competitors’ products/solutions without spending a lot of time or money.

So what are the implications for sellers? 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 »

Have you purchased a vehicle lately? For most of us, we send 10 emails to sales managers at different dealerships and wait for the best price to come back. You know what you want and what you wanna pay. It’s a world of established demand – really just pure order fulfillment.

Now surely B2B solution selling isn’t that bad…or is it?

Well, our data show that core performers prefer selling into this world of established customer demand. Things are so easy when the customer calls us, knows what they want, and even gives us a sense of what they want to pay.

Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

We all know that saying, “Practice makes perfect”—but what if your reps aren’t getting the practice they need? It’s not enough to practice scenarios in the classroom; real-world experience is necessary for skill development. Without enough realistic practice, reps are set up for failure and may be deterred from applying the new skills they’ve learned in training. The problem though is that for most reps, experiential practice opportunities only crop up sporadically.

So, how can you make sales training stick?

Leading companies work with their reps to deliberately engineer real-world application opportunities.

During a recent Council webinar, Dave Horton, Director of Global Sales Operations for Siemens Water Technologies, shared insights and strategies for improving reps’ skills through experiential practice using manager/rep coaching trips.

SEC members, read a few takeaways from the discussion with Dave. You can also listen to the full-length webinar on Mastering New Sales Skills in Just Two Days.

In a lot of conversations I’ve had with heads of sales lately, their CFOs have been reaching out to sales to discuss reinvesting in growth.  CFOs are currently mulling over how to reinvigorate top line growth without killing margins.

During the last year or two, most companies have gone through significant cost cutting.  This has meant that despite the destruction of demand, most companies were actually able to expand margins.  As we come into what most CFOs believe will be an upswing, we’ve seen them turn attention from a sole focus on managing cost/margins, to a joint focus on top and bottom line.  Put simply, they want to get back on the growth train but without killing the margins they’ve worked so hard to attain. 

Over the last 3-6 months we’ve seen CFOs starting to loosen the purse strings to get growth going; they’re doing things like fund more innovation, look into M&A adjacencies, and remove restrictions on hiring and travel.  We expect to see this trend continue over the next few quarters but it will likely still be slow.  And CFOs are struggling with where and how to make smart investments. 

There are several ways for sales organizations to help CFOs as they think through these joint objectives.  A few questions members are asking are:

• What can sales do to drive the top line without sacrificing the bottom line?
• How can they identify wins that will help make a case for more robust investment in sales?
• What role should sales play in making broader growth investment decisions?

Here’s how I’ve navigated these conversations with CSOs – by helping them change their conversations from driving sales value to driving enterprise value.     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 »

You count on your star salespeople. They’ve delivered the number time and time again, so you know you can lean on them in a pinch. But how do you know when you’re leaning on a star too much?

In a prolonged pinch like the recent global recession, we ask more from our salespeople than ever. It is perhaps unsurprising then that 73% of reps believe that their sales goals are unachievable. This is a cause for concern; we all know that nothing deflates sales rep morale like an unreachable goal.

To combat this risk, conventional wisdom teaches us to watch for the tell-tale signs of employee burnout – particularly with star performers who are  exceptionally prone to overextension. 

But according to Duke University (and U.S. Olympic) Men’s Basketball coach Mike Kryryzewski, all of this pooh-poohing of star performers is nonsense. Kyryzewski (a.k.a. Coach K) has faced a media onslaught in recent months for the unusually high minutes-per-game his stars log.

The questions are not unfounded: of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s four “most-played” basketball players this year, three are at Duke. In fact, all five of the most-played athletes in ACC history have played under Coach K, leading some analysts to attribute Duke’s chronic NCAA tournament underperformance in recent years to late season fatigue.

Contrarian though it may be, Kryryzewski’s take on the issue – which he says he’s learned from years of experience – is simple:  When the going gets tough, your stars want to play. That’s a big part of why they’re stars. The best thing you can do as a leader is let them play. Read More »

(This is a guest post from Charlie Dorrier on the SEC Solutions team.  Solutions helps members generate customized insights, tools, and training programs to improve the overall performance of the sales force.) 

Stop for a second and think about the individual sales people on the front line of your organization.  Picture their faces and the diverse set of styles and messages that emerge in front of customers.  It’s a powerful vision that motivates many of us to be in sales in the first place: the collective voice of a sales force, driven by a single objective but made up of many different parts.

This vision is also terrifying.  Mass chaos comes to mind:  lost deals, missed opportunities, isolated information, and sometimes unsatisfied customers.  The chaos needs a little order.  And your organization needs to learn from the front-runners.  

I recently heard a sales manager sum it up very well:  “I’ve got 15 people on my team and there are 500 reps I never really see – I’m not sure I know exactly what drives success in our organization.”  By studying in aggregate all of the individual approaches to selling, a sales organization can learn a lot from itself.  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 »