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 »

If you’re in Sales, it’s kind of assumed that you get along with people. Or, more precisely, you know how to get your way around things. And this surely includes getting your own organization to fulfill some promises you’ve made to a customer. After all, you’re all on the same team, right?

In reality, that’s a lot harder to do than people assume. When it comes to landing that mammoth deal you’ve been working on for the last six months—a deal that involves half the departments and business units in your organization to come together—you see cracks begin to emerge. What you came away promising the customer suddenly seems hard to fulfill. In our experience, you probably find yourself in one of these two sinking boats:

1)   The interests of a single department or business unit outweigh the interests of the overall organization: Like individuals, departments and business units are interested squarely in meeting their yearly goals and objectives. If something doesn’t help them meet their goals, it’s unlikely they’re going to want to pitch in.

2)   Non-customer-facing functions lack customer focus and deemphasize customer need fulfillment: In the absence of a customer-facing role, functions tend to focus heavily on established processes and systems. If the deal doesn’t comply with the processes they’ve set, they are not on board.

So where does that leave you in all this? More importantly, what do you tell your customer? Yes, you can probably cajole your way out of it without damaging the business, but on how many deals?  Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Are sales leaders in your organization constantly on the road? Is your organization geographically dispersed? We all recognize it’s important for employees to feel a connection with their leaders, but many sales executives struggle to make their presence felt where they can’t be in person.

Our sister program The Communications Executive Council recently received a question in its Employee Communications Forum from a sales executive eager to hear about how other companies drive virtual engagement with leadership. Most organizations are using the Internet and other visual media to bridge the gap — here are a few of the takeaways from the thread: Read More »

So far, my blog posts have all been about the things that sales managers find the hardest to do. But there are some management behaviors that people are generally pretty good at.  There are six ‘easy’ behaviors that break down into three categories.

The first set of these “easy” behaviors is really about being a good person:

• “having integrity and demonstrating honesty”
• “being reliable”

It turns out these are essentially binary – you are either good at them or you aren’t.  Luckily, less than 5% of direct reports score their managers as lacking integrity and only about 7% think that their manager is unreliable.

This means if somebody’s direct reports score them low in these behaviors, then it’s a good predictor that that person won’t be an effective manager.

The second category of attributes that people scored well at is around following the rules:

• “Considers compliance and general risk implications”
• “Drives compliance with the sales process”

The third category of attributes is about managing upward:

• “Garners respect by senior management”
• “Champions corporate initiatives”

The good news about these categories being ‘easy’ is that, for the most part, managers are listening to what you tell them.  They make sure reps are doing the right activities and they communicate what senior leadership says they should.  And they are fundamentally reliable and honest.

What does this mean in practice?   Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge | Drivers of Sales Performance

Many SEC members have been asking us how to get their contact center staff to up-sell and cross-sell customers while they’re on the phone with them.  For the most part, this interest is driven by a desire to allow the field sales organization to focus on more complex selling activities by getting other, lower-cost, channels focused on the transactional sales.  

But a huge majority of these same members report that they struggle to make headway and that these efforts to turn the contact center into a sales channel end up stalling out.  

SEC’s sister program, the Customer Contact Council, recently looked at the best levers for getting service reps to up-sell and cross-sell.  Their study of 1300+ contact center reps across more than 50 companies helps explain why most companies stumble in their efforts to drive sales through the contact center. 

The two big reasons are:

1) Sales productivity is driven by a different set of levers in the contact center: Senior leaders tend to think that the two most important levers to pull in building sales capabilities are to build a sales culture/environment in the contact center and to increase the organization’s emphasis on monetary rewards. 

The CCC’s research, however, shows that the “sales culture” effect is nominal, at best.  Meanwhile, an over-emphasis on monetary incentives can actually harm sales performance for customer service reps.   Read More »