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 post was written by Tim Stafford for our Finance and Strategy Practice.)

Every team in a company seems to have one or two people that can accomplish large complex tasks – product launches, organizational redesign – at a speed and with an ease that outweighs their seniority or formal authority. These people are able to influence a course of events far more effectively than their peers.

Some are able to do this because they are naturally good at what management experts call “soft skills“, but many others have learned how to be influential; this is why those that set education policy have become as keen to develop children’s EQ (their “emotional intelligence quotient“) as their IQ.

There are a number of things that successful influencers do that can be replicated, and even formally encouraged within your organization.

Six Ways to Be More Influential

Read More »

By Andrew Kent

With mounting pressure from the cost police to “do more with less,” we at the SEC frequently field questions about if face-to-face time—whether with customers, during training, or between team members—can be replaced by virtual channels like teleconferences or webinars.

Here’s a question for the cost police though: if technology can displace human contact so easily, why do the companies who make that technology place such a premium on human contact in their own business?

Via Ezra Klein, a new book called The Triumph of the City notes “the apparent paradox of cities becoming more expensive and more crowded even as the cost of communicating over great distances has fallen dramatically. New York is a good example of this, but Silicon Valley is a better one:

The computer industry, more than any other sector, is the place where one might expect remote communication to replace person-to-person meetings; computer companies have the best teleconferencing tools, the best internet applications, the best means of connecting far-flung collaborators. Yet despite their ability to work at long distances, this industry has become the world’s most famous example of the benefits of geographic concentration. Technology innovators who could easily connect electronically pay for some of America’s most expensive real estate to reap the benefits of being able to meet in person. Read More »

If I asked you why being in Sales is a tough job, I’m sure I’d hear many reasons ranging from selling increasingly complex solutions, to having less customer face time, to, here’s a good one, not knowing who to sell to.

Unfortunately, the reality is that a buyer is no longer just a C-suite decision-maker holding a checkbook. Now, the traditional buyer is more akin to the Frankenstein monster, consisting of multiple cross-functional stakeholders, purchasing consultants, and committees brought into the buying process. [See finding # 1 in our Ten Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know in 2011]

In fact, our hot-off-the presses customer data suggests that sales reps drastically underestimate the number of stakeholders involved in an average deal.  [See our latest findings from the 2011 customer data]. One member shared with us that the average number of stakeholders involved in each deal has increased by 3.5 people since 2006.

What does it mean for the supplier? Well, it simply means that group buying is on the rise and that access to these groups is rarely granted.

Organizations’ most typical response to overcoming this challenge has been to identify influential stakeholders and turn them into advocates, hoping that they will steer the group in the right direction.  I hate to break it to you, but advocates don’t work like that. In fact, out data shows quite the opposite… Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

These days, closing a deal isn’t as simple as convincing one person to say “yes”—customers are increasingly looking for buy-in from colleagues before making a purchase. And while one executive may have the decision-making power, many companies require several influencers across functions to sign off as well.

The rise of this consensus-based sale is causing a lot of headaches for reps, because they often struggle to modify or tailor their message so that it effectively appeals to each decision maker’s role. This tendency to stay in their comfort zones leads reps to have nearly identical conversations with each customer contact, regardless of the individual’s role or function.

Failure to take into consideration what is going on in a particular contact’s world or what that individual is trying to achieve results in generic conversations that don’t resonate with influencers, leaving them asking “so how does that help me?” and leaving reps without the consensus needed to push a deal through.

So how can you help reps deliver more resonant messages? You help them cheat. Read More »

For the most part, organizations are run with the expectation of driving greater efficiency and productivity. Retailers are expected to improve their revenues per square foot, hotels and airlines strive to improve their yields per seat/rooms, and the mantra is one of constantly doing more with less.

But it is worth remembering that this dynamic is not universal. As William Baumol famously highlighted, a string quartet always has and always will need 4 people, no matter what they earn. Inherently, the complexity of true art requires a certain degree of inefficiency.

And in my opinion, companies should remember this principle when measuring the relative efficiency of their own sales force.

We are increasingly hearing companies cite that reps have become relatively less efficient on a per head basis, even as the rest of the company makes a lot more revenue per head.

The implication is that the direct sales force might need some pruning and that people aren’t pulling their weight. Lean selling is the antidote that’s often prescribed. After all, the rest of the corporation is being run with fewer people so why should the sales force be exempt from this dynamic?

But a fundamental flaw in this judgment is failing to account for the amount of time and “art” it typically takes a rep to complete a new sale. For selling, and complex solutions selling in particular, it requires a slow interaction which ebbs and flows between groups of people who are trying to generate value for each other. Read More »

Members are always telling me about their struggles with sales tool adoption and I always tell them the same thing – first and foremost, when it comes to ensuring that your tools will be used, you have to build the right infrastructure for tool creation in the first place.

No matter what you’re building, who’s building it, or who’s sponsoring it, you’ve got to adhere to these seven steps if you want reps to consistently take advantage of your suite of tools:

1. Keep Your Eye on the Prize. Make absolute certain the tool is built back from actual outcomes your organization, and more specifically, your sales reps, are seeking to achieve.  More often than not, simply building a tool based on stated needs can lead you to a place where a tool fails to achieve its anticipated impact and falls far short of expected adoption.  

• Check out Toyota’s process for ensuring that tool-building efforts solve the correct problems.

2. Prioritize Tool Requests. Put in place some sort of principled prioritization mechanism that guides tool development.  Too often, we flood the tool marketplace with endless ROI calculators, collateral, etc. without making sure the most important tools land on reps’ desks first.  Without a prioritization strategy in place, it’s usually the squeakiest wheel or the most senior request that automatically gets to cut to the front of the line. 

• Review Schneider Electric’s tool prioritization scorecard as a solution to this challenge.

3. Run to Feedback. When designing a tool, make sure you collect very early input from field-based power users around which problems are worth solving with the tool in the first place. 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 »