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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 »

It’s no news that sales executives rarely work with a single buyer. Even if they manage to get one person on board with the new vision, the champion of that vision (regardless of their seniority) still must gain broader organizational support.

One company told us that, in a recent sale, they were able to talk directly to the CEO who fully supported their solution.  However, when the CEO tried to push the solution in the company, it turned out he had to present it in front of the board which significantly complicated the decision process.

What’s even more troubling is that suppliers are rarely invited to be part of the decision-making – most deliberations happen behind closed doors. This means that the stakes of choosing the right stakeholder within an account have never been higher.

Many sales organizations have long been telling their reps to look for a customer advocate or “coach” – someone inside the customer organization who can provide guidance on how purchase decisions are made and, ideally, who is willing to help the supplier navigate that process.

From hundreds of conversations with members we constructed the ideal advocate/coach profile that reps are told to target. The ideal customer contact is one who: Read More »

Here at the SEC, we just emerged from our most extensive annual research process. In fact, we had our first meeting on “Rewriting the Sales Playbook: How High Performers Win the Consensus-Based Sale” here in Washington DC last week – and what a session! (Members: be sure to register for an upcoming session and the overview teleconference on June 1).

One of the most eye-opening experiences during the research process was spending significant time talking with our members’ top performers. We literally wanted to get inside the head of the best reps in the world, and these stars didn’t disappoint.

We’ll detail the findings in the coming weeks, but needless to say, these stars think about selling in fundamentally different ways than core performers. They target very different opportunities, based on very different criteria, and engage completely different stakeholders in completely different ways. In fact, most of them laugh at conventional wisdom on the sales process, opportunity fit criteria, use of sales collateral, and the use of customer coaches inside an account. Read More »

Another quarter-end is fast approaching, and as always, some of your reps are on the fence. They’re one deal away from crossing goal, but most of their remaining opportunities are coin tosses. It’s hard to predict whether that last bit of revenue will come in, or where it will come from. So what’s the best strategy for shaking loose a few more deals in these situations?

As deals enter the late stages of the pipeline, we all tend to make assumptions about what it will take to compel our prospects to complete the purchase. Some of these assumptions are valid; but others may narrow our thinking. For example, many reps assume that they’ve reached critical mass once they’ve talked to 3-5 stakeholders. But customers tell us a different story. They say their typical decision-making group has around 8-10 members.

So how do we help reps avoid these types of oversights?   Read More »

Sales manager time is scarce.  Yet it seems all we do is add to their plate.  Be a world-class coach, seller, resource allocator, motivator, and communicator, we tell them.  Oh, and we can’t really predict why so many deals get stuck, so also be a great innovator.

But good sales innovation requires a certain amount of restraint.  Not only do the best managers know HOW to innovate, they know WHEN to. 

Here is what these managers recognize: not every deal gets stuck for unpredictable reasons.  Innovation is only necessary after the rep has exhausted all the options laid out in the established playbook.

Jumping directly into investigation mode whenever a rep cries “STUCK!” risks involving your managers in way too many deals.

And reps misidentify deals as “stuck” more often than you think, for the same reasons they struggle once a deal truly is stuck: reticence to ask hard questions with unclear answers.  Read More »

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I just read a blog post on HBR that raises an interesting point (What Really Matters in B2B Selling). The author argues that prospect quality is more a product of prospect interest rather than fit.

Those of us in a solution-selling environment will likely be among the first to argue that fit is tremendously important, particularly if we intend to win revenue- and margin-maximizing solution sales with a client. In a purely transactional selling world, this may be less a concern.

And yes, there is a large degree of truth to the statement “you don’t have a strategy if you’ve never said ‘no’ to a customer.”

In reality, many ‘interested’ customers have self-opted as good fits, and naturally you’d expect interested customers to be decent prospects. But let’s put fit aside for a minute and focus purely on customer interest. Read More »

In baseball, the best managers manufacture runs out of seemingly thin air.  To be sure, scoring runs is a complex blend of effort from many different parts of the team and the larger organization. 

The general manager, for instance, can help by putting the best players on the field and investing in the development of young talent.  The players can execute better by taking more batting practice or studying different pitcher tendencies (insert joke here about performance-enhancing drugs).  The coaching staff can help by teaching new hitting techniques or putting together the perfectly balanced lineup.

But as Cubs fans know well, it’s all too common to see two or three stranded runners in one inning.  The inning starts out great – two singles and you’re sitting with runners on first and third, nobody out.  Double play here, strikeout there…inning over.

What do the best managers do?  They call the timely hit-and-run.  Or call for a well-placed bunt to move a runner into scoring position and out of double play danger.  They innovate on the fly – and produce runs that otherwise would have been left stranded.

Sales is no different.  Despite our best efforts, we find ourselves stranding lots of deals.  A member told me the other day “we’re great at getting baserunners to second base but we just can’t seem to get them home.”  Read More »

Recently, I’ve had a couple of conversations with members about some of the words and titles we’ve chosen to convey our research findings—most notably, the “Challenger” sales rep (the big finding from last year’s SEC study on rep effectiveness) and “Sales Innovation” (the big finding from this year’s manager effectiveness study). 

In discussions I’ve had about the Challenger™ term, some members have asked whether it might have been more appropriate to call these reps “the new relationship builder”—after all, this is what the Challenger represents, isn’t it?  Whereas the classic relationship builder is focused on pleasing the customer, the Challenger is focused on making the customer professionally more effective in his or her job.  Isn’t that just a performance-based relationship? 

Similarly, in this year’s study, I’ve been pressed to explain how “Sales Innovation” is truly distinct from “deal-level coaching.”  Isn’t this really what the innovative manager is doing when he or she partners with a sales rep to “un-stick” a deal?

I don’t necessarily disagree with either of these arguments since they are both sound points of view based on a firm understanding not only of Sales, but of SEC content.  But, should we go back and rewrite those studies with terms like “new relationship builder” and “deal-level coaching” so they’re more agreeable to members and don’t run the risk of rubbing people the wrong way?  Absolutely not.

Why?  Because one of the most important things to do in challenging conventional wisdom—whether through a research study like those produced by the SEC, inside your own organization or with your own customers—is to be controversial.  Mind you, you need to have good reason (i.e., robust data and sound logic) to be able to challenge conventional wisdom…but data and logic alone won’t get it done.  Words matter and the story you tell matters.   Read More »

No question, 2009 was a tough year.  And for some of us 2010 isn’t much better.  In fact, I’m struck by the number of sales executives I’ve spoken to across the last 6 months who’ve told me that, actually, last year was the good year, and this year is the tough one. 

That said, irrespective of when the tough times hit your organization, we find the general reaction in Sales is the same.  In times when reps are struggling to sell, one thing we can all agree on is the need to double our efforts around driving sales process compliance.

The idea being, no matter how tough the economy, good selling is good selling.  So let’s make sure we’re following the motion of good selling, even if it doesn’t always lead to a deal.

One thing we know to be true based on our research at the Sales Executive Council is that customer buying behaviors are changing.  In some cases quite dramatically. 

Whether it’s evolving customer needs, increased demands for consensus across customer stakeholders, changes in decision making authority, heightened budget pressures, or re-designed buying processes, one thing members tell us again and again is, for many accounts, Sales has changed.  And as a result, deals are getting bogged down in all sorts of unexpected ways, unique from customer to customer, even from deal to deal.

But if that’s the case, we now live in a world where a standardized sales process will only get us so far.  Driving compliance around the behaviors known to lead to success only works, if we can predict in advance what actually leads to success.   Read More »