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 »

In my last post, I explained how the most important sales-specific skill a manager can have right now – much more important than resource allocation and just inching out coaching – is sales innovation.  But innovation and creativity are not words we frequently use in Sales (at least not in a good way).   So what do we really mean by sales innovation, and how do we get it?  I’ll answer that here, and sprinkle in some links to relevant cases that SEC members can access.

Let’s start by talking about the military.

In the Army, there’s an old saying that applies equally well to Sales:  “No plan survives engagement with the enemy.”

No matter how carefully one plans for battle, the reality on the field will inevitably present in a different way.  And as a result, over the years, army leaders have adopted a style of leadership known as Commander’s Intent.

Commander’s Intent is just that:  a clear, concise statement of the specific goal a commander is looking to achieve. Something like:  “Capture and hold that hill until reinforcements arrive.”

In this approach, Army leaders have stopped giving step-by-step instructions on how to actually go about capturing the hill, because they’ve learned that once the team gets out in the field and engages in battle, they have to quickly adapt to the situation on the ground in unanticipated ways.

Not surprisingly then, the field leaders who excel in the Army have to be creative, innovative, and adaptive to survive. 

Now, Sales is not exactly like war, but it is a series of (hopefully friendlier) battles to win ground over competitors.  And given that these days those battles are less predictable than ever before, it makes sense that deviating from the plan is now increasingly necessary.    Read More »

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In my last post I talked about how changes in customer behavior have made our growth goals harder and harder.  Specifically, customers may be more open to buying a vision, but getting a deal to completion has gotten a lot more challenging, and less predictable.  And our biggest leverage point for helping navigate customer organizations to get a deal done?  Managers.

The first-line manager has arguably always been the most important (and least-defined) role in a sales organization.  But recent changes in customer behavior, coupled with the shift to solution selling, have changed what matters most for managers.  So here’s the new story of manager excellence.

As a reminder, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding over 1,000 managers – to explain the primary drivers of manager excellence.

Our first finding is no surprise:  managers need to be good at the fundamentals.  These are things like integrity, reliability and listening, which are important to any manager, not just sales managers.   Luckily, it turns out most managers are good at these.   For the 3.5% of our sample who failed at the fundamentals—they’re probably not cut out for a job in management.

More interesting are the sales-specific activities that matter most.  These fall into three high-level categories, with the impact on performance in parentheses:

• Selling (26.6%) – being personally effective at selling, particularly the Challenger™ behaviors
• Coaching (28.0%) – helping others improve, particularly with tailoring and asserting control
• Owning the Business (45.4%) – when managers run their territory as if it were their own business

Owning the Business breaks down into two parts:     Read More »

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In my last blog post, I introduced the idea of sales innovation, and how it is the most important thing a sales manager can do to drive growth.  I left you hanging about the specific activities inherent to sales innovation–and I promise to get there–but to really understand the concept, we need some context.

This story starts with why growth is so hard right now: changing customer behaviors.  There has been a lot of change in customer situations–increased price pressure, decreased budgets, etc –but while these changes may dissipate over time, we see a few trends that we think are here to stay:

1. More customer stakeholders involved with the deal
2. Customers pushing risk onto suppliers
3. Rise of third party consultants auditing deal agreements

What this means at the 10,000-foot level:  it is getting harder and harder to get a deal to close.  Looking closer, you can see that it’s getting harder in a very specific way that relies on the manager.

It helps to think about the path of a sale in two main stages:

• First, selling a customer on a vision
• Second, getting them to buy an offering customized to their specific needs

Think about it:  with every sale, we begin with the customer in some sort of status quo—uncomfortable as it may be, given the tough economy of late—then, through the recognition of a need, the customer agrees on a vision.   Read More »

As many of you know, we’ve spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance.  Along the way, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding  over 1,000 managers – and you’ve seen bits and pieces from this analysis here on this site already. 

Now it’s time to start telling the whole story about what we found, not just nuggets of data analysis.   

When we took a hard look at the data, we found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently to succeed in today’s environment.  We’ve started presenting the information in day-long sessions and executive breakfasts around the globe (SEC members, click here to register for one of our upcoming events or teleconferences on the subject).  As you can imagine, there is too much to be communicated in one post, so I’ll use a series of posts to cover our major conclusions.

The top line from our research?

2010 is all about growth.  That’s not news, as we all know it’s not OK not to grow this year.  But changing customer behavior has made growth a real challenge.  Everyone also agrees that sales managers are the vital linchpin for driving a return to growth in 2010.

While coaching is absolutely crucial to sales manager success, it turns out that when it comes to growth, there is a whole other category of manager activity even more important than coaching.

Therefore, what is that category of manager activity that most drives growth?  We call it ‘Sales Innovation.’   Read More »