Is your sales force experiencing increasingly stalled business, extended cycle times, and inaccurate forecasts? If so, it’s time to revisit your sales process and take a hard look at how your customers buy.

Traditionally, companies have taken an inward approach to developing their sales processes—they typically only consider internal senior management requirements that make management and forecasting easier (or so they thought…). Unfortunately, the glaring problem with this approach is that it does not take into account where customers actually stand in the sale.

For most reps, following the traditional sale process is all about providing certain tools and information to the customer to quickly move them to the next step in the sales funnel. However, reps miss a key step here–they take for granted that customers are ready to move on and often end up outpacing them in the deal. As a result, many companies find their reps’ books of business bogged down with deals stuck in limbo. Read More »

In the Sales world, the start of a new year often brings with it a fervent roll out of new compensation plans. It’s the one activity that garners the most interest from all quarters of the sales force. After all, a good compensation plan can drive the right behaviors, and retain and attract top talent.

The compensation plan design process itself is anything but simple though. Its scope overlaps with the domain of multiple functions—Sales Ops, HR, Finance, and Legal being the most vocal participants and stakeholders. Each, with often competing interests, claims ownership of sales compensation design. It’s no wonder we see compensation plans often stray away from the broader business goals of the organization.

Who then is best suited to own sales compensation? 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 »

At last month’s annual Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, the SEC handed out our 2011 B2B Sales Awards. We were thrilled to celebrate the achievements of some of the most progressive organizations in the SEC membership. Awards were given in three categories: Adoption of Insight, Excellence in Sales Operations, and Commercial Achievement.

Without further ado, the recipients of this year’s sales awards were…

Adoption of Insight Award Winner: Treasury Wine Estates

The Adoption of Insight award is given to a company that is particularly good at taking action. This award recognizes an organization’s ability to take good ideas and turn them into actual tools, processes, and approaches that change behaviors. And we were very pleased to present this award to Darren Campbell, General Manager of Field Services at Treasury Wine Estates.

Treasury Wine Estates has a long track record of consistently turning ideas into action – the company is very far down the path of Commercial Teaching, and they’ve also done extensive work executing on our past Coaching research. The Treasury team took one of our most popular coaching best practices—Symetra Financial’s sales process-aligned coaching roadmap—and created their own version of it.

When accepting the award, Darren shared the six things that he believes help an organization accelerate insight to action: Read More »

CRM – it’s a topic that’s guaranteed to derail any meeting with a 15-minute side-bar into why our reps don’t use it.  CRM is so frustrating because very few companies have been able to crack the code and really build a CRM system that is a core part of how they go to market.

There are many reasons why CRM fails…Incomplete data.  Duplicate data.  Inaccurate data.  Too many fields.  Too time consuming.  Not user-friendly.  Redundant.

These are all reasons why CRM is often viewed as a burden and why reps don’t use it.  Although each of those problems must be addressed, there’s a bigger problem that they often mask and it can be traced back to one simple question – why would a rep want to use the CRM?

From the rep perspective, how much better is using the CRM than their own way of selling that they’ve built over their career?  They view CRM as a necessary evil, whose mandatory fields are needed to get resources or help their manager send forecasts up the ivory tower.

Very rarely do reps use the CRM because they believe it actually helps them sell better. And therein lies the problem.

As you’re thinking about investments in CRM in 2012, look at every potential investment through that lens.  Here are some additional questions you may want to ask yourself: Read More »

My colleague Taylor recently wrote a post about one company’s journey to take their sales process to the next level.  The company was Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP), and they intentionally blurred the lines of distinction between buying and selling when constructing the latest iteration of their sales process.

ADP mapped out their customers’ buying process, and then created a tool that synched reps’ selling activities to the stages of that purchase process.

Why did ADP do this? Because they found that this led to easy, efficient purchase experiences for their customers, more efficient sales cycles for their salespeople, and more productive coaching sessions for their sales managers.

(SEC Members, if you haven’t had a chance to familiarize yourself with this best practice, now is a great time to review the case study or listen to our recent webinar during which the architects of this process from ADP discussed their journey in great detail.)

Since profiling this case example, Council members have been quick to construct a version of this tool to call their own.  We’ve learned a great deal as we’ve helped members throughout the construction phase, so here’s a few “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for folks out there planning to take a crack at building a tool like this for their organization: Read More »

(This is a guest post by Yi Kang of the Marketing Leadership Council,our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

The PhDs are hired, the software installed, the data collected, and now the rest of the company waits eagerly for profit to climb – why shouldn’t it, now that we have advanced analytics? The popular book/movie Moneyball shows us that the Oakland A’s hit a homerun using sabermetrics like this, so then why can’t we? After all, if Billy Beane only had one Paul DePodesta, shouldn’t we do even better with an entire geek squad?

We all secretly wish for a magic weapon to vanquish competition. Where better to place our faith than in an analytical model churning out intimidating, neat lines of data? It’s a perfect deus ex machina to get out of a sticky situation.

However, as with anything complex, we forget that it’s one thing to own analytical infrastructure and another entirely to be able to use it well.

Regardless of whether you’re advanced enough to implement agent-based modeling or you’re just taking baby steps beyond bar and pie charts, a few ground rules remain the same when it comes to acting on analytics: Read More »

The sales process of just a few years ago is no longer effective—that’s what we’re hearing in our recent discussions with members.  The culprit? A fundamental shift in the way customers are buying.

In an effort to mitigate the risks and complexities associated with today’s marketplace, customers now require much more consensus to make purchases.  Consequently, running the sales process of years passed is leading to extended cycle times, stalled business, and inaccurate forecasts.

Not surprisingly, a number of companies are planning to revamp their sales processes in the coming months to better align to these new buying conditions. But what does a successful sales process look like in today’s selling environment? Read More »

Heads of Sales Ops made a curious decision back in 2008 during the depths of the Great Recession.  Facing a precarious budget situation, leaders had to decide how best to survive despite having limited tools to measure their function’s own effectiveness, which hampered efforts to make a business case for maintaining (let alone growing) resources.

Conventional wisdom might have assumed the best strategy for Sales Ops was to close ranks, specializing in core areas like process, tools, and data analysis.  The argument: with a comparative advantage in certain competencies, it’s better to focus on perfecting the few.

The natural follow-on question would then be: what responsibilities can I shed to allow focus on the right set of things?

At first glance, evidence seems to confirm this as the direction most companies chose.  The SEC recently surveyed close to 100 organizations on sales ops trends over the last three years.  Nearly 1 in 5 organizations report shedding former key responsibility areas like training, compensation, and forecasting.

Below the surface area, though, it’s clear that winning organizations chose a very different strategy, one that extends Sales Ops’ reach rather than closing ranks.   Read More »

When you ask a Sales Ops exec for a word or phrase to describe their role in the sales organization, you generally get one of two answers: 1) change agent, or 2) creator (as in, “I produce things for the sales team to use).  The irony lies in the massive variability of organizational composition – it seems we organize teams schizophrenically.

Taken in this light, then, the identity crisis we’ve all experienced feels eminently solvable. If shifts in the B2B purchasing environment present an untenable situation, the obvious answer is to determine the root cause of these shifts and aim our creative change mechanisms in the right areas.

And yet when you ask sales ops leaders what exactly they’re examining these days, only 3 out of 20 of their regularly tracked metrics are aimed at the customer, precisely the root of the shifts.  How can we make adjustments if we’re blind to customer sentiment?   Read More »