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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

We’ve all seen sales calls that progress with graceful momentum, and others that crash and burn. Chances are, the customer and rep are in sync and on the same page in those commercial conversations that end on a positive note. But when the buyer and seller aren’t in line with one another, the call goes off the rails and into the “deal graveyard.”

As one member recently put it, “the sale is a synchronized dance—our reps lead, but they must move with the customer.” So, how can you help your reps gauge whether or not their customers are open to moving forward in a deal?

We’ve already talked about strategies for synching reps’ and customers’ actions with very tangible signals aligned to the customer buying process.  But if you don’t want to outright ask a customer if they’re ready to move forward with the deal, are there other ways you can tell whether the customer would like to proceed—especially during those tough negotiations?

It turns out that some successful reps are able to gauge customers’ level of agreement by looking for subtle behavioral cues to determine when a customer is ready to move on with the process. This is one way reps are able to assert control of the interaction- a key differentiator of what makes Challenger Reps top performers.

There are a few ways that can make sensing customers’ subconscious responses- an inherently tacit skill- more explicit.  We’ve seen companies use two techniques to build reps’ sensing ability and focus them on better predicting and adapting to customers’ responses.   Read More »

Do your reps keep telling you they’re on the verge of closing deals, yet nothing ever seems to come in? Are the accounts you’re winning taking longer to close, but there’s no clear indication as to why?  Well, you are not alone.

Over the past year, member organizations have been telling us how they’ve been struggling with both extending sales cycle times and increasingly stalled business, but they’re not really sure what’s to blame. However, one trend has emerged across these conversations: reps and customers do not seem to be on the same page when it comes to gauging deal progress.

Typically, reps and mangers measure deal progress by the completion of sales activities (e.g. sales calls made, presentations given, meetings had with senior stakeholders, etc.). But, there’s one glaring problem with this approach: it doesn’t account for where the customer actually stands in the sale, and as a result, reps can easily engage contacts who are not ready to move forward with the deal. Read More »

In one of my recent member conversations, a VP of Sales was quite frustrated because his reps never seem to be on the same page with their customers – “Just when we think that we are ready to shake on a deal, the customer pulls away. How do we know where the deal really stands?”

Some companies choose a traditional route of tracking sales reps’ actions to gauge a deal’s progress – have reps made X number of calls to the customer, have they sent the proper collateral, have they taken the right subject matter expert on a customer visit.  This approach could work, if not for these two big problems.

• First, it’s highly prone to rep bias – it’s relatively easy for reps to overestimate the impact of a particular activity on the customer (just as it’s relatively easy for the rep to exaggerate the quantity and quality of the activities themselves).

• Second, and more importantly, there are many things that influence customer buying decisions other than rep activities – competitor activities, market forces, end-user demand, internal stakeholder priories, etc. All these have a profound influence on customers’ decisions—often in ways that are completely non-transparent to our sales people.

So, what’s left? How do we really know where customers are in their buying process and whether the deal is moving forward?   Read More »

By Andrew Kent

The other day I was talking with the Head of Sales L&D for a major technology company who told me an absolutely fascinating story.  As most of our members know, SEC research across dozens of companies and thousands of sales reps has found that the best performing reps fit a particular profile, which we’ve dubbed the Challenger™ Sales Rep.  But when we ran the same analysis for this particular company, they found something shocking: their best reps weren’t Challengers at all!

What was going on here?  Were they some kind of anomaly?  Or was the research wrong?

Far from it.  After a follow-up analysis, it turns out that something much more troubling was going on: the company was actively driving its top performers away—and these top performers were Challengers.  Read More »

Common wisdom in (American) football is that “defense wins championships.”  However, focusing on a defensive – and here I mean reactive – strategy with customers is a losing game plan.  With top-level pressure to grow our business in 2010, we can no longer maintain a “what can we do for you today?” approach.

Why?  The answer lies with our customers, who are expecting (and responding to) a more proactive interaction with sales people.  In fact, SEC research has found that customers value a sales interaction that “reframes” the way they are thinking about a problem, or introduces them to a new challenge that they hadn’t considered. 

What this shows us is that we need to call a few offensive plays with our customers.  So, what are the right plays to call?

1. Shift resources away from bad to good customers – even before approaching customers, you need to have a solid understanding of which customers you should be focusing on.  These are the customers who will actually pay you back for your investments.  The problem is doing that without putting your current revenue at risk.

SEC Members, see how Square D segmented their customers beyond typical volume/revenue metrics, and how TNT developed a “downtiering” process to gradually pull resources away from customers that no longer merit the investment.  Read More »