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 »

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 »

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 »

Everything we’ve learned about changing customer demands over the last two years points to two undeniable facts:

1)     The overall sales experience must feel demonstrably different than your competition, and

2)     The opportunity to demonstrate that difference happens in a very short timeframe (most likely, the first 2-3 minutes of your first conversation with a customer).  In other words, to quote our friends at Corporate Visions, Inc., “your brand rests on the lips of your sales reps.”

The timeframe for sales experience differentiation is very short, but many support mechanisms were conceived as a means to achieve scale for a big direct sales force.  Think for a minute about the way your Sales Ops team is organized, its responsibilities, and the tools they create to support your biggest sales objectives.  Most likely, they are built to support an entire sales cycle.  The central organizing theory is very often the sales process itself.

But most sales processes aren’t very different from one another – in fact, many are off-the-shelf vendor solutions.  How well can that support the need for a highly differentiated conversation? Read More »

(This is a guest post from Charlie Dorrier on the SEC Solutions team.  Solutions helps members generate customized insights, tools, and training programs to improve the overall performance of the sales force.) 

Stop for a second and think about the individual sales people on the front line of your organization.  Picture their faces and the diverse set of styles and messages that emerge in front of customers.  It’s a powerful vision that motivates many of us to be in sales in the first place: the collective voice of a sales force, driven by a single objective but made up of many different parts.

This vision is also terrifying.  Mass chaos comes to mind:  lost deals, missed opportunities, isolated information, and sometimes unsatisfied customers.  The chaos needs a little order.  And your organization needs to learn from the front-runners.  

I recently heard a sales manager sum it up very well:  “I’ve got 15 people on my team and there are 500 reps I never really see – I’m not sure I know exactly what drives success in our organization.”  By studying in aggregate all of the individual approaches to selling, a sales organization can learn a lot from itself.  Read More »

Most large sales organizations have teams working full-time trying to achieve a globally standardized sales process.  These teams develop all kinds of methodologies to attain the coveted “common language” – Six Sigma techniques to denote the smallest of errors, communication plans, voice of the customer studies, productivity audits, and training materials to name a few.

But how much of these efforts are a waste of time?

Portions of our most recent work show that sales process can be over-done, and the ROI of perfecting ‘the science of sales’ may be lower than ever: 

1)  Following a formal sales process actually has zero correlation to the success of a Challenger sales rep™, the dominant way to be a star performer in this environment.  In fact, it’s better to be agile. Standardizing activity can be a hindrance.

2)  Mere completion of scripted sales process activities doesn’t necessarily provide better pipeline visibility. Leading edge forecasters have found tracking customer reactions (rather than your actions) far more predictive. Read More »