Archive for the ‘Sales Management’ Category

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What is Sales Messaging?

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

Check out this answer to the question ‘What is Sales Messaging‘ featuring Tanner Mezel of DSG.

The right sales messaging tools and training can bridge the divide between high level strategy and what gets communicated in customer sales conversations. This results in your “big ideas” turning into real results.

But how do you effectively package the actual words your sales channels should communicate in live customer conversations? Discovery questions that will demonstrate insight? Stories that a customer will find compelling? The model to draw on a whiteboard that will illuminate the customers’ real situation and define a roadmap for solving those problems?

MXL Partners CEO/Founder, Michael Griego, is an affiliate partner with DSG. He conducts sales enablement, sales process, messaging and effective leadership projects for companies with “big ideas” and a need to equip and transform entire sales organizations.

Send us a note if you’d like to set up a conversation with Tanner and Mike discuss your situation.

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Posted in Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales Messaging, sales effectiveness | No Comments »

Challenging Winners

Monday, May 27th, 2013

There’s a current debate in some sales circles around the popular Challenger Sale book and a recent Rain Group report entitled “What Sales Winners do Differently.”

The issues are over the so-called death of solution selling and the importance of relationships in selling. The controversy is overstated. Both the book and report, and the research conducted on both fronts, are actually helpful in driving a new composite picture of the modern effective salesperson and the astute customer/buyer.

Just Differing Perspectives: Salesperson vs Buyer

The Challenger Sale studied top performing salespeople (designated top producers in companies sampled) and their aggregated attributes. The Sales Winners report studied buyers in B2B deals won and compared what they said the “winning” reps did vs the “2nd place” reps. (Or 3rd or 4th or 5th place reps for that matter – all lost.)

The recent report found that “Sales Winners” educate with new ideas/perspectives, collaborate, persuade about achieved results, listen well, understand needs and process, help the customer navigate, craft a compelling solution, connect personally and show company, product and personal value. Makes sense to me. Good to know what it looks like from the buyer’s perspective. Sounds like attributes of a balanced Sales Superstar which I wrote about originally in 2009 as Rule #12 (see below) in my book 42 Rules to Increase Sales Effectiveness.

In truth, Sales Winners are actually Challenger Sales Superstars. Certainly Relationship Selling is not dead – see my post Is Relationship Selling Dead? And Solution Selling is not dead either, although it needs to be rethought – see my article Rethinking Your Selling Methodology, published earlier this year in Top Sales World Magazine.

So What’s the Answer?
Simple. The magic is in the honed blending of proactive, advanced knowledge and selling skills with sensitive and astute personal attributes and people skills. The good news is that it’s teachable. No need to debate it. Better to get on it.

Are you a Challenging, Winning, Superstar?

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Posted in Challenger Selling, International Sales, Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Motivation, Sales Training, sales effectiveness | No Comments »

Key Sales Trends – Quota Attainment

Monday, April 15th, 2013

The numbers are in from CSO Insights. They’ve released their latest 2013 Sales Performance Optimization Study after surveying over 1500 firms of various size and across multiple industries.

Since 1994 CSO’s comprehensive research tracks key trends and various data points across sales organizations with teams of less than 25 to greater than 500 salespeople, with revenues less than $1 million to greater than $1 billion.

While increasing since a low in 2009, there was a flattening of sales reps making quota between 2011 and 2012. Average % of sales reps making quota:

  • 2012 – 63%
  • 2011 – 63%
  • 2010 – 59%
  • 2009 – 52%

As for achieving overall sales targets, the following breaks down the average % of companies hitting revenue goals:

  • < 75% of Goal - 23%
  • 75%-89% of Goal – 15%
  • 90%-99% of Goal – 20%
  • 100%-109% of Goal – 34%
  • 110%+ of Goal – 8%

That’s 42% of firms meeting or exceeding their 2012 revenue targets. Interesting to note that the 23% for firms achieving less than 75% of revenue targets was an increase from 14% a year earlier. With market turmoil and increasing targets, clearly not everyone is out of the woods yet.

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Posted in Sales, Sales Goals, Sales Management, sales effectiveness | No Comments »

Provocative Selling in 2013

Monday, April 8th, 2013

There is nothing new under the sun in sales, or so they say. Not so fast.

Fundamentals never go out of style, of course, however how we prepare, engage, converse, present, confirm and conclude transactions large and small is always open for improvement.

The Challenger Sale and supporting research exposed the sales world to the need to bring insight, knowledge and general intelligence to the sales conversation. Teams all over the world have gotten the memo and are upgrading how their sales teams address their customers and opportunities in this new era.

But it’s always been clear that there’s more to individual and organizational sales success than merely the sales call or selling conversation. We believe it’s all about the total package:

  • The Person
  • The Territory
  • The Process
  • The Strategy
  • The Message
  • The Conversation
  • The Opportunity
  • The Activity
  • The Metrics
  • The Leadership

All the pieces come together to make a comprehensive whole. How that entity is defined, developed, honed and replicated determines winners and losers, or mere laggards.

Want to see the blueprint?

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Posted in Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Strategy, Sales Training, Sales/Executive Conversations, sales effectiveness | No Comments »

Grading the Pipeline

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

We’re well into March and the pipeline pressure is building; that is, pressure from above to build the pipeline. How’s it going? How you stand now is a very strong indicator of success for the rest of the year. There is still time to recover and get where you need to be, but this is absolutely the time to assess yourself and the team and objectively grade the pipeline.

There are 4 key areas to effectively assessing a sales pipeline:

1. QUANTITY – Is there enough coming into the funnel? There are a couple of issues here. First, Are there enough leads getting generated? Know and track these numbers like you’re life depends on it. Actually, your sales life does. Secondly, Are leads and opportunities being captured correctly to measure in the funnel? If reps don’t get this info in the CRM, there’s no visibility. Not putting data into the CRM is so yesterday. We should be past that.

2. QUALITY – Are these the right type of deals and opportunities? This starts with correct targeting and prioritization of territory and accounts. Rigorous attention to qualification criteria will eliminate riff-raff deals that can delude one into thinking the pipeline is healthy and growing. Setting the bar high and forcing the exception to jump will drive good attention to qualification detail.

3. BALANCE – Is there a healthy spread of deals moving through the pipeline? While there should be a larger quantity at the top (hence funnel), careful note of the staging of deals throughout the pipeline is critical. Watch for stalls in 2nd or 3rd stages and for the causes. Often lax or inconsistent discovery and/or solution development practices lead to a bulging of this part of the pipeline. Deals can sit and deceive. Crisp competitors will beat you here.

4. VELOCITY – How fast are opportunities moving through the pipeline? Watch for days in the sales funnel. Knowing this metric is helpful to pick up anomalies and standards and setting expectations. Great insight here can lead to finding ways to accelerate sales cycles, highlighting deals that need aggressive management, and understanding nuances between your own product/service configurations.

For each of these 4 areas, know specifically what earns an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ and a ‘C’ and ‘D’ or whatever scale you want to use. Keep it simple and clear. Quarterly and Mid-Quarter Report Cards are standards that shouldn’t go away.

Does your pipeline meet the grade?

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Posted in Sales Forecasting, Sales Management | No Comments »

Top 10 Sales Messaging Problems

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Here’s a summary listing of our Top 10 Sales Messaging Problems. They are common and they are the fault of salespeople, sales management, marketing and sales departments.

They need not be deadly but can be tied to ineffective selling efforts in large and small enterprises. Rate yourself or rate your sales team. These are traps, habits and ruts to which even experienced salespeople succumb.

Top 10 Messaging Problems:

1. Random Sales Messaging

2. Meandering Sales Conversations

3. Sales/Marketing Speak

4. Too Many Questions

5. Poor Listening Skills

6. Incorrect Handling of Objections

7. Too Much Focus on Product

8. Too Much Talking by Salesperson

9. Reactive Sales Questioning

10. Insufficient Knowledge of Customer Problems

How goes your messaging?

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Sales Messaging Madness

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

In traveling to Asia Pacific, Europe and throughout North America, we work with sales teams with various approaches to effective sales messaging.

Some teams use extensive but tired scripts to deal with prospecting and getting past gatekeepers. Some organizations use messaging focused heavily on product feature sets and customer benefits. Other teams simply leave it up to the sales rep and their own good judgment per the selling situation.

Consequently, the result is a hodgepodge of sales messaging effectiveness. In fact, it is sales messaging madness.

Best practices today in effective sales messaging – anywhere in the world by the way – involve the following:

• Short & Long Elevator Speech - Salespeople need a crisp but well crafted “elevator speech.” No less than 20 seconds; no more than 40 seconds. The framework is modular for any environment, fully natural, not canned. An excellent elevator speech (pitch) contains content geared specifically to trigger a response from the customer/prospect and is made up of components that can be interchangeably used anywhere.

• Value Statements - Who you are, What you do, How you do it, Where you’ve done it, Why they care. There is a series of questions that you can address in a 1 to 2 minute conversation that highlights what your business provides to customers. The flexible mastery of this information is crucial for all salespeople. Not to be confused with the elevator speech.

• Customer Talk Tracks – Knowing market trends that impact your customer audience (by title), as well as their business objectives and specific challenges they face make up a calculated “talk track” that gives salespeople confident guidance in all conversations. So-called Challenger reps don’t know everything – they just know talking points really well.

• Executive Whiteboard – Great salespeople paint verbal pictures and can literally draw a powerful storyboard flowing with compelling logic and simple depiction of the customer’s current dilemma and potential rescue. A great Whiteboard is a powerful interactive tool for excellent sales discovery.

Is your sales messaging sane?

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Posted in Sales, Sales Messaging, sales effectiveness | No Comments »

Rethinking Your Sales Methodology

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

With all due respect to Michael Bosworth, author of Solution Selling, it’s long past time to rethink “solution selling” or any of the legacy sales methodologies. Both the selling world and customer interactions have changed and require adjustments to common selling motions.

Besides, after all the books and training over many years, try to find one VP of Sales or Account Executive who can tell you what the 9-Block Vision Processing Model is or even what exactly are “the 9 Boxes.” While brilliant in theory and profound for a past generation, the practical application is often lost in the reality of today’s dynamic sales arena. There’s certainly a new generation selling in a different era.

While my sales, management and consulting career grew up with Miller Heiman (Strategic Selling), Neil Rackham (SPIN Selling) and Bosworth (Solution Selling) over the past 30 years, today I’m seeing 4 challenges facing salespeople relative to modern selling:

1. Shorter Conversations - customer conversations are often brief and on the phone. Reps need to be agile and skilled in the managing of short selling conversations.

2. Blended Conversations- lead generation improvements require clear distinctions between call introduction, qualification and discovery. Reps need clarity of process and conversation flow.

3. Convoluted Questioning - sales call questioning process fundamentals have been lost, forgotten or confused. Reps need talk tracks grounded in simplified questioning fundamentals.

4. Lacking Insights - salespeople need to be bold and provocative, bringing insightful value to conversations that stand apart in a crowded marketplace….

Read the full feature article by Michael Griego published in the December edition of Top Sales World Magazine.

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Sales Effectiveness or Pipe Dream?

Thursday, November 8th, 2012

In the 2012 Sales Performance Optimization Study conducted by CSO Insights, there is the identification of the Top Sales Effectiveness Initiatives for 2012.

The Top 5 are:
1. Revising/enhancing our lead generation programs
2. Revising our sales process
3. Improving sales rep access to information
4. Analyzing our customer’s buying process
5. Enhancing sales team communications

Sad to say, there is nothing very compelling about this list. In fact, this is quite similar to the top list every year. Pause and consider the implications.

Many companies chase after desired sales and marketing organizational improvements without much more than that desire to improve or up-level the team. This is noble and good, however, successful attainment of these lofty targets requires:

• Honest baseline assessment
• Realistic end-target goals
• Specific milestones and objectives
• A documented project plan
• Sustaining measurement and follow-up

There are too many critical moving parts in a modern sales organization. Seeking effectiveness without a prioritized, practical course of action is a recipe for wasted time and effort. Having more leads without a clear and purposeful sales process or an effectively engaging sales team is not going to hit the mark. It’s a pipe dream.

Got a plan or a pipe dream?

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