Archive for the ‘Sales’ Category

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Is it What You Sell, or How You Sell It?

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

The Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Executive Council surveyed over 5000 individuals to determine what customers are looking for in a business-to-business supplier. Interesting data comes out about the drivers of customer loyalty:

    19% – Company and brand impact
    19% – Product and service delivery
    9% – Value-price ratio
    53% – Sales/purchase experience

Customers noted that they often saw little difference between one supplier and another in terms of brand, product and service. Even price was a small factor in sustaining customer loyalty. What customers said they valued most (53%) was in the sales experience itself; that is the actual sales conversations they had with suppliers on an ongoing basis. Some customers found suppliers horrible in the sales experience; other they found to be invaluable.

The CEB concludes that loyalty is won out in the field, in the tenches, during the sales call. It’s in the daily conversations with customers and a salesperson’s ability to outperform the competition in the sales experience itself.

Are you focused on what you sell or how you sell it?

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Posted in Challenger Selling, Sales | No Comments »

Is Relationship Selling Dead?

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

No, of course not. Relationship selling – selling through building and nurturing strong personal and professional relationship – will never go out of style. But are Relationship Building sales reps the top producers in today’s sales organizations? No. In fact, they are the lowest in ranking amongst the top sales producers.

This disturbing information surprised the researchers as much as it might be surprising you.

Last month we wrote how today’s top sales performers are predominantly reps who teach, challenge, and bring insights to their prospects and customers. These so called Challenger Reps, as highlighted in recent breakthrough research by the Corporate Executive Board, are distinct from 4 other sales rep profiles: 1) The Hard Worker, 2) The Relationship Builder, 3) The Lone Wolf, and 4) The Reactive Problem Solver. Challenger sales reps bring deep customer business knowledge combined with bold and innovative thoughts and ideas. This rep profile represented 40% of all the top sales producers; Relationship Builders represented 7%.

So what’s wrong with traditional relationship selling? Nothing in particular. But in today’s tough selling environment, one has to do better than be known and well liked by the customer. Top reps today challenge and teach for differentiation, adjust appropriately per the various contacts and titles they engage, and assertively take control, willing to have tough conversations and dig deep early before moving on to the logical next step. Relationship Builders, seeking to please and advocate, typically don’t rock boats. Challengers stir the waters with insightful customer business provocation and impact customer learning.

Given that buying environments today involve consensus decision-making, while important, individually strong relationships don’t hold as much sway as in the past. Reps who drive insightful customer learning as part of the overall sales experience are more effective than reps who rely on their own individual attributes, or relationships.

Are you challenging customers while building relationships?

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Challengers Rule

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

According to recent breakthrough research by the Corporate Executive Board, today’s effective salesperson needs to be a Challenger – a teacher, a provocateur of sorts, a thinking man/woman who is creative, innovative, and brings new ideas, and thus value, to their customers.

We believe this validates what we’ve seen coming for several years, particularly for those organizations involved in more complex selling.

In studying the attitudes, skills, behavior, activity and knowledge of 6,000 salespeople across 90 companies, the CEB has published conclusions that will have companies reassessing and redeveloping their sales teams for the coming decade. The data is compelling.

In comparing top sales performers to average performers, they found five distinct sales rep profiles fairly even in distribution:

1. The Hard Worker - the self-motivated, driving rep who puts in the time and the effort.
2. The Relationship Builder - the rep who builds and nurtures strong personal and professional relationships.
3. The Lone Wolf - the confident, sales “cowboy” who follows their own instincts, not necessarily management’s.
4. The Reactive Problem Solver - the customer-focused and detailed-oriented sales person who might double as a service rep.
5. The Challenger - the rep with deep customer business knowledge who boldly posits insights and new angles on customer problems.

Seems relatively straight-forward until you evaluate the distribution of super star performers across these profiles. What emerged is a clear winner (40% Challenger) and clear loser (7% Relationship Builder). This distinction is particularly evident in a down economy where Challenger reps thrive nonetheless and others flounder when mere hard work, good service and responsiveness are not enough to win business.

The implications are far-reaching. Past assumptions about what makes a good sales rep are fast-dissolving, while questions are raised once again about nature vs nurture. Rest assured, high-performing Challenger reps are not born, they are developed and can be trained and replicated across your sales organization.

Are you raising up Challenger sales reps?

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CEO Conversations

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

So you want a sales meeting with the prospect’s CEO? Not so fast. While a decent strategy, don’t venture out when you’re not prepared. Senior executives don’t suffer sales fools, but they are susceptible to an intelligent conversation steered by an effective and prepared salesperson.

CEO’s are people like anyone else, but they carry a burden that keeps them focused on things besides the products of salespeople. What’s on their mind are risks impacting their market share, customer base, revenue stream, control of costs, retention and acquisition of top talent, achievement of quarterly numbers, their opportunity window for growth, merger or acquisition. The lists goes on.

And the salesperson wants to talk about their products? Won’t happen. At best, if the CEO is patient and civil, he or she may kindly redirect the salesperson to a lower level staff. At worst, it goes downhill from there.

There are four keys to an effective executive or CEO call:

1. Do your homework - lay the groundwork with research and preliminary conversations
2. Speak executive language – not that of your product. It’s about their issues, not about you and your fixes
3. Paint a business picture – verbally or literally of their world’s relevant challenges that you can help address
4. Get sponsorship – confirm next step meeting with their recommended team member (you’ve earned it!)

Having good executive conversations?

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Universal Selling

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

They should be teaching this stuff in schools. Not just for future professional salespeople, but for those who will someday work in finance, engineering, marketing, law, medicine, even education and other non-business professions.

What are we talking about? It’s about fundamental and essential skill sets you’d want in all employees, not just your sales organization:

• Business Development - everyone sells something, and it’s not just ourselves, but ideas, attention and expanded impact
• Personal Engagement - we all interact, hopefully well, from introductions to conversations through insightful questioning
• Message Communication - articulate communication, verbal and written, is crisp, clear and structured, and a fading art
• Time Management - prioritized daily use of time, our most limited resource, determines wins and loses in all occupations
• Mental Discipline - purposeful actions toward absolute goals aligned with meaningful perspective withstands obstacles.

The art and science of sales is still often misunderstood and distorted. It is absolutely applicable to the foundations of successful living. I’m reminded that the lessons we teach in sales meetings, keynotes and training sessions are universal and apply well to sales rookies, veterans, managers, executives, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, and everyone in between.

Not everyone carries a quota, but everyone operates daily, at varying degrees of quality, with fundamental and essential skill sets.

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Quarterly Sales Upgrade – a 90-Day Strategy

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

We still maintain that you can conduct an effective 90-day salesperson or sales team upgrade without a lot of money, fanfare or wholesale change-out. It’s done through 4 core areas of focus:

1. Territory Scrutiny
2. Target Shooting
3. Message Crafting
4. Activity Analysis

We get many requests from many executives and sales leaders seeking help in improving sales revenues through sales training and consulting. They say “Our team needs more sales discipline” or “Our team needs more qualified sales opportunities” or “Our team needs to improve customer questioning skills” or “Our sales pitch is inconsistent.”

Of course, these are all legitimate concerns and competency areas that can be improved, however it’s not telling the whole story. An honest assessment of one’s territory opportunity set and priorities, focused customer targeting, up-level-ing of all occassion sales messaging, and obsessing with (quick) daily and weekly feedback analysis are the keys to sales upgrading.

It’s a new year. Q1 is here – how’s your team going to perform in Q2?

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Hooray for 100%’ers!

Monday, January 9th, 2012

While some criticize and only pool people into categories of 1% and 99%, we herald the achievers – the Sales 100%’ers.

Congrats to all 2011 sales winners who attained 100% of their quota. We know these sales producers worked hard to meet and exceed quotas and goals assigned in the midst of obstacles, difficulties and a host of customer and market challenges.

100%’ers and all those who work hard in producing and selling goods and services make the nation and world economy work. We could only hope that all people would have the heart, determination and work ethic of all those who achieve the Sales 100% Club.

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New Year Selling

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

We wrote a couple of months ago about the end of the “Solution Selling” era. This month we’ll address the rebirth of sales enablement across progressive selling organizations. A new day (year) is upon us as enlightened companies, consultants and sales trainers develop and implement sticky, adaptable and scalable selling systems that help organizations run like fine-tuned, ultimate sales-driven machines.

The next wave available to companies is an explosion of sales effectiveness and new efficiencies. Prepare for a 10-year run of sales team upgrades and resets.

This new era of sales enablement is already underway in many companies like Citrix, Fujitsu, Adobe, Boeing and VMware, to name a few, that are investing in re-optimized sales tools and practices for their modern updated sales teams.

There are 4 components* to a revamped sales enablement program:
1. Strategy (where to go)
2. Messaging (what to say)
3. Process (what to do)
4. Leadership (how to coach)

* DSG Consulting, an MXL Partners affiliate partner firm.

The redevelopment and integration of each of these component areas into carefully tailored sales 2.0 manual and automated playbooks is opening up an exciting new frontier in a land filled with opportunity. We’ll break down each component in this SalesNote.

Are you “revamping” enablement of your sales organization?

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All Reps and Best Reps

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Imagine enabling ALL your reps to sell like your BEST reps.

What if you could provide your salespeople with a selling “system” that enables them to consistently apply your company’s sales best practices to EVERY deal in which they compete. What if? Odds are your win rates would improve and that you’d be able to accelerate new-hire ramp up.

Now you can with Playboox Playmaker, an on-demand sales playbook application integrated with Salesforce.com.

For some time now sales teams have used manual playbooks to codify their best practices and provide sales process guidance. We’ve helped build playbooks for leading technology companies like Yahoo!, Ricoh, Nokia, ServiceSource, Telepacific, Datameer, Fusion-IO and HyTrust to name a few. Increasingly, we’ve heard the request for a way to easily develop and automate sales playbooks. From this was born Playboox.

Contact us if you’re interested in seeing how you can use Playmaker to equip your salespeople to prepare to win and win more often.

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Posted in Sales, Sales Playbooks, Sales Training | No Comments »

Tebows and Turkeys

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

It’s November and we’re deep into the fall sales quarter, football games and we’re fast-facing the holiday season. Just this past weekend we witnessed the game of century (LSU vs Alabama), Tim Tebow highs and lows, and depending on your favorite team, a slew of great and weak performances as teams vie for bowl games and playoff berths.

Reminds me of salespeople and sales teams as they wind down these last 2 months of the year. There are those that step up and those that check out; those that live up to the hype and those that disappoint; those that overcome adversity and those that crumble under pressure. We watch it every week on TV. And we watch it every year as it’s crunch-time season in the sales arena.

Tebows and turkeys abound.

Regardless of what you think of Tim Tebow’s NFL prospects as a productive quarterback, he’s a winner. What he did this past weekend in Oakland, CA is a great example of one stepping up, living up to the hype, and overcoming adversity. A VP of Sales would love to have a whole team full of Tim Tebows who can face knockdowns, disparagement, failure and come roaring back with tenacity, hustle, appropriated skill, mental and physical toughness, and a gracious winning attitude. Sorry if you’re a Florida, Tebow or Denver hater – gotta love a gutsy winner with heart.

In our business we can teach sales skills, process and prowess. We can’t teach heart. Heart can be developed over time but must come from within. You know when you see it. It’s a great thing to watch in any field of play.

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