Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

The first CRM applications for direct sales were contact managers, designed to capture the salesperson’s “little black book” (today, it’s their personal Outlook file) in case they left the company. In the complex sale, however, there is more to it than just contact information. The real valuable corporate asset isn’t names and addresses — it’s the customer relationships.

Nevertheless, information is an essential tool to create a better customer experience in the hands of the right talent, using the right process, with that objective in mind.

Trust

Everyone talks about “relationships,” when what they really mean is trust. You have to build trust in your company, your people, and the quality of your solutions so that you can win repeat business with less effort and lower cost. This is the currency of account management.

What people really want is someone who knows their business. Tell them something about their company they don’t know — don’t just read information off a screen. You have to show the connection between your solutions and their issues and then sell up the chain of value. This is where salespeople themselves contribute their greatest value.

Partner is the most abused word in selling today. Buyers want more than lunch and a human brochure. They don’t really need professional friends. What they want are people they can trust to solve their business problems. This means that salespeople need to know as much or more about their customers as they do about their own products.

Sales strategy should fall out of marketing strategy (I think I heard this in business school), but it rarely happens to any great degree. Which accounts you invest in should be a part of your industry and marketing strategy. And an opportunity needs to be worked in light of what is going on in the rest of the account. How much time we spend with individuals should be a function of their role in the opportunity decision and their power in their organization.

The result, unless you are in a small account, should be an integrated four-level strategy that focuses every resource on your sales team and the client organization for maximum leverage. Unfortunately, though, it usually doesn’t happen this way.

As we move from selling to individuals to selling to departments that have a more complex decision-making process, each of the four levels of selling strategy requires different talents, techniques, technologies, teamwork, and messaging. The outcome is a unique strategy for that account, in that industry, that leads to the final outcome — trust.

A brief definition of the four levels will help us to define one dimension of the scorecard, which we will then explore in greater depth in following chapters as we move through the Five T’s of Transformation.

Industry/Market

Not every industry buys the same benefits or makes decisions in the same way. Focusing on specific industries allows you to become more consultative in your sales approach and to differentiate yourself with focused benefits, differentiators, messages, and solutions. This approach yields not only competitive advantage but also less “commoditization” at negotiating time.

Smaller companies often focus on a single industry. And the added cost and travel of a vertical approach to multiple industries necessitates economies of scale. Some companies approach this by teaming industry experts with competitive salespeople. In rare instances, extensive relationships and industry expertise can be combined in one individual — the industry networked consultant, the highest level of competency in selling.

Account Management

Few companies can afford to dedicate entire teams to all accounts in an industry. Choosing which ones to invest in requires purposeful segmentation and the clear setting of objectives in order to achieve incremental returns. Without a clear account plan, salespeople will wander the halls, building “goodwill” that never translates into additional revenue.

Opportunity Management

For some industries, such as capital equipment or consulting, opportunities are discrete buying events or evaluations. In others, they are opportunities to expand a flow of products through a channel, such as consumer packaged goods through a retail chain.

In either case, opportunities need to be inventoried and evaluated in light of all activities in the account and in the pipeline in order to combine our efforts and leverage our relationships.

Individual-Level Strategies

In larger organizations, “companies” themselves don’t relationships. Individual-Level Strategies In larger organizations, “companies” themselves don’t buy anything. Committees made up of individuals usually make decisions in a complex sale. People make up their minds first individually, and then they politically rationalize them or compromise them in the committee based on the decision-making algorithm.

Different stakeholders play different roles in the decisionmaking process and have different amounts of power within their organizations. Once you have determined which votes matter, you need an individual strategy to win their hearts or win without their vote. Building preference with everyone equally is inefficient and ineffective.

This scorecard is not for measuring what you know to do. Instead, it is for measuring your execution and consistency, for that is where sales effectiveness and competitive advantage lie. Within each cell are one or more best practices and, therefore, potential areas for focused improvement.

Once you have identified the gap between where you are and where you need to be, you must decide which areas are easy and which are hard to implement and then prioritize your initiatives.

We will discuss each column in a separate chapter. At the end of each chapter is an assessment, where you can score your own organization. (If you would like to see how your organization compares with others—you can take the survey online at www.complexsale.com.) In addition, it might be helpful to see how your sales managers and the rest of your management team would score your sales force to see if their opinion differs from yours.

In Chapter 9, we will discuss change management issues and the metrics needed to make any initiative a permanent change in process and behaviors.

Take a group of ten players. The top two will be supermotivated. Superstars will usually take care of themselves. Anybody can coach them. The next four, with the right motivation and direction, will learn to perform up to their potential.

The last two will waste your time. They won’t be with you for long. Our goal is to focus our organizational detail and coaching on the middle six. They are the ones who most need and benefit from your direction, monitoring, and counsel.

Planning for Failure

Many sales managers start the year with an unwinnable hand. Their CFO won’t allow them to hire in advance of a year or to build a bench of salespeople within their firm. Some sales managers don’t even get their sales numbers until after the beginning of the first quarter. Then they have to begin hiring while carrying a full quota from the beginning of the year. And this doesn’t take into account any turnover that might occur during the year.

As a result, sales managers overassign quotas to the sales reps they have in hopes that a certain number will exceed their goals to offset the bottom 20 percent who aren’t going to make it, open territories that they begin the year with, or turnover they may have.

Many managers try to live with the lesser of two evils: (1) let a bad rep continue to work in a territory because at least there is a “body” there, or (2) live with an open territory that they must cover themselves. The most frequently made mistake is not trimming poor performers early enough. Not only does this demotivate the rest of the team, but it also takes the manager away from being a coach.

Some sales executives aggravate their turnover problem simply by increasing quotas every year based on what the analysts or CFO says the sales increase ought to be, with no thought to where the new sales will come from. Will these quotas come from better coverage, new products, new markets, increased prices, better margins, or an increased win ratio?

Without a bottom-up analysis of true potential, raising sales quotas doesn’t raise sales—it usually only raises turnover and discounts. This is one of the great myths of selling. And if sales quotas are increased as a percentage of an individual’s sales quota last year, then the great reward for a job well done, after the sales banquet, is an even greater quota for your best performers. How motivating is that?

While working for Atlanta-based Optio Software, one of our principals, Blake Batley, was asked to relocate to the West Coast to assume the newly created role of western regional director.

His challenge was to revamp the region, which had previously included only one salesperson and had never generated more than $500k in software license revenue.

Instead of managing the business for what was possible, the company was managing the business for the analysts. They put together a first-year plan to find and generate $10 million in the new territory. His tasks included finding office space, furnishing it with everything from chairs to computers, hiring ten new salespeople plus support staff, and getting them trained and up to speed so that they could produce $10 million in the first year of operation.

At the end of that first 12 months, they had a fully equipped office and a full staff. His team produced over $5 million in revenue on the $10 million quota. To everyone in the western regional office, it was considered a huge success. But, according to the analysts, it was a failure.

When financial strategy drives sales strategy, quite often the result is planning for failure. And if this overassignment of individual quotas results in discouragement or increased turnover in the sales force, a complete downward spiral begins.

When financial strategy drives sales strategy, quite often the result is planning for failure.

The solution is to improve our hiring and planning processes—to get the right people in the right jobs before the year begins. One best practice that we've seen in several companies is the hiring of junior salespeople who work either on existing accounts or on farming and marketing activities to learn the business and prepare themselves for territories when they open up. In my experience, we hired a number of these — about one per district — and many of them have turned out to be not only extremely successful sales reps but also vice presidents of sales and CEOs of their own companies. Without them, we would have begun the year behind the curve and would never have been able to catch up. The impact would have affected sales results and eventually shareholder value.