Selling Power Blog

Who Helps You Climb the Ladder of Sales Success?

Today’s guest post is by Chris Champagne, president and CEO of Champagne Consulting Group Inc, a specialized consulting practice focused on helping salespeople maximize their potential – enabling outstanding results in their sales performance.

 

To truly excel as sales professionals – and separate themselves from their competition – every person in the sales profession needs an equal measure of inspiration, selling skills, and coaching.

I’ve been working in the sales profession for more than 25 years. Over the past three years I’ve coached and delivered sales training to hundreds of salespeople and sales leaders across the world. Along the way, I’ve also observed a wide variety of sales approaches that use various degrees of art and science.

The Source of Sales Inspiration

Recently I had a conversation with my dad, Horace, who happens to be Canada’s first “Master Pastellist,” a designation awarded yearly by the Pastel Society of Canada. Although he’s been a professional artist for more than 40 years, he also spent 20 years in sales.

People often assume that painters are inspired from some divine source to accomplish their great works. That’s why the most revelatory paintings often evoke strong impressions or emotional connections. But my dad and I acknowledged that works of art are also the product of lots of diligent work, honed skills and coaching/mentoring. The years of practice behind the scenes include research, skill development, experimentation, collaboration, failure, and revelation that contribute to the finished piece.

In the early years of my dad’s art career, he spent countless hours in museums studying the masters, specifically Tom Thompson and the “Group of Seven.” He also invests time reading about Picasso, Van Gogh, and Matisse. He shared with me how hard these artists worked when they were not in front of the canvas and how important collaborating to learn from each other was also critical to their success.

What Experienced Salespeople Understand about Buyers

Of course, he stressed talent and an underlying passion are other essential elements in both his success as an artist and as a salesperson. Where there is passion, there’s also inspiration.

Many of the more experienced sellers have clearly figured out the “art” of building relationships as the foundation of their success. However, relationships alone won’t be enough to sustain a successful sales career. Buyers won’t make purchases just because they like you personally. They need you to bring many other skills to the table, including demonstrating a tangible return on investment. In today’s selling environment, you can’t just be inspired – you also need proper coaching and an investment of time to hone selling skills.

The Ultimate Source of Your Sales Success

Are you getting the guidance/coaching you need to succeed? Are you taking the time on a weekly basis to improve your selling skills?

Who are the sales professionals in your “Group of Seven?” As it turns out, this group knew the value of meeting regularly to share their opinions, successes, failures, support, and encouragement – with the ultimate outcome of improving their craft.

If you are looking for ways to be both inspired and instructed, let’s talk. I invite you to reach out to me on LinkedIn to start our initial conversation.

What Is Your Growth IQ?

Below is an interview with Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner and Tiffani Bova, Salesforce growth and innovation evangelist and author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business.

 

Gerhard Gschwandtner (GG): What is growth IQ?

Tiffani Bova (TB): Achieving growth has become far too complex and high-pressure for businesses to rely on smart ideas alone. Repeatable, reliable growth depends on “growth IQ” – your capacity for making the right series of choices at the right time. I like to approach growth as a thinking game. How can we expand our approach to include what is possible – not just what we are successful doing today?

GG: Why is it important for sales professionals to have a growth IQ mindset?

TB: There is no greater disrupter to the profession of sales than the customers themselves. They have shown – through their buying habits, usage of technology, and willingness to choose brands based on value and experience over “products sold” – that, if we don’t rethink the way in which we sell, we won’t win their business. Sales organizations have a difficult transition to make because they are being challenged on multiple fronts. Having a mindset that is open and willing to adapt to new technology capabilities, new processes, and increasing cross-team collaboration is what is necessary to succeed.

GG: Why is there so often a misperception about the role sales plays in a company’s ability to grow?

TB: Companies do two things: they make stuff and they sell stuff. While that is somewhat of an obvious oversimplification, it captures the often-underappreciated role sales plays in a company’s growth. However, it has become far more complicated to define what is considered under the domain of “sales” today. With more and more sales happening online without human touch, more channels with which companies can market and sell, and some companies showing rapid growth with no formal sales force at all, it is important to remember that selling – regardless of how that happens – is the fuel that powers any business. What is important now is to make sure that companies realize it is no longer about how we want to sell that is important – what is important is how our customers want to buy.

GG: What does it mean to focus on sales optimization as a growth strategy?

TB: Historically, when pipeline and deal close rates start to slow companies pull a number of familiar levers. They might spend more marketing dollars, cut costs (including salespeople), or hire more salespeople in an attempt to reverse course. What they forget is only slightly more than half of sales representatives (53 percent) are meeting or exceeding their quotas according to CSO Insights World-Class Sales Practices Study (2018).

While this is concerning in its own right, even more concerning is that this is the fifth straight year of decline. If that isn’t enough to get leadership’s attention, this might: According to the State of Sales study by Salesforce, nearly two-thirds (64.8 percent) of reps’ time, on average, is spent in non-revenue-generating activities, leaving only 35.2 percent for functions related to selling. How can that be possible considering all the time, money, and effort companies have put into training, implementing technology, and enabling sales teams to be more effective? Well, much of the changes required to achieve productivity gains should be focused beyond technology.

Yes, it is true technology such as CRM is extremely important – it enables performance improvements, but it’s not the only requirement. Optimizing sales is also about rethinking the people and process side of selling, which, in some cases, requires even more significant change than deploying a new sales tool. Doing an inventory of what sales processes are in place today and determining if they are still applicable is a great place to start. Then, and only then, can you begin to optimize your current state to help propel you to your future state.   

GG: What can sales professionals do today to start adopting a growth IQ mindset?

TB: The best piece of advice I can provide is to reevaluate as much as you can about current sales processes – especially in the habits which have been built up over time. As the old saying goes, “What got you here won’t get you there.” Without the willingness to take advantage of all that technology enables us to do in serving our customers better, sellers stuck in the past will be left behind by others who are willing to adjust. A salesperson’s future competition isn’t just other companies; it is other sellers who are using AI, analytics, and predictive insights to re-imagine the value equation they deliver to customers.  

High-performing Salespeople: Separating Madness, Myth, and Methodology

Today’s post is by Michelle Vazzana, CEO and a founding partner at Vantage Point Performance, a leading global sales management training and development firm. She is co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance. Her newest book is Crushing Quota: Proven Sales Coaching Tactics for Breakthrough Performance.

 

Every year, the Florida State University (FSU) Sales Institute conducts a benchmarking survey to identify top priorities for their consortium of sales leaders. In 2018, replicating the performance of high performers was the number one focus area. Why? Because, in a world where quota requirements are on the rise, the percentage of salespeople meeting them is at an all-time low.

Furthermore, a recent study of more than 1,000 sales calls examined by the FSU Sales Institute found that, on average, only six minutes of a 60-minute sales call were devoted to information unique to the seller and correspondingly important to the customer. The combination of missed goals and misaligned seller interactions is the equivalent of the sky falling on Chicken Little. Yet sales organizations are pretending it isn’t happening. What’s going on?

Negative Trends in Sales Effectiveness

Worrisome trends are afoot in the world of sales effectiveness – trends that, if left unchecked, will continue to tank sales improvement efforts and stymie well-intentioned salespeople. The result will be billions of dollars wasted and crashing sales force productivity.

The most problematic trend is that we keep investing in sales improvement efforts that don’t work. One of the top choices for improving sales performance is to invest in a standardized sales methodology; yet over 65 percent of organizations report that the results they achieve when deploying these methodologies are below expectations. So, are sales training efforts aimed at standardizing around a given methodology worthwhile? Or are they simply a big waste of money?

The Need for Better Sales Effectiveness Strategies

One very practical way to answer this question is to examine how others have solved similar problems. Let’s use the military as our point of reference. For thousands of years, military leaders all used a single battle strategy. Military leaders lined up as many soldiers as possible and engaged the enemy before them in hand-to-hand combat.

Modern warfare is quite different. Instead of amassing soldiers and engaging in hand-to-hand combat, military leaders strike their enemies with precision tactics – tactics appropriate for the specific situation they encounter. Military leaders today use very powerful intelligence gathering techniques to assess the battlefield before they ever engage – limiting the waste of resources and increasing their chances of success.

The Importance of Data for Sales Effectiveness

Technological advancements lead to increased availability of data, which leads to better military insight, which allows the neutralization of key targets and crippling of the enemy. Leaders must know target locations, which they obtain via satellite images and drones – not guesswork or instinct. The constant stream of data allows continual adjustment in strategies and tactics, thereby creating a vastly more agile force. Agility is impossible without insight, which is impossible without data.

How does this relate to sales improvement and investments in sales methodology?

Standardization Is the Enemy of Agility

Understandably, organizations want to standardize to one sales approach; however, this is “efficiency thinking” at the expense of effectiveness. Why? Because our research with FSU revealed that any given sales approach is effective only 25 percent of the time. In fact, the highest performing salespeople struggle to adhere to a single sales methodology. High performers know that a single approach can never work in every situation.

Successful sellers, like successful military leaders, are agile. They adapt their approach to the situation they face. The scary fact is that average sellers – the core group of any sales force – have the highest adoption rates of sales methodologies that work only about 25 percent of the time. Sadly, organizations are investing millions of dollars to train their salespeople to be average. How is your organization impacted when you consider your own sales improvement efforts?

Sales Agility: The Way of the Future

In sales, as in the military, insight is needed for success. You need insight into the situations your salespeople face – and the best sales approach to use in those different scenarios. First, analyze the factors that define your organization’s unique sales situations. Sales situations are company-specific, exactly the opposite of a one-size-fits-all approach. When it comes to identifying your seller’s unique buying situations, the hard truth is that it’s unlikely that a single approach will do the trick and make the sale.  

Next, you must use data to identify which selling strategies win in your different buying situations. This is the only reliable path to take if you want to replicate the practices of your top performers who do this instinctively. You must analyze the situations they face and identify the sales strategies they use to win in those situations. This is the best path to insight that leads to true sales agility and success. Military leaders know it and – thanks to FSU’s research – now, so do we.

How to Address Five M&A Sales Effectiveness Challenges

Today’s post is by Mark Donnolo, founder and managing partner of sales innovation consulting firm SalesGlobe, and Michelle Seger, global sales strategy and change management leader at SalesGlobe. SalesGlobe provides a range of sales effectiveness services that include sales transformation, sales strategy, sales organization and talent, sales compensation, and quotas.

 

Blockbuster mergers like CVS and Aetna, Amazon and Whole Foods, and Cigna and Express Scripts have been in the news lately. M&A activity is up with the economy, and numerous companies across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific are taking advantage of this growth to make deals. Reuters reported that global mergers and acquisitions totaled $1.2 trillion in value in Q1 2018 – the strongest start ever. Business leaders expect this trend will continue as companies look to obtain new technologies and expand their customer bases.

Mergers and acquisitions offer great opportunity and carry great risk. A recent Harvard Business Review study showed that 70-90 percent of mergers fail to achieve objectives. One of the reasons we see for that is a gap between the merger’s vision and execution – particularly in the sales organization, which should be driving growth. SalesGlobe has seen an increasing focus on sales organization integrations as leaders look to gain the expected M&A benefits.

In our integration work, we’ve found five common challenges sales organizations must address early to avoid losing great talent and failing to achieve the expected ROI:

1. There is conflict between the cultures of the sales organizations (e.g., demographics, heritage, sales orientation, and values) – and the merged organization is not acting as one team.
   
   
2. There is confusion over sales roles, alignments, rules of engagement, and how to successfully integrate the two organizations into a common structure.
   
   
3. There has been no increase in cross-selling or sales synergies, and the strategy, sales process, and benefits of the combined organizations may not be realized by the company.
   
   
4. Sales incentive plans don’t align. Pay levels, upside, measures, and philosophy aren’t aligned.
   
   
5. Customers don’t understand the benefits of the acquisition – and communications from the field are unclear.

Imperatives for Sales Leaders

To address these challenges, sales leaders should focus on managing the message, motivating the team, defining the measures of success, and executing the strategy.

Getting the leadership message out quickly, clearly, and consistently is critical. As soon as the merger is announced, the organization will start speculating about its fate. Top sales performers concerned about job security and career progression are the most likely to look for options elsewhere. Letting the acquired sales team continue “business as usual” – without a clear message about the plan ahead – is a recipe for turnover risk and loss of focus. We worked with one company that sold a technology component that worked well with systems sold by a younger, larger organization they had acquired. While the systems company found it counterintuitive to acquire and lead the component company, the CEO acknowledged the strengths of both cultures and clearly articulated how they would go to market together.   

Assess the acquired company to validate the merger strategy and business plan and develop a detailed integration plan. Sales leadership can align teams only if the entire leadership team – including frontline management – works together to

• Develop and execute an integrated strategy.
• Align the team and change behaviors through a combination of leadership, segmentation, sales process, and incentives.
• Understand the measures of success and motivate the team toward those.

Plan to Create Sustainable Results

Creating sustainable results to support an integration requires a well-planned execution strategy focused on four areas:

1. Develop a coordinated communications campaign that starts early. Leaders should understand what matters to both companies’ employees and tailor messages that address
   
   
   • Why the merger is happening
   • How the benefits will be realized
   • What changes will occur – and when
     
     
   Communicate on a campaign calendar via multiple channels, as messages must be heard three times to be fully understood. Talk with both companies’ customers to understand their viewpoint about their needs and the risks of the merger. Explain how the new company can help them. 
   
   
2. Conduct a sales effectiveness performance assessment that evaluates and integrates the sales strategy and key priorities, total combined addressable market and cross-sell opportunities, alignment of strategy to sales roles, sales process and rules of engagement, and incentive compensation plan match to the roles and strategy. Understanding and improving performance across the key sales disciplines is essential to effective execution.  
   
   
3. Inventory and upgrade talent. Understand the requirements for success in sales roles by developing a role profile to support new hires – establishing key success metrics and engaging high performers in the process. This helps with hiring and retaining the right talent and minimizing errors in an environment that can be emotionally charged around people selection.
   
   
4. Measure, reward, and reinforce. With the program in place – and aligned to the vision of the merger – measure (and course-correct) as needed, reward the team financially and through public recognition, and reinforce the program through regular education and coaching.

Do You Know How to Sell to Women Buyers?

Today’s post is by Katie Bullard, CGO of DiscoverOrg.

 

 

The consumer world decided years ago that female buyers need to be marketed and sold to differently from men. Based on research, companies like Lowe’s (which you might assume would target male buyers) redesigned their stores in the early 2000s to be more visually appealing to women, because women make 80 percent of all home improvement purchasing decisions.

And what about the B2B buying space? DiscoverOrg recently partnered with leading sales linguist Steve Martin to examine, over the course of nine months, gender differences in B2B purchase decisions. We looked at the responses of more than 350 B2B professionals through four different surveys. Male and female buyers participating in the study answered questions that compared various aspects of their personality; how they interact with salespeople; how they behave in evaluation committees; and their opinions on real-world sales scenarios.

The study found there are, indeed, differences in the way men and women view salespeople and selling styles, evaluate and select vendors, choose products, and agree on what to pay for them. But how should this inform the way salespeople approach and engage with prospects?

To find the answer to this question we shared the survey results with three well-respected sales experts  (Jill Konrath, Nancy Nardin, and Lori Richardson), who offered their perspective on the findings and provided some key recommendations for using this new information most effectively.

Value vs. Prestige in Vendor Selection

Perhaps most interestingly, the study found that men tend to choose the most expensive product from the best-known and most highly reputed vendor, while women are more willing to choose lesser-known vendors whose products have greater functionality and a lower price.

According to Nancy Nardin, this indicates that women, more driven by value over prestige, may be willing to give new and upstart vendors a chance to show they can deliver, while men could be a more difficult sell when the vendor doesn’t have a longstanding track record or industry reputation. “I think [this study shows] that women look at things more on balance, and are more willing to take a risk,” says Nardin.  

Women Demand a Deal

Just as women can be known for their relentless pursuit to find the best deal on personal items, they are also determined to pay the lowest possible price for a product they purchase on behalf of their company. The study showed that, for a $300,000 technology purchase expected to save their company $1 million, most men expected to pay $270,000, while women pushed to pay $230,000 – almost 20 percent below their male counterparts.

Notes Lori Richardson: “It’s interesting that the study shows women will offer less in a buying situation.  It’s smart – and women should take this strategy and apply it to our salaries, which continue to trend lower than our male counterparts.”

The bottom line is that salespeople should be aware that women will push for the price they think is fair, so have a counter-strategy at the ready.  

Vendor Selection by Committee

Another finding of the study: In purchasing decisions evaluated by a committee, men are more likely to push for a specific vendor if they believe that product will be most beneficial to the company. To get the outcome they want, men are more likely to use their political skills, whereas women more often try to put politics aside.

So how can a salesperson deal with a committee in which different members may have conflicting agendas? Says Jill Konrath, “If you look at B2B decisions today, a huge percentage stall out because it’s so hard to get people to agree. There’s a big opportunity for a salesperson to look at that phase of the decision and say, ‘How can I help everyone to move forward?’” This requires understanding the organization at multiple levels, and knowing as many players as well as possible. Fortunately, this kind of data is now available at sales teams’ fingertips through a variety of tools.

Selling Styles and Conflict Avoidance

The study also found that female buyers tend to work with salespeople who make them feel comfortable, and they generally prefer to avoid conflict. Nardin believes there are specific reasons for both: “Women are emotionally intelligent,” she says, “and we’re used to having to control situations in our everyday lives. But we don’t want to have to do that with a salesperson. We want to be sold to by someone who we truly believe is concerned about meeting our long-term interests.”

Nardin points out that 58 percent of the men surveyed said they avoid conflict, as well, compared to the 76 percent of female respondents. She commented: “I don’t think anyone really likes conflict – and we don’t want to deal with it in the workplace if we don’t have to, because we deal a lot with it in life.” In light of this, Richardson’s advice to salespeople is: Make sure you truly add value, and don’t be too pushy or aggressive.

So, while the data shows there may be differences in the way men and women engage throughout the purchasing process, perhaps most enlightening of all is that all our sales experts agreed that salespeople don’t ever have the luxury of making blanket generalizations, and must strive to keep an open mind about differences in each sales prospect, regardless of gender. At the same time, sales professionals should try to inform their sales approach with as much hard data and facts as they can find, in order to make strategic decisions and – perhaps ironically – temper their own biases. 

Because, as Konrath notes, when you’re selling, “anything that sheds light on how people are different than you is always important.”

Read the DiscoverOrg report, “8 Key Differences in Selling to Women & Men.”

Here Are the Traits of Top Performing Sales Teams

Today’s post is by Mark Magnacca, president and co-founder of Allego.

 

Watching and learning from the best in the business is a sound strategy for improvement in almost any endeavor – and sales learning is no different. In a recent survey conducted by Allego and ResearchNow, we asked sales leaders to identify the skills and training tactics they saw as most important.

We defined top performing sales teams as those that self-identified as achieving 100 percent of their quota, as well as having 74 percent of reps reach their individual quotas. Not surprisingly, we found that the highest performing sales teams have some things in common. Across industries, top performing teams share habits, best practices, and attributes that predict sales success. By looking at the qualities top performers possess, sales leaders and teams can incorporate these best practices into their own success stories.

Here are the top five traits of top performing sales teams.

Trait #1: Ramp Reps Faster with More Manager Coaching

Overall, our survey found that top performing sales teams were able to onboard new hires faster than peers in their industry. How are they able to do it? High-performing teams rely on the power of manager coaching. While ramp time depends on the industry and product complexity – reps selling more complex products take longer to ramp – increased manager coaching was a successful strategy to reduce new employee ramp time across industries and independent of product complexity.   

For new reps, the learning curve is steep and training time is a precious commodity. Revenue opportunities disappear every day a new rep spends in onboarding. A faster ramp means better revenue performance more quickly, so accelerating time to sales competency is a must. Increasing and capitalizing on manager coaching opportunities gives new reps the benefit of an experienced sales professional’s perspective on the best ways to close deals.  

Trait #2: More Peer Coaching, Less Boot Camp

Along with manager coaching, one of the most effective routes to sales team success is peer coaching. In fact, our survey found that high performers put at least 10 percent less emphasis on boot camps, replacing it with 15 percent more focus on peer training and 20 percent more focus on mentorship programs.

The value of learning from experienced peers is substantial. A colleague who has learned how to handle a tricky objection to a newly rolled-out product – or what language resonates best with a certain type of prospect – is an invaluable resource. Peer-to-peer coaching unburies the treasure trove of information each team member possesses and allows new team members to borrow nuggets of proven value rather than testing out new strategies on prospects.

Trait #3: Assess Sales Messaging to Improve Performance

Message consistency and competency in the field is a key component of sales success, and top performing sales teams make sure reps have their messaging down cold. Overall, high-performing teams believe that sales messaging is the most important sales competency to assess, with 80 percent of them assessing their reps on product messaging versus only 53 percent of the general population. The best teams create processes to ensure they capture and share the right messages. By clearly defining what “best” looks like in this context, the entire team can benefit from the experience and talent of the top performers.

Trait #4: Assess Continuously, Not Episodically

New information is best retained when it is reinforced regularly and continuously. The same holds true for assessment. The very best teams constantly take stock of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. The proof is in the numbers. When asked how often sales leaders are measuring their sales reps’ performance, 70 percent said they measure it regularly, in an ongoing fashion, with only 30 percent measuring quarterly or less. High performers, however, assess sales team competency more frequently, with 85 percent measuring weekly or monthly.

By objectively measuring performance at each stage of the sale, top performers can understand their own strengths and weaknesses and use that information to improve.

Trait #5: Address Competency Gaps with Training

When a manager identifies a gap in competency, the default reaction of many organizations – 50 percent, according to our survey – is to create a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). Top performers, however, are three times more likely to use increased training to address gaps. This focus on training shows both the value of continuous assessment and how a commitment to training leads to improved achievement overall.

The Bottom Line: Habits Matter

The habits of highly effective sales teams are a blueprint for consistently achieving quota. These practical yet achievable best practices show the importance of frequent assessment, as well as manager and peer coaching to address competency gaps and improve performance. This continuous process of assessment and training enables organizations to be proactive, stay ahead, and create a culture of competency and success.

Your Chance to Win a Sales Video Award

Do you know salespeople who are currently using video to increase their sales? If so, we want to know about it.

Here’s a golden opportunity to (maybe) win a prize while (definitely) raising awareness about the power of video to engage prospects and customers – and inspire your fellow salespeople in the process! Selling Power, BombBomb, and the Sales 3.0 Conference are officially teaming up to find the most compelling video success stories. We will honor the winning entries at the Sales 3.0 Conference on October 25 and 26 in Las Vegas.

Here’s how the contest works. The awards team will select three finalists in each of the five categories outlined below. All 15 finalists will win:

• A free ticket for the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas (valued at $995)
• 50 percent off a second ticket to the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas
• Recognition in person at the Sales 3.0 Conference, in front of hundreds of B2B sales leaders and industry experts

Make your nomination for the 2018 Sales Video Awards here. Yes, you can nominate more than one video. And, yes, you can nominate your own video. The video can be used in any channel – YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BombBomb, your Website, or anywhere else. We just need a link to it; or, you can put the file in a Dropbox or Google Drive and share that link.

Whether it’s a simple Webcam or smartphone video or it’s a scripted, produced, and edited video, the 15 finalists will be named based on measurable results and outcomes.

Here’s a helpful contest timeline:

• September 21: Nomination period ends
• September 7-25: Judging period
• September 25-26: Finalists contacted and invited to Sales 3.0 Conference
• October 25-26: Winners announced live at Sales 3.0 Conference

2018 Sales Video Awards: Categories

We’re seeking nominations of videos that match up reasonably well with the following categories.

Category #1: Prospecting, Branding, or Personal Pitch

What we want to see: Videos that have helped salespeople create opportunities, differentiate from competitors, and gain traction on cold calls.

Category #2: Appointment Setting and/or Follow-up

What we want to see: Videos that have helped salespeople move opportunities forward and warm up their leads.

Category #3: Customer Education and Information Sharing

What we want to see: Videos of demos, features, releases, updates, and proofs of concept.

Category #4: Building Relationships

What we want to see: Videos that help you strengthen connections or stay in touch with prospects or customers, including thank-yous, birthday wishes, professional anniversaries, or commemorations of special occasions.

Category #5: Internal Training, Motivation, and Culture

What we want to see: Videos that feature product/program/package introductions, recruiting and onboarding insights, educational messages for an internal audience, or messages of personal recognition/empowerment.

To nominate a video, go to https://info.bombbomb.com/salesvideoawards.

Why Cloning Your Sales Superstars Is a Big Mistake

Today’s post is by Tracey Wik, president and managing director of GrowthPlay’s talent and organization effectiveness practice. Hear Tracey present “Secrets to Scaling Your Sales Force,” at the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas on October 25-26.

 

“Janet is my best seller and, if I had an entire team filled with people like her, I’d be sitting on a beach with an umbrella drink in my hand. If I’m going to scale this business, I just need you to help me find more people like Janet.”

This is what my client, a sales executive at a global medical device company, told me at our first meeting. We were working with her to redesign her sales organization and create tools for her sales managers. If things continued business-as-usual, she was most likely going to miss her targets. My client’s solution? “Interview Janet. Take what she says and turn it into a playbook everyone can use.”

I wish I could tell you this was the first time a client was focusing on cloning a sales superstar. I hear a version of this statement far too often. Conventional wisdom says that the shortest pathway to scaling a sales organization is to do the following:

1. Study the selling techniques of your “A” players (i.e., top 20 percent)
2. Identify the techniques they use to persuade customers to buy
3. Train the rest of the sales force to use those winning techniques

In reality, this is a terrible plan. Here’s why.

Sales Superstars Often Exhaust Resources

Most sales execs recognize that their top reps are expert at bending and stretching their companies’ processes to take care of customers…and, as a result, they are often difficult to manage. So, in reality, sales managers are paying the sales superstars twice: once in allowing them greater resources than the others, and then again with much higher compensation when they consume the resources necessary to win sales.

In fact, you’re probably familiar with the management challenges posed by sales superstars. There’s the top seller who carelessly advises other, less skilled reps to get on the phone with clients too early in the sales cycle. The superstar who somehow manages to have four customer-support individuals (who are supposed to share work among the entire sales force) working only on his projects. The leaderboard-winner who closes huge deals on a handshake and no specific plan for how to accomplish the work – leaving others to “figure out the details.”

Why It Makes Better Sense to Invest in Your Middle Performers

You’ll get much better results if, instead of trying to get everyone to act like your number one sales star, you invest in your mid-range performers. Think about it. If you actually managed to train your mid-range performers to do what your top seller is doing to be successful, you’d have to massively increase the number of support personnel, thereby adding to the cost of sales!

If you want to improve sales performance by leaning on mid-range performers, I recommend this three-step approach:

1. Understand the market you are in or want to target. Investigate what those customers value and how they make purchasing decisions.
   
   
2. Build a go-to-market strategy that includes matching seller roles, activities, and behaviors to specific customer segments.
   
   
3. Organize those activities to create your company’s own specific sales process. Spell out the critical activities that advance sales and close deals – and that you want everyone to replicate.

Once you have the above framework in place, you can decide what your middle performers need to learn to increase their sales.

Don’t fall for the fatal flaw in the logic behind cloning. Chances are that it won’t work in the first place – and you might regret it even if it does.

How to Eradicate Your Self-limiting Beliefs and Boost Sales Performance

Today’s post is by Steve Kraner, president of Software Sales Gurus. Steve helps his clients identify the optimum approach to selling through continuous split testing to provide specific, detailed guidance for sales conversations with today’s technology buyers. Contact Steve at 703/966.0192.

 

Your sales teams’ sales skills are driven largely by their current mental map. This is why a salesperson – who believes she has to discount to win – ends up yielding to the slightest price pressure.

Let’s examine a few of these kinds of self-limiting beliefs and explore how they impact sales performance.

A Salesperson’s Incorrect Beliefs Are Self-reinforcing

Belief: Let’s say a salesperson believes he is constitutionally incapable of holding his own in a conversation with a powerful authority figure.

Response: His belief drives his behavior in the presence of such a person. He may fidget, shift his eyes about, or giggle inappropriately.

Result: The response impacts the outcome. The CEO will probably notice the salesperson’s discomfort and will probably respond negatively, thereby reinforcing the original belief. The salesperson is now more certain he cannot hold his own with authority figures.

A Salesperson’s Actions Are a Manifestation of His or Her Beliefs

If you want your salespeople to act differently and improve sales performance, you will need to help them identify incorrect, self-limiting beliefs. It’s not easy. Self-limiting beliefs are mostly injected – and rarely inspected. Most of us are familiar with the old saying: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It may actually be more accurate to say, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

Your beliefs are not who you are. They are who you learned to be.

Here are four suggested leadership techniques to challenge and change self-limiting beliefs:

1. Weekly game film review with the team. As part of ongoing sales mastery sessions, I use call recordings to critique and directly impact the entire team’s beliefs. When a salesperson hears a peer engender a laugh in response to disarming honesty, they begin to believe it will work for them, too. When a teammate generates engaged answers to all 10 questions of the need diagnostic, they envision themselves doing it.
   
   
2. Lead by example. If you lead a call, allow your salesperson to witness you say “no” to a discount and get the order, their mental map is updated. (I guess it’s obvious, but, if the leader does not believe, that must first be corrected.)
   
   
3. Reverse seminar. Ask a senior-level client to speak with your team on her industry and how they use your solution. This impacts beliefs about the value of your solution and its value in the eyes of senior people.
   
   
4. Pass this link – How Your Beliefs Impact Sales Success – on to your team and use it for a discussion at your next sales meeting,

Changing beliefs is difficult but, once the mental map updates, sales performance is improved instantly and (in many cases) permanently.

My next Software Sales Bootcamp is September 5-6, in Reston, Virginia. Please give me a shout if you’d like to explore a private program for salespeople or sales managers anywhere in the world.

Problems with Predictable Revenue: Why It's Not a Solution for Every Sales Team

Today’s post is by Steve Richard, co-founder and chief revenue officer at ExecVision, a leading conversation intelligence platform. He’s also the co-founder of Vorsight, a leading outsourced appointment setting company.

 

I’ll preface this by saying this isn’t a personal attack on Aaron Ross. I have a ton of a respect for the man as a sales strategist and human being. Aaron has been a driving force behind the sales development revolution that is helping companies grow faster than ever before. He’s also adopted a ton of kids and is an all-around good person.

Predictable Revenue has been called a bible for sales organizations and appears on a number of “Top Sales Books” lists, but that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. The book carries the common cry that cold calling is dead. It goes on to outline a method where a sales development rep (SDR) sends around 100 emails a week to senior executives and CEOs asking for a referral to the right person. Somewhere between 7-20 percent of these emails get a response, leaving the SDRs a “warm” referral to work from.

Sounds great, right? The Predictable Revenue model has worked – and continues to work – for many companies; but. like all things, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model for sales. Here are some of the common issues with the Predictable Revenue model.

1. The Model Was Not Built for Enterprise Selling

The Predictable Revenue Model is a numbers game. For it to work, you need to be selling into a vertical that has thousands of potential customers. What you sell, who you sell to, and your demand type all affect your sales strategy. For those selling to a few large companies, there just aren’t enough targetable accounts for Predictable Revenue to work.

Enterprise sales is all about SDRs digging into accounts to uncover the various business units – and the decision makers within them. Emailing the CEO of a company like Bank of America is unlikely to get you anywhere. The company is just too large for one executive to know who are the right decision makers in all of its business units.

The exception to this is a bottom-up prospecting strategy, where you target a role in an enterprise organization that has several individuals, such as mid-level managers, all performing the same task. 

2. There Are Not Enough Accounts as You Scale

If you’re targeting mid-market companies with 1,000+ employees, Issue #1 clearly doesn’t apply to you. There are plenty of companies in that market. At first, the Predictable Revenue model works great…until your team scales past a certain point.

More SDRs means fewer accounts per SDR, so sending out hundreds of emails each week isn’t effective anymore. This creates an even bigger issue with the reps who have grown comfortable relying on email. They’ll have to pick up the phone – and, for reps who haven’t made an “unexpected sales call” recently (or ever), it’s not going to be pretty.

3. It Creates Conversation Atrophy

The Predictable Revenue model creates reps who rely on email alone to schedule first meetings. That’s fine – until reps start getting fewer replies and need to get on the phone to hit their numbers. It’s because the reps suffer from a phenomenon we’ll call “Conversation Atrophy.” Like muscles, conversation skills atrophy when you don’t use them regularly. Reps unused to cold calling will fumble with starting a conversation that leads to a meeting.

Long term, conversation atrophy can lead to lost career opportunities. SDRs without solid conversational skills won’t be able to break into account executive and client success roles. While it’s one of the hardest skills to learn in sales, the ability to strike up a conversation with someone who hadn’t been planning to speak with you will take you far in your career.

4. Recent Grads and Green Reps Lack the Skills for Discovery Calls

In the book, Aaron highlights that the Salesforce SDRs would take the meetings they scheduled from email referrals and conduct those calls themselves to separate the real opportunities from the tire kickers. Having SDRs do the qualifying meetings is a sound idea, but many organizations fail to execute it effectively.

Most organizations fill their sales development teams with fresh college grads and people making that transition into sales. These reps can get only so far into discovery and qualification calls with business leaders. If your qualification process is straightforward like it was at Salesforce, this isn’t a huge issue.

It does create an issue for organizations that need subject matter experts to complete the qualification process. Green reps won’t be able to articulate the various use cases or understand the metrics different executives care about. If the SDRs are failing to succeed with discovery calls, it creates friction with the account executive team that is seeing a lower conversion rate because of it.

5. Green Field vs Brown Field

The Predictable Revenue method was wildly successful at Salesforce, Acquia, and other companies, but it failed for other organizations that also sell into the SMB space. Why? The answer lies within the third leg of the sales strategy stool: demand type.

The are four types of demand: same old, better mousetrap, evangelical, and government regulation. Alan Nance simplifies it into “green field” vs “brown field.” In the early days, SFDC was operating in a green field –  a wide-open, untouched market for cloud CRM. Now, SFDC operates in a brown field where every CRM solution needs to convince prospects it’s worth putting out a better mousetrap. Predictable Revenue emails aren’t very effective for established markets because the executives reading them will think, “We already have a solution for X…why look at another one?”

What Predictable Revenue Got Right

There is no denying that Aaron Ross made a big splash when he released Predictable Revenue in 2012. While I may not agree with everything in the book, there are some things he got 100 percent right:

• Prior to the book, the role we now know as “sales development representative” wasn’t clearly labeled. When I first started in the industry at CEB, we were called “marketing associates.” Now, the SDR/BDR/BDA terminology is much more universal.
  
  
• The concept of personalization at scale. You can’t send generic emails off to executives and expect to get the referral.
  
  
• Going after the portion of the market that’s susceptible to looking – or in an active buying cycle. Research shows that only a small percentage of prospects will be in an active buying cycle. Predictable Revenue provides a framework for addressing that and lessens the extremes of prospecting ad hoc.
  
  
• I’ll argue against my own point here: The Predictable Revenue method leads to reps with conversation atrophy; but, on the flip side, Aaron prescribes that SDRs should do the initial discovery calls so they can separate the real leads from the tire kickers.
  
  
• Tying activities to results to create replicable sales models.
  

In summary, Predictable Revenue is one sales strategy you should study up on and know how to execute. It works for some companies based on what they sell, who they sell to, and their demand type. But it is not a one-size-fits-all, universal approach. Proceed with caution.

What do you think? Have you deployed Predictable Revenue with great success? Great failure? Tell your story in the comments below.