Coming soon: Quick dip research about sales manager coaching in Australia

A lot of client conversations in the past week or so have ended up coming back to the role of the sales manager in creating change within a sales force. That’s a good thing: the role of the sales manager is absolutely critical to the process. They will need to walk the talk, reinforce new ideas, role-model behaviours, celebrate early wins, translate the ideas to make them relevant to their team, etc. But the most important thing is that they will need to be coaching their team members.

Because of the criticality of the role of the sales manager in driving sales results, as well as in building sales capability, through coaching, I am going to launch a piece of small scale research into current practice in Australia. I want to get a sense of what is happening out there, how sales managers are delivering coaching, how sales people are receiving it, and how organisations are supporting it.

At this point, it will be small scale, as I want to be able to bring results to share with the Australian sales community as soon as possible. It is likely that I’ll launch periodic small-scale research to follow-up on specific areas that come out of our initial quick dip.

I’ll be posting information soon about how to participate in the research, with both a qualitative and quantitative component.

SURVEY LINK: 

Here's a link to the quantitative survey. It is a VERY short survey that should take less than 5 minutes to complete. 

This is ONLY for business-to-business salespeople who have received coaching from their Sales Manager. 

http://svy.mk/11arMqj

Feel free to share this link with your peers, colleagues and friends! 

Building a proactive salesforce

A few years ago we were entering a large engagement for a business process outsourcing company. As part of the engagement, we did a number of interviews with their customers, key contacts in significant accounts. One of the interviews revealed a very interesting insight about our account, but also about what is expected of the modern supplier (or “trusted advisor” or whatever).

“They are terrific,” our account’s customer said, “Whatever I ask them to do, they do it flawlessly.” This is going well, I thought to myself. Clearly, our account is a great and much-loved supplier to this company. He had more to say, though.

“But, you know,“ he added, after I had given him some silence in which to think further about the situation, “in the seven years we’ve been working with them, they have never brought a new idea to me. By now, they know our processes better than I do. So they should be able to point out where I could do things better, more cheaply, etc. They haven’t done that.”

What started out as a very complimentary comment, one that you’d be tempted to put on your website as a reference, ended up as a consistent theme in our consulting work: just doing good work is not enough.

Today’s customers expect a supplier to be proactive, evaluating their business and coming up with ideas for how to improve it. And whether you call it being proactive, challenging, “creativating”, or any other term, that result is the same: if you don’t bring new ideas to your accounts, you’re letting them down.

Being proactive can be a little bit tricky, though. It is critical to maintain your core customer-centric sales philosophy: it should be about *them* and not about you. Any ideas should be focused on solving one of their business challenges, taking advantage of their opportunity, etc. To be successful, you must not be pushing your own product or your own agenda.

Proactivity comes naturally to some salespeople, but it can also be developed. Creating a structure can be useful, encouraging salespeople to be proactive, and even creative, in a structured and organised way. I’ve discussed in other blog posts specific tools that facilitate creative idea generation, and I’m sure I will in future posts as well. So, for now, we’ll those tools aside.

So what should YOU do?

How do you build a proactive sales team? Here’s a few ideas that I’ve seen work well.

•      If you have regular meetings with your existing accounts, include one agenda item that is outside the current project or process. Even if the meeting is a progress meeting, you can add one point at the end of the discussion that is focused on “Additional ideas” or similar. One client suggests that each quarterly review meeting must include at least one new business idea.
•      Schedule a regular meeting that is NOT about current work. One of our accounts requires its sales team to schedule one “Agendaless Meeting” per year. This doesn’t mean that there is no preparation, of course. But it signals to the account that the conversation is wide open, new ideas, and new opportunities. During the meeting, try to defer discussions about current work until the regular meetings.
•      Make sure that the internal team is meeting periodically, and include as many parts of the organisation as possible. Brainstorming with account teams is a great idea, and you will often find that your own team brings up ideas that you’ve not thought of for the account. Involve as many people who touch the account as possible, as they are more likely to bring new ideas. One of our office product accounts created a whole new business opportunity when a service person, who had been onsite to fix a hardware problem, noticed client personnel going through a tortuous series of steps to complete a process. It turned into a new service, and relieved a lot of pain of which the organisation wasn’t even aware.
•      Share new ideas internally. Those of you that know me know that I am not a fan of generic ideas or scripted solutions for customers. However, there is a lot to be learnt from good ideas that succeed at other accounts, and good ideas should be leveraged. When you bring the idea to another account, though, don’t forget to tailor it!

Encouraging a salesperson to be proactive can be tricky. As I said before, some just do it naturally. But with a bit of coaching and a bit of structure, even those who do not can start be a proactive, value adding partner to their accounts.

Does anyone else have ideas for how to increase proactivity – particularly in bringing new business ideas to accounts – in your sales team? 

Avoid generic sales presentations

Presentations. Oh dear. So often sales presentations stumble severely, focusing too much on the supplier and not enough on the customer.

I’ve seen numerous examples of companies forcing their sales teams to use the same presentation template for all of their accounts. At the heart of the concept is a good idea: customers *should* have a consistent experience of dealing with your organisation. There *should* be a distinct feel to your team, as differentiated from your competition.

However, what tends to happen is these good intentions disintegrate into a generic, self-oriented document that gives little thought to the specific needs of the actual client in question.

Last week I had an interesting conversation with one of our clients, who wanted to make sure that his salespeople were presenting solutions in a consistent way to all of their accounts. This makes some sense, of course. But the execution was terrible, and I’ve seen this before.

The *required*presentation deck ran something like:

• A cover page featuring their branding, their logo, their colours, and a small mention of the client
• Their business, their background, and where they are based
• A history of the brand, including the evolution of the logo (!)
• A map showing their sales offices around the world
• A map showing their production facilities around the world
• A photograph of their heritage-listed corporate headquarters building
• Etc…

In this standard deck, it was at least 8 pages before it got to the key business issues facing the account. Even worse, the client had been running training programmes to make sure that everyone delivered the first 8 pages exactly the same way!

While consistency is clearly important, you need to make sure that your salespeople are starting with the situation from the *customer* perspective. This is especially true if you have senior people in the audience. In the example above, you will have lost your senior attendees well before you even got close to the value that you can bring to them.

To be successful, start with the situation, and the business impact it creates. If your audience wants to talk about you – and they probably don’t – you can include your history, locations and a photo of your offices in the Appendix, in case it comes up.

Oh – and I’ll comment on this specific issue in later posts – you also need to *trust* (and upskill!) your sales team enough that they don’t need a script. It is possible to be both customer-centric AND consistent to the brand, but you need your team to be capable of executing.

So what should YOU do? 

• Make sure that all presentations, proposals, agendas, etc. start with the customer issue, not your organisation. From *their* perspective, what is the issue? Why should *they* care?
• Push your sales team to tailor the standard content to address the specific needs that have come up in conversations and research to date. If parts of the standard discussion aren’t relevant, allow your teams to not over them. 
• Coach your teams to focus on the things that really matter to the *account*, not to you. 
• Practice the core components and elements of the sales presentation so that it feels natural, and feels like something that you would say. You shouldn't be reciting a script! 

Create competitive advantage by splitting one buying criterion into TWO criteria

Recently I was doing a deal coaching session with a global market research company, strategising around a current opportunity for them. It was a competitive situation, where they were hoping to win the customer's business in a tight field of three other agencies. We frequently work with our accounts to build strategies to help them win important deals in situations like these.

In competitive situations, it is important to understand exactly the criteria that your prospect is going to use to evaluate the options. This may sound obvious, but it requires having actual conversations with the account; don’t assume you know what they are thinking. 

In this specific case, an interesting situation arose. We were looking at one specific buying criterion that was very important to the account, but where there was little difference between the competing suppliers. No one supplier could deliver that area more effectively than the others.

However, as I probed a bit, we discovered that, while it was true that all competitors were mostly equal, there was a small part of the process where our account had a distinct advantage. This sub-process would deliver better and more reliable results from the research, but it was an issue that the customer did not think of as a separate component.

For instance (and this is a made-up example) let’s say that one key buying criterion was the ability to Source Research Participants that matched the profile of the research. The customer felt that all the suppliers could do this effectively. However, let’s say that our account has developed a proprietary step in the process of finding participants that tends to yield participants that both match the profile AND are likely to Complete all of the Steps required by the research. In terms of Sourcing, there was no advantage, but in terms of “Completion” there was. The problem was their customer didn't think of that as a separate issue, and they lumped it all into Sourcing.

So we helped out our account to create a strategy for how they would split the issue into two criteria. They would acknowledge that all players in the field were best practice on Sourcing. But then they would emphasise Completion as a critical sub-component of that process, demonstrating both how important it is and proof of their expertise. They emphasised that Completion should be considered as a separate issue, not rolled up into Sourcing. Importantly, they emphasised not just their proprietary capabilities, but the business impact that would result – in this case better and more reliable results over the long term.

By splitting the one issue into two issues, they effectively introduced a new consideration in the buying process, one that was “hidden” within something that the customer was already asking for. This yielded a significant competitive advantage, even though the capabilities of the competitors were very similar.

What should YOU do?

•  -  Coach your teams to make sure that they really understand the criteria that your customer will be using. Validate that they are not just using assumptions, past experience or gut feel, but are actually having conversations with key contacts at the account.
•     Even where there seems to be no real competitive advantage, dig deeper to see if there is some sub-issue that you can deliver better than the competition.
•     Where there is competitive parity, split criteria into two issues, graciously acknowledging the parity in one of them, but emphasising a true competitive advantage and customer benefit in the other.

Building pain, before jumping to gain, when selling

I spent last week with one of our clients (I wish I could tell you who!), a business-to-business sales organisation that relies heavily on cold-calling (or at least lukewarm calling) as the front end of their engagement strategy.  I’m not here to comment on the merits or pitfalls of cold-calling. But my time with them did remind me of some key ideas that lead to successful selling, whether over the phone or face-to-face, whether transactionally or consultatively.

Organisations in this situation, like our client, often spend a lot of time and energy trying to hone the perfect pitch. In the old days, this often meant training the team to list off benefits of your solution, and to educate accounts as to why your solution was the best. In other words, lots of telling. If your key approach rests on these issues, stop here. You’ll need to reorganise your thinking to focus on your account, not you.

More modern organisations focus on identifying a potential client’s key Pain Points (or similar terminology), and then defining a way to explain how their product or service exactly addresses those. This is a huge step in the right direction – being customer-focused – and it was the situation we found at our client.

But this refinement still misses the mark for a successful customer-centric sales methodology: it is still fundamentally telling them about us. Ideally, sales people need to get their customers talking, and thinking, about their business, their needs, how they could change or revolutionise their process, etc. Even if you’ve been told to “challenge” your accounts, you need to get them to talk, to internalise, and to challenge their assumptions. You'll get there through questioning. 

Last week we focused on Pain Questions as a big part of the missing solution.  Sales teams were already asking about Pain Points, but then they jumped right into telling the account about their solutions. Anyone who’s ever been sold to by a persistent, overly assumptive sales person can tell you that this kind of telling is rarely successful.  

Pain Questions dig into the implications of the current situation, before moving on to the Gain or reward of fixing it. This can often help to build discomfort around the current situation by uncovering – and building – the consequences of not acting. This is done by asking questions, not by telling them, in order to help amplify the current situation. Use questions like, “What are the implications of that?” “How often does that happen?” “What’s the customer experience like in those situations?” etc.

We found, almost immediately, that the impact and effectiveness of the calls improved. Instead of telling the account why their solution was better, they listened to the specific issues facing the person on the phone, they asked questions that probed and built up the situation, and then they tailored future comments to address the specific issues and pains that they had just magnified.

So the key here is to make sure that selling organisations are digging deeper to uncover the key issues and the true implications behind them. Often, the really good question is the follow-up question. For instance:

Sales: “You mentioned that invoicing is an issue, how often are you finding that there are invoicing errors?”

Client: “About 10% of the time.”

Sales: “OK. And what is the experience, from a customer perspective, when that happens?”

The first question was a good one, and revealed useful information that can be used to help sell in our solutions. But the second one can really start to build pain – in this case strategic pain - for the account.

So what should you do with your team?

• -    Listen in to their calls to see your team is asking about the implications, costs, or consequences of the current situation, as opposed to just the existence or non-existence of certain situations. Coach them to ask questions and dig more deeply before jumping to the solution.
• -   At your next team meeting, get people to think about what questions might build pain at their contacts, instead of just checking to see if it is there. If they can pause long enough to build pain, their solutions will be much more intriguing. 

Understanding the Decision-Making Process: Early and often

A few weeks back a client of ours was working very closely with an internal contact to finalise a deal. They had been going back and forth with the account to finalise the details of the solution and the roll-out/implementation plan. Everything was sorted out, and the sale was in the sales team’s system at 100%. However, it turned out that while the customer contact fully believed that she had the authority to make the decision, other parts of the organisation had more than enough power to block it. In this case, IT was brought in as part of the implementation planning, and they blocked the whole thing.

The deal is now, essentially, back at square one, with the supplier needing to work with IT to understand the needs of IT, and to demonstrate the potential value creation for the organisation as a whole.

Clearly, this episode resulted in a lot of wasted time and effort, and we were brought in to look at the situation in terms of improving salesforce efficiency. I’ve seen it happen a few times at other accounts recently, so this is not a one-off situation. Especially in our post-GFC world, many organisations have changed the way decisions are made, and who has the authority to make them. The result is that salespeople waste a lot of time selling to the wrong people.

In my analysis and research, there are two typical pitfalls that sales teams fall into, both of which are easy to avoid:

1.       Not asking about the buying process early in the sales process. Successful sales people confirm very early in discussions what is the buying process, who needs to be involved, who really owns the process and, importantly, who makes the decision. Less successful people tend to find people who think the idea is interesting, and immediately start trying to craft a proposal.

To avoid this, build this step into your own process: once you have an opportunity to create value for the account, and the contact has validated her interest, ask about how decisions are made. It’s an easy step. Team managers can easily coach around this topic as well, by asking team members “Who makes the decision here?” Simple stuff!

2.       Not helping the contact to understand their internal risks. Later in the buying process, when you’ve been selected as the supplier, there is often still work to be done before you can get the account to a signed contract. Helping your contacts to manage their internal risks is a great way to add value to the client, even when it seems like the signature is imminent.

To do this, you can help them to think about the things that might stop their purchase progressing. There is a balance here, of course: you are not looking to introduce new risks and worries to the decision-making process that might scare them away! Rather, you are trying to open up the conversation to reveal their worries, and to help them think the situation through more effectively.

Consider using questions like:
·         Who else is involved in this decision? Does anyone else need to be on board?
·         Are their people or groups that could block your decision?
·         Have things changed in the organisation since the GFC? Are more people involved in the decision than before?

It isn’t always the case of a contact pretending that they have the authority to make a decision when really they do not. In fact, from my observations, that is usually NOT the case. So what we have here is a great opportunity to add VALUE for the customer, as well as improving our own efficiency and effectiveness. Going into the process with a positive, customer-centric approach is likely to produce results.

As with much of successful selling, it comes down to being comfortable enough to ask questions to open up discussion. In this situation, questions this can help to do two key things:

• Open up the conversation around what the contact knows about the process, to make sure they are sharing as much as they can, and
• Force the contact to really consider what needs to happen, internally, to get their decision through.

If you focus on understanding the decision-making process earlier in your discussions, you’re likely to improve your effectiveness and efficiency, and create value for the customer. Of course, don’t forget that things do change over time, so these discussions may need to happen both early AND often! 

Make sure your Value Adds actually add value!

The concept of including additional “Value Adds” in a proposal has come up frequently lately. In the interest of keeping this posting short (as readers have recommended!), I’ll address only one issue around Value Adds at this point: it is important to make sure that your client actually understands the value of what you are including.

This sounds like pretty basic advice; after all the word value is included in the phrase Value Add. But the key is to make sure that you can show what the specific Value Add means to that specific account, and then, to the extent possible, quantify it. I’ve seen many situations where a salesperson fails to do that.

Here’s a recent example: A salesperson for a technology company wanted to improve the overall value of their solution by adding some additional training for the operators. This was to be included in the proposal, as a bullet point under a heading of “Additional Value Adds”. The customer contact with final approval on the proposal, a fairly senior executive at the organisation, would have had very little idea what that meant, let alone the value of it to the organisation.

It turns out that this Value Add was about building new skills in the operators, beyond the skills required to operate the equipment (which were covered under "Training" elsewhere in the proposal). This would be of tremendous interest to the operator community, who view it as an opportunity to advance their skills, and to get involved in more interesting work within the company. If they had those skills, they could be more proactive about working with other parts of the organisation, and improve the workflow within the business. This could result in reduced administration effort, compressed development timelines, less rework, fewer errors, less frustration, etc. So clearly, this Value Add really could add value, but it was in danger of being sidelined.

To make sure that your Value Adds aren’t under-valued make sure you focus on three areas:

1.  1. Identify what the Value Add means. In the example above, there was the very real possibility that the Value Add would be confused with the training required to operate the equipment, thereby eliminating the additional value. Keep your explanations clear, concise and relevant, but if additional description is needed, make sure to include it.  

2.  2. Specify what it means to the specific individual(s) reviewing the offer. It is important to understand what your audience cares about. If the audience is the operators, discussing the opportunity to learn new skills and advance their career would have been extremely relevant. In this case, though, the audience is senior executives, and operators' career paths may be less compelling. We’ll need to translate the Value Add into business metrics that matter to management: improved efficiency, lowered costs, shortened development timelines, etc. Get the impact right for the right audience.

3.  3. Quantify the impact of the Value Add. It can be hard, but the better we are at quantifying the impact, the more compelling the Value Add will be. We could work with operators, and other departments, to possibly identify the savings from improved productivity, or reduction in waste. We might even model the impact of a decrease in employee turnover in the operator community. In this specific case, the salesperson was leveraging privileged relationships to get access to training that would cost thousands of dollars on the open market: another opportunity to quantify the impact!

Following these three steps can significantly improve the perceived value of your Value Adds, and improve your chances of success! Over time, you may even find that you require fewer Value Adds as you ability to show their impact improves...