Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
Шрифт:
• Good compensation — competitive, no-caps, fair, high-upside. In most companies with successful sales forces, a salesperson is often the most highly paid person in direct compensation. And management thinks that this is wonderful because the stock would be sky high if the company had 20 more of them. And never, never cut it in the middle of a year unless somehow you think 100 percent sales force turnover is a strategy. (It’s happened.)
• Trips. It’s not just the trip; they can afford the trip. It’s the peer and management recognition. And it’s being able to go to your spouse and tell them you won them a trip to a very nice place. Visions of warm climates seem to drive salespeople though the snows of December.
• Personal standards and drivers. Ambition, ego, self-image, fear of poverty, achievement mentality — I’ve seen them all work.
• Working for good management that they can trust and the opportunity for personal growth.
• Achievable goals. Make ’em stretch — but an unattainable goal will demotivate a sales force faster than anything.
• A support organization that will help the sales force create a great buying experience for the customer and make them feel good about what they sold.
If you don’t have these things, a motivational speech, cheerleading, or a merchandise contest won’t help. If you do have these things, you don’t need the others. Focus your speakers on achieving the preceding.
Primary Intelligence has an excellent “Sales Confidence Index” survey that actually measures confidence of sales forces in the preceding factors. If your salespeople don’t believe in your company and your solutions, then they can’t sell them with conviction, and you may not know until too late without third-party feedback.
Win-Loss Reviews — The Silver Bullets of Truth
Another great metric is a win-loss analysis by a third-party organization. The words of the client as to why you won or lost are the silver bullets of truth.
Companies such as Primary Intelligence create win-loss reports that are invaluable and must be conducted by an outside third party. These reports collect information and feedback as to why you lost so that you don’t make the same mistake over and over again. This information is pure gold (and you are going to pay for it in one way or another) and needs to be refreshed on an almost-daily basis.
It will help salespeople learn from win-loss reports if they first accept that all losses are the result of being outsold. Some will say that they were just in the wrong deal. If this is the case, and they stayed until the end, they were outsold.
In the case of the “lesser product” excuse, if they sometimes win with the lesser product due to superior selling, then they must have been outsold. If price is the excuse for the loss, why didn’t they find that out earlier?
It has been said that there are three things that can happen in a deal: You can win, walk, or get outsold. In reality, there are four. You can also lose to no decision after wasting resources.
You can create your own win-loss reports, but the answers are almost always predictable. “We won because of superior salesmanship” or “We lost because of price and product.” You might as well have them preprinted.
The only caution or filter required to make the best use of this information is to remember that customers are making an emotional and political decision in the end. However, when they give answers about their decisions, they will say that the decisions were logical and rational.
The key is knowing how to dig down into the political and emotional dynamics of the deal. An effective third-party company calling on the customer will uncover incredible things about preparation, personality, politics, competitive strategies, failure to link into issues, and misreading of accounts. They are a treasure trove of corrective information.
Sustaining advantage requires continuous improvement and change, not a static solution in which strategy can be set and forgotten.
Speed has become an important element of strategy.
Execution, rather than awareness, is at the heart of making winning a habit. Speed and consistency of execution and innovation are the path to sustainable competitive advantage (see Figure 9–3).
Feedback from all these sources and metrics should cause sales forces to continuously evaluate personnel, sales messages, product offerings, value propositions, and customer loyalty. If these are well implemented and used effectively, the result is a move from inconsistent, up and down results to perpetual advantage.
We discussed in an earlier chapter how Col. John Boyd revolutionized military thinking and maneuver warfare. His acronym for competitive cycle speed in a fighter plane and then a military unit was the OODA loop. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and act, and it changed everything.
Winning pilots or winning generals get information faster than the opponent, process it faster, and react more quickly according to principles to gain an advantage in every situation. It isn’t the plan but the speed and effectiveness of the adjustment process that gives them the advantage.
Speed and accuracy of information drive speed and accuracy of strategy, which drive competitive advantage. The battles of Napol'eon, Nelson, Jackson, and Patton, as well as many marketing campaigns, all teach us this lesson from history.
New technologies can enable the right metrics and adjustment processes without requiring additional input from sales reps to slow them down.
If you can measure in less than one year which salespeople can drive a complex sale, if you can detect and correct deals that are out of control at each phase of the cycle, if you can improve messages in response to the competition within 48 hours, if you can improve your sales cycle model and hiring profile with every win or loss — then you and your sales organization can get ahead, stay ahead, and achieve perpetual advantage. Somebody’s going to do it right first. Will it be you?