Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
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The graveyard of failed sales force automation initiatives has taught us that refining your processes first—selling the right messages through the right people—should precede any sales force automation effort.
8. New Metrics and Feedback for Perpetual Advantage
A transformation demands sustainable change. Too many initiatives wane after the first few months. Sales messages quickly lose effectiveness due to competitive responses. It shouldn’t take a year to find out whether or not a salesperson can cut it, and by the time a deal hits the forecast, it is usually out of control.
Permanent process change to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition requires faster feedback and newer metrics than ever before.
Since not all sales improvement efforts are alike, setting your priorities depends on where your sales force is and where it needs to be. Based on the successful transformations we have observed, we have built an assessment tool to help you compare your organization with the best practices of top sales forces.
CHAPTER 3: Defining the Scorecard
Quality is not an act. It is a habit.
Once you agree that your sales force is in need of improvement, where do you start? How do you assess your sales organization in addition to just revenue? How do you identify your weaknesses?
The principals of our firm, all successful sales executives themselves, have worked with more than 250 leading sales organizations worldwide. Together, we have identified five universal areas of sales effectiveness — Talent, Technique, Teamwork, Technology, and Trust — and how they differ at each of the four levels of sales strategy: Individual, Opportunity Management, Account Management, and Industry/Marketplace. In Chapter 9 we discuss essential elements of achieving and maintaining Transformation for permanent change.
Although most sales organizations execute best practices in some areas, rarely do they achieve best practices in all areas. And certainly, these are not all the best practices in selling, but they should be enough to get you ahead of your competition and closer to your true potential as a sales force.
The result is a scorecard that we have developed to provide sales managers with a gap analysis of their organization. Through this scorecard, we’ll show you how you compare with some of the best sales forces in the world.
Here we will briefly introduce the criteria. In later chapters we will go into much more depth.
Talent
The first step in sales effectiveness is finding the right people. Selling in a complex sale requires a unique combination of sales competencies. Most of the sales managers we talk to say that fewer than 20 percent of their salespeople can consistently manage a complex sale independently.
Most people interview based on two things: performance and personality. But there isn’t a salesperson out there who can’t craft a good r'esum'e and sell a one-hour interview. So what do you look for? Every interview is a selling event. Without a good hiring profile, which has been written and tested, how will you know what a good salesperson looks like when he or she walks in the door? Most people who think they have a good mental picture of what they are looking for would be stunned by their inconsistencies if they actually wrote them down.
Technique
There are hundreds of companies that teach sales skills — presentation skills, objection handling, closing, etc. But the one skill many salespeople lack is the ability to effectively connect their solutions to the prospect’s business problems.
In addition to a greater understanding of the client’s pain, refinements and techniques continue to advance in the areas of controlling politics, competition, and the decisionmaking process.
Innovations also have occurred in both deal coaching and overall performance coaching, as well as in the area of forecasting.
Teamwork
The salesperson’s contacts and calendar are a starting point, but they are not enough to manage an opportunity. To lead in a complex selling environment, you have to be able to communicate the plan to the rest of the team. You have to have a stakeholder analysis that identifies who is involved, what role they play, what their pains are, and how much power they have. It’s not enough for salespeople to keep it in their heads anymore.
Also, the relationship between manager and salesperson needs to move from inspector and loner to one of coach and strategist. In the rare accounts where partnering is a possibility, the team also can include the client.
Everyone on your sales team who touches the account needs to know what’s going on, what the strategy is, and must collaborate on execution and refinement of the plan.
Technology
Unfortunately, most client relationship management (CRM) applications haven’t lived up to their promise—especially in the area of direct business-to-business (B2B) sales force effectiveness. And, if implemented badly, CRM technology actually can build a barrier between you and your best clients.
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.