Interesting Strategy: "We inspire sales people...." Didn't Inspire Me!

Yesterday, I got an intriguing tweet. It was from an individual and simply stated, "We inspire sales people. If interested let's connect." I have to admit, the pitch caught my interest. I looked at his twitter profile and saw roughly 95% of his 374 updates had one of 3 variants of the same pitch.

It got me to thinking, aren't many of our initial introductions and value propositions to prospects very similar? Too often, don't we hear: "Hi, I'm Debbie Smith from XYZ Company. We make the best widgets in the world, if you are interested let's connect."

These introductions may be true, but they are ineffective for a number of reasons. Some of these are:

1. Who is the person calling and are they credible? Why should I listen to their opinion? Sometimes, our company name is enough to get someone to listen. In the case of the guy who tweeted me, I may have been interested if I saw a number of insightful tweets, inspirational to sales. Instead, I saw 100's of the same query---with very few responses/uptakes. I have established many new relationships on Twitter with people who do provide inspirational advice on sales, leadership and business. While I haven't met them, based on what I have seen, they are credible to me.

2. These generic introductions make me feel like "To Current resident or Occupant." Particularly when I see I am one of several 100 getting the same message. Take the time to personalize the introduction if you want to produce results. If the guy had said: I liked Sales The Thinking Person's Profession and would like to share ideas. Would you be interested? (103 characters) The personalized approach and interest in me would have made me very receptive to a discussion. With very little effort, a slightly different approach would have produced profoundly different results. When we meet or call a prospect, are we saying something that personalizes the conversation, demonstrating our interest in them?

3. Tell me a little about yourself and why I should be interested in you. This is somewhat related to the credibility issue, but people buy from people. I like to know a little about the person I'm dealing with. That's part of the step we call "establishing rapport." It may be a few second, or it may be part of your twitter profile, but I respond to people.

Would you add anything more? I know I've just scratched the surface of this issue.

This tweet was a great example of what too many sales people do in introducing themselves to prospects. It doesn't take much to change our approach, but the slightest changes can produce profoundly different results.

The Future Of Selling -- Consultative, Solutions and Customer Focused? Deja Vu All Over Again?

I'm frustrated and a little impatient. As a profession, we seem to be doing the same thing over and over, making little progress. Sometimes, I feel like I'm Bill Murray waking up every morning in "Ground Hog Day."

All sorts of sales consultants, guru's, and other self proclaimed experts (probably including me, if I'm honest) make a lot about being consultative, solutions and customer focused, value driven and even provocative in selling. These topics have been fodder for 100's of books, 1000's of articles and $ billions in sales training and other services.

Virtually every self respecting sales professional talks about being solutions, consultative, customer focused, or even provocative.

Buyers are saying the same thing, they want sales people to focus on their (the buyer's) business and problems, presenting business justified solutions.

I'm convinced --- and I think the leading thinkers and practitioners in selling are also convinced that this customer and value creation focus is critical for success in sales.

So why am I frustrated? This afternoon, I blew the dust off a well worn book on my bookshelf: Consultative Selling, 4th Edition, by Mack Hanan, published in 1990. The description on the fly leaf:

"What does a customer want more than anything else? Profits. If you, as a salesperson can shoe your customers how your product or service will improve their profits....you can be sure they will keep coming back for more...."

" This new approach comes directly from market demands, 'Customers in major markets are setting the new ground rules for selling.'"

"Would you like your customer to value you as a friend who can help make their business grow?"

That was in the 1990 edition, I'm sure similar thoughts were expressed in the original 1970 edition. Yet those are the same words we talk about, today, as the "new selling."

My copy of Miller Heiman's Strategic Selling was published in 1987, my copy of Bosworth's Solution Selling was published in 1995, Peter Drucker lectured on these concepts in the 1950-60's. I could go on citing book after book.

So I'm frustrated, why can't we make progress? For decades, we have been talking about this, but we seem to make little progress in execution. Why are our customers letting us get away with the same old thing?

When will we stop talking about solution selling, customer focused selling, and value based selling because it's the norm of practice by sales professionals? When will we move on to talk about the next thing---what is the next thing?

I don't have any answers and would love to get your thoughts. What's holding us back? How do we move on and look at the next new things we should be doing as sales professionals?

Do You Know Your Customer's Value Proposition? What Are You Doing To Help Them Deliver It?

We know that a clear differentiated value proposition is critical to sales success. Over the past month, I have been writing about various aspects of developing communicating and delivering differentiated value to your customers. I'll stay on the same theme, but take a slightly different direction.

How many sales professionals understand the core value propositions of their customers? Do we know how our customers present their value to their customers and differentiate themselves from their competitors? Most good sales people have a pretty good idea of this.

Now, here's the twist---what do you do to help your customers deliver on their value propositions to their customers? Do you know---more importantly does your customer know and do they see it as an important contribution to their value proposition?

Now you are probably thinking, "Dave, I've bought your stuff up until know, but you are getting pretty far out there. We are just a small component of what our customers do."

Try thinking about it in these ways:

1. Remember the old story, "for the lack of a horseshoe, a kingdom was lost." Think of the value delivery chain--start with your customer's value proposition, work backwards through the value delivery chain and see where you fit in and how you can contribute. I've found if very useful to engage the customer in doing this--often they don't know where they fit in. Mapping it out on a whiteboard can be a very interesting and enlightening discussion for both you and your customer.

2. Take the classic quality and process analysis approach. There are internal and external customers. Think about your direct customer, who are their customers? They may be internal or external. What is your direct customer's value proposition to their customers, internal or external? How do you contribute to that value proposition? Does your direct customer see how critical you are in helping them deliver their value proposition?

Your customers are worried about defining, communicating and delivering value to their customers. Show them how you help them in delivering differentiated value, make your offerings an integrated part of their value delivery process. You become indispensable in their offerings.

Create Value In Every Meeting

A few days ago, a reader contacted me with a great question: "Dave, you always talk about creating value in every meeting with the customer. What do you mean? Is it realistic? How do I get what I need accomplished?" Thanks, for the question and keeping me from being glib.

Let me back up a minute. One of the most common issues that comes up when I speak with sales people is, "we can't get meetings with customers, how can we sell if we can't get in front of customers?" I see the same issue, sometimes I have difficulty getting customers to meet, what's up?

In truth, we have done it to ourselves. Customers don't want to see us because too often we waste their time --- and they are so time pressured that one more sales person wasting their time is unacceptable. We spend our time pitching our products without understanding what they are trying to do.

How to we create value in every meeting?

It starts with planning and preparation. Shooting from the lip doesn't work. If we aren't prepared, we are wasting the customer's time and our time. The best sales professionals prepare for every meeting.

In planning the meeting, a key question we have to ask ourselves is "What's in it for the customer to participate in the meeting?" We always know what's in it for us---we're trying to advance our position through the selling process, but until we can answer the question about what's in it for them, we will waste their time.

If we can't define what's in it for the customer, then we should cancel the meeting -- we aren't ready for it.

Now, let's talk about this concept of "what's in it for the customer?" We aren't talking about solving world hunger, we are talking about using the customer's time well. At the end of the meeting, the customer should have the reaction, "That was a good use of my time, I'm glad we had the meeting."

Think about it, if we pass that test for every meeting, customers will no longer avoid us, we will have less trouble getting meetings with them, customers may even start to look forward to meetings.

But if we are so focused on creating value for our customer, how do we achieve our goals? Frankly, the two are in separable. Early in the customer's buying process, we want to understand their goals, problems, challenges. We want to understand what is standing in the way of them achieving their goals. Here, the customer is focusing on themselves, they are describing what it important to them.

We might, during these early meetings help the customer in other ways. We might help them clarify their thinking about the issues and priorities. We might help them to look at their business in different ways. We might help them understand what they should be considering in seeking solutions to their problem.

Later in the buying process, we are helping the customer understand potential solutions to their problems. We are showing them the results they should expect. We are showing them how to manage the risk and achieve results.

Through this process, we are a partner to the customer in defining and solving their problems. Sales people only pitching their products, features and functions leave the task of solving the problem on the customer.

So how do we create value in every meeting or interchange with the customer:

1. We plan and prepare. Until we can answer the question, what's in it for the customer, we don't have the meeting.
2. After the meeting, we want to make sure the customer says, that meeting was a good use of my time.

For some tactics and tips on doing this, send me a note to ask for our Call Planning Checklist. It is a pragmatic guide to creating value in every meeting.

First, Let Your Customer Finish Their Sentence, Then Ask Three Questions

Yesterday, I had a discussion with "Mark." Mark is one of the best sales/business development professionals I have ever met. In the market segments in which he sells, he is truly an expert. He's spent many years in understanding the industry, the players, the key issues facing everyone in the value delivery chain. Customers seek and respect Mark's opinion. He's helped customers achieve great things with his company's solutions.

Coupled with that, Mark has a very high level of enthusiasm and energy---it's infectious. Meeting with Mark, or seeing customers with him is always interesting. It's often hard to keep up with the ideas.

Imagine my surprise when Mark asked me for some advice today. While he is the highest performer in his company, he was having some challenges with closing deals. He said he was getting sales to a certain point and then they seem to stall. We were talking about what was going wrong.

Fortunately, I had been on some calls with Mark. I've seen how he interacted with customers. I've also seen Mark in conversations with his peers in his company and we had had many conversations between ourselves.

Mark has a problem---it's a problem I've seen many bright, high energy, and high performing sales professionals have. I noticed that Mark rarely lets anyone complete their thoughts. Mark's mind is racing ahead of the conversation. Before the customer has had a chance to state their issues, Mark knows the answer and is presenting a solution. He's eager to solve the issue, his enthusiasm and energy causes him to interrupt and to start presenting a solution.

Since Mark is truly an expert in the industry, more often than not, he is focusing on the right issue and presenting a powerful solution. However, this creates a real problem -- one the Mark is totally unconscious about.

The customer never gets to tell their story, the customer never really feels that she is being heard. Mark has not given them the chance to explain their issues.

The problem gets worse. A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with Mark and one of his customers. A few sentences into the discussion, Mark could read where things were going and jumped in to talk about the issues, their impact on the customer and their customers and potential solutions to resolve the issues. He wasn't pitching, but speaking from his expertise and experience --- an in many senses was very credible.

The problem, however, was that wasn't the issue that was bothering the customer. By interrupting the customer, Mark had cut off the chance to hear the real issues that were bothering the customer and address those. While Mark eventually discovered this and corrected it, it took some time. Fortunately the customer was generous and forgiving, giving Mark the opportunity to explore the real issues.

I see the same scenario too many times, with some of the best, most knowledgeable and experienced sales people.

Going back to Mark's and my discussion. He asked me what to do. I started to tell him, then he jumped in......

After I stopped the discussion, I said: "Mark, here is your new mantra: 'Let the customer complete their sentence or thought. Never, never, under any circumstances interrupt her. Then, before you respond to the customer, ask her three questions. If you do this, you will see profound changes in your effectiveness.'"

Mark paused and thought about it. He made a few comments, stopped himself and said he was being defensive. We started discussing it. Somethings we concluded:

• Everyone wants to be heard--they want the chance to express their views and know
  they are being listened to. They want the chance to tell their story---and they
  need to tell their story to someone who is listening.


• As smart as we are, until we have heard the customer's view, until it comes from their mouths, we are just assuming---and we know what assumptions make us.
  If we give the customer a chance to complete their thoughts, we will learn something new.


• If we ask the customer three questions before responding, the quality of both our listening and our knowledge increases exponentially. We can then respond more
  appropriately and have an engaged customer.
  

I could tell Mark took it to heart. He wrote it down on the front cover of his notebook. He wanted to see it before each call with a customer.

Before we concluded, Mark asked me, "What are the three questions I should ask?" I have a specific answer for this, but I'd like your ideas and views---so please comment.

For any of you who are very curious---email me, I'll give you the three key questions you might ask in these situations. Just send a request to me at dabrock@excellenc.com.

Table Stakes Are Changing -- How Do We Up The Ante?

I just finished a conversation with a client. He is the EVP of Sales for a high performing sales organization. We were talking about the challenge of setting his company's offerings apart from the competition---continuing to differentiate their solutions.

For a few moments, we spoke about the "good old days." We reflected on how things had changed, what used to set them apart is now a common expectation---all the competitors deliver the same capability or experience, the customers now have new expectations -- the table stakes have changed!

Table stakes are constantly changing, the ante is continually increasing. If we aren't changing--in fact driving the change, we will not win. Thinking about the good old days doesn't close sales.

The new reality of competing in sales, the new (or at least today's) table stakes are:

• Customers are better informed than ever before and will continue to be well
  informed. Before you have ever met with the customer, they have "pre-screened"
  you through Internet research--you won't get in the door unless your company has
  represented itself well in the electronic-Sale 2.0 world.


• Your product/service doesn't count. By the time you are meeting with your customer,
  probably any of the alternatives they have "short listed" will meet their need.
  Focusing on pitching features, functions, feeds and speeds just wastes their and
  your time.


• Some of the other things we relied about in the past like quality, delivery, logistics may not be the differentiators they once were.
  

When you are invited to the table, all of these are already on the table and roughly equal for all participants, how do you up the ante? Some thoughts:

• The biggest: What do you do for the customer---both the enterprise and the individuals involved in the decision? How do you help increase profits, grow their business, increase the loyalty of their customers? Frankly, the customers don't care about you, your products and company, they care about what you can do for them.


• How do you create a compelling customer buying experience? Customer experience is the rage in product development and design. As sales professionals we need to start thinking about the customer experience in the buying process. How do we become facilitators in the buying process? How do we create a hassle free experience---both in the buying and the implementation processes?


• How do we, as sales professionals, become the differentiator that causes our companies to win?

Table stakes have changed, if we aren't constantly thinking about how we can up the ante, we will have to fold our hands, we may not even be dealt in. What ideas to you have to raise the ante?

Creating Value---Business And Personal

I've been writing about creating differentiated value for your customers. Let me focus on a couple of elements of value---in this you will discover why "generic" value propositions miss the mark.

Value has many dimensions. As business and sales professionals, we tend to focus on the business elements of value--how much we can reduce costs, how much we can improve revenues, how much we can improve quality, and so forth. Business value, particularly when quantified is critical in sales.

There is another dimension of value that we often miss, but which can be the most important and differentiating element of your value proposition. It's personal value--what you bring to each customer you work with.

My friend, Charles Green, wrote a post on Two Questions. It's an outstanding post and part of it talks about personal value. He talks about asking the question: "How are you doing?"

Personal value is all about the individual, asking "How are you doing" helps you discover what your customer values and how you can help hat person. By exploring this aspect of value you learn about your customer's goals, dreams, and aspirations. You learn about their frustrations, problems and needs. You develop a relationship with the customer, showing that you are really interested and that you care about them---as individuals.

Elements of personal value can be very simple, but have a profound impact on your customer. It could be as simple as "get my boss off my back," "let me get home at a reasonable hour so I can spend more time with my family." It may be, "get me a promotion," or "get me a bonus." Until, you explore the personal side of value with each individual involved in the decision making process, you don't know how you can make a difference for each of them.

We talk about sales being about relationships, but without exploring the personal element of value, it is impossible to develop deep relationships with your customers.

Personal value is an important part of your value proposition. We have seen, many times, that the business aspects of our value proposition are roughly equal to those of the competition. From a business point of view, our value proposition is not differentiated. However, customers make the decision for us because of the personal element of the value proposition--they know we really care.

Before concluding, let me add a warning note. Developing and delivering personal value requires commitment on your part. It must be genuine, it must endure beyond the "deal." If you don't care, if you aren't committed to developing deep, genuine relationships with your customers, you are being manipulative. Customers will see through this quickly and you will never achieve your goals.

As you build your value proposition, think of your real differentiator--it is the deep relationships and trust you build with your customers. It is how you make a difference in their lives. This is the most sustainable and differentiated element of value anyone can create.

Setting Yourself Apart, Developing and Communicating Differentiated Value

A compelling and differentiated value proposition is critical in selling—we all know this, yet this remains one of the biggest challenges facing sales professionals.

This post examines 5 critical elements about developing and communicating differentiated value propositions.

1. Numbers count, quantifying your value is critical. We know the structure of value proposition, it states a problem area or issue your customer has, addresses what you can do about it, and ideally provides quantification of the result.

For example, in working with sales executives, I often say: "We can reduce the number of calls your people have to make on each deal by 30-40%, dramatically improving productivity." Sales productivity and the effective use of time is usually a high priority for sales people and executives, and a 30-40% call reduction is usually compelling to the executive, they usually want to hear what we say.

While most sales people know the structure of a value proposition, very often, we don’t see sales people quantifying the magnitude of improvement or result the customer might expect to achieve. They present the product feature and generalized benefits, but leave it to the customer to guess at what improvement will result. The best sales people make this result very obvious as a part of their value proposition.

2. If your value proposition isn’t differentiated, the only differentiation apparent to customers is price. Product based value propositions are undifferentiated. Today, differences between competitive offerings are often very small. Too often, I see sales people developing value propositions based on the features, functions, and benefit of their products -- but they look similar to the competition’s.

Do this test: Look at a product in your company’s web site and how its value is presented. Go to your top 3 competitors and look at their value propositions---are they almost exactly the same as yours?

To differentiate yourself, you have to take a broader look at your offering. Elements that drive differentiation include company reputation, ease of doing business, the total customer experience through the buying and implementation process, your personal relationship with the customer, and many other issues.

3. The value proposition must change as you progress through the customer buying cycle. Early in the cycle, a relatively generic or undifferentiated value proposition is perfectly sufficient. All you are trying to do is to get the customer interested in you and to commit to consider your offering, along with competition.

Too often, though, sales people stick with these generic value propositions. To win, the value proposition must change. As you discover the customers’ most critical issues, problems and priorities, you must adjust your value proposition to address those specific issues, in the customer terms.

For example in my sales productivity above, as I work with the customer, I might change my value proposition to: "Based on our discussions with you, we have found your people are spending too much time pursuing unqualified or bad deals. We believe by helping your people better disqualify bad opportunities, we can improve your win rates by as much as 15%, and improve resource utilization by 22%."

In the beginning of the deal, the general sales productivity improvement was interesting enough for the customer to consider us. As we understood the customer‘s challenges, we focused on a specific issue impacting their performance and our value proposition focused on the results in addressing their specific issues.

4. You have to address the customers’ top priorities and issues. We tend to treat the customer as the enterprise or company. People make decisions, not enterprises. To be effective, our value propositions must address the priorities and needs for each person involved in the decision making process---in their terms. While they may have some common priorities, there will always be differences.

Using my value proposition example, the sales executive is most concerned with win rates, resource utilization, and cost of selling. A regional sales manager might be concerned with win rates, and improving the quality of the funnel. A training manager will be more concerned with the delivery of the program, the coaching and sustainability, and the learning pedagogy.

To be effective as a sales person you have to focus on each person involved on the decision and address their top priorities and requirements. The one individual you have not satisfied may be enough to cause you not to win a deal.

5. You win by focusing on each customer’s top 5 priorities. I talk to people who have generated long laundry lists of issues they have to address. While you can’t ignore all the issues, generally addressing the top 5 priorities for each customer and setting yourself apart in those areas will be what causes you to win. Make sure you have compelling and differentiated value propositions for those and make sure your customer acknowledges them. Addressing their 20th issue is not likely going to be what causes you to win or lose the deal.

However, be careful to re-validate the customer priorities through their buying cycle, their priorities may change and you will have to change your focus to stay aligned.

6. Bonus---I couldn’t resist giving you a bonus tip: None of this counts until the customer acknowledges the value, confirms that it is differentiated and agrees it addresses their most critical needs. However differentiated and valuable you think you are, until it comes from the customer’s mouth, you are just guessing.

Partners In EXCELLENCE is the recognized leader in helping organizations develop and communicate differentiated value propositions. If you need to sharpen your tools, processes, thinking, and skills in this area, look at our Value Proposition Solutions, follow the link. For a copy of our free Value Proposition eBook, follow the link.

For any other information about how Partners In EXCELLENCE can improve your organization’s capabilities in understanding, developing, communicating and delivering differentiated value, please contact us at +1-949-305-7146 or valueprop@excellenc.com

The Sales Game Has Changed, Are You Playing To Win?

Webinar: Driving Demand in a Demanding Market
July 15 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST

As a sales executive, you know how difficult it is to increase revenue while decreasing costs in today's selling environment. You’re under pressure to produce sales. Missed deals are costing you money. You need new ways to get smarter and more productive quickly – not more of the same. But which new sales strategies will help you uncover hidden demand and maximize revenue potential without breaking the bank?

Tune in to our live webcast to hear a panel of experts discuss strategies on how to boost sales and cut costs to impact your bottom line right now.

Join our panel of specialists to discover:

• Tips to get your sales team smarter and more productive
• How to identify the right deals and avoid wasting time on dead ends
• Tools that help manage and measure critical sales performance metrics
• The role Technology can play in making an impact on your bottom line

Brent Leary is a CRM industry analyst, advisor, author, speaker and award-winning blogger. He is co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC, an Atlanta based CRM advisory firm offering tools and strategies for improving business relationships, with a client list including RIM, Sage, Microsoft, Intuit, and Cisco. Recognized by InsideCRM as one of 2007's 25 most influential industry leaders, Leary is also a past recipient of CRM Magazine's Most Influential Leader Award. Leary blogs at http://brentleary.com/.

Dave Brock is President and CEO of Partners In EXCELLENCE, a global consulting company focused on performance improvement in sales, marketing and business strategy. Partners In EXCELLENCE has trained over 100,000 sales professionals, globally, in how to outsell and outperform their competition. Dave is a trusted advisor to executives in the high technology, industrial products, and professional services, and has worked with the largest organizations in those sectors as well as start-ups. Brock blogs at http://partnersinexcellence.blogspot.com, Partners In EXCELLENCE website is www.excellenc.com.

David Bonnette is Group Vice President of Oracle's North American CRM sales organization, overseeing Oracle’s market-leading CRM portfolio for North American commercial markets. He leads a team of nearly 150 people and has built his organization around industry, segment, and product specialization. In transforming the culture to emphasize Innovation, Collaboration, his team is acutely focused on developing communities that create sustainable, material value for Oracle’s

customers.

To register for this Webinar, click on this link: The Sales Game Has Changed, Are You Playing To Win?

Strategic Partners---How Important Are They To Your Sales Strategies -- A Survey

Over the past 2 months, we have written a lot about Strategic Parnerships and Alliances as part of your sales strategies. Two of the posts are:

Sometimes All We Want Is Good Customers, Sometimes All Customrs Want Is Good Suppliers
If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Bigger Trouble

We've gotten a lot of queries and comments from people who have seen these articles. Many share our views that strong supply chain relationships are critical to successful implementation of their sales strategies. As a result of these conversations, we have decided to research this issue more deeply. We are looking at several issues that seem to have resonated with people:

• The importance of partnering and alliances as a part of their sales strategies.


• The importance of partnering as part of the vendor management strategies.


• The interrelationship of these issues in overall success of the
  organization.

To help us gather information about these critical issues. I'd like to invite you to participate in a short survey, Survey On Customer Partnering And Supply Chain Relationships. The survey should take less than 15 minutes to complete. Everyone completing the survey and requesting a copy of the results will get a copy of the report at no charge. We will be offering the results to others for $49.95.

Please take the time to complete this survey. All results are completely anonymous. Follow the link: Survey On Customer Partnering And Supply Chain Relationships.

Thanks for your help with this survey. It is open for anyone to take, please forward this mail to colleagues, customers, and suppliers who may be interested in this issue. We will close the survey roughly at the end of May and will publish the report in mid June.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

If you’ve made it this far through the series of articles, you probably want to quit your sales job and become a hermit in the mountains. I’ve certainly created a bleak picture. Thank you for your patience and dligence in hanging in with me!

However, I am tremendously excited about being a sales professional and for the future of sales professionals. I think the dismal picture I’ve portrayed, also provides an opportunity for real progress and growth for sales professionals.

Note---I’m focused on a small audience—people who are or who are committed to becoming the highest levels of performance in sales. I’m not talking about people that sell. I am neither naïve enough, ambitious enough, now willing to waste my time on changing sales. As with every function, there will be a tremendous number of “schlock” peddlers (call a New Yorker for translation). There will also be a large number of people who are in the middle---I see great hope for them, but led by inspired sales professionals.

I think the problems and challenges provide the opportunity for true professionals and those that aspire to be professionals to separate themselves from the rest of people who peddle.

How do we improve, how do we focus on becoming truly effective and high performers? Where does the leadership responsibility lie? I believe each of us can take ownership in driving change.

First, we can't be naive, a lot of the structural and systemic issues I identified in Part 2 can't be fixed --- will take more people working together (within and organization or across organizations. But, we don't have to let these constrain us, we can still get a lot accomplished and drive a lot of change that will improve our effectiveness --- as groups, teams, or individuals. We can't let these constraints become excuses for non performance.

To be honest---at least from an organizational point of view, I am tempted to point the finger at management—not just sales management, but corporate management. I do believe that poor leadership or no leadership is one of the key reasons sales (and organizations) perform at a far lower level than they could. I think leaders must set better personal examples, invest in getting things done through their people---which means coaching and developing them. I believe they must fight the systemic issues that block them from driving sustained performance improvement.

At the same time, only the top executives will be able to have any significant impact on the systemic issues. What does this mean for most of sales management? If I got my wish, I would hope that sales managers focus on three things: Doing their jobs as leader/coaches. There are coaching opportunities in every meeting—just the questions you ask have a tremendous impact your team.

Second, rather than reacting, changing priorities and strategies on a daily basis; stick to your principles, processes, and tools. Use them, presumably you implemented them because you believed in the results they could produce, give them a chance to work, monitor, adjust, modify. Follow through on them, diagnose what’s working and what’s not working. There are a lot of good processes, tools, and programs out there. Choose those that work best for you and use them. Don’t become victim of the program du hour mentality.

Finally, execute your processes and lead with passion and excitement. Inspire your people, your peers, your management to follow your example.

Individual contributors have a responsibility as well. Seek to become the best in your profession. Constantly learn, seek out the best professionals you can find, network with them, and learn from them. Develop your own processes, or internalize your company’s selling processes—adapting them for your use. The processes and tools work! They produce tremendous results, learn how to leverage those results for yourself. Invest in planning and thinking. It will get you to your end goal more effectively and efficiently then by reacting to your competition, customer demands, or your management. Set an example in your own performance for your peers.

Whether you are a leader or individual contributor, becoming disciplined and process focused, committing to follow through on these, exploiting the tools produce results. Leverage these processes and tools, not because your management tells you to, but because they help you become more effective.

I don’t believe change only comes from the top. I believe change comes from committed, passionate people at all levels of the organization.

Thanks for your patience in working your way through my diatribe. I have not hit all the issues, I think I may have a bit of a warped view on many issues. My greatest hope is not that you agree with my ideas, but that it stimulates a healthy discussion. Your discussion and comments will be better than my rambling posts! If I'm off base, please correct me.

In case you started at the end and want to go back to the beginning, here are the two previous posts.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

In the first part of this post, I focused primarily on the sales function and challenges we have created for ourselves. However, what we face is not just a sales problem.

There are some things that keep us from being as effective as possible that are not just the “fault” of sales people, but which do contribute to our inability to sustain high levels of effective performance. Some of it is “business culture”—in general, some of it is “regional culture”---that is North American, European, Asian, and so forth. Some of it is “industry culture.”

These represent attitudes, behaviors, practices, expectations by all business professionals, but which applied to selling, adversely impact our performance and effectiveness. I can’t review all of these, but will highlight a few of the issues that impact sales effectiveness.

The focus on the short term is one of the biggest issues impacting organizations, in general, and sales specifically. CEO’s and Boards are concerned about today’s stock performance. Decisions are biased to what impacts our stock now—not what will increase our market cap in 2-5 years. If the strategies, tactics, and actions we have adopted don’t impact stock price today, then tomorrow we will change them.

This has a terrible impact on all parts of the organization, but perhaps the biggest on sales. Strategies, tactics and actions are oriented around booking the order today. If we aren’t tracking at or above plan, then we will change our strategies and tactics. We confuse the sales people, we confuse our customers, and we don’t produce results. We push our customers to meet our schedule for booking orders rather than their schedule of producing results. In this environment, the “program du jour” rules---at least for today, who knows about tomorrow?

Sales people become numb to this, they often ignore everything and just keep doing what they have been doing in the past. They keep their heads down and stay out of trouble.

Speed of execution is favored over planning. We are too busy doing activities, to focus on doing things right. We always have time to do things over (after all, our programs and priorities will change tomorrow, anyway). Taking the time to plan, takes away from time we can spend doing stuff—regardless of whether it moves us forward. We have studies, as do others, which show tremendous improvements in productivity, results, and effectiveness by investing time in planning. Clearly, we can’t go overboard, but there is a mentality/culture in most of the business world that favors activity and speed---any motion/activity is good motion/activity over doing the right thing at the right time with the right people.

We live in a disposable society: Rather than fixing something, repairing it, tuning it, we get rid of it, replacing it with something new. As consumers, when something breaks, we throw it out and replace it with something new. As business people, when something “breaks,” we throw it out and replace it with something new. When our people don’t perform to our expectations, we replace them with someone new. When our managers don’t accomplish what we want, we replace them with something new. When our CRM system, Sales 2.0 tools, sales training don’t produce what we want, we get something new. We don’t look coach or develop people for improvement, we don’t look at processes and analyze what is wrong, correcting that, we don’t learn from our problems and look at how we can repair, tune, or fix them---even though the path to good results by doing this is probably faster and cheaper than a replacement strategy. We deal with symptoms and don’t address root problems. Fixing the symptom doesn’t eliminate the problem.

We forget the Lone Ranger really didn’t exist. We look for the silver bullet, we believe in the magic solution—whether it is weight loss, or the 10 techniques to get anybody to buy anything. We are susceptible to fads and move from fad to fad. There are no silver bullets. Business and sales is hard work. It requires passion, creativity, discipline, follow through, and learning from our mistakes. There are no shortcuts.

All that counts is results. I’m all for results—they represent the ultimate scorecard. But results are produced from strong processes, disciplined execution, and focused action. Just demanding results without looking at the root issues that impact the ability to deliver results doesn’t produce sustained improvement.

Managers aren’t leading. In all functions, managers are spending more time administering than leading. Managers get things done through their people. Their responsibility is to remove barriers to their people’s performance, coach and develop people to perform at the highest levels, developing and managing the process. Unfortunately, few managers—from the CEO down do a consistent job at doing this. Many don’t know it’s their job, many don’t have the skills to do their job. Without leadership, without management setting the expectations and the example, how can we expect sales people to raise their standard of performance. As my colleague, Christian Maurer, likes to say, the fish rots from the head.

It’s better to look good than do good. We seem to honor image more than true accomplishment. What better example than the cult of personalities led by people like Paris Hilton who have contributed nothing. By contrast, a person like Greg Mortenson is relatively unknown, yet he has had a deep impact on dozens of communities and thousands of people. This translates into our business world. Executives spend more time cultivating their personal image/brand—often hiring personal media consultant, than letting their work speak for itself. A fantastic presentation or elevator pitch, a great PowerPoint is more recognized than a simple whiteboard discussion with a customer.

We are time poor. Nobody is “fat” in business these days. To be competitive and to survive, companies must be lean (remember lean is different depending on where you are). In a world of cutbacks and layoffs, the funds and number of people available to do the work have been reduced significantly. Too few people, too few dollars, and 7/24 availability --- thanks to our Blackberry’s, have given us no time to think, plan, organize. We can only react.

There have been too many breaches of Trust. All the items above, and others I haven’t suggested have created very low levels of trust---within the organization, and even lower levels of trust across different organization. We’ve heard and seen too much focus on your personal brand. We’ve seen too many commitments broken. We’ve seen too many of the top executives rewarded for destroying the organizations they were supposed to lead.

These are problems that pervade business. They are not just sales problems, we see these issues in virtually every part of every organization. They impact how we, as sales professionals, act within our organizations and with our customers. They impact how we are perceived by our own organizations and by our customers.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3 (in case you came in on the middle of the story)

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3

Let me start with an apology, I will probably gore everyone’s ox in this post. My intention is not to pick on any group of sales professionals, but to start a discussion about the state of the profession and to stimulate ideas on how each of use—as individuals, leaders, influencers might improve the practice of the profession. I’ve actually split this post into two, Part 1 addresses issues that are primarily driven by sales. Part 2 looks at systemic business issues, beyond sales, that impact how we perform. Part 3 focuses on what we can do about these issues, both as organizations and individuals.

I hope you take the time to read and comment on all three. I may just have gone off the deep end and be mumbling nonsense, I hope you correct me (I know you will ;-)

Over the past week, there have been a number of blog posts, comments, and discussions by people like Dave Stein, Niall Devitt, Christian Maurer, Paul McCord and others touching on various aspects of professional selling and why we as a profession are not improving our effectiveness.

Dave Stein lays the groundwork, with a lot of great data on sales training programs, books, blogs, and surveys on sales effectiveness in his post How Do You Fix Sales Ineffectiveness? If you haven’t read it, you should.

Billions of dollars/euros/yuan/yen are spent by companies in sales training, tools, conferences, seminars and other things to improve the effectiveness of their sales people. As both Dave and Paul point out in their posts, everyday some new book, blog, podcast or other offering promises the “silver bullet” to improving sales performance and effectiveness.

Yet, on the other hand, several months ago, one of my posts, Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation, stirred up a huge amount of controversy and discussion with some people claiming there was little future for sales people, that customers buying processes were changing and the need or contribution of sales people was being minimized.

So where are we, what does this mean, where are we (sales professionals going), where does “fault” lie—if you want to lay blame. Some thoughts, observations:

Sales people have been the butt of jokes, complaints, and stories since through history. (I think this is a vicious conspiracy fostered by lawyers to take the heat off them.) We always will be, so why waste time on this?

The buzz words for professional sales today is “consultative,” “customer focused,” “solutions focused,” “value-based.” If only we became more consultative and customer focused, we would make the buying/selling experience more acceptable and make customer enthusiastic to see us. When I first started selling, in the late 70’s, the buzz words were “consultative,” “customer focused,”……. Nothing’s changed, so clearly we aren’t executing the practices that enable us to be customer focused.

It always intrigues me that we have continued to have this discussion about the importance of being consultative, but we have made no substantive progress in this area. It is not for lack of training programs, books, articles, testimonials. On the one hand, if we are selling and producing results without it, why bother? To those that claim this, I tend to claim you are underperforming your potential. You can sell more---more effectively, increase customer retention and grow your share of customer with consultative approaches---there is plenty of data to support this.

Consultative selling is difficult—it is disciplined, process based, and requires commitment and follow through on a sustained basis. Our focus on now (at all levels) makes this difficult. I think the issue about consultative selling is more about committed leadership than about skills development. Getting sales management to commit to integrating this into their day to day leadership style is the only way we will make substantive progress. Without this, we are wasting time and money.

Sales, by its nature, is about change. We are trying, for good or bad reasons, to get people and organizations to change. Most people are resistant to, or at least uncomfortable with change—they will tend to be resistant to the agents of change, as well. We have to live with this---maybe even revel in it. As a profession, I don’t think we talk about change management or change leadership enough. If I had to make recommendations for skills development, I would recommend something around leading change initiatives.

For too long, we have treated sales as a “black art.” We have let others wrap sales in a “mystique.” Part of this is the act of selling is usually done at a distance from the rest of the organization---it is done at our customers (Duuuuhh!). So people in the organization don’t see what we are doing. With other functions, you see people every day. You see the factories and talk to manufacturing people, you see materials going in one end and products coming out the back. It may or may not be a good process, but at least you can see something going on. You can say this about most other functions.

We as sales people have reinforced this, keeping people out of our accounts (or shepherding them in carefully orchestrated visits). We have also reinforced mystique by being less accountable for forecast accuracy and other things. “Just trust me, we’ll get a purchase order.”

Related to the previous point, we resist treating sales as a disciplined process. Recently, I have been involved in coaching a new Business Development VP. He did not have a sales background, but he was the best candidate for the job. He had a very rich and successful project management background. As you might expect, he was very concerned with his success in this role. I counseled him to think of sales as a specialized application of project management: You establish goals and objectives, you identify the critical activities to meet the goals, you set milestones and schedules to make sure you are making progress. Five months into his new role, he is well on the way to creating one of the most effective sales organizations I have encountered---all because he is applying the discipline, focus, and process orientation from his project management background to the sales organization. He has had to pick up some new terminology, some new skills (prospecting was his biggest worry, but he is doing fantastic).

While this is not new, I think we need to upgrade our thinking and skills around basic project management, process design/management, and systems thinking. All of what we do is a specialized application of those disciplines.

On a related point, much of what has been done and many of the tools in the quality movement, whether it is TQM, Six Sigma, Kaizen, or something else. These offer tremendous capability to improve performance and put discipline to what we execute.

Customers can be more informed and less knowledgeable: The internet, Web 2.0, Sales 2.0 provide the potential for customers/prospects to do much more research and to be both more knowledgeable on your products, competition and alternatives. At the same time, these tools have eliminated market entry barriers for everyone so there is a lot of crap available as well. Immediately, anybody posting a comment, writing a blog, sending a tweet, knowing how to spell www, becomes an authority.

The noise level---the stuff everyone has to sift through is skyrocketing. Will your customers take the time to sift through the pages of garbage and find good information from credible sources? Are we providing good information that is easy for the customers to find and absorb? The answer to both questions is probably not. This creates great opportunity and challenge to all sales people. The bar for performance is being raised by the sheer availability of information. The challenge to correct mis- or bad impressions is even greater. Sales people are going to have to be much more nimble in understanding and leveraging these tools, as well as making sure customers are truly, accurately, and well informed.

We have done too good a job in training our customers to have a low expectation of sales. Over the years, through our performance---pitching products rather than solving problems, focusing on the deal rather than producing value, getting the transaction done rather than building relationships---our customers have become conditioned to a lower level of buying behavior. I’ve been involved in situations where the customer just doesn’t have the time for a “value based” buying/selling process. Combine this conditioning, their natural wariness of sales people, and the fact they are time poor and pressured themselves, it creates great challenges in responding to the customer needs in a value added manner.

Let me stop here. In the next section addresses systemic business issues that overlay these issues, making the job of a sales professional even more difficult.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

Tips For Selling To Manufacturers

Thanks to the folks at TheCustomerCollective and Oracle for sponsoring a terrific eBook, Selling Through A Slump. It's a great resource for every sales professional. You really should download the eBook and use it as your playbook to help you in growing your sales within different market segments.

I was asked to write the section: Selling To Manufacturers. To tantalize you to read more in the eBook, I've published the tips I recommended below:

Selling to Manufacturers

Yes, we know the story, the manufacturing sector is had hit. Plants are closing, companies are looking to get rid of excess capacity, and no one seems to be buying. Yet manufacturers are our customers, how do we sell to them, how do we find ways of creating revenue in this sector.Let’s look at Dave’s Top 10 Tips For Selling Within The Manufacturing Sector. Actually, there are a couple of ways we can look at it---you may sell products, services, or solutions to help manufacturers design, develop, manufacture and support the products they develop. You may sell components, parts, or subassemblies that are embedded into the products the manufacturer builds. I’ll try to look at both aspects of this challenge:

1. If you normally turn right when walking in your customer’s front door, on your next visit turn left. Too often we call on the same old people all the time. Explore your customer, call on new people, new functions, new divisions. If you sold to the manufacturing/production lines, go to development/engineering, meet them and see if you can help them solve problems. If you normally dealt with a certain engineering group, call on the engineers one cubicle over, you may find new opportunities.

2. Look upstream and downstream in the process flow. If you supply products or services to support the manufacturing (or engineering design/development) processes, look at how you fit into the process. Can you extend your reach upstream or downstream to make the process more efficient and better integrated. If you supply component parts, look at the parts you connect to (Think the hip bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to ……) Can you supply those components or even a subassembly? Can you increase your part count in each product?

3. Look at key/hot issues the industry faces and present how your products/services help the customer address those issues. For example, if you can help make peanut products safe, you are gold! Are there safety issues, environmental, regulatory, compliance issues your customer must address that you can solve? Can you help them with sustainability/energy issues?

4. Leverage plant consolidation and downsizing to your advantage---and to help the customer. In shutting down plants, they have to consolidate operations into fewer facilities. This creates a whole raft of nightmarish problems for the manufacturer. How do they handle the logistics? How do they make their lines more flexible? How do they transition products? How do they do better planning/forecasting for the combined workloads? How do they better manage productivity, quality and efficiency in a smaller number of plants that are doing more. This is a terrific opportunity if you can solve those problems.

5. Make sure they are using your products and services as efficiently and effectively as possible. Are they getting the most bang for the buck/euro/yuan? Audit the use of your products/services to see they are operating and top efficiency. Look at the parts you supply, can you suggest other parts that would be more effective/efficient? This is also a terrific opportunity to look at additional services you might provide (and charge for). It’s also a terrific opportunity to educate your customers about how get the most out of your products/services making them more knowledgeable, productive, and comfortable with your offerings. In the very least, when they start buying again, they will tend to buy what they know and trust.

6. Focus on supply chain efficiency, can you wring out costs in the supply chain/procurement processes? If you supply parts, can you take over more of the logistics management headaches? They probably have gotten very lean and supply chain management may be a big problem. If you supply equipment/systems/services sometimes common tools used by suppliers help dramatically reduce costs and improve efficiency through the whole value delivery chain.

7. Ask your best customers to introduce you to their most important suppliers. If you have created great value and efficiency for your customer, it only serves them to have suppliers that that are achieving the same value and efficiency in their operations---it can reduce your customer’s costs.

8. Look at what is happening to your customers’ customers. Can you identify things that are happening there that present opportunities for your customer to grow their business---which may drive demand for your offerings? Helping your customer grow their business is the surest way to grow yours.

9. Become best friends with the finance/controller functions in your customer. Make certain you understand how they evaluate investments. Make certain you understand ROI/Payback hurdles they apply in their analysis. Look at where they are trying to take cost out of operations or how they are trying to improve the financial position of the company. Make certain you are conversant in their language and lingo.

10. Focus on rich collaboration with your customer. Become an integrated part of their team. If you sell parts, become part of their engineering and design teams to help design better products, reducing their design time and costs. If you sell equipment/systems services, look at how you establish a deeper relationship with the customer.

I’m giving you 11 instead of 10 for two reasons: First, I always try to give my customers more than they ask for. Second, prime numbers have a certain elegance—so I had to end this list on a prime number.

11. Ask your customer how you can help and listen to what they say. Sometimes, that’s all the help they need, but no one ever paid attention.

I believe opportunities abound in the manufacturing segment. Those that take advantage and dig deep will find those opportunities and succeed!

There is a lot more good stuff in this eBook, download it now: Selling Through The Slump

What's It Take To Be A Major Account Rep?

The other day, a sales person I had coached a few years ago called me up. He was getting a big promotion to handle one of his company's largest customers. He called to ask me what it took to be an outstanding major accounts rep. The guy was already a great customer focused sales person, so we didn't spend much time on those areas.

I reeled a number of thoughts off the top of my head. I know I've missed some, it would be great to have your ideas. The non-prioritized thoughts were:

1. The major account rep has to understand the customer's business better than the customer does themselves. He has to understand the customer's markets, their customer's problem/issues, the customer's competition, and other opportunities for the customer to grow and improve their business.
2. The major account rep understands how the customer's business works, including: the culture and value system of the customer, how they get things done, the formal and informal organizational structure, the strengths and weaknesses, how they measure and manage performance.
3. The major account rep consistently brings the customer ideas and opportunities to improve their business, growing top and bottom lines, growing their share and presence in the market, and ways for them to achieve their top goals and priorities.
4. The major account rep effectively brings together people within the account, serving as a bridge for people in the account to communicate with each other. Often the major account rep will know more about what's happening than the people in the account.
5. The major account rep will consistently seek to expand the breadth and depth of their relationships within the account. She will not only build relationships with executives, but also build relationships at all levels of the account.
6. The major account rep will serve as an advocate for the customer within her own company. She will make certain any customer's issues are well handled. She will make sure the account's interests are represented as the company builds its strategies, policies and solutions/products.
7. The major account rep will leverage the resources of his own company to help grow the relationships between the two companies. This includes developing peer relationships between executives in the two companies, and building relationships across all levels of the organization.
8. The major account rep consistently brings her customer business justified solutions, not only to help the customer meet their goals, but to assure the rep achieves her goals for
   her own company in growing the business. These goals include revenue, satisfaction, margin, strategic projects/initiatives, etc.
9. The major account rep is a business manager, helping both the account and his own company achieve mutually beneficial business goals.
10. The major account rep does not waste her customer's time, or the time of the people in her own company. She creates value in every interchange. The rep knows they have achieved this when the customer thinks of the rep as "one of them," and the rep's own company thinks of the rep as "one of them."
11. The major account rep leaps over tall buildings with a single bound (running starts are OK).

I know I have missed some important things, what would you add?

Selling Through A Slump

This new ebook from 11 top sales professionals and bloggers (yes, I'm putting myself in that category--at least for the moment) focuses on simple advice on Selling Through The Recession.

Sponsored by the folks at TheCustomerCollective and Oracle CRM, we look at 11 industries, providing the top 10 tips, in each, for identifying opportunities, supporting your customers and growing the business. It's simple and pragmatic advice for every sales professional.

In addition to the great advice, the eBook is Free! How can you beat that?

Download This Free eBook

Selling Through A Slump: An Industry by Industry Playbook brings together sales strategies and best practices from 11 top sales experts from 11 distinct vertical market sectors, ranging from retail to health care to telecom—because one size doesn’t always fit all. The practical tips and experience-based wisdom here aren’t just limited to any single industry, though. Regardless of your market sector, you’re bound to find value in this arsenal of great sales ideas.

Just imagine, getting advice from:

• Charles Green, Founder and CEO,Trusted Advisor Associates writing on Selling for Accountants and Consultants
• Skip Anderson, Founder, Selling to Consumers Sales Training writing on Selling for Retailers
• Mike Kujawski, Founder, Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing on Selling to Public Sector Clients
• Mike Wise, VP, Insurance Technologies, IdeaStar Incorporated writing: Selling for Insurance Agents
• Matt Homann, Founder, LexThink LLC writing about Selling for Lawyers
• Anneke Seley, Founder and CEO, PhoneWorks LLC about Selling in Health
  Care
• John Caddell, Caddell Insight Group on Selling in Telecommunications Markets
• Dave Stein, Founder and CEO,ES Research Group, Inc writing about Selling Technology
• Jill Konrath, Author, Selling to Big Companies writing about Selling in Services
• Anne Miller, Founder,Chiron Associates on Selling Media
• and last, but not least, me, Dave Brock, President and CEO, Partners in EXCELLENCE on Selling to Manufacturers .

I've found the advice from my peers useful---I've been reading and applying lessons from a pre-release version of the book.

Download This Free eBook Now!

You'll find it a worthwhile resource.

Finally, thanks to TheCustomerCollective and Oracle CRM for sponsoring this!

Where You Are Depends On Your Point Of View, A Fragile Sales Ecosystem

I've gotten a number of very positive comments on my post last week: If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Bigger Trouble!

I wanted to expand on it, and to see if I could expand the dialog in the community----meaning, Please Send Comments---regardless of where you see this, at my blog site, the Customer Collective, Sales Management 2.0, Top Sales Experts, SalesMarks, or wherever. If you are a blogger, feel free to publish this as a "guest post."

The comments confirm my thoughts in the original post. This is an important issue for all businesses, and sales can take a great leadership position. Within our companies, from the top down, we have great focus on intensifying and deepening our relationships with our customers. The motivation is clear, we want to sell more.

At the same time, the same organizations are putting the screws to their suppliers, tearing up contracts, making very tough--possibly unprofitable demands, and making survival of suppliers difficult. And the sales people for your suppliers are trying to do the same thing as you, they are tyring to establish deeper relationships with your organization.

If we force unrealistic, unprofitable conditions on our suppliers, they can no longer afford to to business with us. We may be left with those that can---and they may not be the best suppliers, you know the old story, "I'd hate to be the astronaut flying in a space vehicle assembled by the lowest price suppliers."

Now that I've teed the issue up, I have some questions:

1. As sales executives/professionals, are your company's actions to it's suppliers impacting your ability to sell and deliver quality products and services?
2. What are you/can you do to change this?
3. As a supplier, are you engaging the sales executives in your customers to help build deeper relationships?
4. Is this helping you achieve mutually beneficial results?

I'd love your feedback and anything you can do to broaden the discussion!

Delivering Happiness! Zappo's

Zappo's is one of the hottest and most innovative companies around. This is an inspirational presentations by Tony Hsieh, their CEO. There are important lessons in this for any business professional.

Zappos - Startup2Startup - 03-26-09

View more presentations from zappos.

If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Bigger Trouble!

I usually direct this blog to sales and business professionals, focusing many of the discussions on the "sell" side issues. For this post, however, I want to focus on the "buy side."

A few weeks ago in Moving Beyond Selling To Building Collaborative Relationships, I cited a PWC CEO Survey in which 71% of CEO's believed collaborative business relationships were critical with customers, yet only 40% felt these relationships were important for their suppliers?

Talk to any sales person and you will find they are being hammered in their negotiations. Talk to any business professional and they will complain about extended payment terms, returns, defaults, other things.

We're always able to talk about the great difficulty and challenges business face in working with customers, closing business, and developing true value based relationships. We seek understanding, trust and openness with our customers, so that we can sell them more stuff (I'm only being slightly sarcastic).

Yet, look at the other side of the organization, and we are treating our suppliers in the same manner. We are hammering them, making marginally tenable business deals. To respond, they are reducing service levels, may be reducing quality, reducing delivery commitments, doing everything they can to reduce their costs.

I am all for very tough negotiations and for seeking the most effectiveness and efficiency in the supply chain. But we have to recognize, if it's a bad (or even marginal) deal for our suppliers, ultimately, it will be a bad deal for us!

As a sales executive, this notion terrifies me---there goes much of the value and differentiation I provide my customers! My ability to compete plummets. As a business executive, this terrifies me, if we aren't able to design, develop, and build quality product and services, because our suppliers are reducing their service levels and commitments to us, how do we grow the business?

I am distressed by the lack of leadership and insight demonstrated by the respondents in the PWC CEO Survey/ Over 30% of the CEO's don't value their suppliers -- at least in terms of establishing close relationships! If they don't value this in the supply chain, how can they expect to develop these with their customers?

I think this is an area in which sales executives can provide some leadership within their own organization. The strength of your supply chain relationships is critical to your own growth and success.

Maybe I should end: "Do Unto Your Suppliers As You Would Have Your Customers Do Unto You."

SBWA -- Selling By Wandering Around

In their 1982 book, In Search Of Excellence, Peters and Waterman coined the acronym: MBWA - Management By Wandering Around. The thought was for managers to literally get close to customers and their people by "wandering around."

I thought it time to resurface a variant of that theme: SBWA, Selling By Wandering Around. I'm constantly amazed by how little sales professionals to this.

Too many sales people call on the same people, asking the same question, "Can I sell you anything today?" The more solutions oriented sales people will question needs and priorities, but make the same mistake of calling on the same people in the same accounts.

It's time for sales people to start wandering around in their accounts. I often tell people, if you normally turn right when you walk in the front door, next time turn left. You will discover entirely new things about your account and their needs.

Recently, I wrote about the "Big Idea." The example I cited there was an example of how a client discovered entirely new needs and applications for their products by talking to different people in the organization.

Another example, years ago, I was working with a company that made sophisticated instruments that engineers used to design and develop new high tech products. In the labs of every engineering organization you could find lots of their products. In looking at their growth strategy, we asked them, "What about manufacturing?" The initial response was, "No, our customers are engineers designing new products."

We decided to ignore this and went to talk to manufacturing people to learn what they did. Making a long story short, this client ultimately found their biggest market opportunity was not in engineering, but in manufacturing, helping to test products in the production process and at the end of the line. Unless we, and a few brave sales people, hadn't turned left instead of normally turning right, we never would have discovered this opportunity.

I could give countless examples of others that have done this and the results they produce, but you get the point. Start practicing SBWA in your accounts. Systematically, talk to new people within the accounts. Get lost wandering your customers' halls and meet new people. Learn what they do. You'll never know what you might discover.