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?

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?

Sales Managers, Use It Or Lose It.

I work with sales executives and professionals everyday. Many of the organizations have invested millions of dollars/euro/yuan/yen in tools (CRM, Sales 2.0) and training. Yet the results aren't there. The expected improvements in productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness just aren't there. What's wrong, why aren't organizations getting the results? What does it take to get real performance improvement.

At the risk of biting the hands that feed me, the problem is not with the vendors, it's even not with the sales people themselves. The problem rests with sales management.

Let me give an example. Just a couple of days ago, I met with several sales leaders for a Fortune 100 company. Over the years, they had invested millions of dollars in several sales training programs and a coaching program. I knew these programs well, they are truly outstanding programs (second only to those we offer----sorry, I had to throw that in). Yet in meeting with these leaders, they said the sales people weren't performing, they weren't spending enough time planning or in front of customers, they weren't getting the expected results from what they had done.

I expressed my surprise. I asked them: "What happens when you review opportunity, account, or territory plans with your people? What are you seeing on the templates your training company provides?" Their response, "We don't look at those, we trained the people and hope they use them, but we don't use them in our reviews."

I went on and asked, "What about your coaching? That program has some guides and templates, aren't those working for you? Are you using the review process they recommend?" I got the response I expected, but hoped not to hear, "Those are too time consuming, we squeeze coaching in when we can, but the business is too hectic. The program gave us some good concepts to think about when we do talk to our people."

These executives were seeking my recommendations about how to improve performance---and as part of that they wanted a training program and some tools that would fix the performance issues.

As much as I wanted to propose a program to them, I had to tell them, "You don't have a training problem. No training program I could recommend will address the issues that you raise. The 'fix' to this problem is easy---it's you. You need to change your behavior, you need to change how you conduct reviews, you need to start leveraging the tools you have invested in, and expect the sales people use them as well. Use what you have or lose it!"

This isn't unique to this company, I see it in too many organizations. If management isn't using the tools that have been introduced to the sales people---tools intended to improve productivity and results, why should we expect our people to use them.

Management and executives have the obligation to use and reinforce the tools, training and processes put in place to improve performance. If you don't use them, your people will never use them. It's not their problem, it's management's problem. If you don't integrate the tools, processes, training into the fabric of your business; if you don't make it a part of your daily management process, you are wasting your money and your people's time. You will not get the results you expect.

I feel bad about this opportunity, I hate turning away business. But they already had solutions in place, they just weren't using them. The 'fix' didn't require time or investment, it just required a change in management behavior.

Tomorrow, I will give another example of how easy it is for management to set a tone to drive major changes in results and to get the most out of your investments in tools, training, and processes.

Shooting From The Lip, Just In Time Sales Call Planning

I love hanging out with sales people. Most of the sales people I've met are very bright, personable, and very fast on their feet. All of those are characteristics of great sales people. They also represent a critical weakness. They make us sloppy or in the pressure of time, we tend not to prepare, relying on our experience and ability to think on our feet to make sales calls. After all, we've made 100's of calls over our careers and we're successful. We can just shoot from the lip.

Too often, planning for a sales call goes something like this:

• I'm in an elevator, thinking about the meeting I'm going to. Thank goodness it's a skyscraper in Manhattan---gives me a little more time to plan my call.
• I'm meeting with Ms. Smith at XYZ company, we've been talking about a deal, I think I'll focus on these things.
• I might stop by and do a "Howdy call" to a few people while I'm there.
• I've got a briefcase full of the latest brochures, so I can talk about anything.
• I know that Angel Cabrera won the Masters in a 3 way playoff on Sunday and that Tiger's putting was really off.
• In the worst case, we can always talk about how bad the economy.
• Elevator doors open, I'm ready for anything. I can talk my way out of any objection.

Over the years, I've interviewed thousands of sales people, inevitably, planning for most of the sales calls is pretty much like that. I talk to these same sales people after their call.

Dave: How did the call go?
Sales person: Great, we really bonded, I told them about our new products, gave them some brochures, talked a little about the deal and what they needed.
Dave: Did you accomplish all your objectives?
Sales person: I did pretty well, they really understand our product.
Dave: Did you accomplish all your objectives?
Sales person: I did pretty well. I wanted to learn if they have gotten the budget for the project, they're working on it. I'll call back in a couple of weeks and check again.
Dave: Could you have accomplished more in the call?
Sales person: (Pausing for a moment) Well we really are bonding, I can always call and arrange another meeting to get more information.
Dave: Did you forget to ask them anything?
Sales person: Well now that you mention it, I wanted to find out what they thought about the competitors. But I can always call and ask them again.
Dave: How many weeks did it take to get this meeting?
Sales person: Well Ms. Smith is very busy, it took a couple of weeks to set this meeting.
Dave: So it will take you at least a couple more weeks before you can move to the next step?

And the story can go on. Many of you may think I'm exaggerating, but think about the last 10 meetings you had---not the one's that were the final presentation to close the deal, but the meetings you have to get to that point. Do they look something like this?

In our research, we have found sales people tend to make almost 2 times the number of calls they need to make to close the deal. Lack of good planning, preparation, and poor execution lengthen the sales cycle. They cause us to make more sales calls because we forgot to get critical information, we didn't accomplish all our objectives, we could have accomplished more in the call, we were blindsided by something the customer asked.

In the example above, the failure to accomplish all they could have accomplished---because of lack of planning has caused the sales person to make at least one more call to accomplish what should have been accomplished. It will probably take at least another couple of weeks to arrange the meeting.

It's easy to see--the number of calls that are required increases dramatically. The time it takes to close a deal stretches out. This puts the deal at risk---the competitor may be moving faster, the project may be cancelled, the longer it stretches out, the greater the risk is of losing.

Imagine your own personal productivity. What if you could reduce the number of calls you make by as much as 50%? What is you could reduce the sales cycle by months? How could you use that "new found time?" To sell more? Spend more time with your family?

Before I wrap up, let's look at it from the customer point of view. They've probably had a pleasant meeting with the sales person. They may think not much was accomplished. They may think, the sales person keeps coming back to me for endless meetings.

Customers are busy people. They don't appreciate having their time wasted. One of the reasons sales people have such a difficult time getting meetings with customers is sales people waste the customers' time.

Improve the results you produce. Improve your win rate. Improve your customers' perception of you. Spend some time planning your calls. Write the plan down and use it as a guide during the meeting so you don't forget anything. When you finish the plan, ask yourself "What value am I creating for the customer in this meeting?" If you can't answer that question, you aren't prepared for the call. Cancel the meeting until you can answer that question.

A good friend of mine Dave Stein (ES Research Group) is a great fan of checklists (as a pilot he understands their importance). I am too. I've put together a call planning checklist to help me improve my results with each call. I'd be glad to send you a copy of it, just email me.

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.

Moving Beyond Selling To Building Collaborative Relationships

I'm reading Price Waterhouse Coopers 12th Annual Global CEO Survey. It has a lot of good information and I encourage you to read it. One issue that leaped out was the importance in the CEO's minds about the importance of building more collaborative strategies.

Some interesting data points:

• 57% of the CEO's agree or agreed strongly that collaborative business networks would be a defining organizational principle for business.
• 71% believed collaborative relationships are critical with customers and clients.
• About 40% believed collaborative relationships with supply chain partners was critical. (This is a disconcerting issue I will talk about later.)
  

We've always felt that developing close, collaborative relationships is critical to sales. However, to be successful in doing this requires a profound shift in the way we interact with our customers. Traditional approaches to selling will no longer be sufficient. Collaboration means a higher degree of interdependence between organizations. In partnering with our customers, we become important to each other's success and we can only be successful by working together. Partnering and collaboration demand loyalty, relationship integrity, and trust between partners.

Today, the term "partnering" is tossed around too casually by sales people and buyers alike. Rather than simply buying and selling, we talk about "partnering." Too much of the time, the focus, both by sales and buyers, is on "What's in it for me." The seller simply wants to close the deal and move on, the buyer simply wants to close the deal at the best price and move on.

Until we start looking at "What's in it for our partner," we will never be able to create real value in the partnership, and will have great difficulty in sustaining long term, loyal relationships.

I believe sales can offer a tremendous leadership in developing collaborative relationships with customers. It's interesting in the PWC survey to note CEO's have greater focus on these relationships with customers than they have with suppliers. Consequently, if we are going to develop these relationships, sales must take the initiatives.

True partnering demands a different mentality and different set of skills from sales people. I won't go into it in this post--it will be too long. I'll be glad to send you white papers, additionally, some of the thoughts are in a Selling Power article (July//August 2009) in which I am interviewed. However a good way to start thinking about developing successful collaborative relationships is to start thinking the following equation (sorry, I'm a physicist by training):

Translated, effective partnerships are a combination of : Shared Resources + Shared Risk + Shared Rewards + Shared Vision + Shared Values. Without a healthy balance of these factors, the relationship has a high risk of failing.

Collaboration and partnering---true partnering will become increasingly critical to sales. The CEO's have spoken, buyers will not drive this, so it is up to sales professionals to drive the development of these relationships.

Moving from traditional selling to true partnering requires new attitudes, skills, processes, and metrics. Sales professionals need to begin to understand these and develop the capabilities.

(For any of the materials I have referred to, please feel free to contact me at dabrock@excellenc.com, or call at +1-949-305-7146.)

Seven Lessons For Leading In A Crisis

Bill George wrote a great article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago: Seven Lessons For Leading In A Crisis. Without going into detail (read the article), the lessons are:


Lesson #1: "Leaders must face reality." My views on this are: The key issue here is to be willing to look at and tell the whole truth, including how leaders have failed. Until you face reality, your strategies are wishful thinking based on a fictional view of the organization. You won't solve your problems until you acknowledge what the real problems are.

Lesson #2: "No matter how bad things are, they will get worse." My views on this are: This is related to Lesson 1. Often, leaders can't believe things are really that bad. They tend to shoot the messenger or down play the seriousness of the issues. In doing this they never address the real issues or develop the right corrective strategies.

Lesson #3: "Build a mountain of cash, and get to the highest hill." Undoubtedly, cash is king in troubled times. At the same time, I may differ a little, I believe companies need to invest in building their future in tough times. Investments in improving efficiency and effectiveness are critical. Investments that improve your positioning and maximize the value you bring to your customers are critical. I would say: Cash and liquidity is important, but don't hoard it unnecessarily, realize that you must continue to make investments in building and improving your business.

Lesson #4: "Get the world off your shoulders." As Bill highlights in the article, I see executives tending to go into isolation, focusing superhuman efforts on rescuing the organization. Despite what we think, none of us have bid "S's" painted on our chest. The most effective path to recovery is to engage the creativity, energy, and skills of the whole team in developing and executing solutions to the organization's challenges.


Lesson #5: "Before asking others to sacrifice, first volunteer yourself." Haven't we seen enough of executives protecting themselves, at the expense of everything and everyone else in the organization? Leadership is about setting personal examples. We cannot expect people make sacrifices until they see us sacrificing as well.

Lesson #6: "Never waste a good crisis." This is great! Crisis can be an important rallying point for driving great change. When things are going well, people tend to be very resistant to change---perpetuating bad processes, practices, products, behaviors. In crisis, people recognize the need to change and rally behind it. Leverage this as an opportunity to improve.

Lesson #7: "Be aggressive in the marketplace." Organizations tend to do exactly the opposite. Companies tend to retract, they tend to be very cautious and conservative. This is the time to make aggressive moves, reset the rules of competition, re position and better serve your customers.

Surviving Through Tough Times, Things We've Learned

A client called my attention to an article that I wrote during the last downturn, the Internet Bubble. As I re-read it, it is still applicable.

The past year has created new professional and personal challenges. Almost every business faces tough new realities. Focusing their strategies and sharpening execution are the top priorities of most of the executives we work with.

I thought it useful share a few of the things we have learned with our clients or observed in the performances of other companies over the past year:

Down markets bring all past “sins” to the forefront. The robust economy of the past few years masked many poor strategies, bad decisions, and weak execution. In some cases, the companies seemed to grow almost in spite of their strategies. A bad economy and down markets immediately show the impact of bad decisions and poor execution. This economy does not forgive bad strategies. It is less important to assess blame for these failures than it is to quickly understand and correct the situation.

Time to face reality. Wishful thinking or denial are the fastest routes to failure. It’s critical to face the facts, regardless of how bad they are. Sound decision-making requires us to have the real facts and data, using them as the basis for decision-making and recovery. Get the data, understand it, and face the music.

Stopping things is more important than starting new recovery initiatives. Stopping programs that do not directly contribute to the organization’s goals is critical, but it is one of the most difficult things to do. In developing “recovery strategies,” many implement program after program, desperately seeking anything that works. Churning through programs and initiatives merely waste resources and time. In many cases, organizations have cut many people, but try to continue the work done before the cutbacks. This is impossible. The most effective strategy is to do less, stopping all but the few critical programs that produce proven results.

Focus, focus, focus. In tough times, doing the right things with the right customers at the right time is the only way to survive. Focus on the markets and customers where you produce the greatest value and return. Real value must be produced in order to motivate customers to buy. Anything that diverts the organization from its principle focus must be stopped. Remember, too, that most organizations can only effectively address a few things. Stop everything beyond the core 2-3 initiatives.

Keep it simple, go back to the basics. In implementing sales, marketing, and customer service strategies, go back to the fundamentals, execute them with perfection. For marketers: What are we offering? To whom? What distinctive value does it create? How do we communicate that simply, clearly, and in a compelling manner? For sales professionals: Are sales activity levels sufficient to produce the results we need? Do we have the most effective and efficient channels to reach the customers? Are we calling on customers that have a real need to buy and are funded? Are we making it easy for them to do business with us and buy from us? For customer service: Are we responding quickly and accurately to our customers? Are we helping them solve their problems? Are we making it easy for them to do business with us?

Give things a chance. Too often, we see organizations thrashing, making change after change, seeking the quick turnaround and the magical results. The reality is that things won’t turnaround quickly. Develop a plan, commit to it, make it work, and give it a chance. Make sure your plan provides early indicators to make sure it is on track, and make sure you correct the plan when it starts going off target. However, don’t abandon the plan before you have really given it a chance to work.

Speed counts. This sounds contradictory to some of the points made earlier, but moving quickly is critical. We have to clearly assess the situation that confronts us, develop clear and simple strategies to address the situation, execute them, measure them, and correct them. All this needs to be done at warp speed.

Leaders emerge in down times. It’s easy to manage when times are good. People get caught up in the momentum of growth and success. They are more willing to tolerate bad management. Tough times bring out the real leaders; those that inspire others even though things look bad; those that will step up to the tough decision, but do so with fairness and compassion; those that “stick it out,” not just looking for the “quick payoff.” The key is to watch who emerges as a leader, regardless of where they sit in the organization and engage them in leading the recovery.

Leadership is critical. People want strong leadership, not cheerleading. We are constantly amazed by the resilience of people facing tough circumstances. This comes only when they trust their leaders and feel the communication is honest, direct and open. Strong leaders have the confidence to communicate good and bad news to the people in the organization. They have the confidence they can develop and implement the strategies that will lead to success. They have the confidence to engage the organization in solving the problems and moving forward. They spend no time assessing blame, focusing only on solving the problem.

Cut once and cut deep. Cut very deep when you must, but do it once. Don’t get caught in incremental destructionism with round after round of reductions. This death spiral demoralizes everyone, diverts focus, resources and energy. It slows the recovery process. Jack Welch observes in his latest book: “I have never seen an organization fail because they cut too deeply.” Cutting deeply also forces the organization to re-examine everything they do, focusing on those things that can be accomplished with the resources available, rather than trying to continue everything, but with fewer people.

The light at the end of the tunnel. Leaders must have an absolute determination to do what needs to be done to achieve the objectives the company has set. Tough decisions need to be made in the face of tremendous uncertainty. There can be no wavering in their determination to survive and grow. This cannot be a blind confidence, but rather a ferocious focus on reality and commitment to guiding the organization through recovery.

Managing through tough times is difficult work. Those organizations that handle the adversity of tough times well, not only will survive, but are also laying the groundwork for strong recovery when markets and the economy grow again.

Download a PDF of this article at Surviving Through Tough Times, Things We've Learned.

Sales Manager: Stop Wasting Your Time On Coaching Meetings!

I get complaints from both sales people and managers on the topic of coaching. Sales people don't feel they are getting the coaching they need---their managers don't have time. Managers, don't feel they are providing the coaching they should---they don't have time (and they don't know how to--but that's another post).

Somehow, people have the notion that coaching is something that you do differently, it's kind of like the performance review, a specific coaching session or meeting is scheduled and the manager has to devote a certain amount of time to the "coaching meeting." The reality is the meetings are scheduled, then rescheduled, then cancelled, then combined to be part of the annual performance review.

Is that the way we should be coaching and developing our sales people (this message also applies to any other business professional--just do a global replace of sales with whatever function you manage)?

Coaching has to be integrated into the daily business. The impact of the immediacy of the feedback is phenomenal, and, pragmatically, it's the only way it gets done.

Every sales manager that I know conducts reviews. Pipeline/funnel, account, territory, deal/opportunity reviews. Usually, these are focused on the business, but sales managers miss the opportunity to use these normal reviews to coach their teams and each sales professional.

The review process is part of the normal set of activities sales professionals are involved in every day. They present the sale manager not only an opportunity to monitor the status of the business, but also to coach. In these review meetings the manager can:

1. Reinforce strategies, priorities, processes, even the use of key tools (like CRM).
2. Identify best practices within the team or individual performance and reinforce these great behaviors.
3. Identify weaknesses or disfunctional behavior and correct them.
4. Use the meetings to subtly develop new skills and capabilities by suggesting changes in approach---even discussing them in the meeting.

These review meetings are a tremendous opportunity to accomplish a lot of things, let's not just limit them to sharing information about the status of the business. (If you are interested in more information about how to leverage these reviews, we've written some white papers on these, just email me and I'll send you a copy).

Separately, managers travel with their people (or should be). These represent great opportunities to catch your people doing something right, coaching to reinforce the good behaviors and eliminating the bad behaviors. Unfortunately, the tendency is to focus exclusively on the business issues, and even worse, managers push the sales person to the side and "take over" the sales process, acting as super sales people. This usually doesn't help the deal and certainly has a negative impact on the sales person's performance.

Traveling with your people is a great opportunity to move business forward (only if you can add value that your sales people can't), and to coach and develop your sales people in real time.

Coaching is critical! The only way managers will be successful and have the impact they need is to integrate coaching into the daily business process. We need to stop the notion of scheduling specific coaching meetings and use every opportunity we have to coach our teams and people.

No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!

Well, I've got your attention with the implied profanity! Sorry about that, but we all know what I mean. We've all seen it, experienced it, even actively participated in it. We all know what is happening.

Think of the endless meetings we have, whether they are internal meetings, with customers, suppliers, and others. Everyone presents a polite face. There is an air of "superficial congeniality," seeming agreement, then the meeting ends and everyone goes off and does what they intended anyway.

It may be a passive aggressiveness, it may be an avoidance to confront and openly discuss the tough issues. It can be a fear of facing reality, or an avoidance of discussing substantive performance issues. It is group and self-deception. It is letting form triumph over substance.

Michael McKinney calls it "Living Within The Lie." Everyday, in the news we see the extreme consequences this behavior creates --- stories of catastrophic failure --- of systems, organizations, and people. Companies failing, 100's-1000's of layoffs, bailouts, and the list goes on.

Let's not let the catastrophic failures divert our attention from the fact that this happens all too often in little ways, with each of us every day. While the result may not be a catastrophic failure, in the least this behavior drives under performance, and lays the foundation for potential catastrophic failures.

Many of my formative years were spent in IBM. At the time we had something called the "contention system." It was a process to actively stimulate different ideas and approaches. It stimulated active, sometimes heated, discussion and debate. The goal was to consider many alternatives, evaluate their merits, and to emerge, with a consolidated view that everyone supported 300%. I have to admit, it didn't work all the time, but it did work most of the time.

The good news about the current economy, it that we no longer have anything to hide behind. Behaviors and practices around avoidance, confronting reality and the tough issues can no longer be masked or hidden.

The solution is simple, though hard to execute. Superficial congeniality can no longer be acceptable in any organization. This doesn't mean being impolite or mean. It requires each of us to commit to engaging each other in talking about the tough issues, not to let ourselves be fooled, not to blow people off in meetings -- leaving and doing what we want.

Until this bad behavior is reversed, it is impossible to drive and sustain real performance improvement.

Reducing the Learning Curve: Rapid Onboarding Critical to Sales Performance

Guest Post By Jeffrey Stanley, Director of Sales Excellence, AT&T Mobility


All sales managers know the problem…we’ve spent months recruiting, interviewing and hiring the right person. The great hire has started, all of a sudden management is complaining: Why aren’t they producing sales?

Or even worse, we know that we’ve made a great hire, sent them to training and assigned them a strong territory. However, after 3 or 4 months they get frustrated and leave. Not only do we have to take the time to go through the process all over again, but we have the tremendous expense and more importantly, the opportunity costs. We experience months with no coverage and lowered productivity in a critical sales territory…more months of recovering, re-building relationships, and restoring sales momentum.

It’s a nightmare every sales manager lives and in our experience, there are two root causes to this problem. The first is poor hiring; the second is that organizations do not have an adequate onboarding process.

Much has been written on hiring. However, having a focused, disciplined onboarding process is critical to success and retention. Onboarding for many companies is: “here’s your Blackberry and PC, here are your log-in’s and the bathroom is down the hall on the right”. New hires then receive some amount of product training, their territory assignment, quota and the following question…what’s your forecast for next month? And the result:

- Very long ramp times to productivity—meaning you are losing lots of business;
- Frustrated new hires, resulting in higher attrition;
- Return to go…do not collect $200…Do Not Make Your Numbers!

A proactive onboarding process rapidly assimilates new hires into the organization, makes them comfortable with their role, and gets them productive much more quickly. Sales Onboarding initiatives have demonstrated upwards of 40% improvement in productivity and an ROI within 2.5-3 months.

Regardless of whether your company has an extensive new hire development program, there are some best practices that will help with new hire onboarding, productivity and reduced attrition:

1. New hire onboarding needs to be well thought out and effectively communicated. Document “administrative” onboarding activities (id, systems access, laptop, mobile device, contact lists etc…) and timelines associated with each. Arrange for administrative onboarding items as soon as SLA’s will allow. The more transparent this part of the process, the more quickly a new hire can feel comfortable with the new position and focus in on their development. This helps set the tone in your relationship as a coach and advocate with the new hire.

2. Clearly communicate your expectation of the new hire, as well as the onboarding process. Define skill requirements, sales systems, processes, activities, resources and associated timelines within new hire lifecycle. Determine how this relates to the ramp to full-quota and what is the plan to get there?

3. Utilize the diverse resources that are available to you including: HR, formal training programs, web resources, subject matter experts and multiple levels of leadership. Expose the new hire to company resources, strategic partners and senior executives to better enable their understanding of the “big picture” and provide a model for success in the new organization.

4. Engage the new hire in his or her development. Use an internal assessment if available. If not, get their input as to the level of expertise in certain skill areas. But beware of biased self assessments…validate with observable coaching.

5. Assign a mentor to help a new hire navigate and prioritize their way through the company.

6. Conduct regular 1on1’s with your new hires. Be honest in your assessment of their progress and openly address any issues and concerns. Consistently review activity, sales funnel, performance metrics and expectations vs. results.

7. Start formal and informal training early in the new hire’s lifecycle. Don’t send your seller off to new hire training 5 or 6 months after they have started. At that point they are most likely (hopefully) too engrained in deals and customer engagements to truly benefit from new hire training. Along the same lines, drive your training organization to develop a curriculum that is appropriate to your sellers and your sales process.

8. Develop an understanding of what is and isn’t covered in the new hire curriculum and to what degree. Reinforce and inspect where necessary and work with your new hire to create an individual development plan to reinforce and complement formal training.

9. Make territory planning and reviews a high-priority with the new hire. This ensures an understanding of their module and agreement on the prospecting strategy. It also will help eliminate excuses of inequitable territory assignment should there be sub-par performance.

10. Make onboarding one of your top priorities. If you feel like other sales and operational imperatives make this an impossibility, then perhaps you should consider creating an “Onboarding Sales Manager” who would assume management and developmental responsibility for new hires in their first 4-6 months; ensuring a focus on the fundamental skills, practices, processes and systems necessary for a new hire’s success.

Don’t leave the onboarding of your new hire’s to chance. Manage the entire process proactively and you will reduce the time to productivity and maximize retention.

Jeff Stanley has 20 years sales and management experience focused on telecommunications and outsourcing. Questions and comments can be directed to j-stanley@comcast.net.

What's Your Question To Comments Ratio?

Great post at Art Petty's Management Excellence Blog. It speaks to the issue that too many leaders -- and I would expand that to business professionals, tend to talk too much and question---listen---probe too little. The Question To Comments ratio concept is fantastic!

Take the time to read and practice his advice!

Vicious Disqualification Is Critical For Sales In A Down Economy!

Yesterday, I spent time with the sales management team of a large corporation reviewing their funnel. I noticed something very important, the quality of the deals in the funnel had declined significantly.

It seems, as things were getting tougher, management was pushing sales to "go out and get more deals!" In an effort to keep their funnels full, the sales people were chasing bad deals. They were deals in which the customer had no real interest, urgency, or funding to go forward with a project. Deals in which my client's solutions were marginally competitive. Deals that were the wishful thinking of hungry sales people.

We had a long discussion about the topic: Is it better to have a high quality, but lean funnel, or is it better to have a full funnel of lower quality. We quickly concluded that, particularly in tough time, maintaining the quality of the funnel, was critical. Some of the reasons include:

• The lower quality deals have significantly lower win rates, yet consume significantly more sales, pre-sales, and management time.
• The few times those deals were won, the cost of supporting those customers was much higher. Customer satisfaction was significantly lower--impacting the perception of my client in the market, customer support costs were higher, decreasing profitability, and too much sales and management time was involved in dealing with these situations.
• The "inflated" funnel set the wrong expectation in the business. Management could not really determine the real performance or expected performance of the sales organization and the gap to plan. Consequently, they were not implementing the right recovery strategies.
• The time spent chasing bad deals, robbed the time sales people have to prospect and find quality deals. They were missing good opportunities, simply because they were spending too much time managing low quality opportunities.

Maintaining a quality funnel in very tough economic times takes courage, but it is the only way sales professionals and management can optimize their business results. No individual or organization can afford to waste any time or resource on non-productive activities. Maintaining or increasing the quality of the funnel, is critical to maximizing results and sales productivity.

The fastest way to increase sales productivity and building quality funnels is to get sales people to focus on vicious disqualification. They must focus on deals where customers have an urgent need--in today's economy, organizations will only invest in the most urgent, highest return areas. Sales must focus on deals that hit their organization's sweet spot---these are deals that have a higher probability of winning. There may be real deals out there, but if they don't fit your capabilities and sweet spot, you probably have little chance of winning them.

If sales people focus on vicious disqualification, the quality of the funnel will improve dramatically. Win rates and productivity will soar. Management will be able to accurately forecast the state of the business and develop strategies to address gaps. Sales people, with lean, but quality funnels will have more time freed up to prospect and find more quality deals.

It may seem counter intuitive, but vicious disqualification and the highest quality funnels are the best way to maximize business and profitability in a down economy. Your thoughts?

It's All About Trust

I've been reading and thinking a lot about trust recently. Everyday, the news brings more reports of breaches of trust. The leaders and institutions I have thought I could trust have failed.

All around, I see erosions of trust---little things, here and there, a commitment made and missed, a confidence betrayed, selfish or thoughtless actions. A close business friend took many months to pay a large invoice and decommitted on a project, in the middle of the project --- costing me thousands of dollars. He has told my how badly he feels, but it was a rather large betrayal. Another friend made a commitment to meet with a major client --- then backed out at the last minute. In reality, none of these was malicious, but each represented a lowering of standards by these individuals I had trusted.

I was starting to feel a little down about things, almost feeling like pointing a finger and blaming all the people that were no longer trustworthy. Then I start to think, am I trustworthy? In the everyday rush of business, have I started to lower my standards? Am I starting to betray trusts, unconsciously, and certainly not maliciously, but am I no longer trustworthy.

I thought of the colleague that, over the past several weeks has left several telephone messages --- I've failed to return a single one. I'm embarrassed and ashamed, my standard it to return every call within 24 hours. I thought of the report a client was waiting for, I delivered it several days after I had committed it. I had good reasons --- maybe excuses, but I still caused him great difficulty in meeting commitments he made to others.

I've made a decision, I can't control what others do, but I can commit to being trustworthy. I where I have betrayed trust, I must start to repair it. If I start taking personal responsibility for being trustworthy ... and someone else (perhaps someone reading this article) ... and someone else ... and so on, collectively we might make a difference.

Several years ago, Stephen R. Covey, wrote a great book, The Speed Of Trust. I've been re-reading it recently. It's a powerful and important guide. Everyone should read it.

In the end trust starts with me, I can't be angry or bitter about others. I have to focus on being trustworthy, I know it will have an impact on me, perhaps it will on others.

Resistance To Change

Thanks to Art Petty for calling attention to the excellent column in Quality Digest by James Harrington, Managing Resistance To Change. The article is very good. Some of the barriers he cites include:

• An unclear vision that causes confusion

• A history of poor implementation

• No consequence-management system developed to accompany the change

• Too little time to implement the change

• Lack of synergy

There are a number of other reasons that people resist change, but it is important to recognize this resistance as natural. The moment leaders start thinking "What's wrong with them?" the change efforts will fail.

Underestimating people's natural resistance to change is precisely what derails a lot of business strategies and initiatives. Ignoring this, failing to recognize the legitimacy of people's resistance to change, or using a "sledgehammer" to impose change will create the opposite of the intended results.

One of the key jobs of leaders is managing change. This means effective leaders must manage people's resistance to change---they must prepare the organization for change, communicate and reinforce the goals, reasons, and people's roles and responsibilities in contributing to the change efforts. Without this, it will take longer, cost more, produce less.

The Arrogance Of Success

Success masks all sorts of problems and challenges. In the past couple of months, we have been deluged with reports of dramatic failures of all sorts of businesses and organizations --- many of which were the benchmarks of success just a year ago.

While the housing, finance, and automotive industries seem to be the most visible,there are very visible examples in every sector.

We all strive for success, frankly it brings on such a rush. The rush keeps us pushing for more success. At some point, however, too many of us are seduced by success. We forget the hard work, focus, discipline and other things that caused us to be successful.

Many times, we stop listening, we stop learning, we start to think we can do no wrong. In many growing, successful organizations, I also see the newcomers or hangers on -- those who have had no hand in the original success, but now because they are part of a very successful organization, think they are successful and can do no wrong.

The blindness and arrogance the success creates can be devastating to individuals and organizations. It's important that all successful people not be seduced by this. It's great to be proud of success, but at the same time we can't become complacent or overconfident.

It seems to me that all successful people and organizations need to maintain some level of paranoia (Andy Grove was right!) and humility. We have to remain dissatisfied and hungry. We have to continue to listen and learn. We have to look around at others, we have to examine ourselves and continues to change and grow.

I am a great admirer of Jim Estill. Recently, he wrote a blog on this topic -- the Paradox of Success. Jim provides great insight and clarity on this topic.

First Rule Of Management: Stop Whining, Take Responsbility.

Jeffrey Pfeffer has a very nice column in the Wall Street Journal: Woes? Executive, Blame Thyself. There are several very interesting points:

1. It is typical for executives to blame outside-uncontrollable causes (the economy, etc.). Research shows that companies that blame poor results on internal controllable factors see greater subsequent stock appreciation than those who blamed their problems on external factors. Apparently the market appreciates executives taking responsibility for identifying and addressing challenges.

2. Pfeffer identifies the First Rule Of Management: Don't act like a victim. There are always things you can do to make things better. So stop whining and take responsibility.

The article goes on to examine issues about identifying what the real problem is and how to address them, providing examples of both good and bad practice---using the usual suspects. It's good to read!

Seven Ways To Fail Big

I'm still rolling the conclusions of Paul Carroll's and Chunka Mui's HBR article: Seven Ways To Fail Big, around in my mind. The article is very interesting, based on research they have done on 750 business failures.

They claim that nearly half could have been avoided (not surprising), and that the avoidable failures were primarily the result of flawed business strategies, not poor execution (somewhat surprising).

They summarize seven key reasons: The Synergy Mirage, Faulty Financial Engineering, Stubbornly Staying The Course, Pseudo-Adjacency's, Bets On The Wrong Technology, Rushing To Consolidate, Roll-ups Of Almost Any Kind. Each reason is accompanied with case studies illustrating the point.

The article is provocative and stimulates thinking. While, it is worth reading and there are good lessons to be learned, I questioned the research methodology somewhat. It appears to be primarily based on secondary research (news coverage, case studies, other document) rather than primary research (interviews and in depth original research).

For several of the cases they highlight, we have some insight that would not be readily available in public information. In those cases, extremely poor execution, lack of commitment to the strategy, and other factors were also key factors to the failures. However, I may be nit picking with a "chicken-egg" argument.

In spite of being slightly troubled with the analysis, the article is certainly worth reading.

Letting Form Triumph Over Substance

John Gardner book, EXCELLENCE, published in 1961 is an inspirational book. One line in the book has always stuck with me:

"Do not let form triumph over substance."

It's a constant reminder to me, and refocuses me, particularly when I get caught into motions and activity.

I sometimes get discouraged, I see so much effort going into form: Saying the right words, writing the proper letter/email, having the right action plan/project plan, doing the right meetings, having the right appearance. On the surface, everything is polished, professional, things look fantastic.

Dig a little bit, and you find nothing behind it. People move from meeting to meeting, forgetting the action plans and commitments they have made. They move from conversation to conversation, crisis to crisis. They have meetings and conversations about things that haven't been done, agree to do those things, then have more meetings and conversations about why those things weren't done.

In the end, it's all been done in the right form, there's been a lot of activity that we can point to proudly, but nothing is accomplished.

We all get caught up in this behavior, it is seductive, easy to succumb to. I look at myself and see all the things where I have done and said the right, astute, insightful things, but not stepped up to the follow through and creating real meaning and substance behind this. In the end, it's just lip service.

I need to constantly remind myself to do a little less, talk a little less, meet a little less, but execute and create real substance and meaning in those things that I do