Let’s acknowledge that different sales roles have different definitions of productivity. For example; the transactional sales rep selling local advertising with a quota of two sales per week will have a very different schedule than a long-term consultative sales rep selling an expensive piece of technology.

Different types of sellers, different characteristics to their productivity. Demanding a rep with a sales cycle of two years to close deals more quickly probably won’t result in more sales. More likely, it will annoy the potential customers and send your rep looking for another job.

So how can you define productivity in your organization and differentiate it between sales roles?

We worked with a company that recently made a change to build more of an account management focused organization because so many of their people concentrated on just hunting.

But they were in a new market, and both management and the reps were a little disoriented. So, in order to help the reps, the managers temporarily took over the selling. They broke the market, did the major hunting, and passed it along to the reps for account management.

“We said, ‘We’ll go find the customers, we’ll develop the pattern, how they buy, what the customer looks like, persona, cycle,’ everything,” said the vice president of marketing for the company. “And we’ll train the salesman. We will get the first order, we’ll teach you how to do the second order, and then you’re on your own for the third order.”

“We built a war room down on the first floor and started going through this whole process of building this together. The reps wanted to know what we were doing in there, and we said, ‘You focus on the day job. Don’t try to create this new market. Because then, you’ll lose focus, you won’t make quota, and we will go broke as a company.’

“So, we said, ‘We’ll teach you how to do this and add it to your portfolio.’

“There were questions like, ‘Will I lose quota? Will you take business from me?’ So, we had to work through all of those territorial things that we as sales people like to hold on to.”

It was an interesting concept. This company, a major technology company, didn’t put the salesperson out and say, “Go develop the business in this particular area.” They prepared it for them. They went through the process with them, and then repeated it, and let them catch on that way.

“We knew that the first time we were going to get our nose bloodied. We had to understand how the deal happened,” he said. “There were things we didn’t understand when we got started. Our sales guys got chewed up. We figured out what the pattern was, and learned that we had to develop it, and then hand it off to that organization.”

How well would a practice like that work in your organization?

To learn more, visit SalesGlobe or register for one of our complimentary webinars.

We all want to please our customers. But how many of us regularly ask them exactly what they want, versus assuming we know how to please them and proceed about our merry way?

Several years ago SalesGlobe hosted a panel discussion about selling to strategic accounts, and one panelist, who had sold to a major grocery chain for years, recalled the impact of hearing the following sentence:

“You know Tom, it’s great when you sell to us how you want to sell to us. But it’s even better when you sell to us how we want to buy.”

 Simple, yet transformative.

How do you evaluate customers and understand what they are looking for? The goal is to use customer information to become a more productive sales organization. How do you look at the market and where it’s headed for competitors? Are there ways of getting insider information that can improve business results, either in terms of the metrics we’re looking at or what we’re hearing back from customers?

Of course, the more we can partner with our customers the more we can drive productivity together. Partnerships and productivity gains are interwoven. At every front, to listen to the customer – logistics, processing, procurement, billing. Partnering in any way possible to create solutions together will improve our productivity and continue to provide great service. Opening up the entire organization from every functional expert to become more efficient for your customer will help you be successful together.

A client we worked with recently held a partner conference to better understand the needs of their customers. They gathered the CIOs of their top 13 customers into one city for two days. The goal was to listen to their customers and understand not only what the sales people are hearing the market, but why they’re hearing it.

Many companies get voice of the customer in pieces and parts, but we have to amass that information. Once amassed, analyze it for patterns and movements in terms of what we’re missing relative to customer expectations. Why are we losing deals and why are we winning deals?

What practical methods have you found for gathering customer insight and using it to drive productivity?

To learn more visit SalesGlobe.

Sales productivity doesn’t exist in isolation. A sales organization can’t move forward (and in fact can spend lots of time moving in circles) unless its sales strategy, sales coverage model, and sales enablement methods are all well aligned. Before you start calling on customers, ensure the high-level picture is complete with the following checklist:

 1. Insight. The sales organization must understand what’s happening in the market, especially concerning their competitors and customers. Insight can be gathered through forensics on deals won or lost, and by analyzing what we might do better next time. This information is especially valuable if we uncover a pattern within the sales organization of not meeting customer needs or a gap between their expectations and our delivery.

 2. Sales capacity. Sales capacity refers to how efficient we are with the resources we have, and asks how we can maximize their capability through alignment, focus, and sales process. What are our job roles? One very effective method of increasing sales capacity is to decontaminate sales jobs and open up more sales time. Sales capacity is also improved through shifting and lifting jobs: moving some people to cover high priority customers with strategic selling while we ask other roles to focus on transactional selling.

 3. An actionable strategy. Sales strategy defines a clear plan for how the organization can achieve its sales goals. How do we convert our overall business strategy to the sales organization? How do we translate that strategy into day-to-day tactics, and help the reps understand what they’re supposed to do Monday morning when they go out and start  calling on customers? The most sophisticated strategy in the world won’t work unless it can function well on the front line.

 4. Account planning. Defining sales productivity also means understanding our actions that are counter-productive. It is not productive to spend a day (or several days) documenting facts, figures, and guesswork about customers and then shelving it for six months. Account plans that are not used in the daily or weekly management of customers are a waste of time. How can we turn our account plans into living account plans, and use them not only to record critical information but as a basis for coaching?

 5. Sales compensation. Incentive pay can certainly be used to motivate productivity in individuals. The opposite is true, too; people incented to do the wrong thing can lead to an unproductive sales organization as a best case scenario, all the way to a sales organization confidently charging in the wrong direction, as a worst case. Short term incentives including SPIFFs are another way to motivate productivity.

 6. Pipeline. Over the last few years, pipeline management has become much more efficient. This is in part due to the need for more effective lead management in a challenging environment and better application of CRM tools.

 Need help getting greater productivity from your sales organization? We can help here. To learn more, visit SalesGlobe.

For the first time in US history, four generations are working side by side, representing a 50-year age and experience span. On the upside, companies benefit from the range of experience and unique views those decades provide. On the downside, each generation has varying cultural and motivational expectations driving their work ethic and behavior.

You might find some of these defining characteristics in your sales organization:

• The Traditionalist (born between 1927 and 1945). Punctual and conservative, he survived the Great Depression and a world war and believes hard work is its own reward.
• The Baby Boomer (born between 1946 and 1964). Well-established, loyal and work-centric, he values face time in the office rather than work/life balance.
• The Generation X-er (born between 1965 and early 1980s). Witnessed the burnout of his parents; hardworking and ambitious, he prefers to set his own hours and values freedom, autonomy, and family time.
• The Generation Y-er (born in 1980 or later). Smart, creative, optimistic and tech-savvy, she is a multi-tasker who prefers technology over face-to-face interactions. Don’t waste her time making her come to your office.

The challenge is, of course, to aligning these generations toward a common sales goal; and  motivating and retaining talent in each of the generational groups to give your company a talent and performance edge. 

It’s important to start with some insight:

• Understand who’s in your sales organization.
• Recognize the factors that matter most when managing the generations.
• Prevent traditionalist, authoritative management from wreaking havoc on Gen Y achievements.
• Enable each generation in a larger sales strategy context.
• Recruit and retain the talent that you need.
• Set expectations and create effective incentives for each generation.
• Understand how coaching and development can help the generations to work together.

To learn more, visit SalesGlobe.

Sales is no longer just about the product. It’s about the entire customer experience. Consider how companies like Starbucks and Apple have differentiated their brands: it’s not just the coffee; it’s the personalized service and welcoming environment. It’s not just the computers; it’s the opportunity to schedule an appointment with a concierge to learn about the latest and coolest technology. These interactions didn’t happen accidentally – they have been designed in a highly creative way.

Your organization, by plan or by default, creates a customer experience. Your customers, in turn, respond to that experience with their loyalty (retention revenue), growth (penetration revenue), and referral of new customers (acquisition revenue).

We’re offering a free webinar that will focus on methods to evaluate the current experiences of your customers, and implement creative ways to improve those interactions and differentiate your organization. Attendees will learn how to advance customer connections from Interaction, to Engagement, to Relationship.

SalesGlobe and The Sales Leadership Forum are pleased to sponsor this complimentary webinar session featuring Mark Donnolo, Managing Partner of SalesGlobe, and Ron Cox, CEO of Tailwind Consulting and former CEO of Acclivus and AchieveGlobal.

Topics we will address include:

• Customer experience within a larger sales strategy context.
• Understanding how customers see your organization.
• Understanding how your customers respond to the experiences you currently create.
• Identifying all of your customer touch points.
• Building a set of planned interactions across all of those touch points.
• Leveraging the creative process to create a distinct and differentiating environment for your customers. 
• Customer experience within a larger sales strategy context.
• Customer behavior assessment  – Understanding how customers value your organization by how they behave.
• Clue analysis – Identifying critical clues to indicate how you might improve.
• Designing the right customer experience.
• Building a set of planned interactions across your key touch points.
• Creating a consistent experience across your sales organization.
• Leveraging the creative process to create a distinct and differentiating environment for your customers. 

Register here today. Or, to learn more, visit SalesGlobe.

Sales training and development can make or break an organization. Whether auditing your existing program or designing something from scratch, it doesn’t have to be hard. We recommend the following five key points:

1. Leadership must make the mandate for coaching clear. If coaching is not a priority in the organization, it will only be conducted by those who are interested. Many of the top performing sales organizations around the world require that their managers spend target amounts of time weekly on coaching. To ingrain the process in the organization some companies will go as far as requiring managers to post their coaching time on a public calendar, making it visible to the organization. Like most business priorities, coaching has to be viewed as essential by leadership in order for managers to make it a priority in their own jobs.

2. Build a coaching program and methodology that fits your organization. Using a standard coaching program – one off the shelf or one being used by another company – is certain to fail. A program that is a good fit for one organization may be a poor fit for your organization. Determine the priorities for your coaching program. Understand from a customer perspective where your weak points are and engage your leadership team in developing the right program for your business.

 3.      Decontaminate your management roles and your sales roles. One of the greatest robbers of coaching effectiveness is lack of time. Define the top three to four critical roles for your sales managers. Make coaching one of those critical roles and determine the amount of time managers should spend on coaching. Identify any other roles – good or bad – that managers play or tasks that managers conduct and perform a value-added analysis on those tasks. For low value tasks for the manager, either eliminate those tasks or shift them to the right resource to make time available for coaching. Conduct the same type of decontamination process for sales roles to increase their available time to sell. The average organization spends 50% of time selling. Identify your actual performance and set an achievable improvement objective.

4.      Lead ongoing deal level coaching with the team to challenge thinking. Take coaching down to the micro level, developing strategies for key customer pursuits. Use the sales pipeline as more than a review tool and leverage it for coaching. This can provide new accountability for pipeline management and challenge thinking around specific deals. It is also effective for collaboration between the sales rep and the sales manager so that coaching has a purpose and an objective: to close the deal.

5.      Make the process transparent and measurable, including deal forensics, win/loss analysis, and living account planning. What gets measured gets accomplished. If you are not measuring the effectiveness of your coaching program, you risk missing some significant returns. Key to transparency and measurement are tools that provide customer responsive information to coach with. Deal forensics or win/loss analysis looks at major lost deals from the customer perspective and why we lost them. It helps us identify areas for improvement that can be used for coaching the sales team and making strategy changes in the organization as a whole. Living account planning takes the stagnant account plan off the shelf and assigns a process and goals to working the account plan on a weekly basis. The living account plan can be used by managers as a coaching tool to set objectives, track reps according to attainment of those objectives, and coach them to improve their results.

For guidance or help on building your coaching program or coaching your managers and reps to a higher level of sales performance, continue the conversation or visit SalesGlobe.

Sales training and development can be a little bit like eating your vegetables. Or exercising. You know it’s the right thing to do, but the excuses are so easy and there’s never enough time.

But as 2012 kicks off there’s really no better way for sales organizations to achieve goals than through coaching.

It’s a critical role for sales managers. Despite its importance, however, it’s under-practiced in many organizations. Sales managers don’t coach for one of two reasons; they don’t have the time, or they don’t know how to do it. But balancing out the role between sales and sales management is crucial to allow bandwidth for coaching time, and setting priorities for sales managers is the first step.

Most companies realize how important sales coaching is. In a recent survey conducted by The Sales Leadership Forum, 84% of companies perceive coaching as either “very important” or “one of the most important factors of sales success” for their organizations. But are sales organizations really interested in doing the work? Surprisingly, although sales people often take a cynical view of training, most sales people are open-minded when it comes to coaching and development that contributes to their success. In fact, 75% of sales leaders see their organizations as receptive to coaching.

If coaching and development are important, what are the benefits? Many of these same companies (44%) aren’t clear on the benefits and don’t measure the effectiveness of their sales coaching programs. Of those who do measure the effectiveness of coaching, the top benefits they see from their coaching programs are:

• ·         an increase in sales productivity per rep
• ·         an increase in close rates
• ·         an increase in their ability to cross sell or sell complex solutions or complex products
• ·         an increase in revenue or profits.

In terms of ROI, about half of companies (48%) report that they get a return greater than their investment in coaching and development, or a return multiples greater than their investment. And an additional 32% of companies at least recover their costs from coaching. 

Companies report several challenges in measuring the return on investment in their coaching programs. For example, on the “investment” side of the ROI calculation, coaching in many organizations is conducted informally at the manager level and is not practiced consistently in the field. This makes it difficult to measure the actual resources, both hard and soft dollars, invested in coaching. Also, coaching is often blended with other management roles and not clearly tracked by the organization. 

On the “return” side of the ROI calculation, the outcome from coaching is not always clear or near-term. While productivity levels and close rates may appear to be clear metrics for coaching success, those metrics may be driven by other organization and market factors in addition to the coaching program. Improvements in sales capability can develop over time as well. For instance, learning more effective methods for developing the business case and value proposition for strategic accounts may yield results months later when those opportunities naturally present themselves over a long sales process. While the effect of coaching is there, its impact may be latent for some period of time.

How much should a sales manager focus on sales coaching? When we ask managers about how much time they spend on coaching versus other activities in their role, we often get a puzzled look as they think about their range of responsibilities. The fact is spending time on coaching is a challenge for most managers. From the sales executive perspective most leaders (63%) think their sales managers should spend between 30% and 40% of their time on coaching.

But the reality is most sales managers spend less than 20% of their time coaching. That statistic illustrates a gap of about 60% between how much time managers should spend coaching their organizations and how much time they’re actually spending. Such a large disparity may indicate that the message isn’t getting through from executives to managers.

That gap leads to the question of why managers spend so little time actually coaching. One of the biggest challenges we see in both sales management jobs and sales jobs is the time available to focus on their core responsibilities, whether they are selling or sales management. If coaching is a major priority for sales managers, then a premium portion of their time should be dedicated to coaching. That’s not the case. In fact, the top reason companies cite for sales managers not spending more time coaching their teams is they have other management responsibilities that take too much of their time.

A full 70% of companies say that sales managers are held back from coaching because they are too busy with other aspects of their job not always related to sales or sales management. A deeper look reveals that many of these responsibilities are administrative or operational in nature – responsibilities that do not have a direct impact on either revenue growth or development of the team that produces revenue.

Forty-seven percent of companies say that managers are not able to coach because other sales responsibilities take too much time. While more productive than administrative or operations activities, this indicates that many sales managers are actually selling rather than coaching. A clearly defined “selling sales manager” job may indeed have both management and selling responsibilities – a hybrid role used occasionally that is typically not as effective as a true sales manager. This allocation of sales manager time begs the question: What is the role of the sales manager? Is it managing or is it selling? High performing sales organizations understand that they gain a greater revenue impact from managers focused on coaching their teams to sell than from sales managers selling directly.

Time constraints can take another form. Forty percent of companies said that sales managers just do not make the time to effectively coach, meaning they are finding other things to do with their time. Perhaps they are even deliberately avoiding that ominous task.

We know from our research and our work at The Sales Leadership Forum and SalesGlobe that a big part of coaching comes down to the priorities of the organization. About one in seven companies (14%) do not require their sales managers to do any kind of coaching or development. If coaching is not a requirement of the organization, other responsibilities – whether they are selling or administration – will always take the front seat.

Beyond time, the other top barriers are around knowledge and importance. Forty-four percent of companies said managers do not know how to coach effectively. Therefore, even if they are given the time they do not know what to do with that time. Another 19% said they do not have a methodology for managers to use when they have time to coach.

To learn more visit SalesGlobe.

A former vice president at a major office supply company recently talked to us about targeting and segmenting her customers for the sales organization.

Below is some of her wisdom and advice:

“We tried to help our sales people understand where they could get the best return. It was pretty scientific actually.   We found a way to design potential by customer size, by territory.  Really, it’s sitting down there, and it’s not glamorous.  It’s a lot of sweat equity as you figure out what the territories need to look like and then actually measuring people against that potential.  You get people who say, ‘My potential is not very good.’ Too bad.  You’ve got to get people to understand where you are going. Then they can change and you manage according to potential. 

We took a look at the geography, understood the customer that was set within that geography, understood what the buying habits were of the potential customer set within that group and then applied that to territory design. 

“It also spoke to organizational design because we had overlay organizations.  Everybody was a generalist and we had to determine what levels of productivity we could see improve with some specialization.  There was a need to get some specialization in the organization – - people who could hunt, people who could farm, education people, government people where buying cycles and purchasing patterns are unique and procurement policies are different. 

“But you can take that too far, and I think that’s what happened.  I would caution people to try to step back every once in a while and look at the whole forest, because those trees get in there and get you kind of confused sometimes. Eventually we knew we had gone too far. It happened over time. We got away from a sales operating perspective.  We didn’t keep a focus on ensuring that it remained clean and pure, so we ended up with all of these overlay organizations. People would tell me, ‘This is my sales territory and I’m the business development manager of this territory and, oh by the way, here’s my partner from the education sector, my partner from the government sector, my partner from copy and print, etc.’  There became so many segments that it became diluted. The cost of sales needed to be examined more closely than what it was.”

To learn more visit SalesGlobe; look for SalesGlobe’s upcoming white paper on Sales Productivity.

O

 So she went to the CEO. “What’s with all of these posters?” she asked.

 “Aren’t they great?” said the CEO with a proud grin.

 “No,” said the woman. “Every customer is not a good customer. We have to take them down. We have to take them down now.”

 It’s a common misperception. Since we all want more customers, it’s natural to assume all customers are good customers and therefore we should do everything we can to make them happy. But it’s also a way to dig yourself into a losing situation.

 One way to prevent a relationship with a losing customer through targeting or segmentation.

 Targeting customers is a practical way to look at customers differently, and can help us to concentrate in some better places.  If we’re going to line our resources up in a place, how do you know where to put them?  It’s about understanding a new market and finding the right customers in that market.  The product or service you are offering is the same, but the customer’s needs might be different. Understand what that customer’s business problem is, how they’re thinking about the problem and how you can address it. 

Do you agree or disagree that “Every Customer Every Time” is a bad idea?

To learn more visit SalesGlobe.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of business communications is the timing. You’re always behind the 8-ball. So much of communication is formally announcing what people already know thanks to the rumor mill and the water cooler.

 So there’s a natural pause. “Do I really need to announce to my sales team that we’re redesigning territories? They already know it.” But avoiding that formal announcement is a mistake: it’s a missed opportunity to frame the change in positive language and directly address the natural fears associated with change.

 Before you talk yourself out directly communicating to your sales team what to expect with their new sales comp plan or job roles, consider making time for an “assessment phase” to do the following:

1. Send a clear message from leadership making a compelling case for why change is necessary now.

2. Gather input from the people who will be most affected by the new sales comp plan or territory redesign (or other change) through formal or informal interviews and/or mini-surveys.

Whether rumors have begun flying about an expected change, or you’ve just noticed a few fearful glances around the office, beginning effective communication early will usually garner a greater percentage of buy-in from people who feel they’ve been heard.

To learn more, register for SalesGlobe’s free webinar, Implementing and Communicating the Sales Comp Plan on December 13, or visit SalesGlobe or The Sales Leadership Forum.