You know how difficult it is today to secure funding for new six figure initiatives.  There was a time when sales and marketing organizations could count on having a budget available every year to invest in developing their teams.  They enjoyed having the autonomy to use their budget when and how they decided was best.  Not today.  Even if they have budgets available, marketing and sales executives still face tons of scrutiny from their CFO and peers on just about every line item of expense and investments they make.   With this in mind, I plan to share some stories fresh from the front lines about executives who are making decisions to invest in sales enablement and talk about why those investment decisions are getting approved – even in today’s brutal world of tight budgets. 

One of our recent clients is a West Coast software company with a global team of 325 employees and $85 million in revenue.  Their marketing and sales management teams, all relatively new in their roles, are engaged in competitive battles on multiple fronts.  Their top competitor is the big elephant in their market space with 60% market share.  Their market share has shrunk to just 15%.  At the same time, they are battling with an emerging threat at the low end of their market – Google.  Taking a page from Microsoft’s playbook, Google is trying to rapidly commoditize our client’s products by offering their own version of a similar product for FREE. 

 With this kind of competitive muscle coming from both the high end and the low end, our client had some tough strategy decisions to make.  Their decision?  CHANGE THE GAME.  With a major new release of their core software platform ready to be released, their standard operating procedure was to bring the sales force together and listen to product gurus rave about all the new functionality.  This time, however, they boldly decided to take a different direction.  Working closely with their DSG consultants, the leadership team chose to transform the way they positioned their company and their customer value proposition.  They understood this could not be accomplished by a slick ad campaign.  The battle would be won or lost one customer conversation at a time.  A new, compelling message had to be created that would differentiate the company’svalue proposition from fierce competitors, and the inside and outside sales teams had to be trained to deliver it confidently and flawlessly.  To survive, the sales team had to learn how to morph from selling software to IT buyers to selling marketing intelligence to executives in the marketing suite.  This meant not only delivering a new business value message to a new customer audience but the necessity to re-evaluate their legacy of dependence on a Powerpoint deck to impress their prospects (more on the selected alternative in the future). 

 All of this was not happening in a vacuum in terms of their CEO’s awareness and involvement.  A decision to change the fundamental corporate identity, customer value proposition, and approach to delivering the message was not without considerable business and personal risk for the CEO.  With the competitive pressure from both the high end and low end of their market space threatening the company’s future growth and profitability, the executive team’s decision was unanimous to move forward with a customer messaging initiative.  With everything at stake, the decision to invest in hiring an organization experienced in transforming the customer conversation was easily justified. 

 More will follow in future blog postings about the approach this client and DSG have taken to successfully implement this customer messaging and sales enablement initiative to ensure early momentum and sustainable change.

Can you answer “yes” to each of the following eight questions?

1. Has your Company developed a comprehensive strategic plan that involves all business and support groups?
2. Were your best and brightest employees from every department of your organization involved in the planning process?
3. Does everyone in your organization (at all levels) understand their role in achieving the goals laid out in the plan?
4. Does each of your employees have a plan that includes SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timed) goals, objectives and activities?  A plan that they have developed and have made a personal commitment to achieve?
5. Do you require your employees to give a minimum of two progress reports to their respective manager during the course of the year?
6. Are your employees held accountable for achieving their goals and objectives each year?
7. Has the employee’s performance been tied directly to their annual performance review?
8. Are there consequences for an employee who does not achieve your stated goals and objectives?

If you can’t answer yes to each of these questions – there is an excellent chance that your organization is either not meeting their goals and objectives for the year or not performing at their highest potential.

The authors say their book ‘seeks to present lessons in the areas of business that are most likely to be useful to you.’  But, if the often-quoted maxim (nothing happens until somebody sells something) is true, then why is it that none of these supposedly 101 top lessons directly addresses how to sell something?

To be fair, the book covers several lessons that relate to marketing, benefit-oriented selling and sales management, including:

• Targeting the safe middle market is not necessarily a safe marketing strategy (#29)
• A business buys a copy machine because it needs copies, not because it wants a copy machine (#52)
• Customers do not buy a product or service the same way or for the same reason (#53)
• A feature is a fact. A benefit is how it helps the customer (#54)
• Promoting the best performer to manager is often a mistake (#67)
• The real purpose of a visual presentation is to get people to listen, not look (#94)

I wouldn’t argue any of these points – we draw upon them, and many others, in our practice – but I am struck by the fact that exactly zero of the 101 lessons covers how to sell.

Perhaps this is due more to myopia on the part of most business schools than to an oversight by the authors.  For example, I am a graduate of one of the world’s highest-ranked MBA programs – but professional selling was not part of the curriculum.  As a former university professor, I can also report that (unfortunately) few schools even offer a professional selling track or minor.

Do you believe that there are specific things to learn and share about selling?  If so, what do you think they are?

Essentially we work with salespeople and teams, turning techno-speak into a brief, benefit-oriented and engaging talk track for a less technically oriented executive prospect.

Techno-speak is an easy trap, and not one limited to companies selling complex solutions. In the May 21, 2010 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education the author Dennis Meredith explains in an interesting way the failure of scientists to persuade the American public on key issues. Meredith writes that science suffers from its lack of a “culture of explanation,” preferring to remain comfortable in small silos surrounded by jargon. One of the unfortunate effects, according to Meredith, is that scientists “miss even the simplest and most obvious opportunities to advance the scientific point of view in the public mind.” You and I might call those obvious opportunities an elevator pitch or two-minute drill.

Too many technical experts also fail to adjust their messages, even slightly, according to the audience. Meredith writes, “Rather than tailoring their arguments to their audiences, they tend to believe that merely presenting the facts of their work will lead audiences to see the light.”

I believe many companies selling complex technical solutions can learn from the mistakes of these university scientists. 

We find that, with executive-level prospects, engagement in an interactive discussion is far more effective than feature-laden demonstrations or attempts at “educating the buyer.”

Is there a culture of explanation in your company, including both the sales team and subject matter experts?

And yet…we have seen countless examples in our practice of sales presentations that fail to engage prospects properly during that all-important start.

How many sales decks out there begin with slides featuring the selling company’s headquarters building, its history, its executive team and/or mission statement? If your company hopes to win through solution selling, then it is a far better practice to engage your prospect in a solution-oriented conversation from the very beginning.

We often help clients break out of “stumbling out of the blocks” selling habits by:

(1) Moving the discussion about the seller. If you need to establish credentials and credibility, it’s better to send a brief and focused background description a few days in advance of the meeting.

(2) Creating with the client a customized, solution-oriented “provocation” that jump-starts an executive conversation far more effectively.

Are your team’s sales conversations getting off track during the first minute of action?

Just last month, my DSG colleagues and I received an email from a client’s sales leader with the subject line “FW: Whiteboard Kicks A**” (he actually spelled out the final word, but I wanted to make this a PG-13 post).

Our enthusiastic client was passing along feedback from a conference presentation which centered on a new whiteboard we had developed with the sales team. The client executive who used the whiteboard wrote, “Presented a bit skinnied version of the whiteboard to between 60-70 folks…people were floored by the presentation and the way it spoke to their business. The most interesting thing is there were grad students all the way up to CEOs of companies and they all got the message…absolute proof this applies in all circumstances.”

We typically use whiteboard development as a key part of sales-messaging engagements for two big reasons. The first is because the tool itself, once developed and tested, enables the right type of interactive business-level conversation (from one-on-one with an executive to a room full of professionals). The second reason is that the process of developing an excellent whiteboard forces the sales team to condense its value proposition and get away from product demos.

And that really kicks.

It isn’t that managers and salespeople don’t need to meet – but without a detailed plan, meetings tend to disintegrate into a series of either ad hoc affairs (getting together around a crisis) or tactical “base-touching” issues (which generate side conversations but fail to build skills) that should instead take place in “off-line” conversations or emails.

The best sales organizations, just like the best sports teams, do not operate like this. Excellent sales managers prepare their teams to excel in all key sales competencies and excellent sales organizations carry this coaching out through strategically timed, carefully structured meetings across teams.

For each of these meetings there is a defined agenda, duration, checklist of goals, and coaching questions. These elements are developed by drawing on best practices across the sales management team and turning them into regular “practices” with specific “drills.”

With a regular cadence of coaching and review meetings in place, sales teams are able to perform with greater consistency across their key sales competencies – resulting in increased revenue and better pipeline visibility.

In a future post I will talk about fundamentals, variety, transitions and other important elements to help you get the most out of sales meetings. What have you found that works in your meeting schedules?

The real challenge is that sales managers tend to evaluate their salespeople’s individual opportunities and pipeline health in an ad hoc fashion that is inconsistent across the regions. While some managers may have an excellent pipeline management approach, other managers may be taking a different approach or be leaning too much on a salesperson’s gut feeling about their opportunities.

A practical step for increasing pipeline visibility is to sharpen the focus of sales managers’ interactions with their teams by establishing a cadence of weekly, monthly and quarterly sales review meetings. In those review and planning meetings, sales managers will ideally ask their teams a consistent set of probing questions to evaluate opportunities, elevate the opportunity strategy and validate where an opportunity really is in the customer’s buying process.

Here are a few example categories and questions for an effective opportunity review meeting:

Opportunity Qualification

• Where did we enter the customer buying process?
• Have we worked with the customer to define the evaluation process?
• Can we change or influence the evaluation process?
• Can we win this opportunity?

Business Value Assessment

• What are the customer’s business / technical issues driving them to ‘do something different’?
• What are the compelling strategic, financial or personal drivers for doing something now?
• How will our solution address the previous 2 questions?

Solution Assessment

• What is the value proposition of our solution?
• What is our unique business value to the customer?

Organization/Relationship Analysis

• Do we have a ‘Power Sponsor’?
• How do you know they are a ‘Power Sponsor’
• Who are the other individuals involved in the decision process?
• Who must we neutralize? How?
• Who is our coach?

Competitive Analysis

• What are the competitors’ strategies and what traps will they set?
• How will we neutralize them?
• What traps will we set?

Action Plan

• What is the customer’s defined buying /approval process? Timeline?
• What are the potential risks and delays?
• What is the specific closing action plan?
• Is there a complete Evaluation Plan in salesforce.com for all identified issues and next steps?

(Note that these questions should be developed by the sales leadership team based on each company’s unique selling environment, solutions and typical customer buying process. Other key sales review meetings include the forecast review, business plan review and account review.)

We are often asked ‘What does an opportunity review have to do with pipeline visibility?’ It has everything to do with pipeline accuracy and visibility. Through careful evaluation of each opportunity, the pipeline can be scrubbed and the lens into the future made clearer based on the realities of each opportunity across the selling team’s pipeline.

With an accurate assessment of the pipeline, sales can develop focused strategies for closing top opportunities, manufacturing and/or services will know where to allocate focus and resources, and senior management can more confidently use the sales pipeline to make projections beyond the current quarter.

The sales executive decided to join customer meetings to see what was really happening in the field. What he found was a team whose only messaging consistency was no consistency at all. Most salespeople were making up their messages and presentations on the fly. Given the company’s legacy, it was not too surprising that the messaging was still product-oriented and not appropriate for solution-oriented conversation with customer executives.

The sales executive realized he had to find a way to ensure key sales messages were consistently communicated by the organization. A key element of his solution was the development of sales-oriented messaging tools that his top sales performers developed in collaboration with marketing. Due to the direct involvement of top-performing salespeople in creating and validating practical sales messaging tools, the broader sales team ultimately embraced the new messaging.

Are your sales people delivering consistent, compelling messages in customer conversations?

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE: The company has superb execution, often marked by reasonable quality provided at a very low price. The focus is on efficiency, streamlining operations, supply chain management, no-frills, volume counts.

PRODUCT LEADERSHIP: The company is very strong in innovation and product marketing, operating in dynamic markets. The focus is on development, innovation, design, time-to-market, and producing high margins in a short timeframe.

CUSTOMER INTIMACY: The company excels in customer attention and customer service, tailoring products and services to individual customers or narrow niches. The focus is on CRM, staying close to customers and their needs, delivering products and services on time and above customer expectations, creating emotional connections with the brand, and operating on lifetime value metrics.

A number of large international companies have established their identities around operational excellence. Their success is predicated upon channel power and long-term cost advantage – advantages which are only available to a few. So, particularly for challenger brands and companies operating in dynamic competitive environments, winning through operations isn’t a viable option.

Product-driven leadership presents a far easier path for winning in the short term but is tough to sustain. Can your company consistently win on product innovation, particularly in an environment when investment dollars are tight and competitors can respond so quickly? Or is it more likely that you and your competitors tend to be locked in a back-and-forth battle to stay ahead of one another for brief periods of economic advantage?

Winning through customer intimacy is a much higher-probability path for most companies. It depends less upon raw channel power, infrastructure or existing market share (as is the case with operational excellence) or even the expensive hand-to-hand competitive combat of a product-driven strategy. Customer intimacy can be achieved by companies new or established, large or small, in nearly any industry – it’s an issue of management focus, the smart use of customer information, and the right tools and incentives in place for those who interact with customers every day.

Has your company defined its game in a way that is likely to consistently produce wins?