28 April 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

When a sports team loses a game, the team’s performance is dissected by the coach to identify the reasons for the loss and craft a plan to either eradicate or compensate for areas of weakness. But when a sale is lost, too often we just wash our hands of the matter. Only after a problem has metastasized into declining numbers across an entire month or even a quarter do we act, and by then all we have to work with are sweeping generalities that make coherent, focused action difficult.

Improving sales performance requires hard facts, not just to understand what makes your top performers successful, but also to understand why you miss. Writing for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, Bill Golder notes:

It’s surprising the number of deals that fall out of the funnel long before they reach the proposal stage and how often they are “lost” to other factors – such as competing priorities or internal resources vs. a true competitor.

Did you fail because you were trying to force your product into an unnatural shape to fit the client’s needs? Or because the client hadn’t reached internal agreement as to what the true problems were? Is there confusion between the signals sent by sales and marketing? Getting at the truth is vital if you want to avoid spinning your wheels or charging off in the wrong direction.

An honest loss-review process needs to be candid, and this means it needs to avoid laying blame or being used to score points. This process is never easy, because egos and reputations can be on the line. The focus needs to be on processes more than people, and solutions instead of condemnations. The goal of the process is action, discrete and verifiable steps that your organization can take to improve future performance. Keeping that goal in mind, you then review every stage of the sales process to recognize where things went off track.

The data gathered, combined with what you’ve learned of your best performers’ reproducible skills, can be used to fine-tune your team, allowing you to better identify which potential clients show true promise and which are likely to turn into tar pits that devouring resources for little return. Once you’ve identified your true strengths and true weaknesses, you can better choose which fights are worth extra effort and which you need to walk away from.

To learn more about improving sales performance through an organized loss review processes, read Bill Golder’s “Learn From Losing,” originally written for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine’s monthly column series, Chronicles of a Sales Leader.

Photo credits: respres, Gildardo.

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19 April 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

“Setting a goal is not the main thing,” observed Tom Landry, the coach who led the Dallas Cowboys through 20 consecutive winning seasons. “It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” Making the plan and staying with it are two different things. It’s possible to create a plan in isolation, but its impossible to lead your team, whether it be a football team or a sales team, towards the goal without getting down in the mud and the blood with them. Business coaching, first and foremost, is about your people. It’s about giving them the tools they need to do their individual parts so the goals of the team can be achieved.

Know Your Team
Before you can even make a plan, you need to know what you’re working with. You need to know the members of your team, especially what makes them successful and what holds them back. In a recent survey of sales organizations, In the 2009 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, we found that among the World Class Sales Organizations, 98% understood why their top performers were successful as opposed to only 38% across all the organizations surveyed. There may be no more telling metric than this when it comes to knowing which sales teams will meet or exceed their goals and which won’t.

Review the Last Game
It’s not always pleasant to review benchmarking with your team, but it’s vital to improvement. As their coach, you need to follow through with every member of your team to insure that they are doing what your top performers have taught you are the keys to success. “Top performers are not born,” says Sam Reese, president and CEO of Miller Heiman. “In fact, they can be replicated to a great extent.” Among the most successful of the sales organizations surveyed, 85% reported that their performance review process helps improve their sales force’s job performance. Barely more than a quarter, 28%, of all sales organizations surveyed could say the same thing.

Drilling for Discipline
91% of the best performing sales organizations surveyed said that they leveraged the best practices of their top performers to improve everyone else. This requires discipline and preparedness on the part of your team. They need to exercise these best practices when stressed or away from the office. Natural talent might be enough to get the ball moving, but it’s discipline that scores the points. When asked what the single most important quality in a top performer is, the top performers gave almost equal weight to being disciplined and prepared as they did to being able to access and influence senior-level executives.

Walking the Walk
Reviewing your own performance as a coach is also important. You need to know that you’re getting the job done. This may be harder than it seems. When asked if they were leveraging the best practices of their top performers, 42% of C-level responded in the affirmative. However, only 23% of those on sales teams saw it happening. If you’re going through the motions, but the lessons aren’t being learned, you need to change your methods. Talk to your team, and make sure they’re really getting all the tools they need, and not just what you think they need. Above all, coaching is about serving your team so they can perform beyond what they believe is possible.

More Information
If you are interested in learning more ways to help your team, be sure to take a look at the Miller Heiman Sales Makeover.

Photo credit: nightthree

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13 April 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

It’s easy for a sales organization to get blinded by all the issues they have to deal with. Sales performance metrics, reviews, changing policies, and new roll-outs tempt individuals to focus inward, on themselves and the others inside the sales team. Your customers have their own troubles. They don’t care about your metrics or the amazing new offerings you might be rolling out. Their focus is firmly on serving their own clients and customers, and tackling the challenges they face. If you want to close the deal, you have to take the time to see the situation from their perspective.

The truth is, your clients are selfish, and they need to be. They thrive only so long as they fulfill their customers’ needs. They don’t have time to learn about your product, so you have to take the time to learn how it can make life easier for them. Successful sales organizations focus on solutions-led sales 26% more often than their competition. In their 2009 Best Practices survey, Miller Heiman found that 93% of the most successful sales organizations reported that they clearly understood their customers’ issues before proposing a solution, as opposed to 50% overall. By taking the time to understand the customers’ situations, these teams are able to find ways their products solve their customers’ problems. Sometimes this requires flexibility and creativity. A drowning man might not have much interest in keeping his beer cold, but if your cooler also floats, you’ve got yourself a sale.

Once you’ve become an integral part of your customer’s business, it’s important to maintain that relationship. 89% of the best sales organizations report that they jointly set long-term objectives with their strategic accounts as compared to only 36% across all organizations surveyed, and 91% said their organizational structure allows them to easily adapt to their customers’ changing needs, as apposed to 36% overall. Keeping the focus on fulfilling the client’s needs cements you as a regular part of their processes.

Serving your clients might not be something the sales team can handle on their own. “Sales is no longer the total fiefdom of the sales function,” says Damon Jones, President and Managing Director of International for Miller Heiman. “It’s now the responsibility of a much broader part of the organization. The focal point of customer relationships increasingly involves people from across departments.” Again, though, it’s important to keep the perspective of these other people in mind. They may know this client is important to the company, but unlike members of the sales organization, they may not have done the research necessary to really understand the customer’s needs and they haven’t spent time forming a relationship with the people. They don’t want to screw things up, but they also might not have the people skills that sales teams thrive on. Before they can help your customers, they’re going to need a hand from you first. Having standardized systems in place for cooperation between departments goes a long way toward easing anxieties and making things work smoothly. “Having systems and processes and standard ways for managing customer relationships really helps because it puts everyone on the same page,” Jones notes. “If you have a common way for how you talk to customers, you can strategize around key customer relationships. People from other departments can participate and support and really understand what the lead sales rep or account manager is trying to accomplish.”

The key remains rising above the daily challenges in your own organization and seeing from the perspective of others. It takes time and research to understand the world from another’s point of view, but the insights gained are necessary for world-class sales performance.

Photo credits: Hamed Saber, zoniedude1

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06 April 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

“The only constant,” said Heraclitus, “is change.” Many things have changed since his day, but the wisdom of his words endures.  This is especially true of business and keeping on top of the ebb and flow is one of the daily challenges all organizations face.  Decision makers need to keep a sharp eye and a clear head, avoiding both panic and unwarranted optimism.

Unfortunately, shifting economic conditions can complicate this.  As circumstances change, so does the profile of the optimum customer, and while your goals are changing, so are the goals of your customers.  This requires constant awareness of what is happening in your market.  Utilizing research resources like Hoovers can be vital.  Like an advance scout, they let you know how the terrain is changing and what others are doing so you can adjust your plans accordingly and create the right sort of opportunities for your business.

It’s not enough to simply store this information in your CRM system.  Add on modules exist for popular CRM programs such as Salesforce.com, and such data mining tools help funnel the best opportunities to the appropriate members of your sales team.  Marketing and selling must be focused on optimal customers for today’s market, which means they have to shift focus and resources in tandem.  A disconnect between sales and marketing can actually be a critical weakness.  If either team gets a cycle behind, you will waste resources that you can’t spare.  According to Sam Reese, president and CEO of Miller Heiman:

“The gap between sales and marketing continues to be an issue for many organizations.  Solving this disconnect is high on many sales leaders’ priority lists right now as they look for ways to drive top-line sales more effectively.”

Directors of Sales are critical in making sure newly installed sales processes are followed up on, and that such adherence to the new sales methodologies are rewarded for both the account managers and inside sales teams.   Working in accord, marketing can identify the sorts of customers your organization can best serve and sales can land the accounts, but only when management takes the time to make sure everyone is on the same page.  Automated tools such those offered by Genius.com can help bridge the gap between sales and marketing. Having both teams physically sit down at the same table is vital to ensuring that everyone agrees on how to assess and manage leads, and how the needs of current clients are changing.

At times it can seem like leads are scarce, and the reflex will be to pursue as many as possible.  You can never afford to waste resources on clients that are a bad fit.  Quality, not quantity, must be your priority.

For more on creating opportunities over the next year, see the 2009 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study Executive Summary.  Be sure also to check out the Sales Team Makeover for the chance to receive a $100,000 sales performance package made up of many of the resources discussed here.

Photo credits: cpt.spock, Paul Keleher

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