26 May 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

May 31st is the last day to apply for the Miller Heiman Sales Team Makeover.

The winning sales team will receive more than $100,000 worth of services from Miller Heiman, Hoovers, Genius.com, and Selling Power magazine. All eligible teams who apply, however, will receive at a minimum a two-hour consultation, so no team will be left empty-handed.

Among the $100,000 in services the winning team will receive is an assessment of your sales team’s strengths and needs by a Miller Heiman sales consultant. With that assessment, the consultant will chart out a customized roadmap your team can use to reach their goals and evaluate their progress. It won’t end there, however. The consultant will work with your team over the next twelve months to help keep your team on track by making the most of the recommended programs and tactics.

From Hoover’s, you’ll get a full-year’s access to their vast database of industries, businesses, and personalities. Armed with this information, your team will be able to pinpoint exactly which companies should be in your funnel, and who they need to speak with in order to move them towards a buying decision.

The winning team will also receive the benefits of Genius.com’s on-demand email and marketing automation. Unlike other automated marketing solutions, this package monitors a potential customer’s online “body language.” When certain cues are recognized, the sales team is alerted, bridging any gap between the sales and marketing teams and insuring that no potential lead is lost.

Finally, Selling Power magazine will make available an array of sales performance resources as well as providing media coverage of your team’s progress over the following year.

The entire collection of resources would be a powerful boost to any team, and may be just the shot in the arm yours needs to exceed expectations over the next year. Be sure to look over the qualifications, and then fill out the entry form before May 31st to insure your team has a chance at this Makeover opportunity.

Photo credits: Paul Keleher, Ferminius.

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19 May 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

Frequently, managers and executives will purchase training for a sales team. Sometimes it’s purchased for the top performers, sometimes it’s for the members who are struggling. Too often, it’s wasted money.

Assuming the sales training wasn’t simply a pep-rally with delusions of adequacy, training participants probably learned techniques to help them improve their game in a number of different areas. Unfortunately, the best techniques don’t work in isolation. The concepts learned require disciplined and consistent application, generally across the entire team and sometimes through to other parts of the organization outside of sales. Without full deployment from management, requiring actual implementation and not just tacit support, most of the best strategies and tactics simply won’t produce measureable results. Even worse, if there’s confusion or disagreement on how the techniques learned should be implemented, performance could actually suffer.

According to the 2009 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practice Study, 89% of the sales organizations identified as World Class reported that they consistently follow a standardized process to qualify opportunities, as opposed to only 37% overall. Sales isn’t smoke-and-mirrors, or wishing things into being. Success grows from reproducible, sensible strategies performed with diligence and a clear eye towards the shifting economic landscape. This sort of thing needs to come down from the executive level, with oversight and reinforcement.

Solid training properly reinforced and consistently executed, however, is absolutely worth the expense and time it demands. According to a 2006 Sales Benchmark Index report analyzing sales management expenditures, turnover in sales came in at just under 40% across industries. The cost of this turnover was estimated at $200,000 per salesperson. Among the top three causes for turnover were “insufficient training of new hires” and “lack of support from direct supervisor.”

Sales is like any other skill. It can be learned and it can be practiced. Proper sales performance leads to predictable, reproducible results. These results don’t come from an afternoon’s lecture, but a consistent, concerted effort across an entire organization to support and promote the sales that are the lifeblood of the company.

Photo credit: striatic

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11 May 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

“All activities within the sales process are important,” says Eric Wasser in The Miller Heiman Prospecting Guide: Best Practices for Maximizing New Business Development, “but to reduce how low you go into the valleys of your sales cycle, prospecting must be a top priority – right behind closing business.” There’s been a lot of buzz currently about the challenges of prospecting today. There’s not been quite so much talk about the new tools we have to help us overcome those challenges. The growing world of online social media is real, and it’s pulling real money. Computer manufacturer Dell is reported to have moved over one million dollars in merchandise through its use of Twitter. In addition to the new ways to sell to customers are new ways to find them. Sales 2.0 tools can make prospecting more efficient.

“Networking isn’t new,” says Miller Heiman sales Vice President Rich Blakeman. “This isn’t a new idea. The online practice is just a new way to do it. The same people that were effective before are effective now, but these new tools make it easier.” Understanding how these tools work and what they can do for you is key, as is working within the unwritten etiquette of online social media.

The first and most immediate benefit social networking sites offer is improved researching. Tools like LinkedIn make it very easy to see who is where in an organization, as well as keep up with old friends and contacts. There’s no longer any excuse to lose touch with college friends, co-workers, and colleagues. You can also see what they’re doing now, who they’re working for and with, and get some sense of their own networks. You can, in short, more easily see how and where they can be used as resources in your own prospecting. Says Paul Pellman, executive vice president of Hoover’s:

It’s very important for a salesperson to understand all the different influencers and decision makers vs. gatekeepers. How are you going to find that champion to support you? The more you can leverage different relationships, the better able you are to find the right path into the organization.

Finding who to call and how they might help can now be done with the click of a mouse. Blakeman points out, “The people most likely to return calls to provide helpful information are easily identifiable inside a professional networking site.” With a bit of work, you should be able to identify someone most likely to act as a coach and advocate, providing information on optimal buying influences and how to best approach them.

Even without this kind of coach, social networking can tell you what a potential client organization has on its collective mind. Hiring and promotions, new initiatives, and corporate “tweets” can all provide clues as to a company’s challenges and goals. Understanding a prospect’s business issues can help you focus your prospecting efforts and tailor conversations towards helping them with these issues.

If the world of social media is still new to you, feel free to get started by joining Miller Heiman on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Image credits: szlea, Mario Sundar.

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04 May 2009 | Uncategorized | brian

In the 2009 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study 82% of World-Class Sales Organizations agreed that their CRM implementation provides data that their sales management team consistently uses to make decisions. At the end of the dot com boom, when the promises of early digital tools seemed to be a pipe dream, it might have been fashionable to denigrate the relevance of CRM to “real” sales performance. The reality, however, is that rather than robotic automation that replaces sales professionals, CRM is another tool, an especially powerful one, that can improve the performance of sales teams who already have effective processes. By itself, CRM won’t take a poor team and make them good, but it can take a good team and make them great.

In the world of computers, the first rule is still GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The CRM facilitates collecting data and working with it. This means that every member of your sales team is going to need to learn how to use the CRM and keep it up to date. This might look like time taken away from actually interacting with clients, but many of the World-Class Sales Organizations reported that their CRM system actually allowed them to spend more time with their customers. This is likely because, properly utilized, CRM takes a lot of the guesswork out of dealing with customers. CRM improves an organization’s sales reporting, which in turn improves sales planning and forecasting.

Those World-Class Sales Organizations that found CRM usage allowed them to spend more time with their customers, and who reported that the system provided data that management used consistently to make decisions, were two to three times more likely to jointly set long-term objectives with their strategic accounts and regularly engage them in their product and service planning process. They had better access to key decision makers in large deals and the highest levels of management among their strategic accounts. They were, in short, more able to perform those functions that generate world-class results.

Unlike adding a new printer, CRM adoption isn’t plug-and-play. Your team will have to be trained in its use, both for inputting data and getting what they need from the system. Having standardized terminologies and common processes are vital to getting the most out of CRM. Bill Golder, executive vice president of business development at Miller Heiman, addressed this issue in a “Chronicles of a Sales Leader” column:

I was recently on a client visit, and the sales vice president there is responsible for multiple selling organizations. He had one organization that had great process and rigor in place and they were seeing solid data coming in and out of their CRM application—thus, it was a valuable tool for everyone.

Then he explained how his CRM application was nearly useless for the other group he managed. They had yet to implement common process for how that group would consistently engage with customers, so there was much more inconsistency around approach.

CRM is a force multiplier, a tool that can magnify the good habits your sales team already practices. Those good habits must be in place before the benefits of a CRM application will manifest. In short, it’s not a quick-fix or a silver bullet for poor performance. The positive results from CRM adoption can be dramatic, but only for a team that is already comfortable with the sorts of standardized processes and effective discipline that produce results.

Photo credits: Benjamin Rossen.

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