28 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Miller Heiman

If you could only ask one question of your sales team this week to move sales forward, what should you ask?

Does the client view our solution as an investment or an expense?

Understanding how clients view your proposed solution provides valuable insight into whether the opportunity is worth pursuing. Clients who see your solution merely as a product they’ve been tasked with purchasing (a simple expense in the budget) may not be the ideal customer.

When sales professionals properly impart how their solution solves specific business challenges, demonstrating lasting value, they lay the foundation for a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. Selling to clients who see your solution only as a product risks commoditizing it.

Learn more about identifying which opportunities represent the greatest potential here.

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photo credit: alancleaver2000

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26 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Rich Blakeman

I spent the morning on Friday at the invitation of the ZOLL Medical global sales team, speaking to their amazing worldwide force – 375 strong.

In order to ensure value and impact for ZOLL, we did what we do. What was the leadership team trying to accomplish, fix or avoid? What unique strengths do they possess, and how can they leverage them with each buying influence in their customers’ buying processes? So many questions, so little time.

At the end of the day, the ZOLL team came away with a unanimous assessment of high value delivered. High praise coming from an audience hungry to start their year off with a bang and get a strong head start on their objectives – we followed our process, and achieved our objectives…creating value for ZOLL.

What lessons were there in the work (without giving away ZOLL’s secret sauce)?

• Unanimous affirmation for the meeting’s mantra:  New Opportunities, New Approaches. Affirmed in parallel to one of our shared basic principles: “Whatever it was that got you where you are today is not sufficient to keep you there.”

• Concurrence across business units and around the world that there are three things that you should always know about your customers:

1. Why have they chosen to do business with you?
2. What are you helping them accomplish, fix, or avoid?
3. Do you have senior contacts within your accounts who understand why your company can uniquely service them?

• A reminder of what it takes to land an airplane in the Hudson River and have 155 survivors:  By the book…follow your process…don’t fly by the seat of your pants.

• Complete agreement on what it takes to overcome the fear of calling higher and out of your comfort zone.

• Common definitions for otherwise fuzzy concepts that are critical to ZOLL success – value proposition, differentiation, business results and personal wins.

And finally the lessons taught by seagulls, pelicans, Nemo’s dad, Dora, and Herb Brooks – but that’s a story for another day.

Want to know more? Call someone from the ZOLL sales team. They’ll be glad to help.

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20 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Rich Blakeman

Fifty sales leaders spent the day together with us on the 36th floor in the financial district today. I’ll avoid all of the typical comments about sales leaders with their heads in the clouds…or the rainbow that arrived in the afternoon, appropriate to those who chase pots of gold.

Neither could be farther from the truth.

We engaged together, learned together, worked together and enjoyed each other’s company and shared intellect. Presentations by some of the brightest sales leadership minds who are making things happen NOW – not talking about what got us here, but instead sharing the things that work, taking action and working NOW.

Speakers from JDSU…Oakwood…The Sales Executive Council. Best practices, and models that work. Thoughtful and provocative, clear, concise and vivid.

The day opened by our CEO, Sam Reese, and closed by our founder and Dutch Uncle, Bob Miller.  Great bookends for some of the best conversations a sales leader could listen in on, much less participate in. While the formal reviews aren’t yet in, the informal reviews during happy hour (featuring wonderful flavors from our Sales Makeover client, Torani) were broad and deep. A day well spent, with takeaways for all to leverage NOW.

If you have an opportunity to attend any of our upcoming Client Summit gatherings, I didn’t meet an executive today who wouldn’t urge you to invest the time. Results NOW.

Rainbows are extra.

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19 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Miller Heiman

If you could only ask one question of your sales team this week to move sales forward, ask this:

Is your valid business reason concise enough to be left on voice mail or with an assistant and still elicit a response?

Some people get their calls returned simply because of who they are. If you’re Warren Buffet or Donald Trump, your phone call will surely get returned. But for everyone else, compelling and relevant messaging is the key to getting that callback.

If you boiled your reason for calling down to one sentence, would it make them stop and think: “This person clearly understands the challenges my company is facing and can help us navigate to success.”

Would your statement be clear enough to be communicated up without becoming distorted?

Sales leaders today are managing a lot of pressure, a lot of initiatives – with cramped resources. In short, time is of the essence. If they can’t speak to you when you call, are you prepared to be compelling enough to be remembered?

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15 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Elizabeth Vanneste

Last week’s travels took me to the SAVO Sales Enablement Summit in Chicago.  The theme for the event was “Game On” and it really was! Sales and marketing alignment continues to be a hot topic and in attendance were over 100 sales and marketing executives who are making that alignment happen and sharing their stories. Leaders from ADP and Lexis-Nexis spoke about making training and marketing relevant to the salesperson – easy to access and easy to digest – with the end goal being better customer conversations. It is refreshing to see energy and intelligence being applied to the challenges that face sales teams everywhere.

I may be biased, but my favorite presentation was by a Miller Heiman client – Oakwood Temporary Housing (I’ll call them Oakwood for short). Chris Ahearn and Ken Revenaugh presented their sales transformation story. When faced with a dramatically changing market and increased competition, Oakwood realized they needed to do more than inject some incremental change or provide training to their salespeople – they needed to transform their organization to be more effective and relevant to their clients.  They engaged with several partners to assist them with marketing strategy, sales compensation, and sales tools.  Miller Heiman consultant, Alvin LeBourgeois, was brought in to identify the best practices of their most successful salespeople and then create a plan and a sales playbook to instill those practices throughout the organization.  This project took less than a year from kickoff to completion – and the entire organization has been transformed.  They now have a common language to talk about sales, improved executive awareness of opportunity status, better customer experiences, and they have seen results! 

Ken will also be speaking next week at our San Francisco Client Summit, along with his colleague Doug Ferreira, to share more details on their sales playbook and Oakwood’s engagement with Miller Heiman.

Our SAVO implementation is helping us to create tools that will help our salespeople be productive and relevant.  There is plenty of room for improvement but this is an ongoing process and we are committed to it – Game On!

photo credit: the forbz

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07 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Bob Miller

I just completed a week in Australia, first attending and participating in the “Optimising the Sales Force 2009” Conference in Melbourne.

In the span of a 50-year career in sales and sales management, I’ve been to dozens of conferences of this genre. This two-day event was among the best – if not THE BEST – conference in which I have ever participated!

I fully credit the two key organizers – Bryn Hughes and Simon Olsen – for the success of this undertaking. Speakers had been skillfully selected world-wide to comment on varying aspects of selling in today’s challenging environment. It was almost uncanny how the messages of each speaker dovetailed with each other to reinforce the notion that we are at a watershed or tipping-point in the world of selling.

All speakers agreed, as did the audience (largely of sales managers), that selling in the future will never be the same. The combination of the effects upon selling of:

• the growth of information on the Internet,
• the increase in viable competition,
• the phenomenon of the dis-assembly or re-assembly of pieces of large projects to export worldwide, and
• the advent of high-tech tools such as CRM,

are only a handful of the factors refocusing the selling function.

Delegates unanimously agreed that today’s customers or clients in a complex B2B sale are firmly in the driver’s seat, and today’s buyers are much more knowledgeable about your products – and your competitor’s products – than ever before.

Thus the first job of the salesperson is shifting from that of solely purveying product knowledge, to that of trusted advisor who treats his customer as a partner in the search for and implementation of the best solution.

It truly was a live experience of witnessing that Miller Heiman clients are not buying products per se, but rather they are buying the “solution image” of what problems these products or services will solve.

After the Melbourne conference, we continued to Sydney where we hosted over 20 Miller Heiman clients, and several top prospects, at a breakfast seminar held on beautiful Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour.

The participants reacted most positively to this notion I put forward: that managers can plan and implement how to best introduce change initiatives by thinking through how those affected will respond. The old saw is that people always resist change. That is not quite true. The fact of the matter is that people resist the chaos that usually, or often, accompanies a change initiative.

I challenged the group with the proposition that there are only three reasons why people resist change:
1.    They do not understand what change is being implemented, or why;
2.    They understand, but do not know how to implement the change;
3.    They do not want to implement the change.

I then developed the variations on that theme – e.g.: wants to, and understands, but does not know how, or does not understand, so does not want to understand, etc.

In the afternoon, I coached the sales consultants and facilitators of Miller Heiman programs in the up-and-coming changes to the Conceptual Selling® program. I was very appreciative of their positive responses, and most impressed by the high level of understanding and keen insight shown by the Australian team.

To learn more about what your organization can do to impact results NOW, click here.

photo credit:  richkidsunite, Phillie Casablanca

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06 October 2009 | Uncategorized | Miller Heiman

If you could only ask one question of your sales team this week to move sales forward, ask this:

Are there individuals in the buying organization that may not want you to win?

No one expects smooth sailing when someone with influence in the organization you’re trying to sell into is actively working against your proposed solution.

Some people work to negate your efforts to improve positioning with your account – and when these individuals have influence on the key players in the account, it can be a bad situation. Understanding their motivation can help you work toward more neutral ground. Are their self-interests perhaps better served when they support your competitors? Are they perhaps advocating for using an internal solution? Are they bringing an alternative solution to the table that competes for the same budget dollars?

It’s better to understand someone who is vocal about their desires to undermine your efforts than to try to counter a force you can’t pinpoint. Demonstrate  that if your solution is chosen, they will be able to see a legitimate personal win.

Learn more about personal wins here.

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