Game On!
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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
Dan Waldron
October 15th, 2009 at 8:16 am
I discovered your homepage by coincidence.
Very interesting posts and well written.
I will put your site on my blogroll.
Colleen Copple
October 19th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Thank you for posting this, Elizabeth. Oakwood’s story spans so many areas that are top of mind to sales leaders today – process improvements, sales & marketing alignment, change management, hiring practices, compensation, territory realignment, and sales enablement. Oakwood’s story is great, and they are seeing amazing results from their efforts. They are an organization that made the decision to start solving the problem “NOW” as we say at SAVO. They got comfortable moving away from the status quo and innovating internally in order to drive the kind of results they wanted from the sales organization. If folks missed Oakwood at today’s Miller Heiman Summit in San Francisco, I invite them to attend a webinar we’re sponsoring on Nov. 11, which will feature the Oakwood story. You can register at http://www.nielsencast.com/ws/content_display/event/e3iea9ebb170ad87d303ab96b2a111bf5d8.