Текст книги "Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]"

Автор книги: Rick Page

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Gary, a sales rep reporting to Jerry Ellis, one of our principals, was selling planning solutions systems to a large health care organization.

Together, they had gained access to the company’s vice president of finance, Bruce, who reported directly to the CEO.

While meeting with Bruce, they asked him why he was planning to replace the current use of Excel in his organization with a new budgeting and planning solution. Bruce responded with a long list of reasons why the current use of Excel required was overly time-consuming and caused his team to work long hours, including weekends, to meet the continually changing requests of senior management.

After listening to Bruce’s explanation of the frustration the current approach caused his team, Jerry said, “I know senior management is concerned about your team’s quality of life, but the tool you are using now gives them the information they are asking for. I doubt they will spend $250k just to make your life easier. How will you justify our solution to them?”

Bruce then explained the real strategic justification he would use for the new system: It would allow them to move newly acquired health care facilities into their overall process faster, which would ultimately save them money faster and enable them to more quickly add to the overall bottom line.

This team knew that without linking the purchase to more strategic pains, Bruce would not receive funding approval. Through this questioning, they confirmed that the solution could be linked to the strategic gains of powerful stakeholders and that the project sponsor could articulate linkage between their solution and these strategic gains.

Relationships Alone Are Not Enough, Either

Another flaw we see in some organizations is that they focus on building preference through linking solutions alone or through relationships alone. If you focus on linking solutions alone, you ignore the power of relationships. There are over 50 ways that people build influence with each other.

Stephen Covey, in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, refers to this as “building emotional bank accounts with each other.” I’ll trust you for two reasons: (1)because you’re an expert, you’re reliable, you can solve my problems, you have the company and the functionality behind you, and I know you’ll get the job done, or (2)because we went to school together, you know my family, you’re my friend, you know my business, you’ve worked with us before, and I know you’ll work night and day to get things done for me.

But what if it’s a tie? If it’s a tie, I’m going with my friend. Whenever the product or solution is a tie, relationships are the differentiator. But when it’s a high-risk situation and I’m betting my job or the company on it, I can’t go to the committee or my management and say, “I prefer this company because the salesperson is my friend.” I have to provide a business case for why I prefer you over another company.

Frankly, we’re just not that lonely.

Likewise, many salespeople are counting on relationships alone. They are professional friends, or they think they can get by on their personality, by entertaining their clients, and by being grateful for the business. This just isn’t enough anymore. Buyers want better business values.

About a year ago I spoke with a trade association, and the head of procurement for a major electronics retail organization was there. He said something to the effect of, “People call on us all of time saying that they want to be partners and build a relationship with us. Yes, we do have partnerships. We have about 3 strategic alliances and 12 preferred vendors. But everybody else is a commodity to us and we put them out for reverse auctions. People come by and say they want to have a relationship with us. Frankly, we’re just not that lonely.”

While there are some lonely buyers out there, they still have to build business value for having selected your company. In relationships alone, you can linger, but you can’t last. On solutions alone, you may get outsold while you have a superior product if you don’t have strong enough relationships.

Our principal, Joe Terry, was working a big deal once where the divisional vice president had the power of a “gorilla” in an algebraic democracy. His vote counted “the sum of all votes plus one.”

Joe had a good relationship with the vice president, based on previous experience, and assumed that he had a preference for our firm.

But in the executive presentation, the vote came down to five for Joe and one against him. After some research, Joe discovered that the vice president was also personal friends with the competitive salesperson and played golf with him every week.

Turns out, the vice president, who we thought was our ally, was the one vote for the competition.

Joe knew that he had the superior solution, so he went to the vice president and said, “I know you have a difficult decision to make because you are also friends with my competitor.”

After talking with Joe, the vice president agreed that Joe’s solution would achieve his strategic objectives and that it would be very risky for him to try to achieve those same objectives with the competitor’s solution.

Joe suggested that the vice president abstain from the vote and allow the other five people on the committee to make the choice. This way, he could tell his friend, Joe’s competitor, that he had been outvoted.

This proved to be a way for the vice president to save face with his friend and to reach his business objectives by going with the better solution.

Joe won the deal, and the vice president became one of the biggest supporters that drove the initiative throughout the company.

The key to this strategy was to recognize that personal preference was only good if he could also solve the problem. Had Joe not had a relationship with the vice president, he probably could not have had this type of discussion with him. And if he had not had a superior product, relationship would have not been enough to win the deal.

Defining Your Best Practices Sales Cycle

The Six P’s methodology includes the elements that need to be attended to in order to win a complex sale. We teach them sequentially, but in fact, salespeople use them simultaneously.

Once you qualify an account with a dispassionate process, you use a combination of a stakeholder analysis and a metaphor of the sales cycle which we have named the canyon and crucible (see appendix Figure A-1).

The stakeholder analysis identifies each buyer’s pain, power, part, and preference in order to determine a plan to win the heart of each of the key voters or live without it. This process is overlaid with the canyon and crucible, which is a chronologic assessment of the dynamics of changing issues and decision-making politics as they go through a competitive evaluation. Combined, we’ve put a time dimension on the sales cycle.

The best practice in the industry today is to take your sales cycle and define it in terms of the phases that are unique to your company and your industry. Salespeople tend to do the right things in the sales cycle, just not always at the right times. And timing is critical. How you coach depends on which phase of the sales cycle you are in. In general, we want salespeople doing things earlier than they have been doing them before. The other reason that phases are important is that they match your forecasting process.

The Sales Cycle Coaching Template—A Vision of Victory

The first thing we do with a client is take the company’s sales management team and a selected number of the company’s top salespeople and identify, by phase, what an ideal sales cycle looks like. What does a vision of victory look like at each step along the way?

Information drives strategy. We start by defining all of the coaching questions managers will ask during the sales cycle to see if they have included the right activities in the sales cycle that are necessary to answer those coaching questions.

Then, by phase, what are the desired outcomes, questions to ask, information needed, roles and responsibilities, qualification criteria, and action items (with due dates and owners) for each of those phases? The result ends up being a template of an ideal sales cycle from which managers can coach and compare. Because they built it, they own it, and it is tailored to their business. It is then provided to all salespeople so that they won’t feel ambushed when the tough questions are asked.

The R.A.D.A.R. six P’s methodology, combined with your sales process, creates a best practice sales template unique to your organization. The purpose of a sales cycle template and a coaching session is to (1)guide the sales team on how to execute these action items most effectively, (2)identify who to focus your efforts on, and (3)explain why the salesperson should do certain activities or what is the risk of not doing the activity.

All a salesperson has is time, and the decisions he makes on that time are critical to his success. You can’t really “make time,” and you can’t really “save time.” All you can do is change the quality of time spent.

The idea is to have one sales cycle for your company for each market segment or industry. By the way, it shouldn’t take that long to build this. We’ve seen companies spend over $1 million and months with consultants to have this built. Then it sits in a binder without training or execution.

The challenge comes – and where many of these projects fail – in the action items, questions, anticipated risks, politics, and potential objections. Most plans also don’t take into account a thorough transition to post-sales team members.

A best practice sales cycle should be built in three days for less than six figures. For Apple Computer, we built eight of these—one for each industry—because the solution sets and buying processes for each buyer in each industry are different.

The way you sell to government is different from the way you sell to higher education, which is different from how you sell to health care. You may have a different buying cycle for a different solution set or industry. But once it has been developed, it should become the template for sales execution and coaching for your salespeople and managers.

Forecasting Is Now Strategic

Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, sales forecasts are now a serious issue in U.S.-listed companies. Companies have to be compliant and more transparent to stockholders. As a result, boards of directors want to know what sort of analysis is behind the sales forecast.

If the CEO says that everything is going to be okay and then gets embarrassed at the end of the quarter because some deals slipped and didn’t close, investors get surprised and now file lawsuits. It happens about once a quarter, and the result is a stock price that can fall 10 to 40 percent. These are high stakes for a weak forecasting system.

Why Forecasting Doesn’t Work Well

One source of sales discipline is the forecast itself – especially for product-oriented companies, where the revenue is recognizable when the sale is made. But most forecasts aren’t forecasts in the first place. Instead, they’re “pastcasts,” looking in the rear-view mirror at what has happened to date.

If the purpose of the forecast is simply to predict revenue rather than to manage and coach the pipeline, then it fails to reach its potential. In reality, many deals are already out of control by the time they hit the forecast and become visible to management.

In our experience, most forecasts don’t separate the issues of if and when you’re going to get the business. The flaw lies in the nature of competitive evaluations. Most CRM systems simply have line-item lists of opportunities, close dates, dollar amounts, and some sort of A-B-C or 50–70–90 percent ranking.

This is actually a percentage of expected value built on the confidence level of the manager, which may come close to the total company forecast by the law of large numbers. In reality, though, you don’t get a percent of a deal. You either win it or you don’t.

And we have seen newspaper article after newspaper article in which companies have a bad quarter attributed to “several deals that didn’t come in,” and their stock has fallen as much as 10 to 40 percent in a given quarter. These aren’t forecasts; they are simply wishes or guesses. Using a CRM system to automate them is just adding up bad numbers faster.

The closer you get to winning, the closer you actually get to losing because of the crucible effect defined in Hope Is Not A Strategy. As committees get closer to making a decision, politics erupt, the decision-making process breaks down, the issues change, priorities change, and the competition makes counterattacks once it realizes it is looking at 100 percent of zero.

Most forecasting systems are not tied to a methodology. They don’t reflect your strategy or the buying process of the buyer. Most sales reps are too close to the action, and their judgment is clouded by wishful thinking. So they don’t ask the tough, critical questions that challenge their strategy for fear that they will spoil a good forecast.

This is the sales manager’s job. It’s too important to delegate.

The best practice is a forecast that includes a line item but through which a manager can click and drill down to the decision-making process, politics, stakeholder analysis, source of urgency, action items, and value proposition to see what your true chances are of winning.

Then, if necessary, the manager can generate a phone call to the sales rep, which will be shorter and of greater value. Forecasts not built on methodology are a pack of guesses on which you bet your company every quarter.

Only by a forecast built on a detailed analysis of the account, reviewed in multiple coaching sessions by a front-line manager, the sales team, and perhaps some certified deal coaches can a sales manager sleep soundly at night.

Forecasting—If and When plus How

The best practice is to imbed methodology and sales process into your forecasting system. Although this is a best practice, we seldom see it used. Recently, we finished this process with Harcourt Assessment. Scott Sciotto, a sales manager there exclaimed, “At last – a methodology combined with a forecast system.”

There are two obvious benefits to this. We see people all the time who understand the six P’s as their sales process, still using A-B-C and 50–70–90 percent as their forecasting technique. But using phases alone fails to recognize the competitive risk in each deal. In a forecast, we need to know not only when the deal will happen but also if we are going to win it. Lumping the two together results in unpleasant surprises (see Figure 5–3).

As a salesperson, I hated my manager’s quarterly question of, “Is this deal going to close?”

My answer was always the same: “Are you asking me if I am going to win this deal at all, or am I going to win the deal this quarter? That is really two different questions.”

Forecasting using the law of large numbers has flourished to the detriment of quality forecasts at the front-line management level.

In addition, salespeople hide deals off the forecast so that they can turn them in at the end of the quarter and be a hero. Often they are awarded a bonus for this, which encourages bad behavior.

The Next Generation of Drill-Down Forecasting

While many sales managers have embedded their sales methodology into their CRM system, new “on demand” Internet technologies have significantly enabled the integration of methodology into the forecasting system. This can now be done without requiring any programming and while maintaining necessary security by keeping the data inside your firewall.

The success of Salesforce.com in penetrating larger enterprises has validated this approach. The ease of integrating CRM, forecasting, and remote coaching now allows for technology-assisted deal coaching and a new level of teamwork between sales rep and manager.

Technique Scorecard
Best Practices, Technique	Importance	Execution
	Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high)	Agree, but we never do this	We sometimes do this	We often do this	We do this consistently
Individual
Salespeople effectively link our solutions to the buyer's pains.
Our salespeople have the individual skills necessary to create preference for us.
Our salespeople are able to develop value propositions that link into strategic value and emotional issues for powerful people.
Opportunity
Salespeople understand political power and allocate resources to winning the votes that matter.
Salespeople effectively qualify out of deals they cannot win.
Everyone on the sales team knows his or her role and responsibility and understands the account and opportunity plan.
Managers know how to effectively analyze and coach competitive deals.
Account Management
We consistently meet customer expectations.
We have a best practices account management cycle.
Salespeople know how to get to executives and know what to say when they get there.
Industry/Market
We have a best practices sales cycle,defined by phase, for each market segment.
We have industry-focused solutions, messages, and expertise.

SECTION IV: Teamwork

Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work

Vince Lombardi

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.

Michael Jordan

CHAPTER 6: Teamwork

Everybody sells. Everybody either sells or “unsells” their company and its services with every action they take every day. From design to manufacturing to shipping to legal—everybody sells and has an impact on the company’s revenue and therefore affects the company’s livelihood. Some people just don’t realize it. Those who don’t are myopic in their view and perhaps should work somewhere other than your organization.

Obviously, this attitude starts at the top with the leadership of a company and whether or not it has a sales culture. One by one, industries are starting to realize that they need a selling function. Ten years ago it was consulting. Before then, you couldn’t use the “s” word in any of these firms. It was “business development.”

Now, even law firms and medical clinics are realizing that they need a sales function—that business just doesn’t come to them fast enough to fulfill their potential and that even they need to sell value and avoid commoditization.

But not everybody ever imagined that they would be in sales, need a sales training class, or have anything to do with sales. Most universities not only don’t teach it, but most business schools consider it a pedestrian activity (although over 20 million people in the United States alone are employed in sales and probably at least as many throughout the rest of the world).

When we work with firms that are trying to change to a sales culture, the first thing we have to do is take away the old stereotypes – the negative images of selling – and replace them with a vision of selling that is not only acceptable but also worthwhile. Not that the negative images of selling are undeserved. There are a lot of bad salespeople out there.

Most of the bad images people have of salespeople, however, come from those who tried to sell them one thing, one time, and didn’t care about their repeat business. Overselling, high-pressure selling, and all the sleazy images we have usually come from this experience.

But if we define selling in such a way that it’s earning the client’s business by solving his or her problems and serving clients in such a way that they never have a reason to go to anybody else, then most people find the definition acceptable. If we can define selling as outserving and outsolving the competition, most people would accept that – and that’s basically what it is.

If you don’t earn business in such a way that you can meet or exceed your clients’ expectations, you’re not really a sales team; you’re a sales-prevention team. Systematically, you will inoculate your customers against doing repeat business with you.

The real test of selling is whether people will buy from you the second time. You have to do more than just satisfy the client—you have to ensure the client’s return.

Real profitability lies in the second, third, and fourth sale and beyond because that is where the cost of sale is lowest and your pricing can be higher because you have lowered risk and delivered value.

Team Selling

As companies have moved from selling products to selling systems and solutions, their sales efforts have moved from single sellers, who wear all the hats, to sales teams. Team selling consists of two to two dozen people selling to a committee of two to sometimes 200 buyers.

Many sales opportunities will bring a sales team consisting of an account manager, a product specialist (or several), an industry specialist, a technical specialist, a service team, and an executive or two. Since your systems and solutions may now touch multiple departments and, therefore, multiple buyers, all these people may be selling to a committee of buyers.

In team selling, each one of these specialties requires different talents, personalities and competencies, and each team member has different roles and responsibilities.

Soccer or Silos—None of the Above

The real test of selling is whether people will buy from you the second time.

In some companies, the roles and responsibilities of a sales team are clearly defined. In other organizations, including many consulting firms, such roles and responsibilities are not well defined. (One partner described his company’s sales effort as being like five-years-olds playing soccer. We all run over here and kick the ball, and then we all swarm over there and kick the ball. If we score, we all take credit, and if we get scored on, everybody runs away.)

Other firms are so large—and have grown by acquisition – that they sell in silos. Multiple sales reps are often calling on the same account. They rarely talk to each other to share opportunities and contacts and, as a result, quite often end up competing with each other within the same account.

Siemens is a huge multinational company. Actually, in many ways, it is over a dozen companies, each with billions of dollars in sales.

Numerous clients buy from multiple divisions of Siemens—each of which has a separate sales force. This is normally not a problem until the client wants an integrated solution.

To present one face to the client and handle internal issues and communications, Siemens created a separate sales organization called Siemens One, headed by Ken Cornelius in Atlanta.

It was especially effective when the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), after 9/11, needed to increase airport security screening. This meant (the acquisition of) new systems, hardware, technology, and lighting, as well as consulting services.

Siemens One was able to coordinate the sales efforts of several of its divisions and produce a singlevendor solution. Its competitors offered partnerships and coalitions of multiple vendors.

The pain was strategic, and the problem was urgent. Dealing with a single vendor reduced risk and increased accountability in a solution where the political benefits went as high as world peace.

They got the business. They were not the low bidder.

“This approach and success has been repeated dozens of times on large, complex deals for Siemens,” said Cornelius.

Likewise, on a global basis, many times the account is handled by the local country. The result is pricing that varies all over the board for the same business. There is also a lack of synergy in the sales effort, where many times, multiple opportunities could be combined to outflank the competition.

Joe Terry was coaching deals for a client in London and was conducting a strategy session on a $2 million deal for a big-five consulting firm.

Everything had been agreed to, and the contract was waiting for signature. They broke for lunch and returned to hear the salesperson say, “You’re not going to believe this, but our U.S. salesperson in corporate just closed a deal selling a worldwide license for $450,000!”

The U.S. salesperson, with no visibility into the bigger picture, had cost the company millions of dollars in revenue from a prospect that obviously had a high likelihood of buying for hundreds of offices across the globe.

Poor negotiations? Maybe. But the real problem was the lack of teamwork and communication.

One of the first military principles of strategy is concentration of force. Unless an entire global sales team is coordinated and has a unified account strategy, the competition will have a significant chance of defeating you piecemeal. Additionally, procurement departments can outcommunicate sales teams in some situations and shop the same business around the world to get the lowest price. This not only leaves money on the table but is embarrassing to the high bidder.

In order to be most effective, teams need clearly defined roles and responsibilities as to who will do the prospecting, who will lead the account strategy, and who is responsible for providing product information and presentations. In fact, the best strategy is to map your organizational chart to the client’s organizational chart so that each person on your team knows which person on the buying committee he or she is responsible for and has a strategy to win that person’s vote.

At the same time, one of the first principles of best practice is clearly defined account ownership. Whether you have one owner for an entire global account really depends on your size and strategy and whether you have invested in those resources.

Companies that sell in silos should pick one leader of the account. That leader is given control and accountability over that account, and everybody else selling in that account is a member of that team and accountable to that leader.

Other companies define account management as simply caretaking, coordinating, or communicating. They define relationships as being friends, giving favors, and showing appreciation. All this is fine, but we define account management as allocating resources in the most effective way to achieve the greatest account potential whether it is a partnership, dominating the account, or just maintaining it.

In team selling, the biggest challenge is moving individual salespeople from loners to leaders.

From Loners to Leaders

When it comes to managing a complex, competitive sales evaluation, the best practice is one opportunity, one owner. That way, you may be wrong, but you’ll never be confused. And confusion probably will cost you more deals than commitment to a single strategy.

A plan needs to be short enough that the salespeople will use it, but it also has to be powerful enough to win.

In team selling, the biggest challenge is moving individual salespeople from loners to sales team leaders. Salespeople, by nature, are loners. As they started out in business, working for a smaller company without division of labor, they may have had to wear all the hats. Good “hunters” tend to be independent sorts anyway, but as they move to team selling, their job is to lead a team. The strengths that made them good as an individual may work against them in this regard – the first of which is communication.

Salespeople who keep the plan in their head have a hard time leading a team. In order to lead a team with a plan, you have to write it down, and many salespeople don’t like to write. And most have short attention spans. For some reason, they would rather talk about a deal six times than write it down once.

Salespeople are drivers. They work at a high rate of speed and many of them at low attention to detail. Many deal in relationships rather than analysis. In order to get them to lead a team, accountability and discipline need to be driven from two sources: management and the teammates themselves. The vehicles for doing this are the forecast and the strategy coaching session.

Make the Pie Bigger First—You Can’t Split Zero

Major enemies of teamwork in many firms include split policy and fighting over account control. One of the biggest myths of selling and barriers to effective teamwork is a CFO’s opposition to “paying double” commissions – especially for global account managers. This is a misnomer, but once this catch phrase has been set, it’s difficult to change.

Paying more commissions for additional people on the sales team, whether they are global account managers or industry specialists, is simply a greater investment in the account in order to achieve greater returns or volumes.

The real question is whether the benefits of having additional personnel on the account will yield a return to justify the initial expense. We teach people that if they can’t see their way to greater volumes, better margins, or a lower cost of sales through less competition, then they shouldn’t invest in account management strategies for that account in the first place. Instead, they should pursue the business at the individual opportunity level or as a commodity through the Web or through bidding.

Often times, fights over revenue credit and commissions end up meaning that sales teams don’t even pursue the business because they think that it’s the other person’s account. The deal falls between the cracks, or they step on each other in front of the customer.

The answer is a strategy that settles upfront what the split credit is and who’s going to contribute which effort. If need be, the possibility should exist of paying additional commissions. But get the business and make the pie bigger first.

One of our principals, Phil Johnson, was selling software to Amoco Fibers and Fabrics, an Atlantabased subsidiary of Amoco, whose corporate headquarters are in Chicago.

He asked them if Chicago would be involved in the deal, and they said, “No,” so he chose not to contact his guys in Chicago. He didn’t want to get them involved because he didn’t want to split the deal with them.

In the end, Phil won his deal. He sent over a contract on Friday afternoon. But on Monday, Amoco called and said they couldn’t sign it. Corporate headquarters had already signed a deal with his competitor for three sites – one of which was Atlanta.

Though Phil won his deal, he lost in the end because he didn’t communicate with the team in Chicago. He didn’t help them win, so they ended up losing the deal altogether.

Strategy Sessions—When Do You Want the Bad News? Who Do You Want It From?

The difference between amateur strategists and great strategists is their ability to test the plan before the battle begins. Great generals look at both sides of the battlefield.

Great chess players play from both sides of the board. Pool players and chess players can see their strategy three and four moves out.