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

Автор книги: Rick Page

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Before every major investment of time and resources in an account – or move to a different phase of the sales cycle – there should be an investment of time by the sales team in a strategy review session. A strategy review session is not an exercise for the salesperson to sell the team on why he has a good strategy. It’s an opportunity to get the bad news early from your friends who want you to win the deal. It’s a test of your plan. Everyone – especially the plan owner – has to leave their ego at the door.

Leaders let everyone know what their role is in the execution of the sale, when each action item is due, and who is accountable for the results. Without a strategy session of this nature, you’re not a team leader – you’re a loner. And ultimately, you’re probably losing.

You can ignore a strategy and hope to win. In fact, you can win without a strategy at all—it’s called luck. (Don’t pay for luck. You can get luck cheaper on the Web.) If you want salespeople who make things happen through a team, though, they have to seek out bad news, blind spots, and assumptions early.

If you get bad news early, there are two things you can do: you can either withdraw from the account or change your strategy and actions. But bad news late is no good because you don’t have time to change, and you have spent your resources. The cement has set.

Until now, the people who have not had a voice have been the teammates – the product engineers and specialists – because the power in most sales teams lies with the salesperson or the account manager. But the product engineers are great sets of eyes and ears and can actually build better bonds at the lower levels. They are sometimes able to get information and actually validate a strategy and a buyer’s preferences when the salesperson has been screened.

The Blue Angels have made several documentaries about how they are so effective flying wingtip to wingtip—at the speed of sound—and how they manage to stay alive during these incredible aeronautical maneuvers. After every show or training exercise, they have a nameless, rankless debrief.

One of the principles we learned from our friends at Afterburner, Inc., a high-impact training firm that simulates fighter strike missions and teaches teamwork at the same time, is that it doesn’t matter who is right but what is right.

It’s not important to defend your strategy; it’s important to seek out criticism because, for pilots, when they’re not right, they’re usually dead wrong.

It doesn’t matter who is right but what is right.

Similarly, the support people who are in the account after the last sale also have great contacts. If they’re not included, you’re missing a great source of information and access. These people need to have a formal way to critique the account plan—especially the sales engineers, who are going to have to go in and give the presentations. If they don’t understand the plan, the stakeholders, the messages they are supposed to deliver, or the strategic pains they are supposed to link into, you are not going to get a very effective competitive presentation.

I’m a Veteran—Why Do I Need a Coach?

If you go to a professional golf tournament and stand at the practice tee, you see Tiger Woods with his coach – as well as most of the top golfers. The golfers themselves are the best in the world and are all qualified to teach.

Why do they need a coach? Because the unconscious competent does things by reflex and needs an out-of-body observer to pick up their flaws. The conscious competent needs to build consistency. The conscious noncompetent needs technique. And they all need the discipline that a coach provides.

Top tennis players have coaches, top track stars also have them, and they are very highly paid for the value that they bring. Sales managers need to make coaching a priority part of their job because competitive advantage comes not from awareness but from the consistency and discipline that tools and coaching bring.

Sales Managers—Too Busy to Win

Reinforcement and adoption of any process or initiative depend on the buy-in and consistent discipline of the frontline sales managers. They always have, always will. If this is so obvious, then why have so many client relationship management (CRM) and sales automation efforts failed from lack of adoption?

If front-line sales managers don’t buy it, they won’t sell it. If they don’t enforce the discipline necessary to adopt a sales process or technology, it will join the graveyard of failed initiatives.

Buy-in requires involvement. Getting sales managers trained first and involved in the design of the coaching template not only makes buy-in more realistic but also prevents the sales managers from sitting in the class like prisoners with their arms folded. They need to be team teaching with the instructor, linking each teaching point into a real deal that happened in their area.

If front-line sales managers don’t learn how to leverage themselves through coaching and strategy sessions, they can never really manage more than three reps at a time

Buy-in may not be as big of a problem as sales managers finding the time to coach—or, in reality, making the time to coach – because any quality improvement process requires for error prevention (coaching and strategy sessions), managers sometimes have to make time for both – growing the deal and growing the rep. Until they make the shift to growing the rep to gain control early, however, they will always be behind the curve.

One of the first things we do with managers is to evaluate the quality (i.e., who takes up time, is it proactive or reactive, what is urgent/important) and quantity of their time. Of the 168 hours per week, we identify the 15 biggest uses of their time and then ask them to tell us how much time should be spent in each area, including personal time. Then we have their managers identify their ideal time-allocation picture for a week. This in itself is very enlightening.

We then ask each manager to track the actual expenditure of time for a month. The results usually identify several things: Sales managers are too busy selling for the bottom 20 percent of their salespeople who can’t manage a complex sale. Almost every sales manager I have spoken with in the past 10 years admits that their bottom 20 to 25 percent of reps can’t manage a complex sales cycle effectively and probably never will be able to, yet these sales managers still carry a full quota for these salespeople.

In addition, we find that sales managers often are heavily involved in the last 20 percent of the major deals because of the rise in power of procurement departments. In this phase, the buyers are often better at buying than the average salesperson is at selling, so managers need to get involved in the negotiations.

These two forces draw sales managers into becoming the salesperson themselves or out of coaching the middle 60 percent, where their coaching abilities would allow them to leverage themselves and increase their win rate. Delegation of high-stakes deals is difficult. But if front-line sales managers don’t learn how to leverage themselves through coaching and strategy sessions, they can never really manage more than three reps at a time.

So forecasts end up being bad because coaching is bad because hiring is bad. To fix the problem, we have to start at the very beginning.

Coaching Done Badly

What are the flaws in coaching? One of the biggest flaws is premature prescriptions. The salesperson has worked the deal for six weeks, and the coach has all the answers in six minutes. Salespeople just love that.

Another flaw is stealing the deal – taking it over – especially in front of the prospect. Once a sales manager has stolen power from the rep in front of the prospect, the manager has it forever. By the time this has happened several times, the sales manager is no longer the coach but a glorified rep with a bunch of juniors.

Strategy sessions are a labor-saving device.The time saved by not selling to the wrong accounts, not selling to the wrong people, and not doing the wrong action items to win will more than pay for the time investment.

A jellyfish sales manager who listens to a strategy review but doesn’t challenge assumptions, create what-if scenarios, identify blind spots, or suggest ideas provides little value.

Getting the entire account team involved, even if by teleconference, results in more eyes, more information, and therefore a better plan. Often the technical teammates form strong relationships with evaluation committee members and can provide great insight into the sales plan. Excluding them is a mistake.

The best practice coaching style that achieves critical thinking while leaving ownership with the salesperson is the Socratic technique of using questions that prompt thinking rather than statements that prompt defense.

Obviously, in losing situations, documenting lessons learned is more productive than fixing blame and pouring salt on the wound.

Manager—Walk Your Talk. Be Prepared

Another flaw is not reading a prepared account plan or strategy document before going to the coaching session. If managers will read the input or sales plan that they have asked the reps to prepare, coaching sessions can be cut in half because the rep doesn’t have to spend the first hour telling the story.

Nothing offends sales reps more than taking the time to fill out a sales plan that a manager has asked them to complete, just to have the manager not read it. If the manager has read it, however, he can quickly move to value-added comments about strategies and assumptions.

It is interesting how salespeople and sales managers always seem to find time to try to “fix the deal” at the end, attempting to correct all the mistakes that were made in a 9– to 12-month sales cycle. But they don’t have time to conduct strategy sessions along the way to avoid chaos at the end.

When do we find time to have strategy sessions? With teleconferences and Web meetings, it is easier now than ever before. Strategy sessions are a labor-saving device. The time saved by not selling to the wrong accounts, not selling to the wrong people, and not doing the wrong action items to win will more than pay for the time investment. The return on time invested in strategy sessions is anywhere from 2:1 to 10:1.

We’ve turned millions of dollars worth of deals around in strategy sessions with our clients and have seen them work. But it has to be a matter of discipline. Lexmark does it every Monday. Some companies have strategy sessions at each change of phase in the forecast. Other companies simply say, “No review, no resources.” If it’s not worth 30 minutes of your time to review the strategy with the team, why is it worth 15 hours of their time to travel across the country and look unprofessional?

The main reason that salespeople should have a strategy session is because they want to win and will have a better plan and a more committed team if they have invested the time to lead.

Enemies of Teamwork

For some companies, the biggest barrier to success is themselves. Their culture and values are so rotten inside that when you leave their building, you just want to take a shower. They can’t partner with anyone else because they can’t partner with themselves.

If this is your prospect, you should seriously consider whether the company is worth your time in the end. If there is a project involved, it probably won’t be successful. If it is the company you work for, you probably won’t be successful. Leave. Fast!

It’s not worth the money.

Top 20 Enemies of Teamwork
Personal agendas	No compromise
Insecurity	Weak links
Misaligned goals	Glory stealing
No trust	Blame fixing
Favoritism	Overemphasis on compensation
Finger pointing	No vision
Rumor mongering	High turnover
Poor leadership	Constant reorganization
Selfishness	Carrying weak performers
Internal competition,silos	Cynicism

These are the activities that are the sand in the gears of a successful team. They destroy trust. Use the preceding list to evaluate your own company's team behavior. Use it to evaluate your customers to see if you really want to sell to them. Then evaluate yourself to see if you have engaged in any of these activities. The best salespeople build strong teams inside their own organizations to get things done for their customers.

Teamwork Scorecard
Best Practice, Teamwork	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
Individuals are recognized and rewarded for their sales teamwork.
Support people consider themselves to be part of the sales team.
Opportunity Management
We map our organizational chart to that of the buyer's so that team members know their assigned stakeholders.
Before every major investment of time and resource in an account, strategy review sessions are held.
Account Management
Each account has a clear owner to which team members are accountable.
Split credits are settled up-front and support our strategy.
We have global account coverage with well-defined roles for all members.
Industry/Marketplace
We have a strong sales culture. Selling skills are recognized, rewarded, and reinforced in our company.

SECTION V: Technology

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Albert Einstein

CHAPTER 7: Technology

CRM—Relationships, Where Art Thou?

While there have been some successes, customer relationship management (CRM), as it has been executed, has become one of the biggest misnomers in the business world.

It hasn’t been about customers, it hasn’t been about relationships, and it hasn’t been about management. In fact, when done poorly, CRM can serve as a barrier between you and your best clients. In reality, CRM has been about cost reduction, and the net effect has been to commoditize relationships by allowing customers to have a “personal” relationship with a computer.

In my personal life, I have fired four vendors who implemented CRM systems badly: my landscape chemical company, a florist, my home alarm company, and several banks. (In fact, I was bank-free for over 15 years. I moved everything to an online brokerage account.)

My landscape chemical company was the first to go. I have been blessed to own 12 acres, just north of Atlanta. Although I have a large yard, I represented only one account to this particular company. Different zones in my yard require different care, and because the company didn’t have mapping capabilities, its system had only one description for my yard. On top of that, every time they changed drivers, we had to start all over because their system did not provide continuity of information, which is one of the primary purposes of a CRM system.

The next to go was my florist. Several years ago we had a personal tragedy in our family and I needed five flower arrangements on a Friday, the beginning of a holiday weekend, for a funeral on Saturday. I called my usual florist and explained the situation. I told the salesperson that I would be right over (the store was only a few blocks away). When I got there, the store was closed. I got on my cell phone again and called the salesperson back.

“I am standing outside your door, and it doesn’t look like anyone is inside,” I said.

There was a long pause.

“Can I please speak to a manager?” I asked.

Another long pause.

“Where are you?” I demanded.

“In Denver,” she said.

When I asked her why she didn’t tell me this when I first called, she explained that the shop had recently been acquired by a larger company, and all the records had been moved over to a new system.

I canceled my order and called a local florist, Nature’s Rainbow, who already had my preferences and credit card on file. The salesperson told me that he would have five flower arrangements ready the next day, and that he would work as long as it took to get them done. Guess who had my business from then on?

My home alarm company was next. A few years ago, my house was struck by lightning, and it knocked out my alarm system. I called the 800 number to ask the company for help. The person on the other end was polite enough, but I soon realized that she was in Salt Lake City. My records, she told me, were in Kansas City – again because of a merger, which happens often in this industry.

I was incredulous. This was the number my wife was supposed to call if there was a burglary attempt while I was out of town! Now I deal with a local company, and my representative is good ole’ Alan. The last time I called him with a problem, he said, “Oh, yeah—that’s the switch over by the window. It’s always been a problem. I’ll stop by on my way home tonight.”

Give me high touch over high tech.

Bankers. Where do I start? I have a credit card from a bank that is now one of the largest in the United States. They were nice enough to give it to me when I graduated from college and had no money (this is either a great investment in me or terrible credit checking, but I’m glad to have the card). I’ve kept it for 32 years. Today, when I put that card into an ATM machine, the very first question the machine asks me is what language I speak. Thirty-two years and they don’t even know which language I speak? How is that for customer intimacy?

When I go in and speak to a teller face-to-face, the first thing he asks me is if I have photo identification. For 20 years in Atlanta I couldn’t get a banker to learn my name. I was running a large region for a major software company where we had a new hire almost every other week. I could have brought in a lot of nice accounts. But not once did I ever have a branch banker come out of his cave in the back to learn my name.

Much less, not one of those bankers – until this year – learned my business and provided advice on how to run it. Finally, I found a banker I like: Jim Pope of Ironstone Bank. He knows me, has invited me to play golf, and checks on me to ask about my business and my needs. I actually walked into the bank building a few weeks ago and was greeted across the lobby by Caren Lightfoot from behind the teller window. I asked to see one of the executives, but when she learned what my issue was (a deposit and a check written at the same time), she handled it herself. She said, “I know your relationship with the bank and what other funds you have. We’ll be fine.” I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. Access to information made it possible, but a caring person made it happen.

When I need something or know that someone is looking for a good banker, I have somebody to call. This is why small banks are booming. When it comes to relationships, they are actually doing what the big banks say they do in their ads. My insurance agent is next. He thinks a relationship is sending calendars and refrigerator magnets once a year.

CRM: Cost-Reduction Management

“Please wait while our agents are servicing other customers” often means “We haven’t hired enough people to take care of our clients, so you have to wait.”

The reason many CRM systems have been implemented poorly is that their objective has been a lie. It was never about customers or relationships in the first place.

The true objective when it comes to many of these systems is lowering costs. The idea is that if you can move a customer to a call center from a sales call, your cost drops from $200 to around $25. Even better, if you can move the customer out of the call center and onto the Web, it drops to about 17 cents. Lowering costs in this age of the “China effect”—the epidemic of cost containment – means that in some cases companies have become more efficient at providing Internet or call-center service for very low margin accounts.

But the disease has spread over to large-margin relationships where companies are treating their best business customers like commodities, making them wait in long hold lines. “Please wait while our agents are servicing other customers” often means “We haven’t hired enough people to take care of our clients, so you have to wait.”

The next objective of the CRM system has been to get the “little black book” out of the heads of salespeople and into the computer so that, if and when the salespeople leave, they don’t take their names and contacts with them. In reality, if they have built relationships with these contacts, they still take the relationships with them.

Whenever you have turnover in your sales force – on your side or on the client’s side – emotional bank accounts, as referred to by Stephen Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, go back to zero.

The real issue is turnover. If companies spent a fraction of the money solving their sales turnover problem that they do trying to automate their sales force to solve customer problems, they might start to build some real relationships.

But getting all the information and contacts into the computer is designed so that no one person has to have a relationship with the client. We can swap people out as the call centers change shifts. In direct field sales and marketing, though, capturing the little black book and ignoring the turnover problem simply won’t work.

While it is true that information is important to relationships, it is only a tool. There are missing links between our objective in the account – account dominance or preferred vendor status – and an information tool (see Figure 7–1).

Let’s work backwards: If you want to dominate an account, what the client wants is trust. Trust is built over time. Relationships are built over time. In complex sales, people buy from people—not computers. You can sell online, but not if you want trust. Not if you want account dominance.

If you want to sell commodities, sell them over the Web and service them with a call center – the same for noncompetitive reorders. But strategic business-to-business (B2B) services and products include greater career risk to the buyer and therefore require trust. In order to maintain trust, you need continuity of the relationship, yet sales turnover in the high-tech industry averages around 30 percent per year.

A CRM system is a repository for information – not a process. Information about problem resolution and purchasing history is very important, but only to the degree that it builds trust and continuity so that clients don’t have to constantly train new salespeople on how to sell to them. In addition to this continuity, the company has to have delivered value because performance on the last sale is the gateway to repeat business. When your product or solution is performing and producing results and value – and you have documented those results – then risk begins to lower.

A CRM system is a repository for information, not a process.

As risk lowers, trust goes up. This is why IBM was able to sell its products for such a premium in the 1980s. The company lowered risk for IT directors. In order to do this, you have to have a sales process that rewards not just customer satisfaction but also customer loyalty. And there is a big gap between the two.

In some studies, there is as much as a 40 percent gap between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Satisfied customers will still buy from somebody else. As Herb Cohen, the great negotiating trainer, said in one of his speeches, “They care, but not that much.”

Several years ago, Blake Batley met with a vice president of sales of a large CRM software provider and asked him, “What makes your CRM application so much better than all the other CRM applications in the market that seem to be positioned the same way?”

The vice president said, “Well, our application is great because it gives our clients insight into all the history and interactions they have had with their own customers.”

“But how does your CRM application help your salespeople defeat your competition?” Blake asked. “How does it help them win deals and make their numbers?”

The vice president didn’t have an answer.

Having access to contacts and a customer history alone doesn’t help you win deals.

Technology can’t make up for what hit-and-run selling does to destroy trust. And if you want to be trusted, you have to have trustworthy people – people who can sell consultatively, who know their clients’ business as well as they do their own, and who are willing to work collaboratively to solve business problems.

David Stargel, our principal in charge of the Deloitte account, relates this story. A partner at Deloitte called on an executive client, and although the executive didn’t have any work for the consultant, he agreed to meet with him anyway.

A few months later, the partner called on the executive again. He still didn’t have any work for him, but again, they met anyway.

The executive continued to meet with the consultant every time he called on him, never having any work for his firm, for 15 months. Finally, at the end of those 15 months, the executive called the consultant with a project.

The consultant excitedly offered to get his team together and present a proposal.

“That won’t be necessary,” the executive told him. “The last 15 months have been a test. If you will stay with me when I am not buying anything, I am confident you will stay with me when I am.”

Information is vital to the degree that it supports all these missing links and strategies. As Klaus Besier, who grew SAP America in its early days, says, “Knowledge of birthdays alone is not going to give you competitive advantage.”

If your objective is to reduce cost and you end up nickel-and-diming your clients by not giving them adequate service, then a bad CRM implementation can ultimately cost you.

Field Sales Forces Served Last

Many CRM initiatives are ill fated when they get to the field sales force because they are implemented by IT and implemented backwards. Considering the system first – and then addressing the needs of marketing, legal, and customer service – before finally talking to your sales force about their sales process and what they need to improve, is the wrong approach.

The result is asking your primary revenue generators to do data entry for the rest of the firm. Think about the basic economics of this: If a salesperson has a yearly quota of $2 million and works 2,000 hours in a year, he or she must sell $1,000/hour to make quota. Yet the CRM implementation wants you to make that salesperson into a $1,000/hour data-entry clerk—for the benefit of everyone else (see Figure 7–2).

A better approach, seconded by Joe Galvin of Gartner, Inc., is to start with a sales process. First, identify your best practices sales process, all the way from demand creation through competition to contract and then to account control.

“Gartner Dataquest has recognized that enterprises have spent more than $3.6 billion on sales software alone, with growth projected through 2007,” says Galvin. “However, many of these investments have failed to deliver measurable results, characterized by extremely low adoption rates or total abandonment.”

Galvin further states that, “sales culture dictates, to a large degree, technology adoption,” and “technology alone will not change behavior.”[4]4
  Joe Galvin, Technology-Powered Sales Productivity (Gartner, Inc. 2004), pp. 6–10.


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Defining your best practice sales cycle with your management team is the starting point for almost all things in sales effectiveness. Out of this exercise, you can identify – in each phase – what questions should be asked, what actions should be taken, and who is responsible.

Take that sales process and combine it with a methodology that incorporates tactics, the impact of time, the hierarchy of pain, political navigation, and consultative selling, and out of this comes a strategy that will drive your sales activity. This becomes the “playbook” for your team.

Most information systems are used simply to provide access to your process, to document your chosen strategy to the rest of the sales team, and to give managers a tool from which to coach.

This is not about filling out forms or screens. It’s about how you think and how you lead.

There are two purposes to creating a sales plan. The first is to stimulate thinking and make sure that you haven’t forgotten things. Pilots, whether they have been flying for 3 months or 30 years, still use a checklist.

The second purpose of a sales plan is to communicate your strategy to your manager, who may be able to help you with your strategy, and to your teammates, who need to know who is responsible for which actions, which messages, which stakeholders, and when each activity is due.

This is a major area in which salespeople must move from loners to leaders. Lots of salespeople like to keep this in their head, and as a result, the forecast suffers, the presentations suffer because teammates don’t know what is expected of them, and prospects suffer because they have to sit through endless presentations that don’t address their pains.

“Meeting demands for increased visibility does not help salespeople or organizations sell more,” Galvin says. “The reporting of pipeline and forecast values to meet requirements of CEOs and CFOs has little impact on individual or organizational productivity. To increase productivity, sales executives should focus the execution of the sales methodology and processes that accelerate selling, not the reporting requirement of finance.”

It’s about communication, your plan, and leading your team. Your process needs to drive your technology, not vice versa.

Tools for the Individual Salesperson

It is helpful to examine technology in light of how it empowers the four levels of sales strategy. At the bottom are tools that empower selling to individuals, or face-to-face selling. Obviously, these are the contact and activity managers, and there are many vendors in this area. This has been one of the most productive areas for information technology in assisting salespeople.

Not only has new technology given salespeople a tool for searching and finding contacts earlier and then generating e-mails and correspondence more quickly, but it also gets the information, which is a company asset, out of the salesperson’s head and into the corporate system.