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

Автор книги: Rick Page

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The purpose of account management is to build company-to-company trust. The gateway is performance and quality on the first sale. If you don’t exceed expectations on the first sale, you may have inoculated the client against future business.

You have to do more than deliver and perform on the first business – you also have to document your value. The customer will not always do this. If you want to build from rapport to preference to trust, you have to go in and document and publicize what you’ve done for the client and why it was a good decision to choose you or keep you. Rarely will the client go to much effort to dispute these claims if they are reasonable, but it gives ammunition to your supporters.

If you have built trust with powerful individuals in an organization, you then can borrow that trust for access to other people you need to meet. This is called sponsorship, and it allows you to radiate successfully to the rest of the organization or industry. The last step of an implementation process is to proactively ask your sponsor who else you can be doing this for in the company, in the industry, and in the network. Then you need to ask those people to help you gain access to the people you need to meet.

Equal-Rank Meetings

There are many other things you can do to build company-to-company trust. If top executives can meet each other, this reduces risk because they know that if the salesperson leaves, they still have someone at the top they can call on who has skin in the game. Corporate visits and executive meetings are also important because they assure buyers that there is a company vision that supports the buyer’s agenda – that the seller is going to continue to commit resources to product, industry, or geography.

Before Enron became the poster child for corporate abuse (before Ken Lay), the company was one of the best-run organizations in the southwestern United States.

During a very competitive evaluation, Joe Terry had developed relationships with the divisional presidents but had not been able to penetrate to the corporate executives.

Our chairman, John Imlay, was an icon in the industry and known as a very charismatic speaker. He was going to be in Houston to meet a very prestigious client, and Joe took advantage of the trip to arrange a breakfast meeting with the divisional presidents so that he could use John’s name to get an audience with the corporate executives.

John made a huge impression on Enron’s president and CEO. The CEO asked John, “We are considering investing a substantial amount with your company. What are you going to do to ensure our success?”

John smiled and answered, “I’m going to let Joe make the good decisions he always makes, and everything will work out fine.” Baton passed. Deal won. Happy client.

These equal-rank meetings are especially important overseas, where there are greater class differences between managers and non-managers. The executive may say nothing different from what the salesperson has said all along; it’s simply that the executive has the stripes. It’s important in these executive-to-executive meetings to make sure that trust is left with the account executive after the call.

If the executive steals power during the sales call, he or she can’t give it back. That executive is now the actual account manager, and the salesperson is now the gun bearer. Every effort must be made to pass power to the account manager during the sales call. This also reduces vendor abuse if the people inside the account know that you have inside access to executive management.

Relationships

One of the reasons I may trust you and your company is because you solve my problems. The other pillar of trust is personal relationships – moving from alignment to rapport to trust. If I am going to trust you, I have to know that I can depend on you for at least a win-win in every transaction. (Dependability alone is not enough. There are some people I can depend on to stick it to me every time.)

My father-in-law was trusted for 39 years in the insurance business because his clients all knew that he would never do anything to his gain and their detriment. Most of these rural people never quite understood the implications of the insurance they were buying, but they knew he would never do anything that wasn’t in their best interest.

This is called trusted-advisor selling (the seventh generation of selling), and the height of it is when the buyer says, “I’m not sure what I need. Why don’t you study it and tell me what I need. Whatever you’re selling, I’m buying.” It takes years to build this kind of trust with buyers and only one abuse to break it, but it is the highest level of selling.

Sometimes we trust people only because we know that the risk of loss of future business will keep them honest. Danger comes from sellers who only want to sell to you one time. This is why a contract is still important. Without it, there is really nothing to ensure that trust.

In order to trust you, I need to know that you are dependable. I need to understand your principles and values and trust that you will never do anything that is not in my best interest. Principle-driven people are consistent, not situational. And principles are values acted on consistently.

If that trust grows into personal friendship, this is even better. This is when I not only trust you, but I also enjoy your company. I appreciate your counsel, and you are fun to be around. This is a great benefit to the buyer-seller relationship, but if it doesn’t have the underpinnings of strong product or performance, it can melt down quickly.

Even your best sponsors cannot go into implementation saying, “Buy from this guy. I like him. He’s my friend.” You have to build on both pillars of trust. I trust you because you are an industry expert, you know my business, and you can solve my problems. Or I will trust you because we work together, you are my friend, I know your family, and you will never let me down.

In the end, the only thing your company really has to sell is trust. It’s at the heart of brand management. Just look at all the images in advertising that focus on trust.

Trust Scorecard
Best Practices, Trust	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 are trained in fundamental skills for discovery, linkage, and presentation.
Opportunity
We consistently conduct needs assessments with the client before showing our product and solutions.
We consistently debrief each reference to get perspective of where we are in the sale.
Account Management
Our references are developed, rewarded, and their time treated respectfully.
We consistently document our value to our existing clients.
We have earned preferred vendor status in accounts.
We get exclusive evaluations and noncompetitive business.
We maintain continuity of the same reps on the same accounts from year to year.
We conduct customer satisfaction and loyalty assessments regularly.
Industry/Market
Our sales force is organized and focused by industry so we can focus on industry-specific solutions for our clients.

SECTION VII: Transformation

CHAPTER 9: Transformation – Making It Stick

Until new behaviors are rooted in social norms and shared values, they are subject to degradation as soon as the pressure for change is removed

John Kotter, “What Leaders Really Do,”

Harvard Business Review, 1999

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Peter Drucker

Over the past 30 years I’ve had a lot of managers come to me looking for improvement. Some of them are ready to make drastic changes and are willing to do whatever it takes to solve their business problems. Others aren’t comfortable with that much change. They want improvement but not transformation. Others just want a speech. Some want a miracle.

To achieve true competitive advantage, obviously there has to be a lasting top-management commitment to full integration of all sales processes from hiring to training to compensation to team roles and responsibilities, rewards, and performance. To really make it stick, managers have to get back into both deal coaching and performance coaching.

I would start by requiring every manager to read Larry

Bossidy and Ram Charan’s excellent book, Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done. It focuses on what it takes to build a culture of execution in all areas. One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “Coaching is the single most important part of expanding others capabilities. It’s the difference between giving orders and teaching people how to get things done. Good leaders regard every encounter as an opportunity to coach.”

The key is integrating these new processes, embedding them in every aspect of your culture from management language to forecasting, the sales cycle, and compensation.

How Salespeople Learn: C.A.S.H. Learning Model

Before you can transform your sales force, you have to understand how adults learn. In addition, salespeople learn differently from other adults. In our experience, there are four steps: curiosity, awareness, skill, and habit (see Figure 9–1).

Curiosity

Curiosity is the seed of learning – the individual has to bring this to the table. In our sessions, we always have a mixture of sponges, vacationers, and prisoners. The first two hours are spent getting the prisoners to unfold their arms. They are prisoners of their own experience.

We have to create a gap between where they are and where they need to be to survive and thrive as the demands of selling and the buyer evolve. They need to understand that they must either grow or go.

Awareness

New awareness is important to personal growth. Reading and training are essential. By definition, a system cannot change itself from within. It takes outside forces. But you can’t get competitive advantage from awareness alone. It comes from speed of reaction and execution.

For many people, personal growth and development after college often stagnate or are limited to gaining the skills and knowledge needed to perform their current job. For salespeople, however, the competencies required to perform in today’s market have escalated because they now need to sell to all levels of their client organizations.

Whether a salesperson is a vice president or not, they need to be conversant with and knowledgeable about Clevel issues. However, many salespeople have not developed the necessary strategic literacy in their industries.

Skill

I play golf often and have some skills. I’ve read almost every book on golf, so I have awareness. I birdie some, par some, and have eagled a few. But Tiger Woods does consistently what I do occasionally (I know, he does some things I’ll never do) because he has the discipline to practice incessantly – with his coach – to develop his superior natural physical talents (which I will never have) to their fullest potential. Without this discipline, though, he might be just another trunk slammer, fighting to stay on the tour.

This is also the difference between best-in-class sales organizations and the rest of the pack. The leading sales forces do consistently what others do only some of the time. In the complex sale, the stakes are huge, and the difference between the winner and the loser is often a very close margin.

Habit

Competitive advantage comes with making skills a habit – a permanent, consistent behavioral change at the individual and organizational levels. From awareness to habit is really a two-year process of guided practice.

During the first year, you’re telling them. During the second year, you’re making them realize that this isn’t just the “theme of the month” and that it’s here to stay.

Sometimes salespeople decide to just wait a year until the sales manager either gets fired, taking his new processes with him, or fails to follow up. It will take two years of consistent pressure on your part before all your salespeople are finally convinced that the new process is here to stay.

They will begin to get on board when they see others winning using the process. They will make it a personal habit when the company makes it an organizational habit. Every time you don’t insist on an activity, strategy session, sales plan, principle, or standard, the cloth of discipline begins to tear.

Making It Stick

Greatness can be nothing unless it’s lasting.

Napoléon Bonaparte

An equal challenge is how to make such a process or technology stick with salespeople, who have short attention spans and would rather talk than write. Sales forces have stared down implementations and used passive resistance to outlast scores of multi-million dollar CRM and training initiatives.

Formula for Failure – What Won’t Work

• Declare that, “We have a sales problem.”

• Implement CRM as a fix.

• Hire a big consulting firm to define your sales cycle (be sure to spend seven figures and take a year). Display the results in a large binder.

• Buy what looks or feels good or what came with your new CRM system.

• Pay less than competitive rates to recruiters.

• Make the form or CRM input very comprehensive (i.e., long), and ask everyone for input.

• Run your training at your sales meeting; make sure that it’s the first time your managers have seen it.

• Train your own trainers to save money.

• Hope for adoption, make threats, use guilt, and cheerlead for results.

• Use revenue as the only metric.

• Excuse veterans from compliance.

Management Commitment: They’re Watching You to See If You Are Still Watching Them

This is obvious, of course, but what does it mean? Beyond the customary announcements of top management, it means consistency of execution. Busy salespeople will wait to see if this is just another “theme of the month.”

It may seem unnecessary to emphasize that managers must actually attend and help to lead training sessions, but we have seen organizations where this expectation clearly was not set. Every salesperson is watching his or her manager during any rollout for body language, faint praise, passive resistance, or cynicism.

Every failure by management to reinforce the process will cause the fabric of discipline to begin to tear and competitive advantage to slip away. I once passed one of my managers in the hall and asked him about an action item we had agreed on months earlier. He said, “You don’t forget about these things, do you?” It was one of the best management compliments I ever received.

Fortunately, the new Web-based tools allow managers to see who is actually using the process on a daily basis. The Fort Hill Company, founded by Cal Wick, has built software so that managers can track action item completion and training follow-through by individual, complete with dashboard and graphics.

“You need to check-up periodically and let them know that you are looking. A quick e-mail or some online feedback will put them on notice that you are checking and that you expect execution,” Wick says.

According to Wick:

Up until now, most training programs concentrated exclusively on what happened in the classroom. What happened afterwards was a “black hole.” In fact, what usually happened was something like this: Sales training put on a course to teach new skills and approaches to optimizing the sales process. In the concluding session, attendees were asked to write a goal for applying what they had just learned. They did. Then they put it in their notebooks, put the notebook on the shelf, and went back to doing what they had done before.

Technology is changing that.

As with the other technologies we discuss, a followthrough system alone is not a solution. To maximize the value of follow-through management technologies, managers and training professionals need to pay attention to what is going on. They need to use the system to track behavior and provide encouragement, recognition, or correction as necessary.

When that is done, postcourse follow-through technology increases the impact of sales training and the value companies realize as a result.

Moreover, adoption needs to be incorporated into comp plans and performance reviews of all managers for it to really stick.

One of Cal’s clients, AstraZeneca wanted to increase the amount of coaching its sales managers did, so it ran a program called “Breakthrough Coaching” but did nothing to ensure that managers followed up on what they had learned. Not surprisingly, not much changed in the field.

So the company went back to the drawing board and developed “Breakthrough Coaching II.” The big difference this time was that the company put a rigorous system of follow-through in place to make sure that what was taught was used.

Every manager who attended the program was required (1) to set two goals for improving their coaching and (2) to report on progress five times over a 10-week period. Area and regional managers had access to the follow-through technology so that they could see who was doing what they were asked and who was getting results.

The change was dramatic. Salespeople were polled three months after their managers had attended the program.

• 48 percent reported increased frequency of coaching interactions with their managers.

• 59 percent experienced a shift to a more coaching style of interaction.

• 61 percent felt that their managers were more effective or much more effective as a result.

One summed it up this way: “I am now receiving coaching even when the situation is positive. I used to feel like I only received coaching when I needed to improve on something. I feel like my manager is more in touch with what I am doing.”

If you want something to stick, you have to make sure that it is reinforced. The real work begins when the course ends.

It Takes One to Two Years – Do You Have That Long?

Our first step as managers is to expand our time focus. For an individual, research shows that it takes about 21 days to form a habit. For an organization, it takes one to two years of consistent and persistent reinforcement to create organizational habits.

You can get awareness in two hours through a book or a speech. You can start to build skills in a two-day training program. But it may take two years for your salespeople to figure out that you’re going to stay with this and for them to actually see the results when they use it versus when they don’t.

Real World and Relevant

A successful class alone will not ensure adoption. But a bad one will ensure failure. Word of mouth on the first class will make or break the effort.

The first step toward making a new process stick is to make the training relevant. Canned programs won’t work anymore. The best training actually involves working live deals in class. Similarly, in technology rollouts, salespeople have to see how it helps them with their everyday jobs.

If you use a case study, salespeople will never see their flaws. However, if you have them working their own deals, they see their own flaws – no one has to point them out. This self-discovery of pain creates the curiosity required to start developing new habits.

In our workshops, the first thing we do is add up the dollar volume of all the opportunities/accounts we’ll work in class. Then we discuss how we’re going to create better strategies and action items to make that either a bigger number or increase the probability of reaching that goal.

The transformation is startling. All of a sudden, it’s no longer a training class. It’s actually working on live deals – their competitors, their products, their issues, and their pipeline – and giving them something they can use at 8:30 tomorrow morning. When we focus on deals that are relevant to them, we have very few prisoners in class.

Tailored to Your Unique Sales Process

Before training begins, it is important to define your unique sales cycle and potential action items—built and designed by your people and owned by your managers. This not only makes the process of technology relevant, but it also gains the buy-in of front-line managers, who are the key to adoption.

The worst thing you can have is a sales manager, with arms folded, passing judgment on a new program while you’re training the troops. How can such a manager object to a process he or she designed?

Usually front-line sales managers, especially the intuitive ones who are not process-oriented, are hungry for a process to make their people more independent and to give them a coaching tool to keep deals in control. Tying the methodology and their sales process together by phase relates to what they do every day. Real deals mean that the results can be seen immediately. The question that must be answered by the reps is, “Was it worth my time?”

Keep the Tools Simple

The next step is to make any account management or opportunity management planning tool extremely concise. Processes that require salespeople to fill out a 12-page form are destined to fail.

If the integrity of the logical work flow of the tool is not preserved, or if there is excess redundancy, when the tool is integrated with your CRM, you can almost guarantee a failed CRM and a failed methodology.

In a pivotal meeting for us a few years ago, for which I will always be grateful, Phil Wilmington, then senior vice president of worldwide sales for PeopleSoft, said, “We need a one-page sales tool.”

I said, “Well, you have the author and owner here. Which of the six P’s would you take out?”

He looked at it and said, “None of them. I’ve got to have them all in order to win.”

“Well then, we don’t have a methodology issue. What we have is a management issue,” I said.

The challenge was discipline. But we did take the razor to our process and drove it down to one page of output and three simple input screens.

It has to be simple, but it also has to be effective. A blank piece of paper is simple, but it’s not powerful enough to help you lead a team. And a 12-page document certainly would be complete, but no salesperson is going to slow down enough to use it.

Successful, Credible Instructors – No “Facilitators” Allowed

The next step is to have credible instructors. People who stand up in front of experienced salespeople have to have walked in their shoes, or they will not earn the respect of those people. Lightweight “facilitators” without experience or worn-out salespeople whose experience is not current will not be credible.

In today’s marketplace, any instructor has to be involved in sales and have the executive presence to be able to customize the process to the client. Unbelievably, there are legions of sales trainers out there who have never carried a bag or covered a territory. There are ex-product reps out there trying to teach competitive hunting, and there are hunters trying to teach account management. There are ex-reps out there training who have never coached a deal.

Obstacles to Adoption

The character and discipline of an organization are defined by the excuses it allows. And people have no shortage of reasons why change is not needed or why they don’t have time for it.

Top 10 Most Common Adoption Subversion Excuses

1. We’ve had a new sales manager every two years – I can wait this one out.

2. I’m too busy to coach deals.

3. I’m ahead of quota. They won’t fire me.

4. I’m a veteran. That stuff is for rookies.

5. I handle the big account. They won’t fire me.

6. If I take time to do that and don’t make my numbers, they’ll fire me anyway.

7. Let’s see if my manager has the guts to insist on doing this.

8. I have too much administrative work and no time to coach.

9. Why do we need strategy sessions? We talk to the reps all the time.

10. We’ve tried this before. This too shall pass.

On to the Fourth Generation: Perpetual Advantage

New Metrics – New Accountability

So what does the future hold? One of the best practices to making processes stick is creating new sales metrics – other than just revenue. Focusing on revenue only as a measurement is like driving in the rear-view mirror.

What is needed are metrics that measure accounts, deals, and salespeople along the way and spot out-of-control performance while there is still time to make changes. Metrics have not been an area of focus, outside of training departments, for the last few years. Salespeople respond well to being measured against goals. And metrics drive visibility and accountability, which ultimately drives discipline.

A great book for illustrating the potential effects of new metrics to achieve greater productivity is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.

He writes about how Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s baseball organization brought new thinking into how to evaluate which factors predict success for a player. This enabled the team to get high performers for less money and build a perennial winning team without the superhigh payrolls that don’t always ensure success.

The “gut-feel” metaphors and stereotypes used by the major league scouts were replaced by new criteria. Beane and his Harvard economists had analyzed what really predicted success in baseball performance – walks taken, onbase percentage, and slugging percentage. They challenged established statistics such as errors – how can you have a statistic based on something you were supposed to do? They saw that the best way to avoid an “error” is to not try, or to be in the wrong place, or to have poor range.

The effect on the scouts and the rest of the league is a classic story of resistance to change management and the difficulties of challenging the intuitive, gut-feel, but untested factors that baseball scouts have used for years.

The power of new metrics changed baseball thinking and performance forever.

As we discussed in the section on technology, a critical best practice is to tie the methodology and customized best practice sales cycle back into the forecast.

New metrics are needed during the coaching phase. There are questions that coaches need to ask salespeople that will challenge assumptions, find blind spots, identify competitive counterstrategies, and drive toward a more successful sales plan.

We have recently implemented with some of our clients a coaching feedback system called Sales Prophet – an analysis of the analysis – that gives a manager’s confidence rating of the major questions in the sales plan as a result of the strategy session. The sales executive can then see how and why the forecast has been adjusted by front-line management. This results in fewer surprises and greater confidence in the forecast, as well as a greater win ratio.

As a result, there is also a watershed shift in accountability. Rather than seeing who has filled out forms, the question becomes which managers have strategized and coached their deals? And if not, why not?

Metrics drive visibility and accountability, which ultimately drive discipline.

Coaching and Forecast Follow-up Metrics

The Internet has created the possibility of getting greater feedback on the pipeline at a minimum of expense and time from the field reps.

While a good coaching session is the foundation of forecast accuracy, a manager needs to separate coaching and forecasting techniques. Coaching must be value-added. It needs to provide new ideas to help qualify, advance the strategy, gain access, challenge assumptions, or brainstorm new ideas. Coaching should expose blind spots for the rep’s benefit – not expose his or her shortcomings. These sessions could take an hour or some could take a day depending on the size, importance, and complexity of the deal.

Forecasting reviews should be quick and very focused. They should be driven from the key question areas just discussed: Why will you win? When will it close? What is the source of urgency? What has to happen between now and when it closes? Forecast reviews should take no more than 30 minutes per opportunity. If nothing has changed, five minutes.

A manager should be able to take truthful answers and create a consolidated forecast to pass along. Based on the estimated close date of the opportunity, we have helped a number of our clients track the effectiveness of the coaching session and the progress of the deal. First, we can find out if the deal closed at all, if it closed faster than expected, if it closed for more or less than the expected amount, or if we qualified out.

We can ask if the new sales process or technology was helpful or not and, if so, how. We also can determine whether a strategy review was conducted by the sales manager and if it was helpful or not. (This involves more accountability and visibility for the front-line sales managers.) This is also an opportunity for the reps to say where they need help and more follow-up training.

Deal-Tracking Survey

One of the new metrics introduced at Apple to help determine the effectiveness of its training initiative was an Internet survey of over 400 deals that had been coached in strategy review sessions. The beauty of the survey was its efficiency. The survey consisted of a half-dozen questions that branched further only under certain conditions. It didn’t take much time to complete.

Rather than just ask why they won or why they lost, it prompted the sales reps about how well they understood the elements of their sales process in the deal. For example, how well did they understand the decision-making process? Did they understand the client’s strategic issues? Did they detect a pain that was a source of urgency?

It also asked if the reps had conducted a strategy session with their managers, and if so, was it helpful?

With this metric, managers were able to see that their win ratio when they used the process was significantly higher than when they didn’t. They also identified specific areas where salespeople needed more training, which could be done by e-learning modules or reviews.

A very useful outcome was that managers learned that their people weren’t qualifying out of enough bad deals. They rewrote their qualification criteria to focus on their more winnable deals.

The last outcome was to identify which managers were conducting strategy sessions and which were not. Interesting phone calls followed. Greater visibility had pushed accountability to the front-line sales managers, where it belonged.