Brent Adamson's Blog, page 11

Strategic Planning: It’s Never Too Late (Or Too Early) to Start

(This is a guest post by Jade Scott of the CEB Communications Leadership Council, our sister program for communications professionals. We thought the information here will be useful as sales leaders revisit their strategic plans, and look to establish Sales’ mandate for the next year.)

These days, conversations with members in the network are filled with questions, ideas and brainstorming about resource allocation, budgeting, re-organization, and hiring new talent. As we have greater expectations placed on ourselves to create greater value for the business and to ensure the team’s talent bench is built out for success, we realize that something in our current process and strategy has to change. Even with all the focus on re-allocating and re-organizing, there’s still a wealth of opportunity when it comes to the current team’s ability and capacity to create strategic plans.

Close your eyes for a minute and picture a strategic plan. If, in your mind, you see a binder of many pages, sitting on a shelf and gathering dust, then you’re likely seeing the traditional old-school 5-, 10-, 20-year strategic plan. But what we’re talking about today is more of the living, breathing, actionable, innovative strategic plan. This plan is engineered from corporate strategy and business objectives, and easily translated into action steps. It should be simple, modifiable, and easy to execute by others.

It’s tough in the day-to-day to think about strategy…to consider how every tactic, or ask of the team, relates back to the company’s priorities and objectives for the year… but for those teams that have taken a concerted effort to create a strategic plan for the year, and to develop a strategic plan for major initiatives, those teams are able to be more pointed in their tactics, more consultative in their support and are much more capable of sorting through high vs. low value work.

So how do your fellow executives approach strategic planning with their teams? When speaking to a senior executive the other day, I asked about her team’s strategic planning efforts and who is responsible for building these plans. She answered candidly, “I create the strategic plans for my team and there is only one other person who I trust to develop them besides me.” Her next comment was that often it’s tough to get everyone on the same page, particularly those team members or leaders of other functions that aren’t involved in the planning process.

It’s understandable that teams don’t need everyone to be focused on strategic planning, nor do teams need a strategic plan for every initiative. Yet everyone in the function is capable or should be capable of strategic thinking.

I talked to another senior executive a few weeks ago and he said he and his team create a plan for every big initiative that comes across their desks. They take a painstaking amount time to figure out the messages they want to share, the channels they’ll use, even the owners for the communication. Yet, he admitted that even with all of this work, it’s hard for the team to take action on this plan, to see how these initiatives relate to corporate priorities and it’s very tough to measure success.

4 Smart Steps to Strategic Planning:

When it comes to strategic planning, here are 4 key steps that the most progressive teams follow:

1.  Establish Objectives

Uncover desired business outcomes
Identify the target audiences
Define your key objectives

2.  Understand Audience Motivations

Deepen your understanding of the audience
Determine the appropriate channels to reach these audiences

3.  Create Action Plan

Select outcome-focused metrics – ask: what is the call to action?
Create a one-, two-, three-page action plan that readers can tack up and reference throughout the planning, roll-out and implementation process

4.  Track and Report Progress

Here’s where the creativity kicks in: develop and execute messaging – ask: how can leaders, employees, customers share this message?
Measure and report on progress – ask other leaders: what does success look like?

So, here’s a suggestion for the next round. Try out this 4-step process, adjusting and customizing it to fit your company’s unique needs, and let us know how it goes. Or, charge a few of the more junior members on your team to try their hand at this step-by-step process. Not only will this signal your trust and confidence in their abilities, but it will also provide an opportunity to develop critical and strategic thinking skills. It’s never too late (or too early for that matter) to start!

Tell us – what cool things are you doing with strategy plans? Discuss in the comments section below!

CEB Sales Related Resources

Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Organization
Toyota Motor Corporation: Strategic Objectives Heat Map
Eli Lilly’s Strategy Assumptions Cascade

CEB Sales Related Blogs

3 Ways to Get Strategic Planning Right

Want to Change Quickly? Enlist Your Managers

In many of our recent posts we have talked about the impact a culture that encourages judgment can have on a reps’ ability to get in earlier, Challenge customers, and drive sales in a world of information proliferation . While many agree about the need for change, culture shift is hard.

Using managers as a lever can be an effective way to begin implementing change quickly. Managers can create a micro-climate within their teams than can help reps develop new skills, empower them to sell, and effectively share information to make each seller more effective. Ineffective managers, on the other hand, stunt the development of important skills and retard the ability of sellers to challenge customers.

Managers who boost a judgment-led micro-climate also provide effective coaching, facilitate reps’ connections and idea sharing, and encourage debate and innovation within the team. Ineffective managers are motivated by personal achievement and recognition, emphasize metrics that prioritize measuring rep activities instead of identifying customer progress verifiers and over invest in supporting deal close (instead of qualification and planning.)

Managers interested in improving their team’s micro-climate should focus on three high-impact areas:

Coaching:  Managers who foster ongoing development in key skill areas invest time coaching the core for performance and stars for retention. Effective coaching focuses on a specific area and draws a clear path to improvement. Coaches that are able to tailor delivery and next steps to the learning and communication style of individual reps ensure engagement and improve motivation.

Innovation: Managers who use their experience and perspective to find creative or novel solutions to business challenges and opportunities, and encourage their team to do the same simultaneously empower reps and drive business growth. Our research finds that improving sales innovation skills has nearly double the impact on a sales manager’s ability to drive growth than driving compliance to sales process.

Activating a climate of Judgment:  Managers who trust reps to determine the best course of action through a deal and manage to principles over rules, instill confidence and encourage sellers to stretch—crucial for selling to informed customers. In fact, our research shows that managers who create a climate of judgment have 120% more Insight Sellers on their teams than managers who are more directive.

CEB Sales Members: Explore our updated Coaching Topic Center, use our Manager Ideation Toolkit, or listen to a webinar replay about the importance judgment plays in the new era of sales

Is Your Sales Process Hurting or Helping Reps?

In our last post from our series on Driving Sales Transformation, we discussed what sales organizations can do to allow reps to exercise judgment.  And while most would agree that in theory reps exercising judgment is a good thing, the results of our quantitative analysis revealed that in practice, most sales organizations have adopted a philosophy of process discipline, seeking to ensure that all reps follow as closely as possible all the steps in a process that sales leaders have pre-determined to be effective at driving sales. But, as we have previously argued, our research shows that activity-driven process adherence is standing in the way of reps adopting winning sales behaviors.

So is your sales process currently hurting or helping reps sell? Obviously, we are not suggesting that sales organizations discard sales process, or eliminate the important oversight and controls that exist (for good reason) today.

The answer for most sales organizations lies in creating a sales process that shifts focus away from activities and towards customer outcomes.  Specifically, sales organizations should create a customer-verified sales process, as ADP did, which allows for a high level of control while still granting reps the autonomy required for them to exercise judgment.

CEB Sales Members, review how ADP’s ‘Buying Made Easy’ sales process incorporates customer verifiers, by listening to this webinar.

There are three main ways in which customer verifiers in the sales process support rep judgment while maximizing sales outcomes:

No Subjective Estimate: Since the customer rather than the rep indicates where a particular deal stands in a customer-verified process, managers can increasingly trust reps’ assessment of a commercial opportunity.
Clear Planning: Affirming deal progress allows reps to anticipate roadblocks and identify effective next steps.
Creativity: Because the means (sales activities) are de-emphasized in lieu of outcomes (verifiers), managers are encouraged to innovate rather than micro-manage reps.

CEB Sales Members, learn more about ADP’s Buying Made Easy tool, and register for one of our upcoming Executive Retreat or Regional Briefing sessions to learn more about this study.

Simplifying Compensation Plan Administration

 

Compensation is one of the most difficult facets of a sales organization to manage. In large companies, it’s not just the often diverse compensation plans that complicate the practice, but global rep dispersion and their home currency play large parts as well. Companies are increasingly looking to compensation management tools for help consolidating and standardizing compensation for the entire sales force.

Exploring how companies use compensation tools was the purpose of our recent brief titled “Using Tools to Standardize Sales Compensation.” We brought the topic to three member organizations to see how their compensation management teams were using tools. We asked five main questions:

What is the high-level structure of your sales organization and compensation team?
What are the attributes of your sales compensation tool (vendor, access rights, payout currency)?
What has worked well with the compensation tool at your organization?
What are the challenges associated with the compensation tool at your organization?
Do you have any additional key considerations for instituting a compensation tool?

Two of the companies in our brief use the compensation tool Callidus while the other company uses Iconixx. Both of these tools provide a two-sided platform with visibility for both the compensation team and individual rep’s personal compensation plans. The uniform tool structure and customization possibilities helped the profiled companies to more easily facilitate compensation payment and adjustments.

However, when seeking to improve compensation efficiency, executives remarked that the company focus should be placed on organizational consolidation and simplification rather than tool usage. At each of the profiled companies, compensation tool installation was coupled with a sales structure change that served to align compensation plans and management strategies.

CEB Sales Members, check out the full report: Using Tools to Standardize Sales Compensation and use the profiles to compare your organizations’ compensation processes. Also, review the Compensation topic center to learn how to better design and communicate compensation plans.

Is Asking for Money a Deal-Breaker?

In a recent installment of our blog series on hiring Challengers, we suggested that in order to increase the number of high-potential sellers recruited into sales organizations, leaders must consider altering their recruiting strategies to hire Challengers who can sell, rather than sellers who can challenge.

However, when diversifying hiring efforts to recruit in non-traditional talent pools, organizations risk acquiring candidates with no sales experience for whom a sales role does not meet expectations. (See how leading organizations are succeeding at recruiting young sales talent).  And as we all know, working in sales inevitably involves asking customers for their business. Thus, even high-potential Challengers are likely to fail in their seller roles if they are not comfortable asking customers for money.

But would Challengers not currently working in sales be comfortable asking for money?

CEB Sales tackled that question in the new 2013 research study, and the results from our quantitative study of nearly 4,000 working professionals indicate that in fact most Challengers who aren’t currently in sales are comfortable asking others for money. To be precise, 63% of those candidates who were statistically identified as high-potential Challengers indicated having a high comfort with asking others for money as compared to 49% of the general population.

The good news for sales organizations is that identifying and sourcing high-potential Challengers will likely yield those individuals who are also most likely to be comfortable asking others for money. And is that really all that surprising? Challenger reps are four times more likely to be high-performers (in complex selling environments) precisely because they are able to teach, tailor, and take control of the buying process.  In a way, this year’s research just confirmed what we have known all along: Challengers are skilled negotiators who also excel at mobilizing stakeholders, and who are comfortable driving momentum into a deal.

What is surprising is the number of reps currently employed in sales that are comfortable asking others for money. That number is 69%. In other words, our research indicates that a third of your current reps are not comfortable asking others for money. So while on the one hand, it is comforting to know that there is a pool of high-potential Challengers not currently in sales waiting to be recruited who are essentially equally comfortable asking for money as existing reps, perhaps it is time to do something about the reps working in sales organizations today who are not comfortable asking for money.

Stay tuned for more posts in this series discussing the implications of hiring Challengers who can sell.

CEB Sales Members, register for an upcoming Executive Retreat or Regional Briefing to learn more about how to hire Challengers. Also, visit our new key findings: Hiring Challengers in Today’s Sales Environment.

4 Myths About Driving Mobile Sales Enablement

Mobile-supported activities are a new domain for most sales organizations – looking to mobile as a means to further improve sales process efficiencies and customer interactions. But during the course of our research on Mobile Sales Enablement, we uncovered four common myths:

Mobile sales support is a passing fad: With the need for in-the-moment access to information, sellers are increasingly having to use mobile to stay ahead of the game. Indeed, our recent survey on mobile sales enablement shows that 84% of the sales force already uses mobile for various sales-related activities. In addition, the proliferation of sales apps coupled with their proactive discovery by sellers, despite limited organizational support, are all strong signs that mobile sales enablement is not just here to stay, but to increase in the near future.
 Mobile support is best used for routine, transactional activities: 92% of the sales organizations we surveyed focus mobile support on low-end, non-customer facing tasks such as task and schedule management activities and access to CRM data. While their benefits are easily recognized, our research shows a spurt in the use of decision-making and interactive capabilities like BI and sales analytics, customer and peer collaboration, and information exchange and remote training activities among the most progressive sales organizations.
Mobile support technology development should be kept in-house: Mobile technology is marked by rapid change that necessitates agile mobile strategies to deliver consistent sales functionalities successfully. Most companies cannot achieve this alone. By tapping into outside experience, companies can optimize costs while ensuring higher quality and faster goal achievement. We see companies defining roles of internal and external experts to achieve a balance in meeting sales requirements and maintaining control.
Mobile support is easily accepted by the sales force: Not true! Most companies provide a plethora of capabilities but often forget who their target audience is. To stay on top of customer requirements doesn’t mean providing a variety of mobile capabilities to the sales force. In fact, it means recognizing what your sellers need to be more effective, e.g., easier navigation, offline access, real-time data. In addition, companies need to nurture mobile use through a well-structured execution plan which includes constant reinforcement and communication on mobile uses, benefits, and sales success stories, to drive mobile acceptance across levels.

What has your experience been? Are there any other myths you’d like to share?

CEB Sales Members, to learn more, register for our upcoming webinar on the topic. Also review our recently published research on Mobile Enablement for Sales.

Why Leads Die

Think about a typical B2B organization, your organization perhaps. Imagine you’re facing increased financial pressure, increased scrutiny from above into your spend and performance, and numbers just aren’t quite what they should be. Now if you’re like most organizations, the finger-pointing between Sales and Marketing is probably heating up. On the one hand, Sales is demanding better leads—how can they hit their numbers without quality leads in the pipeline? On the other hand is Marketing wondering, how they can be expected to measure and improve lead performance if a large portion of them just get dumped?

The issue of alignment between Sales and Marketing is a constant. But when you think about the resources invested in lead gen, scoring, nurturing, and additional qualification steps, the lack of alignment becomes a huge financial liability. Each lead is a financial investment and unfortunately many of them end up being ignored, then forgotten, never to be seen again.

While almost everyone understands that alignment is important and beneficial—it can feel like a hopeless task. What exactly is the cause of a “misalignment” and where do you even start in trying to fix it? CEB Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing professionals, recently launched a poll to find out from Sales and Marketing, why some leads aren’t followed up on and how to fix it. Not surprisingly, the two functions had some differences of opinion.

Interestingly, both Sales and Marketing seem to agree that information transparency could be better. Marketers generally assume that having more customer information will make Sales more inclined to follow up. But what Marketers clearly underappreciate, is that Sales often wants to know why Marketing considers a lead valuable or sales-ready. While it may seem like a subtle distinction, giving sales the right type of information could be relatively easy and make a big difference to follow-up.

However, information transparency is just one of the many facets of a larger alignment issues facing Sales and Marketing. At the end of the day, it’s not enough to produce better leads; you have to effectively position those leads in a way that makes sense to your reps.

CEB Sales Members, read more on how high performers shape demand early in the sales funnel. Also, learn how to qualify opportunities based on emerging demand potential.

This is a guest post by Katie Castagna of the CEB Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing professionals. We’ve modified it a bit for a sales audience. Visit the original here!

Are B2B Buyers More Rational?

This year, our sister program, CEB Marketing Leadership Council, is exploring the rationality (or lack thereof) of customer decision-making with respect to B2B purchases. When they initially tested this topic on the membership, they received pretty consistent feedback: “Of course, we are selling to people, after all.  Feelings like ‘fear’ and ‘trust’ are hugely important.” They also heard a common caveat: “The larger the deal, the less emotion involved because more is at stake, and customers pull together larger buying committees to make a rationally defensible purchase decision.”

Now, intuitively, that makes sense. After all, conventional wisdom says that groups do a better job at decision-making than individuals. However, our review of academic research shows that it would be a grave mistake to hinge your efforts on that assumption. To demonstrate why, here’s how three widely-believed aspects of that assumption stack up against the (repeatedly confirmed) academic research.

Myth #1: Groups make better decisions because they process information more rationally.

Researchers have found repeatedly over the decades that group members don’t pool critical information, and as a consequence, the quality of their decisions is low.  For one, confirmation bias plays a huge role.  According to this study on group decision-making, information conforming to the group’s preference is more likely to enter the discussion than opposing information.  And this phenomenon has been observed in both groups as well as individuals, for both preliminary (reversible) and final (irreversible) decisions. 

Myth #2: Groups make better decisions because they can deal with more information than individuals can.

This would be true if every piece of knowledge that each member of the group knew were actually discussed…but that rarely happens. Research shows that groups mainly discuss and make use of “shared information” (available to all members before discussion) rather than “unshared information” (only originally accessible to one or a few members). And in experiments involving such asymmetrical information, groups have less than 30% success rates in picking the rationally correct choice. Researchers even found that groups given instructions designed to improve information use performed no better than those who were not.

Myth #3: Groups make better decisions because of the ability of group members to point out errors in others’ information processing.

The truth is, group decisions are often driven disproportionally by one individual (a phenomenon known as “cognitive centrality”).  This was observed both in laboratory experiments as well as in corporate executives’ decision-making processes.  That effect is exacerbated because more a person feels committed to a particular position, the greater the desire to uphold it, even when confronted with conflicting opinions and evidence. There’s also an aspect of the group’s objective to consider here: consensus-driven groups (goal = agreement) make poorer decisions than critical groups (goal = right answer).

In light of all this, it’s pretty safe to say that buying groups are no more rational than individuals in their purchase choices. This means that we need to reconsider our approach towards communicating to various customer stakeholders. Though the rational, function information is necessary, it’s the non-rational dynamics (whether emotional or cognitive) that will actually get customers to internalize that information to drive action.

CEB Sales Members, learn more about Mobilizers – customer stakeholders that can mobilize an organization around a purchase. Also, visit the Commercial Coaching topic center to learn how reps can actively guide customer stakeholders through the consensus-building process.

This is a guest post by Jing Zhang and Anna Bird of the CEB Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing professionals. We’ve modified it a bit for a sales audience. Visit the original here!

Should You Videotape Coaching Sessions?

Videotaping to enhance learning is a familiar idea; teachers are often encouraged to record and evaluate their lessons in order to identify opportunities for growth. Watching a videotape allows people to notice specifics about their behaviors and speech that they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

Coaching presents a valuable opportunity for videotaping for a number of reasons. Our research has found that coaching is an incredibly important driver of rep performance and employee engagement, and there is a significant difference between good and bad coaching. Bad coaching can decrease staff engagement by 17% and actively degrades performance. Given the disparity between effective and damaging coaching, it’s important to have a mechanism in place to evaluate the quality of your coaches.

One member company recorded individual coaching sessions and then had managers evaluate one session a quarter using a standard scorecard. Coaches watched the videos as well, and they were able to see their facial expressions and reactions to reps.

There are some specific benefits and drawbacks to videotaping coaching sessions: 

Pros:

Videotapes capture body language, nonverbal cues, and nuances that might not be picked up by audio recordings and that can influence the tone of coaching conversations.
Videos can be watched several times and specific skills can be highlighted and focused on each time, which is not possible with an observation session.

Cons:

In any setting, videotaping has the propensity to make people uncomfortable and self-conscious. This can be dealt with by making videotaping a more regular occurrence, and lessening its novelty.
Videotaping equipment can be expensive and can be a significant investment for your organization.

As with any new technology, introducing videotaping requires planning. If your company is considering taping coaching sessions, you should consider the following:

How regularly will videos be reviewed?
How long will tapes be stored for?
Will the cameras be stationary and used in specific rooms, or will they be mobile and stored in a central location?

Has your organization had experience with videotaping coaching session? Share your thoughts below!

CEB Sales Members, visit the Coaching topic center for more resources. Also, review the Anatomy of a World-Class Coaching Program to assess your organization’s coaching effectiveness.

This is a guest post by Gauri Subramani of the CEB Customer Contact Council, our sister program for call center and customer service functions. We’ve modified it a bit for a sales audience. Visit the original here!

Does Sales Have an Image Problem?

In our last post we explored the idea of looking outside of traditional sales talent pools to source a higher number of Challenger reps. However, looking in non-traditional pools (e.g., candidates with no prior sales experience) presents new challenges for sales organizations. Because these job candidates are unique and have different experiences, several questions must be considered. But, first and foremost, we must ask whether or not these people want to work in sales?

In the past, organizations have dealt with candidates declining job offers due to compensation, location, etc. Today, another explanation is often given for not accepting a sales role. Many candidates decline sales offers due to the negative perception and reputation of the sales profession.

To discover whether or not sales has an image problem, CEB Sales studied the perception of sales among over 4,000 diverse respondents. We crafted two job descriptions that were identical, except for the title of the position. One role was entitled “Consulting Associate”, the other “Sales Associate”.  We wanted to test whether or not two job postings that had identical requirements and responsibilities with only a one word difference (“sales”) would have different chances of people applying to them.

The results we found were startling. After the age of 35, the word “sales” drastically affected a candidate’s likelihood of applying to the job. The age component is critical because it means that the perception of sales only turns negative as candidates gain more job experience and exposure.

So how does this information affect your organization’s ability to hire Challenger reps? There are two options—focusing on attempting to shift the perception of the experienced talent, or alternatively, concentrating efforts on the younger generation who has not yet formed its opinion of the sales profession. This group represents a prime opportunity to shape and help create a new understanding of what a career in sales entails, and to help reform the image of sales that exists today.

One company that has embraced this opportunity is 3M, who has developed partnerships with universities across the U.S. to target students before they develop a negative perception of sales. Specifically, 3M’s university partnerships inform and teach students what a sales role entails and provides examples of career paths and opportunities early in a student’s education.

CEB Sales Members, register now for an upcoming webinar featuring guest speakers from 3M and the DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership. Also, learn more about hiring Challengers in today’s sales environment.