Brent Adamson's Blog, page 18

Getting Commercial Insight Right

This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing professionals.

Our recently held 2012 Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas had a hugely informative panel discussion on building a commercial insight engine with Lori Morell and Fran Walsh from Kimberly Clark-Professional as well as Keith Clements and Paul Brown from DENTSPLY.

Here’s a quick summary of the most practical advice shared on a) how to develop commercial insights and b) how to get sales reps to use those insights effectively.

How did you get started with commercial insights?  

DENTSPLY: “We deferred kick-off until we’d built the foundations—deeper knowledge about customers and their business, for example. Then we brought all divisions together to exchange knowledge, build a complete picture of the customer ecosystem and brainstorm insights.”
Kimberly Clark-Professional: “We began with customer research and ran our first commercial insight workshop a few months later. We included Marketing, Sales, and Innovation to bring as much knowledge to the table as possible and get broad buy-in.”

Are there any low-effort ways to come up with commercial insights?

DENTSPLY: “We don’t always need new product claims or new research.  We often take existing claims and look for external research that can extend those claims—and then we marry the two together.”
Kimberly Clark-Professional: “We now do ‘messaging lite’ and create insights in just a few hours, test them with a few customers and then share what works.”

How did you roll out your commercial insight training for the sales force? 

DENTSPLY: “We ran a pilot with a few reps from each section of the business (i.e., every region and product line, high- and low-performers, new and tenured staff) to gauge the effectiveness of both insights and training. This helped us work out what to refine versus scale and also created an early group of advocates.”
Kimberly Clark-Professional: “We did a two-month pilot as a ‘disaster check’. It also taught us how high-performers and Challengers would react.”

How do you keep up momentum?

Kimberly Clark-Professional: “We run contests on Chatter for the best use of a commercial insight. Sales reps have to explain on Chatter how they taught, tailored, and took control.  Each week we select and profile a winner on our homepage. One winner a year goes on our annual top contributor trip. It’s increased best practice sharing and enthusiasm a lot.”

How have you changed your collateral?

DENTSPLY: “We used to start with features, benefits, and metrics. Now we start with an insight about the customer’s business and end with our benefit.”
Kimberly Clark-Professional: “In many cases we took the first page of our existing presentations (all about us) and made it the last. And we often moved what had previously been the last page (all about the customer) to the front.”

Do you have any examples of insights that worked?

DENTSPLY: “We discovered that patients spend 90% of their time at the dentist with the hygienist and explained to dentists that it’s that experience that really drives loyalty.”
Kimberly Clark-Professional: “We sell hygiene products to universities. One of our sales reps recently had a great conversation with a school facilities manager. She started by saying that enrollment was up 33%, which meant 600 more students—something the manager didn’t know. Next, she asked how the facilities budget had changed. It hadn’t. Then she explained that prospective parents and students look for cleanliness and that lower hygiene standards can hurt a school’s popularity. This helped the manager make the case for more investment. The result was that the meeting extended over lunch and in the afternoon the manager introduced the rep to a university colleague as a consultant who was there to help, not a sales person. That showed how much value we’d provided.”

What are your top lessons for others?

Kimberly Clark-Professional: “Don’t wait for a perfect insight; just get started. You can continually refine your insights once they’re out there.”
DENTSPLY: “Don’t worry about buy-in too much. You’ll be surprised how hungry sales reps are for training, but they’re sick of price battles. And, Marketing will be relieved when reps stop asking for a better price and start asking for a better insight. That should get them onboard quickly.”

SEC Members, learn more about Commercial Teaching and the components of world-class insights. Also, register to attend SEC’s upcoming day-long Challenger Workshop sessions on how to build commercial insights and how to get reps to adopt the Challenger skill set.

Are Your Reps Mobile-Ready?

Growing sales complexity and better informed customers are changing the way sales organizations go to market. Leading companies no longer focus on solution selling; instead, they build an insight generation capability—challenging customers’ established beliefs through commercial insight.

That said, the dynamic nature of customer interactions often makes it difficult for companies to equip reps with the right information at the right time. To overcome this, progressive companies are exploring mobile sales enablement to provide reps with “in-the-moment” access to information.

Here are some ways we see mobile being used by companies:

Increase Field Sales’ Efficiency: Pressed for time while on the road, field sales reps are always looking for ways to multi-task—from presentation creation to reporting. To facilitate this, companies are endorsing third-party or creating custom mobile apps for their sales force. For example, Roche, a pharmaceutical company, uses mobile to enable call preparation, e-detailing, and follow-up activities— driving both rep efficiency while also ensuring real-time information updates.
Support Sales Managers’ Activities: With reps out in the field, managers find training and coaching their teams particularly difficult. Companies are addressing this by going mobile, such as Pfizer is exploring mobile e-training alternatives for field sales reps.
Engage Mobile Customers: Customers today are looking for information on their mobile devices more than ever before. To engage mobile customers, leading companies focus on user-friendly m-sites and apps to increase customer engagement and drive sales efforts. For instance, Regus, a global supplier of temporary office space, provides an iphone app that uses augmented reality (AR) and location-based services to help users find office space near them.

Are you aware of other sales activities your sales reps and customers use mobile for? How are you using mobile for sales?

SEC Members, learn more about using iPads and tablets as sales tools or listen to the event replay. Also, read about the top iPad apps for sales and top apps for CRM.

Manager Onboarding with a Twist

As much as we all agree that sales managers are critical to driving growth, across the membership there’s actually little consensus as to how to go about maximizing manager effectiveness internally. And, in light of the great deal of change occurring inside member organizations in recent months, properly onboarding newly minted sales managers has become a hot button topic for many.

We all know the stakes are high for first-line sales manager failure—according to one member company the average cost of a failed manager for them is nearly $4 million. So, it’s critical to put our best foot forward to support folks that are new to the world of managing sales people.

But who is responsible for this development? Senior sales executives? The training organization?

At Bombardier Aerospace, they use peer networks to aid in manager development. By organizing their front line leadership into peer groups, it not only allows new managers, but managers of all tenure to be exposed to different approaches and philosophies employed across the organization.

To accomplish this, Bombardier organizes and facilitates “peer consulting cohorts“. These are groups of managers organized from across internal silos, tasked with pushing one another’s thinking and developing novel approaches to real-world business problems.

To summarize, each month a different manager from the cohort will play the role of a “client” and bring a particularly difficult deal to his cohort for consulting advice. And, while the session is based on an actual deal that the manager is currently working with one of their sales reps, it’s also meant to be a kind of role play. The “client manager”, just like any client in a consulting engagement, requests a specific kind of feedback from their “consultant” manager peers (whether that’s brainstorming on how to advance that particular deal or input on how they might effectively brainstorm with their sales rep for that given customer account).

Worth noting, this isn’t just a regularly scheduled manager “conversation hour”. In order for these ideation sessions to really work, they’ve got to have a formal structure and a clear goal—otherwise chances are it would devolve into an unfocused, non-productive gripe session.

For Bombardier, it’s about creatively pushing managers’ thinking to increase deal size and scope, likelihood to close, and also help their less tenured folks leverage the collective knowledge of the manager community.

SEC Members, to learn more about Bombardier’s Peer Consulting Cohorts, review the best practice and listen to the event replay. Also, read the key findings on building innovative sales managers and visit the Developing Managers topic center for world-class practices on driving manager effectiveness. For ideas on how to design and facilitate sales manager innovation workshops, download the Ideation Toolkit.

Manager Onboarding with a Twist

As much as we all agree that sales managers are critical to driving growth, across the membership there’s actually little consensus as to how to go about maximizing manager effectiveness internally. And, in light of the great deal of change occurring inside member organizations in recent months, properly onboarding newly minted sales managers has become a hot button topic for many.

We all know the stakes are high for first-line sales manager failure—according to one member company the average cost of a failed manager for them is nearly $4 million. So, it’s critical to put our best foot forward to support folks that are new to the world of managing sales people.

But who is responsible for this development? Senior sales executives? The training organization?

At Bombardier Aerospace, they use peer networks to aid in manager development. By organizing their front line leadership into peer groups, it not only allows new managers, but managers of all tenure to be exposed to different approaches and philosophies employed across the organization.

To accomplish this, Bombardier organizes and facilitates “peer consulting cohorts“. These are groups of managers organized from across internal silos, tasked with pushing one another’s thinking and developing novel approaches to real-world business problems.

To summarize, each month a different manager from the cohort will play the role of a “client” and bring a particularly difficult deal to his cohort for consulting advice. And, while the session is based on an actual deal that the manager is currently working with one of their sales reps, it’s also meant to be a kind of role play. The “client manager”, just like any client in a consulting engagement, requests a specific kind of feedback from their “consultant” manager peers (whether that’s brainstorming on how to advance that particular deal or input on how they might effectively brainstorm with their sales rep for that given customer account).

Worth noting, this isn’t just a regularly scheduled manager “conversation hour”. In order for these ideation sessions to really work, they’ve got to have a formal structure and a clear goal—otherwise chances are it would devolve into an unfocused, non-productive gripe session.

For Bombardier, it’s about creatively pushing managers’ thinking to increase deal size and scope, likelihood to close, and also help their less tenured folks leverage the collective knowledge of the manager community.

SEC Members, to learn more about Bombardier’s Peer Consulting Cohorts, review the best practice and listen to the event replay. Also, read the key findings on building innovative sales managers and visit the Developing Managers topic center for world-class practices on driving manager effectiveness. For ideas on how to design and facilitate sales manager innovation workshops, download the Ideation Toolkit.

5 Things to Know Before You Dismiss Social Selling

(This is the last post in our series on sales organizations’ emerging use of social media as a channel for shaping demand.)

In the previous posts in this series we discussed the importance of social media for social selling, ensuring reps profiles match their organization, the reality of social media use in B2B sales, and  IBM’s approach to supporting social media use.

So what conclusions can we draw?

1)      Social Media and Social Selling are here to stay

Social media is not a passing fad and as online networking increases the spillover into B2B sales is somewhat inevitable. What we’ve seen is that customers aren’t just changing the way they buy, they are changing the way they learn and the way they learn is online from their peers.

Organizations that ignore social media will be penalized in the long run, much in the way those that ignored email had to scramble to catch up. Encouraging and supporting social media use early is the best way to learn and institutionalize this important new technology.

2)      Social Selling is not that different from the real-world

Many reps don’t fully appreciate the similarities of Social Selling to the real world and use electronic platforms as billboards instead of communities of discussion. Online communities should be leveraged similar to real communities and used to extend or supplement offline relationships. Networks should include not only potential customers but existing customers, industry experts, and competitors as well. A good Social Selling network includes the most and best information which, in turn, requires the largest network possible.

3)      Social Selling enables reps to become an Information Curator

Online engagement allows a seller to constantly provide existing or potential customers with interesting information and demonstrate ongoing thought leadership. Curating relevant insights and teaching where customers learn creates a long-term relationship that pre-disposes the customer to trust a rep’s commercial insight that is beneficial when it comes time to address the actual sale.

4)      There are good ways and problematic ways to engage online

One good reason for encouraging early social media adoption is the possibility of learning the best methods for engagement with less public risk. As few people are familiar with the landscape, or are experimenting themselves, an audience is more likely to be forgiving of missteps. Getting your reps online now will mean that in the long term they are well versed in social media etiquette before everyone else shows up to the party.

5)      Beginning is easier than you think

 Many organizations feel that to get reps online they require a full social media strategy, complete with air-tight social media policies, marketing plan, and investment in training. Instead what we have seen is that with a little encouragement and advice establishing a social presence is a matter of taking the time. Reps and organizations who want to can go further, but establishing a presence can provide a big enough return to encourage further individual development.

SEC Members: Listen to our webinars on Social Media Credibility and Scalable Social Selling; see how companies like IBM and Eloqua support reps to enter the online sphere and watch for our new Social Selling subtopic page (coming soon).

5 Things to Know Before You Dismiss Social Selling

(This is the last post in our series on sales organizations’ emerging use of social media as a channel for shaping demand.)

In the previous posts in this series we discussed the importance of social media for social selling, ensuring reps profiles match their organization, the reality of social media use in B2B sales, and  IBM’s approach to supporting social media use.

So what conclusions can we draw?

1)      Social Media and Social Selling are here to stay

Social media is not a passing fad and as online networking increases the spillover into B2B sales is somewhat inevitable. What we’ve seen is that customers aren’t just changing the way they buy, they are changing the way they learn and the way they learn is online from their peers.

Organizations that ignore social media will be penalized in the long run, much in the way those that ignored email had to scramble to catch up. Encouraging and supporting social media use early is the best way to learn and institutionalize this important new technology.

2)      Social Selling is not that different from the real-world

Many reps don’t fully appreciate the similarities of Social Selling to the real world and use electronic platforms as billboards instead of communities of discussion. Online communities should be leveraged similar to real communities and used to extend or supplement offline relationships. Networks should include not only potential customers but existing customers, industry experts, and competitors as well. A good Social Selling network includes the most and best information which, in turn, requires the largest network possible.

3)      Social Selling enables reps to become an Information Curator

Online engagement allows a seller to constantly provide existing or potential customers with interesting information and demonstrate ongoing thought leadership. Curating relevant insights and teaching where customers learn creates a long-term relationship that pre-disposes the customer to trust a rep’s commercial insight that is beneficial when it comes time to address the actual sale.

4)      There are good ways and problematic ways to engage online

One good reason for encouraging early social media adoption is the possibility of learning the best methods for engagement with less public risk. As few people are familiar with the landscape, or are experimenting themselves, an audience is more likely to be forgiving of missteps. Getting your reps online now will mean that in the long term they are well versed in social media etiquette before everyone else shows up to the party.

5)      Beginning is easier than you think

 Many organizations feel that to get reps online they require a full social media strategy, complete with air-tight social media policies, marketing plan, and investment in training. Instead what we have seen is that with a little encouragement and advice establishing a social presence is a matter of taking the time. Reps and organizations who want to can go further, but establishing a presence can provide a big enough return to encourage further individual development.

SEC Members: Listen to our webinars on Social Media Credibility and Scalable Social Selling; see how companies like IBM and Eloqua support reps to enter the online sphere and watch for our new Social Selling subtopic page (coming soon).

Why Hiring Matters for the Future of Sales

This is the second in a series of posts introducing SEC’s exciting new research topic for 2013: Driving Effective Sales Transformation . Read the first post here.

In response to an increasingly complex selling environment, organizations are beginning to fundamentally change their selling approach. As a result, many Heads of Sales are beginning to question whether they have enough of the right talent, and are turning to hiring to drive lasting change.

Heads of Sales are concerned that not enough of their existing sales force has the innate skills required to successfully sell to today’s customer. However, they continue to look in the traditional talent pools for proven sales talent. Instead of focusing on high performing sales reps, organizations will be more successful if they identify high potential Challengers and teach them how to sell. The rep of the future is different than the majority of the current sales force and as a result organizations must prioritize new competencies when hiring new talent.

Many organizations are also relying on traditional methods to attract talent, such as offering large compensation and rewards packages. These efforts alone will not attract or motivate the desired talent.  Instead, organizations must develop an Employee Value Proposition (a set of attributes that employees perceive as the value they gain from working at an organization) that is aligned with the needs of high potential candidates.  EVP attributes fall into categories, such as rewards, work, organization, opportunity and people. These values should also motivate and increase the commitment to the organization of the existing sales force. Some attributes that will be attractive to people with potential to insight sell, include:

Opportunities to have an impact on customer outcomes
Emphasis on customer outcomes over sales quotas
Increased rep autonomy

How is your organization thinking about identifying and attracting the sales rep of the future? Let us know in the comments section below.

SEC Members, read more about our 2013 research study and learn why SEC thinks organizations need to rethink how to attract and retain talent. Also, participate in the new SEC Sales Transformation Survey to evaluate key drivers and barriers of sales force engagement within your current sales culture.

Why Hiring Matters for the Future of Sales

[image error]This is the second in a series of posts introducing SEC’s exciting new research topic for 2013: Driving Effective Sales Transformation . Read the first post here.

In response to an increasingly complex selling environment, organizations are beginning to fundamentally change their selling approach. As a result, many Heads of Sales are beginning to question whether they have enough of the right talent, and are turning to hiring to drive lasting change.

Heads of Sales are concerned that not enough of their existing sales force has the innate skills required to successfully sell to today’s customer. However, they continue to look in the traditional talent pools for proven sales talent. Instead of focusing on high performing sales reps, organizations will be more successful if they identify high potential Challengers and teach them how to sell. The rep of the future is different than the majority of the current sales force and as a result organizations must prioritize new competencies when hiring new talent.

Many organizations are also relying on traditional methods to attract talent, such as offering large compensation and rewards packages. These efforts alone will not attract or motivate the desired talent.  Instead, organizations must develop an Employee Value Proposition (a set of attributes that employees perceive as the value they gain from working at an organization) that is aligned with the needs of high potential candidates.  EVP attributes fall into categories, such as rewards, work, organization, opportunity and people. These values should also motivate and increase the commitment to the organization of the existing sales force. Some attributes that will be attractive to people with potential to insight sell, include:

Opportunities to have an impact on customer outcomes
Emphasis on customer outcomes over sales quotas
Increased rep autonomy

How is your organization thinking about identifying and attracting the sales rep of the future? Let us know in the comments section below.

SEC Members, read more about our 2013 research study and learn why SEC thinks organizations need to rethink how to attract and retain talent. Also, participate in the new SEC Sales Transformation Survey to evaluate key drivers and barriers of sales force engagement within your current sales culture.

Deal Reviews Are NOT Sales Coaching

“The only thing worse than coaching someone and having them leave is NOT coaching them and having them stay.”

This powerful statement about the importance of sales coaching was made by one of our members during a panel discussion at last month’s CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.

Many organizations pursue coaching as the key lever to impact sales force performance. That said, changes in today’s buying environment have found managers treating coaching as opportunistic at best, and not the norm.

That’s why we were very excited to host this panel discussion focused on re-energizing coaching for today’s selling environment. Our session featured panelists from The Charmer Sunbelt Group and Staples, Inc., two organizations that have been on the coaching journey for some time now, and have seen a number of benefits as a result of their emphasis on coaching.

Our panelists offered lots of helpful advice and lessons learned they’ve gathered along the way, on everything from recognizing the need for improved coaching to building managers’ coaching skills, some of which I wanted to share with you here.

“There is a difference between deal inspection and sales coaching. One is about behaviors, the other is about beliefs.”  

A main theme throughout the discussion was the danger of managers’ viewing coaching as one-time events, often rooted in deal reviews and business results. As both sets of panelists shared, it’s easy for coaching to devolve from its original purpose and deteriorate into a mere exercise or check-the-box activity.

Data from our Coaching Pulse survey shows that managers often tend to prioritize deal-level coaching at the expense of skill-level coaching, which is why it’s essential to differentiate between the two and to make sure managers understand these key differences.

(SEC Members, for more on deal-level and skill-level coaching, see our Deal-Based Challenger Coaching Guide and our Skill-Based Challenger Coaching Guide.)

What’s more, numbers-driven sales managers can also confuse regular deal reviews with deal-level coaching. As our panelists advised, you must re-focus your managers not on the numbers but rather, on the story behind the numbers. That is how managers can gauge where the disparity in performance is coming from.

As one panelist commented, “We do not want managers coaching to metrics that are in the CRM (i.e., activity or success metric numbers). We had to redesign what deal coaching looks like – it’s not deal inspection, but a conversation to drive the right activities and behaviors that we know bring a deal to a close.”

“Spend more time than you think showing your managers what good coaching looks like.”

It’s extremely important to put some structure around coaching – don’t let it be a free for all. As our panelists advised, define what good coaching looks like, formalize your coaching process, put metrics in place, and hold managers accountable to them.

For managers to provide high-quality coaching, they must first understand what high-quality coaching is…and is NOT. Our panelists commented that coaching can often be confused with training, managing, and leading. That’s why it is crucial to give managers as many examples of good coaching as possible.

(SEC Members, see the SEC’s definition of coaching as well as the PAUSE coaching framework developed by our sister program SEC Solutions.)

As one panelist noted, “Coaching is not comfortable and it is not popular. You’re essentially showing someone how to do something better. It’s important that managers recognize that.”

On a similar note, a theme throughout the discussion was the need to provide managers with plenty of opportunities to receive feedback on their coaching.

In fact, our panelists shared that as part of their formal coaching process they’ve added in a specific stage/component for Second-Line Sales Managers (SLSMs) to give coaching feedback to Front-Line Sales Managers.

Overall, one of the main takeaways for members that attended this panel discussion was that for coaching to be high-quality and truly impactful, organizations must spend a lot more time and energy on it than most typically do. As the Charmer Sunbelt and Staples stories show, there are many benefits that can be gained from putting such rigor around coaching.

SEC Members, for more information on Staples’ and Charmer Sunbelt’s coaching journeys, access this replay of our recent webinar with them. You can also watch this video of Staples discussing the impact their coaching certification program has had on their organization. And, for more on coaching, be sure to check out our newly updated Anatomy of World-Class Sales Coaching Practices.

Deal Reviews Are NOT Sales Coaching

[image error]“The only thing worse than coaching someone and having them leave is NOT coaching them and having them stay.”

This powerful statement about the importance of sales coaching was made by one of our members during a panel discussion at last month’s CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.

Many organizations pursue coaching as the key lever to impact sales force performance. That said, changes in today’s buying environment have found managers treating coaching as opportunistic at best, and not the norm.

That’s why we were very excited to host this panel discussion focused on re-energizing coaching for today’s selling environment. Our session featured panelists from The Charmer Sunbelt Group and Staples, Inc., two organizations that have been on the coaching journey for some time now, and have seen a number of benefits as a result of their emphasis on coaching.

Our panelists offered lots of helpful advice and lessons learned they’ve gathered along the way, on everything from recognizing the need for improved coaching to building managers’ coaching skills, some of which I wanted to share with you here.

“There is a difference between deal inspection and sales coaching. One is about behaviors, the other is about beliefs.”  

A main theme throughout the discussion was the danger of managers’ viewing coaching as one-time events, often rooted in deal reviews and business results. As both sets of panelists shared, it’s easy for coaching to devolve from its original purpose and deteriorate into a mere exercise or check-the-box activity.

Data from our Coaching Pulse survey shows that managers often tend to prioritize deal-level coaching at the expense of skill-level coaching, which is why it’s essential to differentiate between the two and to make sure managers understand these key differences.

(SEC Members, for more on deal-level and skill-level coaching, see our Deal-Based Challenger Coaching Guide and our Skill-Based Challenger Coaching Guide.)

What’s more, numbers-driven sales managers can also confuse regular deal reviews with deal-level coaching. As our panelists advised, you must re-focus your managers not on the numbers but rather, on the story behind the numbers. That is how managers can gauge where the disparity in performance is coming from.

As one panelist commented, “We do not want managers coaching to metrics that are in the CRM (i.e., activity or success metric numbers). We had to redesign what deal coaching looks like – it’s not deal inspection, but a conversation to drive the right activities and behaviors that we know bring a deal to a close.”

“Spend more time than you think showing your managers what good coaching looks like.”

It’s extremely important to put some structure around coaching – don’t let it be a free for all. As our panelists advised, define what good coaching looks like, formalize your coaching process, put metrics in place, and hold managers accountable to them.

For managers to provide high-quality coaching, they must first understand what high-quality coaching is…and is NOT. Our panelists commented that coaching can often be confused with training, managing, and leading. That’s why it is crucial to give managers as many examples of good coaching as possible.

(SEC Members, see the SEC’s definition of coaching as well as the PAUSE coaching framework developed by our sister program SEC Solutions.)

As one panelist noted, “Coaching is not comfortable and it is not popular. You’re essentially showing someone how to do something better. It’s important that managers recognize that.”

On a similar note, a theme throughout the discussion was the need to provide managers with plenty of opportunities to receive feedback on their coaching.

In fact, our panelists shared that as part of their formal coaching process they’ve added in a specific stage/component for Second-Line Sales Managers (SLSMs) to give coaching feedback to Front-Line Sales Managers.

Overall, one of the main takeaways for members that attended this panel discussion was that for coaching to be high-quality and truly impactful, organizations must spend a lot more time and energy on it than most typically do. As the Charmer Sunbelt and Staples stories show, there are many benefits that can be gained from putting such rigor around coaching.

SEC Members, for more information on Staples’ and Charmer Sunbelt’s coaching journeys, access this replay of our recent webinar with them. You can also watch this video of Staples discussing the impact their coaching certification program has had on their organization. And, for more on coaching, be sure to check out our newly updated Anatomy of World-Class Sales Coaching Practices.