Brent Adamson's Blog, page 23

The Do’s and Don’ts of National Sales Meetings

It’s time to start thinking about getting the team together – picking that critical, fun, but productive location…putting together a program that is going to motivate, inform, teach and drive the commercial business to the growth goals we’ve put in place. That’s right, it’s planning time for your national or global sales meeting.

Seems simple enough, but as many of us know, it certainly isn’t.

Over the years, our members have given us many opportunities to be a part of their National and Global Sales Meetings, so we thought we’d give you a few tips on some interesting and not-so-interesting parts of a schedule.

The Good

1) Doesn’t everyone love a good way to fire people up?

We’ve seen members use various competitive games to get the sales force excited, one popular approach being a “minute to win it”-type game.  Now, when it comes to this approach, it’s about executing it the right way, because games could backfire. What we’ve seen create the most success here is keeping it short and simple.  For example, having a few teams compete at a time on stage, creating a lively, fun experience for the entire audience.

The Bad

2) You’re giving away what?  No thanks, I’ll pass.

Certainly, everyone likes free things and it’s a great gesture by an organization to thank hard-working employees, but occasionally we see some giveaways that don’t meet the excitement bar.  You don’t want the reaction of your reps to be “actually, you can keep that, that’s not even worth taking home.”

For example, as prizes or giveaways for “placing” in a game or as an award, we’ve seen rubber band balls handed out, or folders with the company name on it.  As you can imagine, these items didn’t elicit fantastic reactions from the recipients – in fact, it’s probably not even worth handing items like this out as giveaways.

You want to be sure your awards or giveaways have enough value for recipients that they (and non-winners) will, at a minimum, be something that people would want and see as a nice expression of the organization’s gratitude.

3) It’s systems’ training time – Look at what our CRM can do!

Now, to be sure, a national or global sales meeting allows you to have the attention of an audience in one place – an opportunity that you might not have at any other point in the year.  So you’ll want to get critical, new information in front of them.  But, again, it’s all about the approach.

Here are a few items to keep in mind:

Avoid system training in a large room where people will struggle to read the projector screen.  We’ve seen presentations full of screen shots that are unreadable to all but the front row.  When that happens, no one is listening or watching.  It’s time to breakout the smartphones.
Beware product update sessions.  They are often delivered by those in the product group and can struggle to be energetic and engaging.   Second, it’s information overload for the sales force – We’ve seen companies that have four to five day meetings where three of the days are all product reviews and updates.  And, finally, companies are unknowingly teaching their reps to lead with features and benefits, reinforcing the “show up and throw up” sales behavior they are trying to break.

And here’s a general suggestion: Do what you can to effectively fight the lunch coma…don’t feed the beast.  We all know it’s a tough spot on the agenda, the hour after lunch.  You’ve got to fight this with your best weapons – place some type of dynamic, engaging material in the post-lunch spot.  The speaker is going to need to be as energetic as ever, which means the content should also be something that plays to this (so, probably not a CRM training…).

SEC Members, see the advice your peers shared about planning national sales meetings, including determining meeting objectives, topics, and speakers. You can also see peers’ recommendations for inspirational keynote speakers.

We hope this list of Do’s and Don’ts was helpful, and assists you with designing and holding the most successful annual sales meeting you’ve ever had!

What other tips or pitfalls have you encountered when planning your national sales meeting? Please share your experiences in the comments section below.

Making Remote Coaching Work

Dispersed sales teams and their growing mobility is increasingly challenging manager ability to coach reps. Managers often turn to e-mails, team meetings, and phone calls—the same tools they use to communicate with their teams—to coach reps remotely.  But despite consistent communication, managers still struggle with gauging rep engagement, identifying problem areas, or giving feedback. Managers often wonder, what can I do differently that can make remote coaching work?

To drive coaching effectiveness, managers must rethink their approach to remote coaching. Indeed, successful remote managers use the same coaching principles as that of face-to-face coaching.

Below are a few tactics to help improve your coaching to remote sales reps: 

1. Plan for the session: Both managers and reps should know what they want to achieve from a coaching conversation. By setting an agenda prior to the call, managers can ensure that both s/he and the rep are prepared for the meeting. For effective execution, managers can use SEC’s virtual coaching toolkit for tips on how to plan, prepare, and choose the right coaching channel.

2. Overcommunicate: To coach effectively, managers must be in constant communication with reps. This helps reduce the distance barrier, while simultaneously builds a personal rapport. One way of doing this is to establish routine check-ins.

3. Look for non-verbal cues: While coaching, managers should focus on what is being said, as well as what is not being said. For example, do reps come prepared for a scheduled meeting, are they focused or distracted, do they sound disengaged, and are they being proactive or reactive? Grasping such subtleties can often help managers identify coaching instances.

4. Build trust through discipline: Reps gauge manager commitment by their involvement in rep coaching. This is often reflected in coaching discipline and is usually measured by instances like the frequency of sessions canceled or postponed, level of attention during an interaction, or even promised action steps taken or not following a coaching session.

5. Adapt to remote situations: Managers must create opportunities to observe rep behavior, when required. For instance, while a ride-alongs may not always be observable, cold calls or follow-up calls can be shadowed over the phone for coaching purposes.

What other coaching tactics would you recommend to make remote coaching more effective?

SEC Members, learn more on the four rules of effective remote coaching and related tools here. And for more tips and resources on coaching, visit our Coaching topic center.

The Secret to Social Selling

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

One of the most surprising findings in the SEC’s newest research study was the importance of social media and social networks to high performers. Getting in early is now about finding the places where customers learn, and becoming a trusted advisor in those spaces.

In previous blogs we have given you practical advice about getting onto LinkedIn, and ways that corporations have supported reps to get into Twitter and blogging. But how do corporations proceed without a developed social selling strategy? What about those reps who would like to try going beyond an online profile but don’t know where to begin?

Social Selling seems like an overwhelming prospect. The sheer number of ways to engage and the speed at which information evolves can make it seem impossible to begin. The difficulty of knowing where to position reps and get above the general noise is a real and pressing problem. 

Social Media and Social Networks, when leveraged well, can be powerful tools to demonstrate thought leadership, teach where customers learn and initialize the commercial insight journey. They can provide good prospect information and aid with thorough due diligence. Unfortunately, navigating the online landscape can be confusing and time consuming, and most organizations don’t have a lot of margin to experiment or get it wrong.

In response to these challenges, Eloqua developed a Social Media Playbook with information about how to get the sales force online and leverage Social Media platforms for successful Social Selling.

The secret behind any online use though, isn’t really a secret: people sell to people and behind any successful Social Selling effort is a real person who is authentic in their interactions. The goal of Social Selling is to leverage new technologies to extend your network or find opportunities for engagement you might not otherwise get.

Use the playbook to start your journey, but be sure to adapt it to make it your own. Social Selling is a magnified reflection of you, the seller. If you aren’t reflected as a person it will be hard to connect to (and sell to) other people.

SEC Members: Use our Pre-funnel Demand Shaping Toolkit, or Eloqua’s Social Media Playbook to plan an online engagement strategy, or listen to the webinar replay Social Selling: Gaining Credibility and Influence in B2B Social Media Networks to learn how Eloqua does it.

Arm Reps to Teach Where Customers Learn

Despite increasing deal complexity and shifting customer buying behavior, the best performing sales reps continue to prosper in today’s world of sales. Why? Because, they are consistently engaging customers well ahead of the traditional sales funnel.

SEC’s 2012 research shows that the best reps shape the nature of customer demand by delivering disruptive insight where customers learn, effectively reframing how customers think about their business. In doing so, high performers are moving customers into the sales funnel by teaching them about previously unrecognized, underappreciated, or unanticipated problems affecting their business in a way that leads customers to appreciate the value the supplier is uniquely positioned to provide.

Sounds simple enough, right? But as you might expect, getting reps to go out and shape demand is far from easy—especially without the right organizational support.

To enable member organizations to support reps’ pre-funnel activities at scale, SEC developed the Pre-Funnel Demand Shaping Toolkit. Based on interviews with high performing reps and the behaviors attributed to successful demand shaping, the Pre-Funnel Demand Shaping tool serves as a guide reps can use to gain permission and access to, qualify, and teach customers like their top performing peers.

That said, the tool isn’t exclusively for reps—managers can also leverage it as a coaching guide for sharpening reps’ pre-funnel sales activities and sales leaders can use it to inform sales processes and/or enablement support.

The tool follows a four step process that emulates how high performers approach opportunities ahead of the sales funnel. Each step is accompanied with key tells and action steps to help reps identify and advance the right opportunities into the sales funnel. At a high level, the four steps the tool follows are:

General Listening—Leverage social media channels for more than just direct leads; use it to understand the nature of the conversation customers are having with one another so reps can better position themselves as thought leaders in the space.
Narrowing Listening and Gaining Access—Focus listening on accounts to identify opportunities with potential to move into the sales funnel, gleaning as much information as possible.
Identify Change—Determine the potential for driving change within these accounts. Establish an understanding of whether the customer is aware of the problem/opportunity in their business and potentially has an action plan/solution in the works, aware of the problem/opportunity but has a poor understanding of it, or is unaware of the problem/opportunity altogether.
Teach to Shape or Reshape Demand—Teach the customer about the problem or a better way to solve it to shape/reshape demand and lead them into the sales funnel.

SEC Members, to learn more about the Pre-Funnel Demand Shaping Toolkit and how the top performing reps engage customers with commercial insights, make sure to check out this year’s SEC study, Getting in Early: Shaping Customer Demand Through Pre-Funnel Engagement.

Also, review the Challenger Plan, SEC’s new research-based sales methodology that represents how today’s best salespeople approach commercial opportunities from pre-funnel activity through to deal close.

Go For the Gold – By Coaching Your Reps!

[image error]It’s that time again – when the best athletes in the world converge on one city for the Olympics.  We watch the Olympic games for the quality of the competition and to see who gets to stand proudly on the podium, receiving the gold, silver, and bronze medals as the leaders in their event.

Interestingly enough, the SEC has profiled how an British company has taken this ‘medaling’ theme into their organization and used it to measure and reward their sales managers for their coaching  abilities.

The company is called Britannia, and no, they don’t sell encyclopedias.  Rather, they are a British financial services institution that has taken the idea of front-line manager certification to the furthest extent we’ve seen.

The reason for that is that they believe, rightly in our opinion, that ensuring front-line managers have the right set of capabilities to be effective is among the most important factors for their reps and teams achieving their goals.

(See my colleague Stacey’s latest blog on the penalty created by an underperforming manager for a more thorough review).

And so what Britannia did was to introduce a certification program, using a Gold, Silver, & Bronze Medal theme, to test for the quality of their managers’ coaching abilities.  Here’s how it works:

No Medal – Every single manager, no matter their tenure or performance, starts without a medal.  This is akin to the qualification rounds.  In this stage, managers attend coaching training and begin to use these new skills with their teams.


Bronze – To get to bronze medal status, managers not only have to attend coaching training, but they also have to demonstrate through two observed coaching sessions that they can effectively apply these coaching skills with their sales people.

Now, just as an aside, this is where most training certification ends – ensuring that the trainees can use the training.  But for Britannia, they’re just getting warmed up.

Silver – To get a silver medal, managers not only have to demonstrate their coaching abilities, but they also must be able to demonstrate how their coaching creates commercial outcomes.  So for Bronze, they focused on the skills, and to get a Silver, you have to show the outcome. But we don’t end there, because…


Gold – To get a gold medal, what all managers want and where expectations are set, managers have to retain their silver medal for at least six months.

And that leads to one of the most interesting aspects of Britannia’s practice.  At any time a manager can be down-tiered from gold to sliver, silver to bronze, and so on.  So Britannia is not only testing for whether a manager can acquire and use new skills – what they’re really doing is ensuring that these skills and behaviors are being used consistently over a long period of time.  Compare that to what most companies do after training, and it’s no surprise that Britannia saw the results they were looking for (not only commercial outcomes, but secondary effects like reduced turnover rates and decreases in customer complaints).

So the next time you watch a medal ceremony, think about whether you could see your managers on a medal podium – not by running the fastest time or jumping the farthest distance – but by providing their team an exceptional coaching experience.

SEC Members, see the full Britannia case study as well as a replay of our recent webinar on coaching certification programs. And for more on coaching, review our Coaching topic center as well as our newly updated Anatomy of World-Class Sales Coaching Practices.

You can also improve the effectiveness of your front-line sales managers with the new Sales Manager Leadership Academy offering.

The Biggest Casualty of M&A: Your Customers

[image error]Every now and then, we hear of a merger or acquisition gone horribly wrong, taking with it two otherwise profitable companies into oblivion. This, despite the endless hours of due diligence by management teams to ensure synergy and value creation when operating as a single new business entity. 

Nowhere is the effect of M&A felt more strongly than the sales organization. Indeed, with revenue growth cited as the most common reason for M&A, sales leaders are often tasked with lofty targets to demonstrate success. But, while sales leaders should be focused on the effective management of customer relationships during this time, they instead get pulled into the nitty-gritty of the integration itself. 

The result: Nervous customers start taking their business elsewhere.

So, how does a sales organization maintain customer focus during and following M&A activity? SEC research has shown that the best companies direct their energies to:

1) Communicate Change to Customers During M&A: Maintaining customer communication enables companies to update customers on the progress of the M&A, any changes in services or new product offerings, and how these changes will affect customers. Periodic communication helps prevent customers from becoming skeptical of the motives of the M&A, as well as the changes associated with the process. Typically, companies can adopt a two-phased communication strategy:

Pre-Merger Communication: Reassure customers of your continued commitment to their company and industry and the seamless transition of services during the M&A.
Post-Merger Communication: Provide any information on changes in services and ensure that customers do not have any problems or concerns regarding the integration process.

Importantly, messages should describe M&A benefits to the customer—placing importance on customer preferences throughout the integration process—instead of benefits solely to the company.

2) Maintain Service Levels for Customers: To avoid disruptions in service levels, sales organizations must move quickly to assign reps to ensure that customers do not experience any drop-off or interruptions in services. Specifically, companies should have reps in place who will be the main points of contact for customers, as well as verified product lines and services. Typically, the most common approaches to aligning sales forces to best meet customer needs include:

Acquiring Similar Customers that Require Similar Services: Merge sales forces quickly as the sales team is fully equipped to serve customers and requires little transition time.
Acquiring New Customers that Require Different Services: Allow merging sales forces to operate independently and build customer relationships to avoid drop-offs in service levels.
Acquiring Similar Customers that Require Different Services: Allow merging sales forces to work independently until sales reps learn how to deliver specific products and services.

Has your sales organization recently been through an M&A exercise? How did you maintain customer focus throughout the integration process? Share your experiences below.

SEC Members, learn more on how to organize for seamless sales force integration and manage the sales organization during mergers and acquisitions.

Developing Challenger Messages: Lessons Learned

[image error]In mid-July, the SEC had the pleasure of hosting 70+ members for a full-day workshop at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center.  This workshop was designed to help members take the initial steps toward developing the organizational capability necessary to build Challenger-oriented messages.

Below, I’ll describe the two key components of the day and discuss a few takeaways and observations from our experience with the members in the room.

Section #1 – Identification of Unique Differentiators

Why this is important: 

Challenger messages teach your customer to value the unique capabilities of your offering, so the goal of the exercises contained in this section were to help members figure out what differentiates their offering from the competition.

During the session, members responded well to the guidance given around what constitutes a differentiator: 

It’s Unique – it outperforms the competition and is sustainable (difficult for competitors to quickly copy)
It’s Valuable – it has economic impact and value for the customer
It’s Defensible – it’s believable, there is credible evidence of how/why this capability outperforms the competition

Observations & Takeaways: 

It was clear that certain members in the room had a good sense of what differentiators they should focus on, while others struggled a bit to define what truly sets their offering apart.  For the members that felt more confident about their differentiators, our guidance was to push the boundaries , to think laterally and try to make connections that they hadn’t prior to the session; and to take care not to mistake the features and benefits common to their market as true differentiators (e.g. green, innovative, leader, service-oriented, etc.).

We have a number of members who operate in highly commoditized environments (e.g. financial services, manufacturing, industrial supply, etc.), and in those instances, struggling with differentiator identification was a bit more common.  For those members, we encouraged them to look for differentiators in the form of the services their company provides that surrounds their offering (services that allow the customer to reap the value of your commoditized product/solution).

Section #2 – Surfacing Opportunities to Reframe the Customer’s View

Why this is important: 

Insight is the reason for your customers to change behavior.  It’s premised on teaching customers about either new business problems (or opportunities) or better ways to solve and act on known business problems (or opportunities); ultimately reframing the customer’s current viewpoint.  The exercises contained in this section helped to clarify the different methods of “reframing”, and encouraged members in the room to brainstorm customer business problems that relate back to their offering.

During the session, members worked to brainstorm customer problems so they could ultimately figure out what type of reframe is possible.  Here, the exercises focused on revealing customer business problems with either a misunderstood cause, which is leading the customer astray in their efforts to resolve a known issue, or an unrecognized problem, of which the customer is unaware or ill-informed.

Observations & Takeaways:

We found that the exercises that were focused on surfacing customer problems with a misunderstood cause were easier for members to brainstorm but ultimately harder to reframe.  In contrast, brainstorming around unrecognized problems proved difficult but, if identified, can make the message and story creation portion easier and create something that can be very powerful for the customer.

Worth noting: Working hard on this last exercise in particular is absolutely worth the effort.

By connecting the results from the two sections mentioned above, members were able to begin to figure out:

What they know about customer business problems that the customer doesn’t yet know (or has failed to appreciate)
The guidance the sales force can give to customers to help resolve those problems
How that solution to the problem connects back to something our member’s  offering is uniquely positioned to solve

SEC Members, Watch Brent Adamson explain components of Commercial Teaching, learn how to organize your Commercial Teaching pitch, and see an example case study of a peer who has taken this journey.

Why You’re Not Hiring the Right Salesperson

[image error]By now we should all know what to look for when hiring new salespeople. We want the high performers, the Challengers—the salespeople who can teach for differentiation, tailor for resonance, and take control of the sales interaction.

But there’s a difference between knowing what you want and getting what you want.

Some members have expressed frustration with their new hires not performing at the level expected of them. They put Challenger behaviors in the job description and told Recruiting what to look for when screening applicants, but still no luck.  If your new hires are not performing as well as you had hoped, perhaps it’s time to take a deeper look at your competency models.

An ineffective competency model will not only hinder your ability to hire the right people for each role, but it also makes it difficult to diagnose skill gaps and target training and coaching investments for everyone on your sales team. Read on to discover the three reasons competency models are often ineffective and what you can do to overcome these challenges.

Overly generalized models. Many times, sales competency models borrow too heavily from existing, organizational-level models. While these models are effective at determining overall fit within a company’s working environment, they are often much too generic and place little emphasis on Challenger-specific sales skills and behaviors.

The fix: Match skill sets to roles. Look at your most successful people in each role. How are they spending their time? What techniques are they using to pitch and close business? By customizing the sales competency model based on the unique demands of specific sales roles, you can emphasize the most important traits needed for each. See how IBM customizes competency models for each sales role.
Vaguely defined behaviors. Many sales competency models do not sufficiently distinguish between effective and ineffective behaviors. Sometimes ineffective behaviors are simply defined as a “lack of” preferred behaviors, which makes it difficult for sellers and managers to know “good” behaviors when they seem them.

The fix: Link competency models to key business processes. Define behaviors associated with a given skill area as specifically as possible, making sure to include both effective and ineffective behaviors.
Rigid models. Models are rarely revised to reflect evolving customer buying behaviors, leaving an emphasis on skills like relationship-building that may no longer be sufficient.

The fix: Gather multiple inputs to develop competency models. Review your organization’s strategic objectives and conduct interviews with senior leadership and the frontline to assess current and future needs. Regularly review competency models

It is also important to communicate any changes made to competency models across the sales organization, from senior executives, to their direct reports, to HR managers and front-line sales managers, to all other sales employees.

SEC members, see the Sales Competency Model Development Workflow for step-by-step guidelines for developing a sales competency model. And for more tips and resources on developing effective sales competency models, see our Defining Sales Capabilities topic page and be sure to check out our guide on developing Challenger-specific competency models.

Getting in Early: European Perspectives

[image error]“Our customers just don’t call us in anymore!” 

This line, from a Head of Sales in the manufacturing space, articulates the difficult reality that all sales organisations, from across industry, are faced with in today’s buying environment. The truth is that, even if customers do call you in, they’re nearly 60% down their purchase decision already, leaving your sales reps to battle it out on price.

In some industries it’s even worse; one member in the chemicals space shared “not only is it our customers and our distributors, but even our end users already know what they want.”

These sentiments certainly got 35 Sales leaders all nodding their heads at the most recent Sales Executive Council’s (SEC) Executive meeting here in London, where we discussed the SEC’s latest research on Getting in Early: Shaping Demand through Pre-funnel Engagement.

While there’s always a lot to talk about when you get 35 like-minded peers in a room, the day was really dominated by two questions:  

1)      Where do your customers learn?

2)      To what degree do we leverage social media in sales?

Let’s start with the first one: where do your customers learn?

“Consultants – Industry Forums – the Internet – Social Media – Conferences – their peers.” What struck me in these answers was that sales leaders know exactly where their customers are learning. But then the thunder bolt follow-up question: “What are your salespeople doing about it?” A muted hush descended across the room.

Now, that is not to say that organisations aren’t doing anything. It’s just that salespeople have traditionally relied on Marketing to do that for them. As another member in the Healthcare space put it, “You have to redefine who your competition is – the competition is no longer the other guy sitting in the corridor waiting to meet your customer. It’s the internet.” It requires a different approach.

SEC’s latest research confirms that this is exactly what your high-performing reps have figured out. They teach where their customers learn. They shape demand, using newly available tools and technology to build personal brands as trusted advisors to their customers. (SEC Members: Check out this webinar replay to learn more about effective B2B Social Selling techniques)

Which brings us to the second question: what should be the role of social media in sales?

The fear many sales leaders have was best articulated by a member in the transportation and logistics space: “Would I even want all my reps using social media? Sounds dangerous. How do I get the rest of my reps to go out and teach where customers learn?”

Our answer to the first question is absolutely, so long as the organisation supports and enables reps to leverage this learning channel. There are a number of examples of companies getting this right. For example, Morgan Stanley allows 600+ of their advisors to leverage LinkedIn and Twitter to generate leads and re-engage previous clients. IBM has gone one step further and armed their inside sales force with non-commercial “social sound bites” to send out to recommended social networks. This has resulted in a 12X increase in Twitter followers and a 2X increase in page views of seller profiles, culminating in increased lead generation.  (SEC Members: Learn more about IBM’s “social sound bites” and register for our upcoming webinar on this best practice.)

Ultimately, the heated discussion on these questions prompted a number of takeaways, probably best summed up by a member in the chemicals industry: “I know we have some examples of our high performers doing this already, I think I’m going to go to them first.”

We’d agree. Start with what your best people already do to shape demand and go from there. Have confident answers to the questions, “Where do your customers learn?” and “What are we doing about it?” Based on early feedback from European sales leaders, those questions may spark a lot of debate, but they’re the right questions to ask.

For those senior sales leaders who want to continue this discussion, join your cross industry peers at our upcoming executive briefings in Copenhagen on September 6th, Johannesburg October 17th and London November 29th.

How Challengers Account Plan

[image error]What should be keeping this customer up at night?

That is the single most important question sellers must know about their best accounts – arguably all accounts – but most certainly their most promising.

Account managers are exposed to a level of customer knowledge that allows them to confidently answer this question, and create a mutually valuable partnership in the process. However, answering this question based on blind assertion or speculation is playing with fire.

Extensive data analysis and dozens of interviews with the highest performing Challenger reps in our global membership have revealed that Challengers answer this question in a unique way. We recently shared what we’ve learned by introducing the Challenger Plan to members of CEB Sales Executive Council.

First, it’s important to understand that the best salespeople conduct extensive due diligence of their accounts. This goes well beyond a Hoover’s report, reading the latest public filing statements, and reviewing the customer website. As one rep told us, “public filings lead you to information the customer already knows about themselves… I have to learn things that the customer has yet to realize about their own organization.”

Specifically what information are the best salespeople seeking? That’s the basis of the Challenger Plan, which aims to help sellers think through the customer dynamics and Challenger actions to grow the account. The Plan is comprised of 4 critical questions: 

What Change is Occurring? In the Challenger mind, change equates to commercial opportunity. Change, particularly change surrounded by customer uncertainty, leads to excellent chances to teach the customer. Challengers constantly assess change in the customer’s world. This could be internal change, such as leadership transition, or external change such as legislative or regulatory issues.

How is the Customer Responding to This Change? Is the customer aware? Has the customer taken action or started to think through the emerging issue? Again, Challengers are looking for opportunity to teach, and help the customer build consensus around an action plan.

Who are the Key Players? This is pretty self-explanatory, and any account plan must have this section. As we know however, identifying Mobilizers is of the utmost importance. Mobilizers are not the typical advocate or customer coach – in fact, they rarely want to engage with a supplier. But they build consensus in amazing ways. (Check out our interactive Mobilizer Identification Tool). For non-members, check out our latest blog for the Harvard Business Review on Mobilizers.

Where is the Customer in Their Buying Process? This is not a reflection of where the seller is in their sales process, but rather reflection of where the buyer stands. Challengers seek out opportunities to take control of the sale and show the customer how to build consensus, how to handle objections, and how to manage the change associated with a substantial purchase.

These questions scratch the surface of the Challenger Plan, and the underlying tools we’ve created to help our member organizations and their salespeople adopt a Challenger mindset. But they are vitally important questions that we encourage all our readers to ask of themselves and their sales team when account planning.