Brent Adamson's Blog, page 28

Using Social Networks to Become a Trusted Advisor

Customers today are engaging sales reps later and later in the purchase decision. Our research shows that the typical purchase decision is 57% complete by the time the customer reaches out to a supplier. By that point, the customer has already decided:

The problem that needs to be solved,
The course of action that needs to be taken,
The list of suppliers they might buy from,
What they want to pay. (potentially)

All that’s left for the rep to negotiate is price. Average salespeople don’t mind this because it means much of the hard and messy work of needs diagnosis and building customized solutions has, in fact, already been done by the customer. High performers, though, reject being relegated to an “order fulfillment” role and instead head upstream—WAY upstream.  

Similarly, average performers see lead generation as Marketing’s job. They wait for a lead to be handed over or for their territory to be assigned and then they use their scorecard to pick the best opportunities to pursue. But high performers view lead gen as THEIR job. They leverage channels like social media to engage customers much, much earlier in the customer’s buying journey than most salespeople would even think is possible.

By doing this, star performers have found a scalable way to engage the customer while the customer is just learning about issues but before they’ve actually recognized that they have a need. These reps don’t wait until the lead comes in because they know that’s too late.

The best salespeople play in the places where customers are gathering information and learning…and, increasingly, that’s in social networks. These reps steer clear of advertising themselves and their companies on social channels and instead take a “give to give” posture—engaging in discussions, listening to customers, offering content they’ve carefully culled from different sources (sometimes from their own companies, sometimes from other sources). By doing so, they are establishing themselves as trusted advisors, helping customers form opinions about the world and, ultimately, “teaching them into the funnel.”

Across 1,000 sellers in roughly two dozen companies, the data is clear: top sellers leverage social media to help them get in early and average performers don’t. What we need to understand is why the data presents this way and what lessons we can take from it to make our own sellers more effective.

Matrix Structures: A Practitioner’s Guide

We live in a world of growing sales complexity. Organizational structures that were once well equipped to meet business and customer needs now face the challenging task of coordinating multiple goals, decisions, and resources across geographies.

Sales executives, in response, often reorganize and make principled trade-offs between the benefits achieved by centralized and decentralized arrangements. However, each of these structural models fall short as companies are increasingly required to operate in a truly global environment, yet at the same time maintain their regional responsiveness.

While various organizational models have emerged to meet these structural challenges, the most common among these is the matrix organization, in which some form of lateral authority overlies the traditional vertical hierarchy. Sales employees are subject to dual influences, requiring coordination across functional boundaries.

Simply put, matrix structures balance two or more objectives simultaneously, such as responding to product line competition and maintaining customer nuances between geographies.

That said, like the centralized and decentralized models, matrix structures also bring potential challenges; specifically of dual reporting relationships, which result in ambiguous lines of authority, complex divisions of responsibility, power struggles, unclear reward structures, and excessive overhead costs.

In benchmarking sales structures across industries and geographies, we’ve uncovered four practices for the successful management and execution of matrix sales organizations:

Align Sales and Organizational Goals: Matrix structures require all functions and business units to align goals to ensure collaboration and not competition for scarce organizational resources. In the absence of goal alignment, employees with dual-reporting relationships often face conflicting priorities, driving cannibalization between functions and units (see how Seagate aligns organizational goals).


Formally Articulate Roles and Responsibilities: While true for any organizational structure, this is crucial in a matrix organization where employees are managed along two lines of authority creating potential for conflict of interest. The best companies find there is less room for conflict when employees have clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and are empowered to make recommendations.


Institutionalize Mutual Task Dependency: Matrix structures by design make employees across functions, geographies, and business units dependent on each other. Success often is a joint outcome, which requires coordination across different lines of authority. Companies that are able to formalize a team culture within their organizational construct are most likely to succeed here.


Encourage Open Lines of Communication: Create policies that encourage open communication at all levels of the organization. To ensure this, companies hold regular meetings in which senior management openly disseminates corporate information to employees. In addition, teams meet formally to exchange ideas and discuss progress and problems in a matrix management structure.

This list is by no means exhaustive. What are your experiences on operating in a matrix environment? What do you like and dislike about working in matrix structures?

SEC Members, to learn more on matrix structures, review the study on Managing Matrix Sales Organizations that profiles best practices on aligning sales and organizational goals, removing account ownership silos, enabling cross-functional communication, and simplifying compensation plans.

Continuing the Challenger Conversation

Over the past several years, I have had continuous conversations about the Challenger Sales Model with companies of every size and from every industry.  This research is literally transforming the way that sales leaders think about supporting and enabling their sales organizations.

For those unfamiliar with this research, after analyzing several hundred sales professionals, we found that your sales reps/account managers fall into one of five behavior/skill profiles:

The Hard Worker
The Problem Solver
The Challenger
The Relationship Builder
The Lone Wolf

And the key finding?  One of these profiles – the Challenger – dramatically outperforms the other four, especially in higher complexity sales environments.

While it’s good to KNOW which profile is winning, the challenge for sales leaders (no pun intended) is HOW do we BUILD more challengers?

For my next conversation, I’ll be hosting a webinar with SAVO on May 8 – where I’ll discuss why Challengers win and how companies can build the Challengers they need to drive customer loyalty and higher growth.

Avoiding the Million-Dollar Hiring Mistake

Sales leaders are acutely aware of how painful a wrong hiring decision can be.  When you calculate the fully-loaded cost of recruiting, onboarding, training, coaching, and compensating an employee who ends up chronically struggling in role, the numbers can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands in sunk costs.

Of course for sales roles, there is a double-whammy as well. In addition to the direct hiring and training costs that are lost, there are often even greater indirect, opportunity costs that arise when an underperforming rep’s territory goes under-covered, and its revenue potential goes unrealized.  In some industries, these costs can quickly skyrocket into the millions.

The point is, hiring right matters a lot. It matters in general, but it especially matters in sales. And while there is no sure-fire way to accurately pinpoint superstar seller potential for every position you fill, we’ve seen many sales organizations becoming more systematic in their approaches.

So how are they engineering greater comprehensiveness into their hiring processes? The key is to move away from thinking of candidate assessment as a binary, yes-no test, and more toward thinking of it more as a 360-degree evaluation that results from multiple, distinct inputs. For example, if you think of the selection process at your organization as a pie chart, you might aim to have an allocation that looks something like this:

25% credentials-based criteria you can assess by a resume scan (years of experience, specific degrees, etc.)
20% organizational fit, high-level qualifications and capabilities, professionalism, and salary expectation based criteria that can be tested in an initial screening interview conducted by a recruiter.
30% deeper dive on specific capabilities and skills that lead to success as defined in your competency model, and as determined through behavioral based interviews.
25% personality and critical thinking skills that lead to working well on a team, being less likely to leave, be less likely to behave unethically, etc., which can be tested with a pre-hire assessment.

The above percentages may of course change based on your organization’s need. And for particularly critical roles such as line management, outside references or even scenario-based role-play assessments might be worth throwing into the mix. But regardless of the allocation you select, members tells us that a key factor is that these assessments be used not just to determine whether or not a candidate is a good fit for the position they’ve currently applied for, but also to begin to gauge how they might perform in the next position, should they stay with the organization longer term. This is particularly critical in sales, where many sellers end up lacking the fundamentals needed to succeed in management roles.

While none of these methods offer guarantees, many members tell us that they see a strong relationship between the rigor of their hiring practices and the success rates of their new hires. In fact, to help members build that rigor and improve success rates, SEC is currently developing a new product that can assess candidates to determine their propensity for high performance given your selling environment, assessing particularly for Challenger skills. For more information, please click here to send an e-mail to our product development team, who would be more than happy to have your input as we design the final product.

Have you taken all the steps you can to build a well-rounded hiring process? How does your organization’s approach to job candidate assessment compare to the above?

4 Onboarding Pitfalls to Avoid

In a world where exceptional sales talent is essential and we’ve found the person with the right skill set and fit for the company (a Challenger Rep, SEC research would suggest), we still have to provide a supportive, seamless and robust onboarding period.  This is important for both the organization and the new sales professional.

While most would agree with these statements about the importance of onboarding, there often tends to be some common challenges sales organizations face in their onboarding programs.  Here are some of the most common onboarding pitfalls we’ve heard at the SEC:

Lack of standardization and confusion, both region to region and manager to manager
Information overload: new sales hires feel as if they are “drinking from the fire hose”
Content is dominated by policies and procedures: it’s important content to be sure, but dwarfs other content in a program
Increased productivity: the organization demands new reps need to be at “full” speed sooner than ever before

Now we can’t fix it all at once (and some of these may be more easily fixed than others), but we’ve seen member companies come up with some innovative ways to combat these onboarding challenges.  

Let’s take number two on the above list, “information overload”.  First, stick to the first 90 days of a new hire’s time – most companies agree that this is a good timeframe to focus attention on.  With the timeframe established, you then need to determine WHAT new hires NEED to know by the end of that period.  This is where we see information overload most often occur.  Why? Too often, when asked what’s essential for new hires to know, the answer is “everything”.  Well, that’s simply not realistic.  You don’t want to set a new hire up for failure by giving them goals that aren’t actually achievable…are they going to want to stick around if that’s the case?

In order to determine the critical components that should (and should not) be covered in their onboarding program, Dimension Data put together a roundtable panel comprised of high performing sales reps, first line sales managers and sales training and development staff.  The panel vets onboarding content and curriculum to ensure topics are relevant – this filtering process not only helps to prevent information overload but it also ensures program buy-in exists in the manager ranks.

Dimension Data then leverages this information to do something that addresses the other common onboarding issues in our list above; they created an “Onboarding Passport”.  The “passport” is a collection of information and checklists that teach new hires how to navigate the organization for future success, and they are specific to roles and regions.  To drive accountability for onboarding activities, the passport includes dates of completion that are set and tracked by the new hire’s direct manager.

By leveraging processes and tools similar to Dimension Data’s in the first 90 days, organizations can successfully manage the common new hire onboarding challenges. What other strategies have you used when creating onboarding processes and content?

SEC Members, for more onboarding resources, check out our Onboarding Topic Center. You can also see a recap of the Q&A session we had with the creator of Dimension Data’s onboarding program.

The Secret of Creativity

(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

I recently saw a lecture by Jonah Lehrer, the Wired blogger and author of How We Decide about his latest book: Imagine: How Creativity Works.  He explores the seeds of creativity, covering a broad range of research on the topic and sharing findings from the wacky (blue walls and collective bathrooms foster creativity) to the practical (individual feedback is usually more effective than group brainstorming sessions).

Two themes particularly interested me:

What distinguishes creative geniuses from everyone else
What leads to those moments of insight when you suddenly have a great idea

First, Lehrer looks at new research on what distinguishes creative geniuses (Picasso, Einstein, Beethoven etc.) from the rest of us – and shares some pretty surprising findings.

These people don’t stand out from the average population in terms of IQ. They might not even do better at traditional creativity tests.  The key factor that sets them apart? “Grit” — persistence and passion for long-term goals.  Grit is the ability and willingness to stick at something far longer than the rest of us – in spite of disappointment and difficulty.  The most talented people tend to be focused to the level of obsession.  Beethoven, for example, would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one.

“Grit” is a better predictor than IQ of:

Who’ll win a spelling bee
Which Ivy league students will get the best test scores
Who’ll survive the first summer at the US Military Academy
Which children will end up performing well at school

The second theme that intrigued me was the exploration of moments of insight.  We’ve all had that experience of struggling with a problem for hours on end and then suddenly experiencing an epiphany… the answer comes to us out of the blue.

New research has shed light on how this works via word pairing tests in which participants are asked to find a word that links 3 other words, e.g., Apple links Crab, Sauce, Tree.  This research has found a few common patterns.

First, when the answer comes to us it just feels right – we instantly sense that this is the solution.

Second – and more surprisingly – before we come up with the solution, we can actually tell how close we are to getting there. We don’t know the answer, but we can accurately predict whether we’re nearly there – or nowhere near. But it’s really important.  It helps us know when we need to take a break or change tack vs. keep plugging away.

Third (and related to #2), that insight often comes to us once we’ve stopped consciously thinking about the problem – maybe in the shower or walking home for instance.

But there’s a link between this research on moments of insight and the research on grit.  When that insight comes – and it feels like it was out of the blue – it wasn’t.  Even if we have our revelation while in the shower and not thinking about the problem, the time spent reflecting on the issue beforehand will have helped.

Newton’s discovery of the theory of gravity is a great example of this.  The popular version focuses on that spontaneous moment of genius when the apple fell.  But Newton’s own explanation is almost the exact opposite: “I thought continuously until I reached the answer.”  To make Edison a little more accurate then – genius is 90% perspiration followed by 10% inspiration.

SEC Members, learn more about using creativity and innovation to unstick stalled deals – check out our Ideation Toolkit, which helps you generate new ideas for moving deals forward, as well as our research on Manager Innovation.

Social Media: The Future of Sales?

"Selling is dead. Long live social media"

This is a claim that has sparked heated debate recently in one LinkedIn sales group. While it is a bit of an outrageous claim meant to invite discussion, it captures one of the most pressing issues we all face today. What role does and will social media play in the marketplace and how can we plan for the ways it will impact us?

Some quick facts about why LinkedIn has become an important thing to understand:

2 new members join LinkedIn every second.
LinkedIn generates 277% more conversions than other social media channels.
Only 47% of B2B sales utilize the tool, almost exclusively for lead generation.
93% of people have received no training in social media.

So what does this mean for you?  

The topic of social networking is popping up more and more in recent member conversations. To get in earlier with customers it is increasingly necessary to use sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. One member referred to the social media landscape as the Wild West, and after some research, we tend to agree. This is a vast space of infinite possibility for sales organizations but is largely misunderstood, untapped and unknown. For those who can pioneer this area there is great benefit, but what are the road signs to help tell us which direction to go?

This is the first post in a series of what we hope will give you some insight into the basic steps you need to take to enter the unfamiliar world of social media and make that space work for you. You need to go where your customers are learning and increasingly this is online. We'll start at the very beginning with creating a profile and walk you step by step through the process of getting up and running, finding and engaging with peers and prospects online and how you can turn that socializing into sales.

So, to begin with, let's look at the basics of LinkedIn, the popular business networking site. Let's start with what it isn't:

LinkedIn is not:

Facebook for grown-ups.
A more specific Google.
A social shotgun.

LinkedIn is about taking the process of networking online. People and businesses set up profiles so others can find them more easily and start the process of creating relationships. Although LinkedIn is a good search engine the capabilities are geared towards the relational aspects. Find a company, who is employed there, but most importantly how you are connected to those people and that company. All the information and tools available are there to aid you in good communication, but you have to aim carefully. Message blasts and form letters are not likely to yield you good results. Choose your targets specifically and take time crafting personal messages.

So how do you start if you have never LinkedIn?

1)      Make a profile. Go to www.LinkedIn.com and register.

2)      Start connecting. Look for contacts from your current organization. Find old colleagues or classmates and check their connections to see if you find others.

3)      Find some groups you are interested in. Alumni groups are a good place to start, but look by keyword to find topics you like or communities that may be interesting to learn about.

4)      Put up a few posts of your own and see how people respond.

Remember, the medium may be different but the message is still the same. Social networking online is the same as social networking off-line, don't let the screen and keyboard fool you into thinking its anything else.

SEC Members, see how our latest research can help you begin to navigate the unfamiliar, and more importantly, how it can drive sales. Also be sure to register for our upcoming webinar previewing our new research findings.

Are Your Managers Effective Coaches?

We know that effective sales manager coaching is important – but just how important is it? Years of SEC research has shown that a successful coaching program can significantly raise the performance bar for the average sales rep. In fact, we've found that effective coaching can increase overall sales team success by up to 19% (see page 5).  Even more, when the SEC looked at coaching at the individual rep performance level, reps with star coaches have an 8% increase in their performance against goal compared to reps with ineffective coaches.

The value of coaching doesn't stop there. Salespeople who receive more effective coaching are far more likely to stay at their current company than those who receive less effective coaching – which has huge implications for disengaged star performers who may be looking at other opportunities. Losing our top performers can be detrimental to overall success, which call for an increased focused on effective coaching that, as one SEC member put it, "can impact team member engagement, team unity, and the team members' perception of career path position and progression."

So, if sales manager coaching can have such positive returns on investment, how can we quantify the overall effectiveness of our managers' coaching abilities to make sure we're on the right track? Below are three steps we've seen members take to gauge and improve manager coaching effectiveness:

1. Get hard numbers. A good place to start is to survey the sales team to gather quantitative feedback on managers' coaching performance.  Leading companies establish clear measurement criteria that evaluate coaching's impact on organizational goals. We've seen sales organizations use a blend of measurement strategies, including customer feedback on sales rep improvement and sales rep feedback on coaching quality.

SEC Members, consider deploying the Coaching Pulse Survey to see how much time managers are spending coaching their reps, where in the sales process managers are focusing their coaching time, and how valuable their coaching efforts are to reps' expectations.

2. Certify manager coaching. To embed great coaching into your sales teams' culture, consider creating and rolling out a comprehensive coaching certification program. This has the dual benefit of giving leadership the complete picture of coaching quality in the organization and is also a great mechanism for incentivizing managers to continue to improve the quality of their coaching. This kind of coaching certification program incorporates the following:

Feedback from the sales reps collected via an annual coaching survey to get the upward perspective
Feedback from leadership who have observed and assessed the manager's coaching to get the downward perspective
Team performance metrics to validate that coaching is having an impact

SEC Members, see how Britannia used a Tiered Coaching Accreditation Program to improve and sustain manager coaching abilities over time.

3. Incorporate coaching into performance objectives. Because coaching has such a big affect on goal attainment, many organizations weigh coaching behaviors just as high as other performance criteria.  Consider incorporating coaching activities into existing behavioral performance expectations. If management skills are called out in existing development plans, for example, employee development would tie into that specific objective.

SEC Members, learn more about embedding star coaching into your sales organization in the Coaching topic center.

SEC Members, see the Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Coaching Program to get a clear view into how your managers are performing and which metrics should be incorporated into manager development plans. Also, check out other members' perspectives on measuring coaching effectiveness in the Sales Talent Management Forum.

Do You Know What Your Customers Want?

While most companies have a well-established account planning process in place, few include the critical step of involving customers, especially in the early stages when expectations are set (rather, they involve customers only toward the end when results are reviewed).

Leading companies, on the other hand, build their account planning process around customer involvement.  We've captured best practices from three companies that demonstrate how to include customers in the account planning process – ranging from a multi-day meeting to a ten-minute conversation.

I've included summaries of these practices below and I've ranked them from top-to-bottom in terms of the amount of effort required for both supplier and customer.

Cargill's Partnership Calibration Process: Suppliers often over-invest in customer relationships relative to the opportunity present.  In other words, despite our best effort, some customers are less willing to invest their own resources in the relationship.

To create an environment of open communication and level setting around mutual expectations, Cargill developed a multi-day offsite meeting for their most strategic customers.  The primary purpose of the meeting is to calibrate expectations on both sides of the table based on the perceived potential value that can be created by the relationship.

Only after this calibration do both sides jointly agree to the plan for the upcoming year, with agreed upon objectives, and mutual investments.

(SEC Members, check out this recap of our conversation with Cargill's sales leaders for more information on how they set mutual expectations with customers.)

Baker Hughes' Value-Creation Scorecard: We all have customer scorecards, right?  Well, few of us have a scorecard like the one Baker Hughes developed for their strategic accounts.  Baker Hughes developed a measurement and reporting system to show how they are meeting the objectives of critical stakeholders at the local, national, and global levels.

The primary purpose of these reports is to show, beyond the costs involved with the project, the value that Baker Hughes is providing (e.g., decreased downtime on the rig, health and safety improvements, etc).  The key to this practice is identifying the outcomes that stakeholders, particularly those who have impact over the buying decision, are working towards in their day-to-day jobs, and then matching up the reporting to show, definitively, how you are achieving these objectives in a competitively differentiated way.

CVS/Caremark's Customer-Weighted Performance Metrics:  CVS/Caremark developed a low effort and highly effective way to gauge customer prioritization of outcomes.  The key to this, of course, was not just asking what a customer wants, because which customer would not want more service at a lower price?  Rather, they share with customers key outcomes they likely want to achieve (e.g., order accuracy, issue resolution time, etc) and they ask two important questions.

1) What outcome is the customer expecting? In other words, do we actually have a good understanding of what the customer is looking for?  2) How important is that outcome to the customer?   And this is critical – CVS/Caremark asks the customer to prioritize those outcomes through a 100-penny exercise.  This not only gets the customer to identify what is most important, but also to show the relative differences among the outcomes the customer is looking to achieve.

Each of these practices is based on a structured approach to involving customers in the planning process; one that forces customers to make concessions in addition to demands.  The driving force behind these practices is to develop a dialogue with customers – one that focuses on mutual value creation instead of merely price-based concessions.  And from the experiences of these companies, it's best to surface this sooner rather than later.

SEC Members, visit our Account Planning topic center for more tools and resources on the account planning process.

How to Hire Reps Without Reading Their Resumes

(This is a guest post by Anastasia Milgramm of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of customer service and contact centers.)

A candidate's job search process is fairly straight-forward: send a resume, attend an interview, and provide references. In today's digital age, however, employers are relying on new and creative methods to gauge candidate fit.

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, some companies have completely stopped asking candidates for their resumes. Instead, they rely on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles, and online tests to better understand employees' skills and measure cultural fit. For example, Union Square Ventures, a New York-based venture capital firm, asks candidates to submit videos demonstrating interest in an open role. Colorado-based StickerGiant.com makes resume submission optional, and instead uses online tests to determine whether an applicant would be a good fit.

Companies that have embraced these new hiring processes claim that resumes are not a good way to identify best-fit candidates.

Sales organizations are not immune to the challenge of finding best-fit applicants for frontline roles. In fact, as rep jobs have become more complex in recent years, identifying "best-fits" has become more difficult than ever.  Customers are buying in new ways, and requiring greater consensus to move forward with deals. As a result, new hires must be able to adapt easily to evolving job demands and buying environments.

The SEC tested the drivers of performance to identify the rep skill sets that are most suited for this more complex sales environment.  As many of you know, we found that the skills that have the biggest impact on rep performance are reps' abilities to teach for differentiation, tailor for resonance, and take control of the buying process. We call reps that embody these skills Challenger Reps.  Challengers are 4x more likely to be high performers in a complex selling environment.

The good news is that you can identify talent with innate Challenger capability—so from a hiring standpoint, sales organizations need to focus on screening out the few candidates who don't show the potential and zeroing in on the ones that do.

Since resumes are often not the only – or the best –method for finding best-fit applicants, what other strategies can sales organizations use to hire high-potential staff?

Screen out candidates with low potential for success using behavioral interviewing. Interview questions about an applicant's past behaviors can predict future behaviors, since candidates are asked to provide detailed evidence for each answer.

SEC Members, use our new Challenger Behavioral Interview Guide to uncover a sales candidate's true behavioral instincts and to get a holistic sense of their Challenger potential once in seat.




Watch candidates in action before offering them the job. To test for the important qualities and behaviors in applicants, several companies have watched candidates in action in simulated 'day in the life of' programs.

SEC Members, see how Hewlett Packard pre-certifies sales manager candidates' capabilities before extending offers with a full-day simulation skills assessment.

Do you think that resumes are useful in screening for applicant fit? Can you imagine a world without resumes?

SEC Members, for more resources on hiring Challenger Reps, check out our new Challenger Starter Kit.