Brent Adamson's Blog, page 3

Get Things Done Faster and Better

Besieged by an unending stream of e-mails, workers have had to find techniques to get things done efficiently in our chaotic modern offices. As a result, time management—a bland, unexciting skill set—morphed into the trendy topic of “lifehacking,” touted at sites like Lifehacker and in books like The Four Hour Work Week and Getting Things Done.

While lifehacking often veers toward the mundane—Lifehacker’s most popular guide is about an (admittedly stellar) technique for quickly folding t-shirts—it is based on a set of principles that can be used to transform how you manage your life. Below, we highlight two core lifehacking principles you can use to become more efficient at work, helping you to get things done—and get out of the office on time.

Lifehacking Principle #1: Capture Everything

It’s a simple, yet commonly overlooked, fact: your brain can’t perform at its peak when it’s focused on remembering other things. If you’re focused on remembering to pick up bread on the way home from work, you won’t have the bandwidth to create a better version of a pitch or have a truly engaging conversation with a client. Even small things that you’re not consciously focused on—say, an idea you want to run by your manager at your next meeting—measurably reduce your brainpower and your productivity.

This means that you can significantly increase your productivity simply by getting thoughts out of your head. You’ll have more energy to focus on other tasks when ideas are out of your head and in a place where you know you’ll review them again, whether that’s a piece of paper, your calendar, or an online to-do list manager.

Getting Started. Paper aficionados can use Moleskines, legal pads, or even a stack of index cards to capture tasks. Technology fans who want to capture all of their information in one place should consider Evernote; it not only handles audio, text, and web clips, it can create a searchable database of contacts from pictures of business cards you collect. Wunderlist allows you to create to-do lists that sync everywhere, and is more customizable than standard to-do apps.

Caution: Your calendar doesn’t work well as a place to capture all of your ideas and tasks; it should contain time-sensitive tasks and meetings occurring at a specific time, not tasks that you’d like to get done during a block of time. And, as we discuss below, your e-mail inbox is also ill-suited for capturing all of your thoughts and to-dos.

Lifehacking Principle #2: Clear Your Inbox

Living out of your e-mail inbox is a surefire way to accomplish a bunch of small tasks that don’t yield any big accomplishments. Since so many requests come to us via e-mail, it’s tempting to keep your e-mail client constantly running, using it as a glorified to-do list.

To be fair, triaging tasks out of your inbox initially works out. As weeks pass, though, your inbox inevitably gets clogged with requests that you can’t handle right now and e-mails that you’re waiting for a response to. Eventually, the system collapses as more e-mails stay in your inbox than are processed out of it. You start failing to follow up on things, and ask colleagues to send you another e-mail to remind you to do something that they already e-mailed you about.

Taking all of the e-mails that come into your inbox and getting them out of there—whether to an archive folder, an action on your to-do list, a meeting on your calendar, or the trash—will free you to get out of your inbox and back to your real job.

Getting Started. Lifehackers swear by Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” system of e-mail management, which you can read about on Mann’s website or watch a presentation on. The e-mail game uses a timer to force you to process e-mail quickly, while Boomerang allows you to schedule e-mails to be sent at a later date and to receive reminders if someone you e-mailed doesn’t respond.

Caution: If your inbox is irrevocably overstuffed, e-mail bankruptcy may be necessary. This is a one-time only solution, though, so make sure you’ve established good e-mail habits before invoking bankruptcy.

CEB Sales members, see how Kodak gets reps to focus on activities that contribute most to corporate goals and The Home Depot creates a message gatekeeper team to control the volume of internal communications and requests. Also, review our Practical Advice Series for tips and tricks on a range of topics from how to run effective meetings to the dos and don’ts of effective voicemails.

Social Selling: What Sales Leaders Need to Know

A few weeks ago, we showed you how your reps can become valued insight creators on social media. Today we’ll talk about what your organization can do to help make reps social media all-stars. Below are four most common questions we hear on social selling, and our advice to sales leaders:

What advice do you have if our organization is new to social media?

Start simple and take small steps. Begin with one or a couple of social media outlets (like Twitter and LinkedIn) and do those well. Make sure that Marketing, Sales, and senior management are aligned in this initiative and then start with a pilot program and work from there. Share the commercial and customer success stories of your team. Communicate often about what’s working and who’s doing well as a benchmark for the rest of the organization. Also, make sure to check in with what’s not working and fix that. A social presence, like social media itself will grow organically. Lastly, encourage it! When some of us think about using social media at work we have an image of an employee slowly peeking over their cubicle to ensure that no one is around before logging onto their social media account. Do things like embed social media initiatives into the onboarding process, talk about it around the office, and remind your team that it’s actually something that you as an organization are promoting.

Our sales team is already pulled in too many directions. Won’t adding a social media initiative to their job description be the straw that broke the camel’s back?

Not necessarily. The key is to incorporate a social media initiative into your reps’ everyday life. What can you do as an organization to make it as easy as possible for them to engage with it? What about creating an RSS feed that delivers your company-generated content to the reps’ mailbox so they don’t have to search their CRM system or portal? Share success stories so they’re incentivized to use it. Marketing should be the insight generation machine for your company’s content, not the sales reps. Make sure that Marketing is sending sales reps information specific to their business segments, customers, and geography at regular intervals so the burden is off the reps to generate that content.

Think of your social media presence like going to the gym. If you’ve worked out every day for a week then the best workout is often a day off. The same is true with a social media presence. Perhaps they’ve been extremely active in their social media initiatives, but then they have to take some time off to focus on back-to-back meetings, travel, contracts, prospecting, end-of-quarter activities, etc. No problem! Remember, social selling is a tool that should compliment a rep’s efforts in sales, not replace them. Reps are measured against quota, not how many Tweets they have. Ideally, their social media efforts will become integrated into their everyday routine to bolster their Sales efforts instead of being an either/or activity. Natural ebbs and flows in this journey are alright as long as the long-term vision is maintained.

Isn’t there a lot of opportunity for inappropriate sharing of content?

Potentially. Make sure to work with Legal and upper management to ensure that you put the right guardrails in place. Create a social media playbook for guidelines on what content is appropriate (especially for industries like Financial Services, Pharmaceutical, and Healthcare), what individual reps’ profiles should convey, and be very clear about what is/isn’t appropriate to post. That said, just as we trust our sales reps face-to-face with our clients, we too must take the training wheels off and let them embark on this social media journey. Allowing sales reps discretion, while still maintaining company policy, will be essential for long-term success.

Shouldn’t our reps share our content exclusively?

No. While extremely important, sharing information about your organization is only a small part of what your reps should be doing. Remember, the point of a social media presence is not to sell, it’s to educate. The majority of what they share should be ideas that they’ve had or seen that will be relevant for their customers’ issues or challenges.

CEB Sales members, see how IBM turned social media into an organizational capacity. Also, visit our Social Selling topic center for more resources on engaging customers through social media.

The 2 Types of Sales Effectiveness Functions

We recently had a member come to us hoping to better understand what the “typical” responsibilities of a sales force effectiveness function are. Her team has been in place for several years and is doing well, but this member wanted to make sure that her team’s model was up-to-date. We thought this was an interesting question and decided to ask for your input.

As you can see from the survey results, the data doesn’t point to one particular activity that is a “must do” for every sales force effectiveness function. Among survey respondents, analytics was the most commonly selected responsibility; however, when we spoke with five member companies, training and development and performance management were the most popular choices.

During these five conversations, though, something did begin to stand out: all of the companies’ sales force effectiveness functions seemed to fall into one of two camps: competency builders or new product incubators.

Competency Builders – These sales force effectiveness functions start off with a clear objective: define the top drivers of sales effectiveness and the requisite competencies for the sales force (several of the member companies use our Anatomy of a World Class Sales Operations Organization as a guide). Once these drivers and competencies are defined, the sales force effectiveness functions focus on two activities: training and development (e.g., building competencies) and performance management (e.g., measuring reps’ progress against said competencies).
New Product Incubators – These sales force effectiveness functions do not have static responsibilities but assist the sales organization by pilot-testing new initiatives and projects as needed. Sales Force Effectiveness will develop processes for a new initiative, pilot-test them with local sales teams, then work to integrate the initiative across the sales force. Once the new initiative becomes established, the sales force effectiveness team will typically cede control and oversight of the project to another team. For example one of the sales force effectiveness leaders we spoke with was implementing a new onboarding platform for the sales force. His team was responsible for rolling the new platform out to different sales teams, but once the platform is integrated across the entire sales force, the member executive will hand responsibility for the platform over to the individual sales teams.

In our conversations with the member executives, there was agreement that there is no one metric that perfectly encapsulates Sales Force Effectiveness’ performance. The members we spoke with have, instead, broken down their performance into major responsibilities and then measure success within each of these areas.

CEB Sales members, read the full brief on Sales Force Effectiveness Functions to learn more about the five member companies’ approaches to Sales Force Effectiveness and visit our Anatomy of a World Class Sales Operations Organization to see the 20 attributes of a World-Class Sales Operations Organization.

The Crucial Part of Comp That You’re Missing

Fact #1: An effective compensation plan is a critical component of a successful sales organization.

Fact #2: The effectiveness of compensation plans depends more on how well it is communicated to the sales force than how well it is designed.

Although comp plan design is undoubtedly important, what really matters at the end of the day is the sales force’s perception of the plan, particularly how fair it seems.  CEB Sales research shows that the greatest risk sales leaders face when making changes to their comp plans is seller backlash stemming from general misunderstanding—if sellers don’t understand what they need to be doing differently in order to get paid or if they don’t buy-in to the plan for any reason, it’s only a matter of time until they become disengaged and resentful, rendering the comp plan a dud.

While this may not seem like a revolutionary point, there’s no arguing that improving how compensation is communicated to sellers is something that companies need to improve. In fact, a recent PayScale survey found that 73% of leaders do not feel “very confident” that their managers could have tough conversations with their employees about compensation, the Harvard Business Review reports.

So what are the best companies doing to make compensation communication work for them? CEB Sales research finds that in order to maximize sales force buy-in to their comp plan, companies should:

Consult the sales force on proposed plan changes

Take sales force input into account as you design compensation plans—especially star reps. Plans created “behind closed doors” are unlikely to obtain crucial sales force buy-in.
Communicate transparently

Be honest about your reasons for changing the comp plan, and explain what reps need to do differently to maximize their pay.
Empower first-line sales managers to have tough compensation conversations

CEB Sales research shows first-line managers are the most effective channel for communicating the plan.  Manager communication is especially critical when bonuses are paid out and during plan changes.
Hold at least two formal compensation conversations per year

CEB Sales research shows that fewer than two conversations reduces perceived pay process fairness by 50%, while more than five conversations produces little incremental gain.
Focus conversations on the pay-performance link

Performance criteria used to determine pay is the number one topic managers should discuss.  Actively reinforce organizational messages around performance expectations and pay potential rather than just current pay.

CEB Sales members, visit our topic centers on Designing a Compensation Plan and Communicating Compensation Plan Changes to learn more about how to maximize the effectiveness of your compensation plan.

Getting Compensation Right

Fact #1: An effective compensation plan is a critical component of a successful sales organization.

Fact #2: The effectiveness of compensation plans depends more on how well it is communicated to the sales force than how well it is designed.

Although comp plan design is undoubtedly important, what really matters at the end of the day is the sales force’s perception of the plan, particularly how fair it seems.  CEB Sales research shows that the greatest risk sales leaders face when making changes to their comp plans is seller backlash stemming from general misunderstanding—if sellers don’t understand what they need to be doing differently in order to get paid or if they don’t buy-in to the plan for any reason, it’s only a matter of time until they become disengaged and resentful, rendering the comp plan a dud.

While this may not seem like a revolutionary point, there’s no arguing that improving how compensation is communicated to sellers is something that companies need, and want, to improve. To this end, a recent PayScale survey found that 73% of leaders do not feel “very confident” that their managers could have tough conversations with their employees about compensation, the Harvard Business Review reports.

So what are the best companies doing to make compensation communication work for them? CEB Sales research finds that in order to maximize sales force buy-in to their comp plan, companies should:

Consult the sales force on proposed plan changes

Take sales force input into account as you design compensation plans—especially star reps. Plans created “behind closed doors” are unlikely to obtain crucial sales force buy-in.
Communicate transparently

Be honest about your reasons for changing the comp plan, and explain what reps need to do differently to maximize their pay.
Empower first-line sales managers to have tough compensation conversations

CEB Sales research shows first-line managers are the most effective channel for communicating the plan.  Manager communication is especially critical when bonuses are paid out and during plan changes.
Hold at least two formal compensation conversations per year

CEB Sales research shows that fewer than two conversations reduces perceived pay process fairness by 50%, while more than five conversations produces little incremental gain.
Focus conversations on the pay-performance link

Performance criteria used to determine pay is the number one topic managers should discuss.  Actively reinforce organizational messages around performance expectations and pay potential rather than just current pay.

CEB Sales members, visit our topic centers on Designing a Compensation Plan and Communicating Compensation Plan Changes to learn more about how to maximize the effectiveness of your compensation plan.

The Key to Account Growth Is Sitting in Your Executive Suite

I don’t know many CEB Sales members who aren’t interested in increasing revenue and deepening customer relationships. With this universal goal in mind, we recently spoke with four member executives to learn more about their executive sponsor programs.

The members we spoke with all listed similar motivations for creating their executive sponsor programs: they wanted to build more collaborative, strategic-level relationships with their customers, and they wanted those customers to buy more from them. How these four companies structure and execute their programs, though, varied.

Choosing Customer Accounts for Executive Sponsorship

While all of the companies we profiled target customers with the potential for future account growth, the interviewed executives also consider factors such as the customer’s current account size, the customer’s reliance on their products, and how long the customer has been engaged with them.

Selecting Executive Sponsors

At most of the organizations we profiled, the account manager for the targeted account has the final say in choosing the executive sponsor to be paired with that account; however, one of the organizations created a committee to select executive sponsors and match them with customers. Regardless of the method for pairing executives sponsors with accounts, industry knowledge and skill set are important factors in determining a good fit.

Structuring Executive Sponsor Interactions

The frequency and type of executive sponsor interactions varied from company to company. One organization requires executive sponsors to meet with their partner executives in person twice a year, while another organization’s norm was weekly communication via phone or email, interspersed with four in-person meetings throughout the year.

A related and common challenge associated with any executive sponsorship program is scheduling. One of the member executives we spoke with cited an example in which eight months passed before the executive sponsor and customer could schedule a 30-minute meeting!

Measuring Program Success

Going back to the reasons for establishing executive sponsor programs (i.e., increased revenue and stronger relationships), are the programs successful? While all of the members we spoke with viewed their programs as successful, they lacked the hard data to back up this claim. Several organizations survey executive sponsors and customer accounts to rate the executive sponsor program, but none have been able to illustrate a link between the program and increased revenue, which, in the words of one member, “must be clearly demonstrated in order for the executive sponsor relationship to be deemed successful.”

CEB Sales members, to learn more about the profiled organizations’ executive sponsor programs, check out the full report: Structuring Executive Sponsor Programs.

Make Your Reps Social Selling All-Stars

One of the things that sets the very best sales reps apart isn’t just their ability to challenge customers (as we’ve seen with our research around Insight Selling), it’s how they engage with their customers before the sales process even begins. The best reps know that their customers are now learning on their own more than ever before and that success means not just responding to customer demand, but actually creating it. Consequently, sales reps are using social media to teach their customers where they’re learning.

The best sales reps understand that a successful social media presence is not about using social media to create another commercial channel, it’s about becoming an information curator to help deliver insight earlier in the pipeline right where their customers are learning. Sales reps who establish a credible social selling presence are becoming valued contributors to their customers’ professional community and act as the hub for their professional network of customers, influencers, industry experts, and leaders.

Let’s say you’ve taken the plunge as an organization and have committed to actively supporting a social media initiative. Now what? Below are some tips and resources that will help your reps become valued insight contributors:

How can our sales reps build a personal brand around themselves on behalf of our company?

Sales reps should be the living, breathing embodiment of all that their company has to offer. That said, make it personal! Customers want to know that there’s a person on the other end of that tweet, not a corporation. A sales reps’ social media presence should be a reflection of who they are. To help gauge what that looks like find leaders in your industry and have your reps emulate what they’re doing.

How can our reps improve their social media presence?

Reps should be sharing information regularly. This will help them build their personal brand image as an expert in their industry and as a hub for their professional network. Reps should be Tweeting, Retweeting, posting content, blogging, and connecting people to each other. They should be following their customers and the influencers of their customers, reading what they read, attending tradeshows and industry events, and then sharing that information with their network. They should be learning about the organizations, networks, events, and resources that are valuable to their customers and incorporating them into their social media presence. If their customer wins an award or writes a great blog post your reps should promote it on behalf of their customers. If your reps read an interesting article they should always be thinking how can this information help my potential buyers or existing customers?

Want more information on how your reps can create a powerful personal brand?

Meet Jill Rowley. She is currently the Social Selling Evangelist at Oracle and has over 12,000 followers on Twitter! We profiled her when she was Eloqua’s top salesperson three years running to understand how she created such a powerful social media presence. To learn more take a look at this webinar interview where Brent Adamson, Managing Director of the Sales Leadership Council at CEB and co-author of the Challenger Sale interviews Jill.

Check back next week for tips and resources on how sales organizations can enable and encourage their sales force to utilize social media in a scalable way.

CEB Sales members, listen to our recent webinar on Social Selling, and read our full study on Getting in Early: Shaping Demand Through Pre-Funnel Engagement.

Are You an Insight Curator?

One of the things that sets the very best sales reps apart isn’t just their ability to challenge customers (as we’ve seen with our research around Insight Selling), it’s how they engage with their customers before the sales process even begins. The best reps know that their customers are now learning on their own more than ever before and that success means not just responding to customer demand, but actually creating it. Consequently, sales reps are using social media to teach their customers where they’re learning.

The best sales reps understand that a successful social media presence is not about using social media to create another commercial channel, it’s about becoming an information curator to help deliver insight earlier in the pipeline right where their customers are learning. Sales reps who establish a credible social selling presence are becoming valued contributors to their customers’ professional community and act as the hub for their professional network of customers, influencers, industry experts, and leaders.

Let’s say you’ve taken the plunge as an organization and have committed to actively supporting a social media initiative. Now what? Below are some tips and resources that will help your reps become valued insight contributors:

How can our sales reps build a personal brand around themselves on behalf of our company?

Sales reps should be the living, breathing embodiment of all that their company has to offer. That said, make it personal! Customers want to know that there’s a person on the other end of that tweet, not a corporation. A sales reps’ social media presence should be a reflection of who they are. To help gauge what that looks like find leaders in your industry and have your reps emulate what they’re doing.

How can our reps improve their social media presence?

Reps should be sharing information regularly. This will help them build their personal brand image as an expert in their industry and as a hub for their professional network. Reps should be Tweeting, Retweeting, posting content, blogging, and connecting people to each other. They should be following their customers and the influencers of their customers, reading what they read, attending tradeshows and industry events, and then sharing that information with their network. They should be learning about the organizations, networks, events, and resources that are valuable to their customers and incorporating them into their social media presence. If their customer wins an award or writes a great blog post your reps should promote it on behalf of their customers. If your reps read an interesting article they should always be thinking how can this information help my potential buyers or existing customers?

Want more information on how your reps can create a powerful personal brand?

Meet Jill Rowley. She is currently the Social Selling Evangelist at Oracle and has over 12,000 followers on Twitter! We profiled her when she was Eloqua’s top salesperson three years running to understand how she created such a powerful social media presence. To learn more take a look at this webinar interview where Brent Adamson, Managing Director of the Sales Leadership Council at CEB and co-author of the Challenger Sale interviews Jill.

Check back next week for tips and resources on how sales organizations can enable and encourage their sales force to utilize social media in a scalable way.

CEB Sales members, listen to our recent webinar on Social Selling, and read our full study on Getting in Early: Shaping Demand Through Pre-Funnel Engagement.

Get Reps to Speak Your Customer’s Language

For years we’ve been talking about the importance of the three Challenger rep competencies: Teach, Tailor, and Take Control. While each competency is crucial for Challenger rep success, our focus in this blog is Tailoring. Why? Because it’s really tough to get right!

In today’s sales environment our reps are working with more customer stakeholders than ever before, and each of them have different value and economic drivers as well as barriers to overcome to make a purchase. In order to ensure that our value propositions land on receptive ears, our sales reps need to tailor their messages to each specific stakeholder. That can be difficult for a myriad of reasons. One such reason is that sales reps struggle to understand the different roles within an organization and therefore have difficulty tailoring their messages to those individuals.

We often see members try to remedy this by putting their reps through business acumen boot camps that aim at helping reps better understand broader business issues and get a better understanding of how their offerings map into different areas of the customers’ business. While a great use of time, what often happens is that the reps return to the field armed with the knowledge they learned and struggle to translate it to the specific stakeholder in front of them.

So what can we do as an organization to help our sales team become more effective at tailoring?

We’ve recently profiled Solae, LLC – a company who has done an extraordinary job at helping their sales reps tailor their conversations with their customers by creating a process called “Message-to-Role Mapping.”

The Solae process involves three principles:

Solae doesn’t simply tell their reps what to say, they help reps understand why certain messages will resonate by teaching them how different functions are goaled and how those individuals think about their world. They then give their reps a roadmap to individual customer stakeholders, organized by role. It’s everything the rep needs to know—all on a single sheet of paper.
The Solae Marketing department works in conjunction with Sales to craft a set of talking points or messages tailored to the various stakeholders’ desired outcomes, ultimately connecting the customer’s needs to the supplier’s offerings.
Solae created a validation tool to ensure that the rep has reached consensus with individual customers on how Solae’s solution can help that individual specifically. This is done before Solae dedicates resources to that account.

Solae learned that for a rep to tailor, we’ve got to take the seemingly endless world of possibilities and break it down into the core components. Solae reduces the burden of taking all the customer information reps have at their disposal, and strips it into the two most critical components.

First, their knowledge of an individual stakeholder’s context – or how that individual fits in to their overall business.
Second, they have an understanding of the outcomes that the customer is looking for, or more specifically, the quantifiable results that individual is seeking to achieve.

What do both of these conditions have in common? In both cases when speaking with customers, Challenger reps aren’t focused on what they’re selling, but rather what the specific stakeholder is trying to accomplish.

Want to learn more? Click here to download Solae’s Message-to-Role Mapping case study. Want even more? We’ve conducted a 90-minute webinar with David Hewitt, Director of Global Sales Effectiveness at Solae at the time of this case study who introduced this tool to their sales team. Also, visit our topic center on Tailoring for Resonance. Happy Tailoring!

The New ABCs of Sales

I recently had the opportunity to see Daniel Pink speak about his latest book, To Sell is Human, at the SAVO Sales Enablement Summit in Chicago.  In fact, this was the second time I’ve had the opportunity to hear Dan speak on the topic (although this time I had the pleasure of following him on the main stage).  If you’ve read the book, you’ll be familiar with his main tenants but I wanted to share a few takeaways and how they tie into much of what we are seeing at CEB.

The one big insight that Dan emphasized was that “sales has changed more in the last 10 years than in the last 100.”  And why is that?  Dan shares that in the past, the buyer-seller relationship was one of information asymmetry.  We, the sellers and suppliers, held all (or most) of the information.  That gave us the power.  This is what created the idea of “buyer beware”.  But then something happened.  Information asymmetry disappeared because buyers had access to information like never before.  This empowerment created a different dynamic, one that Dan called “seller beware”.  This is what we’ve been sharing with many of you over the years with our research findings on customer buying behavior – the fact that customers have completed, on average, 57% of their buying process before engaging suppliers.  We’d absolutely agree with Dan – sales has changed dramatically in recent past because customers are empowered with more information than ever before; that their ability to learn on their own has changed the nature of sales.

Dan went on to share three core ideas, that to him and his research, define successful sellers in this new “seller beware” world. He calls them the “ABCs of Selling”.  While inspired by Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, in Glengarry Glen Ross, he isn’t talking about Always, Be, Closing; rather he uses the ABCs this way:

A is Attunement – this is about seeing things from the customers’ perspective.  The ability to look at it from their side of the table, going even beyond empathy.
B is Buoyancy – being buoyant is an “ocean of rejection”, as Dan put it.  The ability of an individual to continue to move forward and press on despite a high amount of rejection.
C is Clarity – the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more reveling ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had.  It’s a shift “from problem solving to problem finding”.

It’s been interesting to listen to Dan (and read his book), because much of his findings and thoughts align and support the conversations we have been having with CEB Sales members.  It also provides additional support and confirmation for the Insight Selling journey many are now on, most especially attunement and clarity.  When Dan speaks of clarity, all I think is commercial insight.  Teaching customers something they underappreciate or don’t recognize.  When I hear attunement, I think the Challenger skill of tailoring, to have conversations that resonate with each individual stakeholder.

What we continue to see in the commercial marketplace is that our sales and marketing organizations HAVE to change approaches and behaviors to grow in a “seller beware” world.

CEB Sales Members, learn more about Challenger Selling, and visit the Challenger Starter Kit for recommended tools and resources. Also, register for one of our upcoming Challenger workshop series on Challenger Messaging or Challenger Sales Process and Opportunity Management.