Brent Adamson's Blog, page 34

Do Account Planning WITH Your Customers, Not TO Your Customers

I often hear from sales leaders that it is more important than ever to drive account planning across the sales force to help allocate scarce resources, identify the right opportunities, and build deeper customer relationships. But what does good account planning actually look like? It starts with choosing the right preposition.

Fundamentally, account planning is setting and executing your strategy for engaging the customer. Here at the Council, we believe a successful account plan should do three things:

1) Create long-term customer and firm value– Map selling strategies to customer needs and manage the complexity of solutions-selling

2) Streamline internal processes– Focus account teams on defined objectives and coordinate cross-silo communication

3) Create stakeholder accountability– Create accountability for achieving goals and set metrics to evaluate rep and internal stakeholder performance

Account planning is most effective when it simultaneously works to achieve the strategic objectives of both the supplier organization and its customers. We want to make sure that we're embarking on a commercial journey that is right for our firm and for the customer

And the first step you need to take?…Qualify!  Determine whether this account, this opportunity and this person is worth the effort in the first place. (SEC Members, visit our newly updated page on Selecting and Prioritizing Accounts).

Avoid wasting the most valuable resources (including field-rep time, product specialist support) on unprofitable accounts and overlooking potentially high-growth accounts.

At an institutional level, determine the right tiering of resources by objectively assessing account/ customer value. Weigh up cost-to-serve criteria against strategic fit, emerging demand, and future growth potential. See our new Opportunity Fit Scorecard for more on how to do this.
At an opportunity level, teach reps to screen for emerging demand – is this customer in established demand 'fulfillment, lowest-bidder-wins mode' or can we influence a larger emerging need?


At an individual customer stakeholder level, screen for a stakeholder's ability to mobilize their organization for internal consensus. Teach sales not to get stuck with 'talkers' — use these contacts for information, but don't expect them to close the deal for you!

Another crucial step of account planning is communicating your expectations to the customer and verifying their expectations. (SEC Members, visit our newly updated page on Communicating and Monitoring Account Progress).

All too often, sales reps create an account plan that gets put in the drawer until next year – and they review it superficially, or not at all, with the customer.

The key to effective account planning (and successful execution) is to do it WITH your customer, not TO your customer. A 'don't ask, don't tell policy' keeps your organization in the dark about what the customer values most – and how they see you as a supplier. So much so that, customer transparency about their intentions is one of the key drivers to effective Key Account Management.

So don't seek compromise – seek transparency.

For your top 10-20% of accounts, consider taking an approach similar to Cargill's joint expectation setting process: get your account executives and the customer's executive stakeholders in separate rooms – and have each write out their most self-centered expectations from this relationship.

Are you looking to tap into and leverage their distribution access to emerging markets? Maybe all they really want is access to guaranteed supply. Come back together and put the cards on the table – then you can review areas of alignment and misalignment and adjust service levels accordingly.

You'll want to do this at least annually, if not semi-annually, for your top accounts. Knowing that expectations misalign is good to know — it's better than betting on hope!

For your other accounts, a scaled-down version of this process is sufficient. Caremark and Baker Hughes both sit down with customers on a quarterly basis to define specific metrics, prioritize what's important to them and give the supplier a score on how well they're doing.

We've reviewed two of the most important elements of account planning – to learn about more of the keys to effective account planning, visit our newly updated Account Planning topic center.

I'm curious how you qualify and verify expectations with your customers? What works – what doesn't work?

Is Your Company Ready for Globalization?

(This is a guest post by Lara Ponomareff of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Customer Service and Contact Centers.)

One of the main benefits of working at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) – SEC's parent company – is that I get to learn what is going on in other corporate functions and keep pace with changing priorities and new challenges.

Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about globalization's impact on the sales and service organization– especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it's questions about how to serve local markets, work with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Selling to global customers and serving them in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn't anything especially brand new to us in the sales and service organization.  We've seen our organization become more global as our customers become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues around CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while sales organizations may be trying to sell and serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up.

So, what's happening?  Well, CEB found five big barriers to successful globalization and six things leading companies do to overcome these barriers and have an effective corporate core that will successfully grow globally.

The bottom line is that traditional corporate center functions will no longer be able to support global operations from a single, centralized geographic location. While there should be a common strategy clear to all stakeholders, the center must also be agile, manage risk, encourage global collaboration and trust, and think globally about talent.

In essence, it becomes a global 'corporate core' – still the same corporate center functions – but now newly aligned with globally dispersed market-level operations.

SEC Members, you can read the full executive guidance or assess the readiness of your company's corporate functions on our new Executive Guidance resource center.

For more information on encouraging global collaboration across the sales organization, check out our case study from Dimension Data on incentivizing cross-company deal collaboration.

The 2011 Sales Award Winners Are…

At last month's annual Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, the SEC handed out our 2011 B2B Sales Awards. We were thrilled to celebrate the achievements of some of the most progressive organizations in the SEC membership. Awards were given in three categories: Adoption of Insight, Excellence in Sales Operations, and Commercial Achievement.

Without further ado, the recipients of this year's sales awards were…

Adoption of Insight Award Winner: Treasury Wine Estates

The Adoption of Insight award is given to a company that is particularly good at taking action. This award recognizes an organization's ability to take good ideas and turn them into actual tools, processes, and approaches that change behaviors. And we were very pleased to present this award to Darren Campbell, General Manager of Field Services at Treasury Wine Estates.

Treasury Wine Estates has a long track record of consistently turning ideas into action – the company is very far down the path of Commercial Teaching, and they've also done extensive work executing on our past Coaching research. The Treasury team took one of our most popular coaching best practices—Symetra Financial's sales process-aligned coaching roadmap—and created their own version of it.

When accepting the award, Darren shared the six things that he believes help an organization accelerate insight to action:

Be honest with yourself about what's holding your organization back!  LISTEN to feedback
Make a commitment to improve, and encourage entrepreneurial behavior among staff
Role model the key behaviors that drive energy and action throughout the organization
Consistently reward these behaviors – both formally and informally
Link all your action initiatives to growth (for both the customer and your organization)
Check your progress regularly with staff, customers, and end-consumers. One helpful tip for doing this – ask customers to describe your business in three words

 

Excellence in Sales Operations Award Winner: Automatic Data Processing (ADP)

We were thrilled to present the Excellence in Sales Operations award to Theresa Russel, VP of Sales Operations at ADP Dealer Services.

Across the past few years, ADP has built an entire suite of tools (and really, an entire sales methodology) that is not only well designed but that people actually use. They've managed to do what every Sales Ops team aspires to do – and that is enable the field to succeed.

Theresa and the Sales Ops team at ADP have built extensive commercial teaching capabilities, creating countless sales pitches that reframe how their customers think about their business. The company has also taken its sales process to the next level by basing it entirely on their customers' buying process.

When accepting the award, Theresa emphasized the importance of engaging and collaborating with senior field leaders. She said one of the main reasons for their success, and a chief reason of why the tools and processes the Ops team designs actually work, is that they have buy-in from the top.

In fact, joining Theresa on stage to accept the award were two of ADP's Field VPs of Sales, providing a strong demonstration of the close and productive working relationship that Sales Ops has with the field team.

Commercial Achievement Award Winner: W.W. Grainger

The Council has spent the past few years extensively researching the drivers of growth from both the seller and customer perspective, the output of which is our work on commercial teaching and insight-based selling. The inspiration for the whole teaching story can really be traced back to one company—W.W. Grainger. That's why we were thrilled to present the Commercial Achievement award to Deb Oler, VP of Grainger US Brand Business.

The Grainger team taught us that it's how you sell that's so important. Their journey to reinvent how they go to market began with them asking themselves one very important question:

"Can we articulate why our customers buy from us as opposed to our competitors?"

It's a disarmingly simple question and yet one that can take you to a very dark place. Commercial organizations must go through this thought exercise though, in order to identify their unique strengths and differentiators.

In her acceptance speech, Deb once again reinforced the core tenet of her commercial strategy, the principle which has led to Grainger's well-known success, and that is simply: "always put your customers first, never stop listening to your customers, and build everything back from your customers."

(SEC Members, you can hear more from Deb about how Grainger rewrote their sales pitch to focus on underappreciated strengths in this short video.)

Congratulations again to the winners of our 2011 Sales Awards!

Why Would a Sales Rep Use Your CRM?

CRM – it's a topic that's guaranteed to derail any meeting with a 15-minute side-bar into why our reps don't use it.  CRM is so frustrating because very few companies have been able to crack the code and really build a CRM system that is a core part of how they go to market.

There are many reasons why CRM fails…Incomplete data.  Duplicate data.  Inaccurate data.  Too many fields.  Too time consuming.  Not user-friendly.  Redundant.

These are all reasons why CRM is often viewed as a burden and why reps don't use it.  Although each of those problems must be addressed, there's a bigger problem that they often mask and it can be traced back to one simple question – why would a rep want to use the CRM?

From the rep perspective, how much better is using the CRM than their own way of selling that they've built over their career?  They view CRM as a necessary evil, whose mandatory fields are needed to get resources or help their manager send forecasts up the ivory tower.

Very rarely do reps use the CRM because they believe it actually helps them sell better. And therein lies the problem.

As you're thinking about investments in CRM in 2012, look at every potential investment through that lens.  Here are some additional questions you may want to ask yourself:

-  Is your CRM built back from how your best reps sell?

-  Is your CRM designed to help your customers through the steps in their purchase process?

-  With buyer behavior changing dramatically across the last 3-4 years, and with the simultaneous increase in the complexity of selling – has your CRM system kept up?

Now before you go running off to ask for a $1M budget to overhaul your CRM – because that's really easy in today's business environment (insert sarcasm) – the good news is that you don't have to entirely re-tool your CRM to help your reps sell more effectively.

Earlier this year we profiled how ADP built a sales process to align with its customers' buying process and saw significant impact on sales results.  Technically, their CRM system is still built around the old sales process – but reps and managers use the "Buying Made Easy" tool to better understand where the customer is in their process and help them sell better.  Because of this tool, reps now enter and track opportunities in the CRM based not on rep actions, but customer actions in response to selling activities.  As a result, forecasting accuracy has gone through the roof.  So has the quality of Sales Managers' deal-level coaching.

Granted, ideal state would be to have everything embedded in the CRM system.  ADP has acknowledged that this transformation will be an iterative process that will likely take a lot of incremental changes. Still, the folks at ADP have started working towards a world where their CRM is there for the purposes of "guided selling" – meaning that as you track opportunities through the pipeline, the CRM system will recommend a suite of tools that you could use to help your customer through the stage in the buying process they're currently dealing with.  And because of that, more business will close.

Now that's a pretty far stretch from the CRM world we live in now.  But as we've uncovered in our previous CRM research, if we're trying to solve a CRM adoption problem when what we really have is a CRM design problem, all of our efforts will be in vain.  Even worse, we'll only be further distancing ourselves from where we ultimately need to be.

While CRM hygiene (data quality, sales force automation) is a good investment to make, also be sure to evaluate CRM investments in 2012 based on whether or not they help your customers through their purchase process and whether they help your average reps sell like your best reps.  Because anything other than that might not be addressing the root cause of the issue.

SEC Members, for more guidance on CRM, visit our CRM topic center. And for more information on ADP's Buying Made Easy process, review the case study or listen to our recent webinar on the topic.

How to Be a Hall of Fame Coach Like Halas, Lombardi, Walsh and Madden

There are 21 NFL Hall of Fame coaches, yes, just 21.  As we start the playoff run of this NFL season, we are reminded that winning championships not only takes great players on the field, but also great coaches and leaders.

The question often asked is – are great coaches made or born?  Well, according to Vince Lombardi, "Leaders aren't born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal."

But, we still ask this same question in Sales – is a sales manager born a great coach or can a sales manager become a great coach?

The good news – our research at the Sales Executive Council shows we CAN make great coaches, which means there are more than just a few "Hall of Fame" sales coaches out there.

But now the question becomes, HOW do we foster successful coaching in our sales organizations?  What's required to make "Hall of Fame" sales coaches?  

Here at the SEC, we set out to answer those questions.  Answering these led us to develop The Anatomy of a World Class Coaching Program. It's compromised of 15 sales coaching attributes that, together, make for a world-class coaching program.

Here are just a few to consider as you think about your own sales organization:

Ensuring Coaching Capacity – We recognize the time commitment required for quality coaching and have instituted strategies to free up manager time to coach.

Our research has found that 3-5 hours per month is critical.


Allocation of Coaching Time – We direct managers to overweight coaching effort to salespeople with the greatest potential for improvement (core performers) and those whom we most want to retain (star performers).

Why focus on core performers? Because effective coaching to core performers provides the greatest opportunity for improved sales performance.


Secondary Coaches (no, not football coaches of cornerbacks and safeties) – Though managers own overall coaching and development strategy for their direct reports, we leverage specialists and peers to coach in their area of expertise when appropriate.

While having this Anatomy as a guidepost is a start, our members also use it to diagnose the effectiveness of their current coaching programs; it can be deployed internally to understand if your company is creating and fostering a culture of "Hall of Fame" coaches.  The results help sales organizations pinpoint their coaching strengths as well as areas that need additional focus.

As Lombardi said, we can make great leaders and great coaches, which will take a lot of hard work; but that makes winning all the more satisfying.

SEC Members, download the Anatomy of a World-Class Coaching Program and also check out our Coaching topic center for more tools and resources on embedding coaching in your organization.

Member Spotlight: How Does "Challenger" Translate Globally?

(This is a guest post by Bill Skaggs, Global Director of Sales Excellence at Solae, LLC. Bill has more than 30 years of experience in the sales excellence and enablement function.)

Our company, Solae, has embraced the SEC's rep behavior profiles research since it was introduced several years ago and has actively begun developing the Challenger behaviors in our sales force.  Over a number of years, our Go-to-Market process and selling tools had been defined and refined to sell complex solutions to our targeted customer base.  The definition of "Challenger" reps and the data to support the actions of these high performing Account Managers appeared to be the missing piece to bring all our marketing strategy, account strategy, and tactics to the execution at the account.

In good style, we had our SEC Executive Advisor bring the concepts to our global management team.  There was great enthusiasm and excitement for training the global commercial teams on this research. We designed material and workshops to introduce and train the behaviors of high performers during the regional meeting that was kicking off a new fiscal year.

Reality hit when the behaviors were introduced in the regions though. Outside of North America, the Challenger behaviors ran into some roadblocks.  

The first major issue was the understanding of Challenger by people for whom English is not their primary language.  I have trained in a number of countries and to lots of people who struggle with receiving training in English, so I feel that I have sensitivity to the issue.

However, the level of resistance to presenting Challenger behavior was surprising.  In digging deeper, we uncovered some of the major issues were with the perception of what it really meant to be a Challenger account manager.

People who have English as their second (or even third) language tend to be more literal in translation.  As in all communication, there is the literal and the emotional impact to the understanding.  To most people, this was an aggressive, pushy behavior that conjured a mental picture of John Wayne. Even sales professionals in the US do not want the connotation of being pushy or aggressive. In other cultures, it is taboo.

Another issue is that a global audience receives the rep profiles as mutually exclusive behaviors.  Being a Relationship Builder, a Hard Worker, or a Problem Solver were not perceived as being bad working profiles by most of the people.  There are a lot of positive connotations in those behavior descriptions.

We found that there were three things we could do to help get past the resistance and translate Challenger for a global audience:

1)  Focus on the behavior concepts, not the words themselves.  It takes some time to describe what it means to be a Challenger, but it is well worth the time.  Be sure to test sales teams' understanding by asking how they perceive how to be a Challenger and what sets Challengers apart from the other profiles.

Demonstrating a sales call as a Challenger or using analogies (such as Are Your Reps Bartenders or Personal Trainers) help to deliver the message.  Ask the local sales teams how they would implement the concepts in their market.

2) Make sure the sales teams understand what a Challenger is and is not. Being a Challenger does not mean that it isn't important to work hard, build relationships, or solve problems.

3) Show the sales teams that Challenger behavior is driven from the customer, not from internal expectations. We use the drivers of Customer Loyalty to begin the discussion from the customer's perspective and then lay in the Challenger Behaviors to align with the customer expectation.  Most sales professionals want to give the customer experiences that they want.

It takes time to explain, reinforce, and evolve towards the Challenger profile, particularly across global groups. The literal definition of the "words" can get in the way of the concepts. The concepts do have global application, but have to be executed in alignment with local cultures.

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SEC Members, for more information, tools, and resources on building and developing Challenger reps in your organization, be sure to check out our new Challenger Rep Starter Kit.

You can also listen to a reply of our recent webinar Key Lessons on Developing Challenger Reps® or register for the upcoming December 14th Q&A session on Challenger Selling.