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The 5 Worst Kinds of Managers

If there’s one phrase about manager impact that I’ve learned and will never forget, it’s that “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Even if people don’t leave, CEB research finds that having a bad manager drives down employee performance for up to five years. Whoa. Sounds like an easy way NOT to grow business is to manage poorly. Recently, Time wrote an article about “The 5 Absolute Worst Kinds of Bosses.” Here’s the list:

The crooked politician: This is the politically savvy boss who is believed to have gained his or her position oftentimes through some form of “cheating.”
The bully: The manager that has figured out who they need and how to influence those people, to get ahead. The bully manager craves power.
The micromanager: Self-explanatory here. This manager can’t let go; he or she needs to have control and ends up getting involved in too much day-to-day work.
The workaholic: The manager that doesn’t believe in any real type of “work-life” balance. This person often will send late night emails and expect (sometimes demand) immediate responses, because everything is “urgent.”
The BFF: A manager that has no boundaries and is “diva-like.” This manager often uses direct reports as his or her sounding board and uses the team’s time and resources.

Now, just because these are the five worst types of bosses, it doesn’t mean that everyone falls into one of these categories. I’ve been lucky enough not to have had any of these types of managers over the years, but they certainly exist, and we all have heard the stories from those that have had to live with it. Either way, the critical aspect is that even bad managers can change. How can we break poor or bad leadership habits?

What we know is that in today’s ever-changing and highly variable sales environment, good leadership is more critical than ever before.  What do sales managers (and sales organizations) need to be doing to avoid falling into these five kinds of bosses?

As we’ve studied sales manager effectiveness, we’ve identified the differentiated competencies of manager effectiveness in the world of increasing sales complexity. At the core, they do three things above all else:

Coach: Yep, they coach. But they do it in the right way by diagnosing root causes, tailoring development, and creating an ongoing dialogue.
Innovate: Investigate deal-level challenges and use that to ideate creative or novel approaches.  They also share deal-level insights with other managers.
Facilitate Judgment: Promote business ownership at the rep-level and empower the team.  Additionally, they facilitate a network of collective team support.

For each of these areas we go deep-and-wide, digging into what each of these differentiated skills look like and how organizations are helping managers build these skills. In fact, we are also running member workshops where senior sales leaders and heads of sales training can join us as we spend a day discussing how to address these and avoid managers becoming one of those five worst bosses.

CEB Sales members, register for one of our upcoming workshops on Developing Managers for the Insight Selling Era and our upcoming webinar on Driving Manager Effectiveness in the Insight Selling Era. In addition, review the Insight Selling Manager Competency Grid that provides levels of proficiency and examples of ineffective behaviors for these competencies.

5 Worst Kinds of Managers

If there’s one phrase about manager impact that I’ve learned and will never forget, it’s that “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Even if people don’t leave, CEB research finds that having a bad manager drives down employee performance for up to five years. Whoa. Sounds like an easy way NOT to grow business is to manage poorly. Recently, Time wrote an article about “The 5 Absolute Worst Kinds of Bosses.” Here’s the list:

The crooked politician: This is the politically savvy boss who is believed to have gained his or her position oftentimes through some form of “cheating.”
The bully: The manager that has figured out who they need and how to influence those people, to get ahead. The bully manager craves power.
The micromanager: Self-explanatory here. This manager can’t let go; he or she needs to have control and ends up getting involved in too much day-to-day work.
The workaholic: The manager that doesn’t believe in any real type of “work-life” balance. This person often will send late night emails and expect (sometimes demand) immediate responses, because everything is “urgent.”
The BFF: A manager that has no boundaries and is “diva-like.” This manager often uses direct reports as his or her sounding board and uses the team’s time and resources.

Now, just because these are the five worst types of bosses, it doesn’t mean that everyone falls into one of these categories. I’ve been lucky enough not to have had any of these types of managers over the years, but they certainly exist, and we all have heard the stories from those that have had to live with it. Either way, the critical aspect is that even bad managers can change. How can we break poor or bad leadership habits?

What we know is that in today’s ever-changing and highly variable sales environment, good leadership is more critical than ever before.  What do sales managers (and sales organizations) need to be doing to avoid falling into these five kinds of bosses?

As we’ve studied sales manager effectiveness, we’ve identified the differentiated competencies of manager effectiveness in the world of increasing sales complexity. At the core, they do three things above all else:

Coach: Yep, they coach. But they do it in the right way by diagnosing root causes, tailoring development, and creating an ongoing dialogue.
Innovate: Investigate deal-level challenges and use that to ideate creative or novel approaches.  They also share deal-level insights with other managers.
Facilitate Judgment: Promote business ownership at the rep-level and empower the team.  Additionally, they facilitate a network of collective team support.

For each of these areas we go deep-and-wide, digging into what each of these differentiated skills look like and how organizations are helping managers build these skills. In fact, we are also running member workshops where senior sales leaders and heads of sales training can join us as we spend a day discussing how to address these and avoid managers becoming one of those five worst bosses.

CEB Sales members, register for one of our upcoming workshops on Developing Managers for the Insight Selling Era. In addition, review the Insight Selling Manager Competency Grid that provides levels of proficiency and examples of ineffective behaviors for these competencies.

Coaching for Challenger Skills

So, your organization has decided to embark down the Challenger journey. Management is excited about the initiative, your managers are bought in, you’ve started your insight-generation journey, and you can even look your team in the eye and tell them great examples of Teach, Tailor, and Take Control – the fundamental Challenger competencies. Maybe, you’ve even asked one of our CEB Executive Advisors to get on stage and bring excitement and awareness to the sales team for what they’re about to embark upon.

Your reps’ heads are nodding, excitement for this journey is at an all-time high; the organization is primed and ready to go. But, then your reps approach you and say, “I love it! This is outstanding…now what?” “How do I actually teach these insights we’re creating to our customers?” Or, “how exactly do I tailor the conversation to the specific economic and value drivers of my different customer stakeholders?” And, a question we get asked a lot, “what exactly does it mean to take control? Does it mean I need to be pushy or aggressive?” The answer, by the way, is no.

To help you on this journey of instilling these Challenger competencies into your reps’ daily habits we’ve created various tools and resources for you. And, since the battle for our reps’ adoption of sales competencies is often won or lost at a manager-level, we’ve shared two resources your managers can start using today in their coaching sessions with their teams:

The Challenger Competency Grid is designed to help your managers make accurate assessments of their reps’ progress and provide clear coaching guidance. Whether you use this tool as the foundation for a new competency grid or as a compliment to your existing one, we encourage you to focus on the behavior indicators we’ve defined for each of the three fundamental Challenger competencies – Teach, Tailor, and Take Control. We’ve also provided tangible examples of effective (and ineffective) Challenger behaviors.
Let’s say we’re well on our way to encouraging the right kinds of sales rep behaviors, but our managers still need guidance on how to spot the ineffective Challenger behaviors prior to and during coaching interactions. To that effect, we’ve created the Ineffective Challenger Behaviors Heatmap. This heatmap illustrates the most common problems we see our sales reps exhibit with Teach, Tailor, and Take Control at the different stages of the customer buying process.

If you’d like any further assistance in learning how to implement these tools (or any others) please reach out to your Account Manager and we’d be happy to find a time to walk you through them. Happy coaching!

Does Challenger Have a Place in Transactional Selling?

This is a guest post by Kevin Starner , VP of Sales Enablement at Iron Mountain .

I know what many of you might be thinking: transactional sales requires a Hard Worker profile. We need people who are going to run through walls, make hundreds of dials every day, and continuously go that extra mile. On the surface, it does seem as though transactional sales proves the exception to the rule that Challenger always wins.

However, after participating in numerous panels, forums, and discussion boards around this topic, I find myself time and time again coming back to the same answer. If you don’t think Challenger can play a role in transactional sales, then you don’t know Challenger. After all, Challenger is a study of sales effectiveness, and who doesn’t want that?

At the crux of every sales opportunity, the goal is the same: make your customers feel confident that they’re making the right decision for their organization, and then help them act on it. When you’re in a selling situation where your competitors are so closely matched in solution and in price, there’s really only one thing you can do to differentiate yourself: show your buyers that you and your company think differently than the competition.

So how do you differentiate yourself in those moments? You may think it depends on the type of sale, but it doesn’t. The best salespeople bring new insight to the customer—ideas for saving money or avoiding risk that customers themselves have yet to realize.  We’ve heard from our customers that they want and expect us to provide more insight and thought leadership.  It’s almost becoming table stakes in order to have a meaningful buyer conversation.

While commercial insight is key for any Challenger, it’s important to put it in the proper context. To do so, try these 3 things:

Understand your buyer’s issues and educate them on looking at the problem the right way, even if it means looking at it differently than they ever have before.
Shape your solution and message to fit your buyer.
Manage the process to keep it moving and see it to close.

I will always be a sales professional at heart, but now that my position requires me to be a buyer as well, I look differently at those who try to sell to me. Any sales professional who can educate me on avoiding landmines, customize their solution to me and my needs, and guide me through my process will always win my business in a competitive bake off.

The principles of Challenger are Teach, Tailor, and Take Control. In all my years of selling to small business, mid-market, and enterprise customers, every single one of those principles rang true. It speaks to educating your customers. It speaks to shaping your message to make it about them. And it speaks to managing the process throughout. The framework provides room to stretch for more strategic processes, as well as to streamline for transactional opportunities and everywhere in between.

So, if you ask me, does Challenger have a place in a transactional sales environment? My answer: If you want to be relevant and differentiate yourself, then yes.

CEB Sales Members, to learn more, visit the Challenger Selling topic center. Also, register for our upcoming workshop on Challenger Sales Process and Opportunity Management.

The Most Important Factor for Key Account Success

Now we all know that key accounts are critical—it’s fairly common to see 70-80 percent of an organization’s business come from just 20-30 percent of their accounts.

But as the global economy has continued to sputter along, leaders and investors have continued to call for growth.

Conventional wisdom says that the quickest and easiest way to get growth is from existing customers.  And while that may be true, try telling that to your key account managers—sometimes growing our biggest accounts can often feel like trying to squeeze water from a stone.

The business of Key Accounts is incredibly complex, and there are many factors that combine to either enable or prevent success.  Things like account planning, coordination across teams and across business units, coordinating executive involvement, deciding how to structure the teams, how to build the necessary skills, how to manage compensation in a team selling environment, and on and on and on.

And all of these things are critical for companies to get right for key accounts to work.

But there’s one part of key accounts that is more important than anything we can do internally to try and grow an account: THE CUSTOMER. 

We can have the best key account teams, the best account planning process, the best executive sponsor program, the best EVERYTHING.  But if a customer isn’t willing or able to meet us halfway and live up to their end of the bargain, that relationship is dead on arrival.

If we’re going to partner with a customer at a deeper level than we do today, that requires a LOT of capital on your customer’s part:

Human capital—we’re going to ask customers for more of their time,
Political capital—we’re going to ask to grow partnerships into different parts of their business and at higher levels in the organization, and
Actual capital—we’re hoping to cross-sell and grow share of wallet

And that leads to a few questions:

What does the customer get in return for all of this effort?  What is the value to the customer for increased partnership?  It’s got to be more than a discount on what they buy today and a dedicated Key Accounts team.  How are we going to help them grow their business above and beyond what we are doing today?
Is the customer even able to live up to their end of the bargain?  Just because they happen to spend a lot of money with us today doesn’t mean they’re willing (and able) to take it to the next level.  Will their colleagues across BUs be willing to partner with us?   Will they open up and share information required for us to partner at a deeper level?  Can our two companies even pull this off?
What happens if the “partnership” we envisioned doesn’t pan out?  We suddenly have a very expensive Key Accounts team and other resources we’re providing an account that is not growing.  How do we pull back resources without damaging the relationship?

Companies that focus on the execution of Key Accounts over the strategy of Key Accounts often find themselves in a place where their key account programs feel like a leap of faith.  They elevate a customer into the program, and it takes years (and a lot of money) to figure out if this partnership is going to work.

Leading edge companies, however, have found ways to overcome this.  They:

Rigorously and objectively analyze not only revenue opportunity but also strategic fit between their company and a customer before nominating them to key accounts.
Set clear expectations of mutual growth and accountability and test for ability to partner BEFORE elevating a customer to a Key Accounts program.
Put in a series of checks and balances to continuously monitor partnership performance and re-calibrate with the customer when things fall off the rails.
Have a way to scale back resources in a way that does not damage the relationship with the customer.

Before we can even start to think about account planning, executive sponsorship, Key Account Manager skills, and all of the other really critical things to get right, we’ve got to ensure that we have a program that is flexible and destined to succeed out of the gates.

CEB Sales members, listen to our webinar replay that reviews these concepts in greater depth and walks through key account strategies from three different companies to help bring these principles to life.

5 Meetings You’re Doing Wrong

When done well, meetings allow people to do their jobs more effectively.  In practice, though, meetings rarely produce enough benefits to justify the time they take up, giving credence to the cynics who describe meetings as “the most frustrating exercises in pointlessness ever to have been invented.”

It doesn’t have to be this way.  A recent Google Ventures presentation offered tips that startups and multinational corporations alike have been using to make meetings as pleasant—and productive—as possible.  Below, we distill their insights about the five types of meetings that you’re probably doing wrong and suggest how to turn your situation around.

Meeting #1:  The Brainstorming Session

You’re hoping to:  Solve a tough problem with the knowledge and creativity of a diverse group of colleagues.

What goes wrong:  Chaos ensues.  One person has no idea what the meeting is about, so you spend the first ten minutes updating them.  A few people dominate the conversation while others struggle to contribute or simply stay quiet.  One person thinks they already know how to solve the problem and spends the entire meeting lobbying the group to go with their proposal.

Fixes:

Keep them small.  Better to have three separate meetings with four people than one big meeting with twelve people.
Keep them scoped.  It’s important to know what problem you’re there to solve, but it’s even more important to know what problems you aren’t there to solve.  If you aren’t clear about that, someone will inevitably push the conversation to an inappropriately high altitude, e.g., “I know we’re here to build a database of customer advocates, but this discussion is bringing up fundamental issues with our CRM system we should discuss.”  (That discussion may be worth having; a brainstorming session just isn’t the time for it.)
Designate a facilitator.  It’s impossible to be deeply creative while also watching the clock and tracking group dynamics.  Let the facilitator take care of ensuring that the meeting is running on schedule and that everyone is participating an appropriate amount.
Make sure you want a brainstorming session.  If there’s a decision to be made, run it like a decision meeting (see below).  “Brainstorming” meetings are often decision meetings in disguise; the person organizing the meeting wants to make a certain decision, but they also want to seem like a collaborative colleague, so they call the meeting a “brainstorming session.”  Don’t let this happen.

Meeting #2:  Decision Making

You’re hoping to:  Make a decision based on evidence and your colleagues’ views.

What goes wrong:  Gridlock.  You spend time debating whether a decision needs to be made right now, you debate who actually deserves to be making the decision, and someone makes a plea to gather more evidence.  In short, you spend remarkably little time debating the decision itself.  If, despite all of this, you actually make a decision, those who disagree with it may sabotage the process by going along with the decision half-heartedly.

Fixes:

Decide on the decision ahead of time.  A decision making meeting is not the place to debate the decision on the table, so decide this beforehand and include it in the agenda.  Avoid weasely, vague language here.  The meeting isn’t to “decide on a new organizational structure”; it’s to “decide whether to adopt the proposed reporting structure for global account managers.”
Decide on the decider ahead of time.  Most people at a decision meeting should be reviewing the decision and offering their thoughts to the decider.  Having a power struggle over who the decider is needlessly derails decision meetings.  Determine the decider—or, if necessary, deciders—and explicitly state their identity in the agenda.
Make escalation okay.  If someone really doesn’t like the decision a decider made, there should be a way to express that concern besides trying to stall the decision out.  Encourage people with strong objections to escalate their concerns and bring in more senior colleagues rather than engaging in silent subterfuge.

Meeting #3:  Update Meetings

You’re hoping to:  Keep a group of people updated on each other’s workloads through weekly/bi-weekly meetings.

What goes wrong:  Everybody mentally checks out; nothing valuable happens.  Half of the attendees check their e-mail while a junior employee blathers on about his embellished accomplishments of the past week.  The 200-word follow-up e-mail contains all of the information anyone could have gotten out of that hour long meeting.

Fixes:

Only have them when necessary.  If all of the organization information could be sent out in an e-mail, just send it out in an e-mail.  You can always call meetings when something substantial is happening.
Get team updates through stand-ups/e-mail snippets.  A team can learn what everyone is up to without having an hour-long meeting.  Consider Google’s “stand-ups”:  ten-minute meetings where small teams of ~8 people stand in a circle and say what they accomplished yesterday, what they’re working on today, and what roadblocks they’re expecting that a colleague/manager could help them overcome.  Prepare to be amazed by how quickly meetings end when everyone is standing rather than sitting.  Alternatively, use a program like iDoneThis to send out a daily digest of what everyone has been up to.  (E-mail snippets like this are particularly useful for remote teams.)
Sunset the meeting every four months.  The calendar planners for update meetings are typically set to recur indefinitely, which allows the meeting to continue on long after everyone has realized that it is useless.  If you decide to do an update meeting, make the planner end after four months.  At that time, you can reexamine the meeting to make sure that it’s still necessary, that the right people are attending, that the current time still works for everyone, etcetera.

Meeting #4:  One-on-Ones

You’re hoping to:  Check in with your direct reports and preemptively address any performance concerns.

What goes wrong:  The meeting is postponed again and again.  Something more important comes up, so you keep canceling your one-on-one meeting until you have to deliver that official performance review.  Or you keep your one-on-one meeting but spend the time dealing with an ongoing project rather than the higher-level issues you intended to discuss.

Fixes:

Just do them.  One-on-ones are like preventative checkups with your doctor:  they allow you to spot and address problems before they turn into something ugly.  Even if you don’t think there’s anything pressing to discuss, have the meeting anyway.  A conversation about sports can quickly morph into a discussion about a staffing issue or a lingering source of frustration.
Walk and talk.   It’s difficult to be fully engaged in a conversation when you’re in a stuffy office or a dimly-lit conference room.  If the weather permits, take a walk around the block or down to your neighborhood coffee shop.  The change of scenery will open up the conversational floodgates.

Meeting #5:  All Hands Meeting

You’re hoping to:  Get your entire company to pay attention to something at the same time.

What goes wrong:  People only pay attention when something major is happening:  layoffs, a reorganization, new executive leadership, etcetera.

Fixes:

Increase the frequency and fun.  Don’t just do quarterly presentations of financials and new strategic directions.  Have these every week or two, paired with free snacks and drinks, budget permitting.  Cover new products, humorous anecdotes, and success stories in a personal, approachable way.
Use video.  You should be including time for Q&A, and Q&A over video is much more engaging that Q&A over a teleconference line.
Schedule during downtime.  People won’t login to a webcast at 10 am on a Monday when they’re digging out of their e-mail inboxes.  Try Friday afternoon or right before closing time.

What strategies have you found to be particularly effective in making your meetings more productive? Use the comments section below.

To Centralize or Not to Centralize: That is the Sales Ops Question

With national sales meetings in the rearview mirror and sales reps digging in for the year ahead, sales ops teams find themselves with a moment to examine their own structures. Any structural review is bound to touch on centralization, which can raise a handful of difficult decisions. We love the supposed benefits of cost savings, efficiency, and consistency, but what will we have to trade in order to achieve these benefits?

Over the last few months, we’ve spoken to four member companies about their transitions to a centralized sales ops structure. Unsurprisingly, the members we talked to highlighted cost savings and efficiency as the main reasons for centralization.

But one of the toughest parts of any centralization effort, according to these executives, is deciding which activities will be brought into the central functions vs. those that will continue to live at the local level. How do organizations make this decision?

Two of the member executives we spoke with decided whether to centralize an activity or not based on the degree to which sales ops staff need to incorporate local factors into their work (e.g., complexities specific to the regional selling environment).
Two other executives used CEB Sales’ Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Operations Organization as a guide to determine whether an activity should be centralized.

So, what activities do organizations choose to manage centrally? While we heard a considerable amount of variety from our members, a few common activities were:

Commissions,
Reporting and Analytics, and
Training and development.

That said, the member companies we spoke with highlighted several obstacles they had to, or are working to, overcome along the road to centralization:

Gaining buy-in from local stakeholders and sales reps,
Integrating IT systems (e.g., CRM), and
Working across different geographies.

For a more in depth look at the member companies’ transitions to a centralized sales ops structure, CEB Sales Members can read our latest research brief on Centralizing Global Sales Operations, and also review our topic center on Sales Ops Management.

Your Sales Training Is Falling Short

With the sales environment becoming more complex, sales skills of the past are no longer sufficient. Building a successful sales training program is a top priority for every organization. However, creating a best-in-class training program is only the first step. To upskill reps on new skills, sales organizations need to find ways to make that training “stick” in the field.

When talking with sales organizations about their training programs, we often hear them tell us that they have put together superior training content, that they are delivering it with the most innovative techniques, and that they’re using the best people to train their reps.

Yet, when they asked their reps how they are applying their newly-learned skills on the job, they hear a variety of disappointing responses. Some say that they tried applying new skills, but gave up after repeated customer resistance. Others mentioned that they want to try these new skills, but that it was the end of the quarter, and they didn’t want to risk not meeting their goals. Still others admitted that they didn’t get many immediate opportunities to apply the new skills.

The fact of the matter is, no matter how effective the training curriculum and delivery are, a number of obstacles in the real world prevent reps from applying what they learned on the job.

So, how can you prevent this from happening and ensure reps apply what they learn in training?

You have to create opportunities for reps to practice new skills in a safe, yet real-world environment. Below are some strategies that some of the most progressive companies employ:

Rapid-fire, real-world practice with managers: Siemens Water Technologies engineers a series of pre-planned, rapid-fire experiential opportunities as part of manager/rep coaching trips. Several weeks in advance, managers and reps schedule two-day coaching trips in which the rep focuses on practicing pre-agreed upon behaviors. This allows reps to immerse themselves in the skill while receiving immediate feedback from managers, thus improving retention.
Realistic role-play sessions: St. Jude Medical employs an elaborate role-play in its training efforts—instead of using managers or coaches as role-play partners, they use customer proxies. This results in immediate and sustained increases in rep performance because the role-plays are much more realistic and closer to a real customer interaction.

CEB Sales members, if you’re interested in learning about the specifics behind this best practice, register for our upcoming webinar on Getting Sales Training to Stick. For more resources and best practices, review the full study, Boosting Sales Training Stickiness, and visit the Sales Training topic center.

How to Translate Training into Results

Building a successful sales training program is a top priority for every organization. With the sales environment becoming more complex, sales skills of the past are no longer sufficient. To upskill reps on new skills, sales organizations need to find ways to make training “stick” in the field.

Typically, here is how most sales organizations describe the success of their training program:

“We put together superior training content.”

“We delivered the training with the most innovative techniques.”

“We got the best people to train our sales reps.”

BUT, when it comes to applying these skills on-the-job, this is what reps have to say:

“I tried applying the new skills, but gave up after repeated customer resistance.”

“I’d love to try these new skills, but it’s the end of the quarter, and I don’t want to risk it.”

“I didn’t get many immediate opportunities to apply the new skills.”

This is what your reps experience after a training session when they attempt to apply what they’ve just learned in the field. No matter how effective the training curriculum and delivery are, a number of obstacles in the real-world prevent reps from applying what they learned on-the-job.

So, how can you prevent this from happening and ensure reps apply what they learn in training?

You have to create opportunities for reps to practice new skills in a safe, yet real-world environment. Below are some strategies that some of the most progressive companies employ:

Rapid-fire, real-world practice with managers: Siemens Water Technologies engineers a series of pre-planned, rapid-fire experiential opportunities as part of manager/rep coaching trips. Several weeks in advance, managers and reps schedule two-day coaching trips in which the rep focuses on practicing pre-agreed upon behaviors. This allows reps to immerse themselves in the skill while receiving immediate feedback from managers, thus improving retention.
Realistic role-play sessions: St. Jude Medical employs an elaborate role-play in its training efforts—instead of using managers or coaches as role-play partners, they use customer proxies. This results in immediate and sustained increases in rep performance because the role-plays are much more realistic and closer to a real customer interaction.

CEB Sales members, if you’re interested in learning about the specifics behind this best practice, register for our upcoming webinar on Getting Sales Training to Stick. Also, review the full study, Boosting Sales Training Stickiness and visit the Sales Training topic center for more resources and best practices.

STOP! Is This Really Commercial Insight?

Commercial insight is the holy grail of today’s sales organization. In an environment where customers are increasingly unable to appreciate differences in quality, reputation, service delivery, and product value between suppliers, commercial insight is what differentiates you from the competition and drives the greatest loyalty impact.

Yet it’s sometimes difficult to assess whether the goblet in front of you is truly a holy grail or merely a glittery imitation. Many organizations think they are arming their sales reps with commercial insights, but are in reality simply providing them with an array of facts, data, and observations that may be newsworthy, but fail to drive any real action.

The problem lies in distinguishing between thought leadership and true commercial insight. Thought leadership presents interesting, newsworthy information that customers likely wouldn’t have discovered on their own. It attracts customer attention and teaches them a new perspective, but unfortunately, that’s all it does. To drive action, a message must go beyond merely presenting a new idea to actually undermining an existing one.

While it’s easy to explicate what differentiates a commercial insight at a high level, we understand that in practice it’s often much more difficult to know whether the message in front of you is truly a commercial insight, and if not, how exactly to improve it. For this reason, CEB Sales has developed the Commercial Insight Audit, a free tool to help members understand the strengths and weaknesses of their commercial insights, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

The Commercial Insight Audit starts with a general review of the insight, guiding you through the most basic components of a good commercial insight to ensure you have them down pat. The Audit also delves deeper into your insight, helping you evaluate the strength of your insight on three important aspects:

Understanding of conventional wisdom of customer’s business. In order to reframe a customer’s way of thinking, you must first know how the customer currently thinks about their business. The Audit evaluates the depth at which you understand the conventional wisdoms held by a customer segment and the extent to which these viewpoints are held across the segment.
Highlighting what the customer has overlooked or misunderstood. As mentioned earlier, a message goes beyond thought leadership and becomes insight whenever it forces the customer to reassess what they thought they knew about their business. The Audit evaluates the power your message has to compel customers to take action.
Detailing the new customer approach. Most importantly, a commercial insight must lead the customer back to you as the supplier best able to help them take action on that insight. The Audit evaluates the extent to which your message leads the customer to your unique supplier differentiators.

We here at CEB Sales recognize that developing strong commercial insights is no easy feat. The Commercial Insight Audit is just the newest of a repertoire of tools and resources we have created to help you develop world-class commercial insights.

CEB Sales members, check out the new Commercial Insight Audit to evaluate the strength of your organization’s commercial messages. Also, review the Components of World-Class Insight and listen to the key takeaways and learnings from our popular Challenger Workshop Series on Insight Messaging.