10 Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know For 2013

We hope you’ll read and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. Across 2012, the Sales Executive Council had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and summits, and analyzed hundreds of thousands data points.

As the world’s preeminent sales excellence research organization, we’d love to give our readers a sense of what we’re exploring and thinking about based on our interactions from 2012. This blog post contains the first of ten trends. The remaining five will be published in early December.

Please note, this is NOT a list of definitive research findings. But it is a series of informed thoughts and hypotheses, often based on some initial data trends we are seeing. We hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, feel free to disagree where appropriate, and share ideas you think we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input!

1. Customers get increasingly “untaught.” All of us are now selling to incredibly well-informed buyers, that are able to buy on price alone. It’s a hugely troubling trend. Customers are able to spec their own buying criteria without supplier involvement, pinning a small set of suppliers against one another in a consideration set. That’s just customer code for “in consideration for who is going to cave the most on price.”  To combat this trend, suppliers must “unteach” customers. I have to credit my colleague Brent Adamson with this term, but it perfectly captures how sellers must be able to show customers new ways to think about managing their business that will form the basis of the criteria they buy upon. This is the entire premise behind our original research on Insight Selling™ leading us to the Challenger sales profile. We have seen tremendous strides made this year between sales and marketing organizations and they unite to arm their sellers with insights that properly unteach customers. We’re excited to offer more support to companies pursuing this path. Our latest tool and diagnostic helps firms assess the steps required, across both sales and marketing, to create great insights to unteach customers. It’s a really helpful tool that results in a custom report for your organization – and it only takes about 15 minutes to complete it. Leading salespeople are already unteaching customers – they are the natural Challengers – but we are starting to see leading organizations make good on this idea. Building insight is indeed an organizational capability, not a rep-level skill, and therefore requires tight coordination across sales, sales ops, and marketing.

2. Sales culture gets an overhaul. We can claim this because we are currently studying it, intensely at that. Anecdotally, we seen that organizations heavily invested in driving new selling behaviors  through the traditional means of training, coaching, and hiring are see some gains but those are often short-lived. The investments these organizations make in driving a new sales behavior are for naught without the right (and, we believe, very different from most) cultural foundation. It’d be a cliché to say that sales culture matters when driving substantial transformation. But when you pry beyond the idea and accepted importance of sales culture, you find little evidence or understanding of what this really means. Social science that can help sales leaders better understand what good sales culture and good social norms look like in today’s selling environment simply does not exist. Frankly, our data is suggesting most sales organizations embodying a cultural profile that overly emphasizes compensation, individual contribution, and near-term outcomes. We think those cultural norms are a distant cry from what today’s best sales organization should embody. Stay tuned as we have more to come on that front… For our member organizations, be sure to participate in the 2013 Sales Culture and Transformation Survey to understand the cultural profile of your sales organization, and how that is helping or harming your efforts to sell to today’s highly informed customer.

3. Individual performance takes backseat to network performance. Closely related to trend #2, we believe a fundamentally new organizational dynamic will drive sales productivity – and it’s not based on making individual reps more effective in their sales-related tasks. This trend is based on research our sister team at the Corporate Leadership Council spent the better part of this year conducting. Their publically available research summary is a must read. The punch line of their research is that peak organizational productivity is a driven by both:

individual task performance: an employee’s effectiveness at achieving individual tasks and outcomes, as well as
network performance: an employee’s effectiveness at improving others’ performance and using others’ contributions to improve his or her own performance

Network performance spans well beyond collaborative online portals and knowledge management platforms – it’s literally the informal networks that answer the question “how does work really get done around here?” And here’s the kicker: network performance is drastically underrepresented in most organizations despite its importance nearly doubling in the past 10 years.

In fact, firms that were able to proper balance network and individual performance saw a 10% improvement in profitability. This underscores how important the creation of not just formal, but informal networks within your sales organization is becoming. In sales environments, CEB suggests that the “right balance” is closer to 44:56 in favor of individual versus network performance. Most sales organizations, however, are nowhere near that ratio, drastically over-representing individual performance.

4. Sales comp gets an overhaul. Related to both trends #1 and #2, we believe the backbone of most sales organizations – the comp plan – is drastically outdated for today’s sales environment. Team performance, information sharing, collaboration and peer support are being forsaken at the cost of driving individual rep productivity. Our good friend and member – Mitch Little, Head of Sales at Microchip – is moving aggressively on this idea and has shifted sales compensation away from the traditional quarterly incentives, highly-variable comp model towards a team performance model that resembles traditional salaried positions. And Mitch isn’t alone. In fact, I’d say one of the most common questions we’ve been getting from our most progressive heads of sales is on this very topic. I don’t think we are prepared to proclaim an end to the coin-operated era in sales, but all the evidence and research in the space of human motivation sure does signal that comp design needs to be revisited, and not just to tweak it, but to potentially overhaul it. This is another trend for our members to stay tuned to as both the our team and our sister council, the Corporate Leadership Council for Compensation, further research the implications.

5. New watering holes emerge for sales talent. Here’s an idea to consider: what if I told you that the best salespeople for today’s complex sale are currently employed as teachers, engineers, or other knowledge workers? In fact, they have no inclination towards sales, but they love to share ideas, they love to challenge others’ thinking, the love to see the outcomes of their work, and help others. What if I told you that those characteristics rarely co-exist in the candidates your currently screening who are opting into sales roles? Would you believe me? It kind of gets you thinking doesn’t it? A hard work ethic, persistence, and strong interpersonal skills were enough to get by in yesterday’s sales era. We think the entrance into the Insight Selling™ Era is changing the game of talent entirely. This is an idea that, at this point, is more conjecture than fact so don’t go tell your head of HR to blow up the recruiting plan. But our data is starting shed some interesting light on where the right talent can be found. Our recent acquisition of SHL is helping our team better understand the human capital challenges facing heads of sales in ways we never could have before. We have a lot of reasons to believe that the old model of hiring folks who want to sell and training them to teach a customer is less productive. The better way, we think, is to hire folks who can teach and convey ideas clearly, and train them to sell. That one is sure to spark some debate and we look forward to keeping our members posted on the findings. And to be clear, this doesn’t mean you can’t train your current sellers to Insight Sell, or challenge customer thinking – you can, and we’ve proven this several times over. But it does mean that as some percentage of sellers who can’t or won’t make that transition opt out and leave your organization, you may want to consider a drastically different backfill.

So there are the first five trends. We look forward to sharing some additional trends in a couple of weeks, and to hopefully sparking some good conversation between then.

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