It's Been a While, Why - and What's Going on with Sales Enablement These Days?

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, and it’s been brought to my attention by many of you as we discuss the sales enablement topic at: conferences, meetings, over peaking duck, or during inquires.   (NOTE:  guys, if you add comments - I know you are reading!!)

 

Most of you already know that the 4^th quarter is by far our busiest time at Forrester.  Most of our business is subscription based, and these contracts have annual terms which are more often than not – January to December.  So, in addition to my normal workload of: writing reports, fielding inquires, and delivering on consulting engagements – I’ve been out in the field working with our sales force to help drive contract renewals.

 

Additionally, I’ve done a lot of speaking engagements as well.  Since our last post on October 2, I have:

 

• Conducted a webinar for Forrester entitled “Are you mounting a value selling engine on a product selling chassis”
• Was the keynote speaker at Savo’s Sales Enablement Executive Summit
• Was a keynote speaker for ASTD’s Sales Training Drivers virtual conference
• Facilitated an invitation-only executive roundtable on sales enablement sponsored by XFI
• Participated in a webinar for SAP about the need to improve business intelligence systems for knowledge workers like sales, marketing, and finance professionals
• Participated in a sales enablement analyst day at our Foster City office
• Gave a presentation at Forrester’s Marketing forum in London introduction our “model-map-map” vision
• Participated in an analyst day in our London office

 

While this has been going on, we’ve also been reaching out to our clients – asking them where they would like us to take our research agenda, how we can improve how we deliver value, and what topics they want us to cover moving forward.  The demographics of our sample of technology industry clients included:

• Company size:
• 13 (50%) $1B or more in revenues
• 7 (27%) Under $1B, but more than $100M
• 6  (23%) Under $100M
• Altitude level (our term for the level of authority in the organization)
• 8 (31%)  C-level (CEO, Chief Sales Office, CMO, etc)
• 10 (38%) VP-Level (Sales, Marketing, Sales Enablement, Field Ops)
• 7 (27%) Director-Level (Sales Operations, Field Marketing, etc)
• 1 (NA) Manger level (Sales Enablement and Field Communications)
• Department (which functional group did the people report in to?)
• 13 (50%) Sales
• 8  (31%)  Marketing
• 5  (19%) Other (field operations, both, office of CEO, etc)

 

Obviously, there is a lot of information I can share with you – but in the interest of getting something out right now, I wanted to give you a status report on what’s been going on and why I’ve not updated the blog in a while.

 

I think the single thought I can leave you with (if you promise to really think about what it means) that best summarizes all of these conversations would be….

 

“Focus ON the system, not IN the system.”

 

Too often people are focused on very tactical, short term things to boost sales or improve skills, but a year later have very little to show for that effort.  Why?

 

Enterprise selling is complex, and that complexity creates a paradox (hey, I warned you that you will need to think deeply) where making things simple for customers and sales requires you to confront the fact that you have a variety of people in your company who each carry different perspectives of who your customers are; and what needs to be done to solve them.

 

Declaring you need better sales people (or smarter sales people), or focusing on more activity (more leads, more calls); misses the point entirely.

 

Your customers have access to more information now (thanks to Google and Live) than they have ever had before in the history of mankind.  Preparing your sales people with more product knowledge is not suitable today as you are arming your field with the vary information customers can get themselves. 

 

Buyer/seller relationships are stratifying right before our eyes into a new caste systems of strategic, value-added vendors on the one end; and undifferentiated, commodity-type suppliers on the other.   Addressing this issue requires a fundamentally different way to go-to-market than we have had in the past and it means we’ve got to confront the mismatch in our business unit construct and product-centric view points with the new selling model of actually co-creating value with customers and focusing on helping those customers drive business outcomes.

 

I understand from your vantage point, this might seem a big task; others might feel like this is “boiling the ocean”.  If you feel this way, all I can say is that you would be very surprised at the number of your competitors who are building strategic programs right now to address these exact issues.  The trick is to first understand this is a holistic problem, and then break it down into a set of manageable projects where you can “fix the plane while it’s flying”.

The Great Escape: Role Model For Enabling The Great Sale

Last month, the Wall Street Journal featured an article about America’s obsession with the latest style icon, the long-dead movie actor, Steve McQueen. Apparently, he's become the latest fashion icon, thanks to his ". . . stint as a U.S. Marine, rugged athleticism, less-is-more acting style and real-life love of car racing and motorcycles."

The article goes on to acknowledge one of my personal convictions — Steve McQueen was the "guy's guy" (which I'm thinking means he wouldn't own, never mind wear, anything with Lycra in it).

For me, his best movie was The Great Escape. The movie, based on a true story, is about an escape by Allied prisoners of war from a German POW camp during World War II. But these weren't ordinary prisoners and this wasn't the typical POW camp. These Allied prisoners were serial escape artists, so this prison was built to be escape-proof.

But when the guy who orchestrated most of the Allied escapes arrives at the camp, he plots what will be his "greatest escape" — a 250-foot tunnel that would enable a mass breakout of  POWs, not just one or two. He assembles an ace team of specialists: James Garner was the guy who scrounged up stuff like fake ID cards they'd need on the outside; James Coburn acted was the resourceful "tool maker", manufacturing the implements they'd need to dig the tunnel; Charles Bronson was the lead guy directing tunnel operations; and Steve McQueen was the "distraction", essentially creating enough complications and disruptions to throw the attention of the guards off the tunnel-ers. The rest of the prisoners supported the effort by singing in the prison choir to drown out some of the tunnel noise or subtly disbursing the excavated tunnel dirt throughout the camp from pockets sewn into their pants. While there are lot of twists and turns in the story, the tunnel gets completed and the escape more or less happens, albeit not entirely successfully.

So what does The Great Escape have to do with what makes for a great sale? We recently talked to about 40 quota-carrying sales executives and sales directors, and we wanted to know all the ingredients that made them successful in their jobs. Well, we laughed, but we also cried, especially when heard things like "my company does absolutely nothing for me" or another case where it took the pricing desk a week and half to turn around a price quote.

Our take-away from these very enlightening conversations? We learned that the successful sales organizations develop when everyone in the company knows that they play a role in supporting the sale, with roles being flexible and organizational and functional boundaries highly permeable. When it works, it delivers big sales impact. As one wise sales veteran told us a few years ago, "sales is a function, not a person, so for a company to be successful, there is a recognition that everyone sells."

The Quest For Vision — Selling Ahead Of The RFP

It used to be that sales people could hit their numbers by responding to inbound inquiries (leads, RFIs, RFP, etc) from various companies within their territory. Now, however, these same reps are forced to develop opportunities from scratch as go-to-market models are increasingly more account–based than in the past. In addition, most firms are finding their win rates for unsolicited RFPs drop below 25%, a fact that contributes to the growing cost of sales. These two realities are forcing sales organizations to improve their ability to manufacture new opportunities within targeted accounts, and do so in a more scaleable and repeatable way.

In most organizations, a small handful of the sales organization (about 20%) accounts for the lion’s share of their new revenues (about 80%). So, the question becomes “How do we get more of the 80% of our reps to perform like the top 20%?”

When I ask top performers the question “why are you so successful” all tell me more or less the same thing — they concentrate on selling a vision.

In my quest for vision, I recently asked one executive at a major energy company “If a vendor helps you frame out a problem or clarify a vision before you have funded a project to address it, how likely are you to work with them over competitors?”

He replied, “This is usually a given, but the key is the vendor has to have credibility and trust to start with.”

Logically then if we could model the steps and techniques used by these stellar performers, then we could improve the success of the entire sales force. However, when pressed to define what a vision is, top performers really struggle to articulate it more concretely. The only lesson learned is that the vision they create is about how the customer can solve the business problems they’re facing.

There is a moment in a buyer’s mind when their thinking shifts from trying to understand their problem to thinking about the approach to solving it. It’s at that moment when an executive develops clarity around a “solution vision” about what their world will look like when complete. This inflection point is the single most important mindshare to gain because vendors who are involved prior to this event have a significant competitive advantage over those who engage after.

So, how does one define a “solution vision?” It really is a guiding conceptual model for achieving a desired end state. It provides a shared understanding to the network of people (internal and external) who must perform related, but unique tasks for the organization to realize the anticipated benefits of the endeavor.

Solution visions that have successfully been implemented all have three common ingredients.

1) Authentic — it has to be real, well-researched, and obtainable.
2) Applicable — it has to be communicated in the context of the account and the stakeholder.
3) Actionable — the path (and the required details) to realizing that vision are mapped out into an understandable approach, but also simplified so the program doesn’t collapse under its own complexity.

If you create a simple checklist of resource allocation based on this definition, you will find that the overwhelming majority of your business development resources (sales, marketing, and solutions) are focused after a customer has developed their solution vision rather than on helping to influence that vision.

Instead of continually investing in programs to incrementally improve how your sales teams manage opportunities after the customer knows what they want, significantly better returns await those who invest in programs to help customers shape a solution vision. This is done by creating scalable and repeatable programs to help sales people more easily collaborate with executives to develop a shared vision of success for a given account.

Are You Mounting A Value-Selling Engine On A Product-Selling Chassis?

This economic downturn is having profound effects on go-to-market models.

Technology buyers are actively stratifying their vendors into a caste system of strategic and non-strategic suppliers in an attempt to move away from being in the business of assembling piece parts — and more towards delivering business-enabling infrastructure and services.

 

Virtually every technology vendor has the topic of "improving sales productivity and execution" as one of their top three priorities and this focus is creating a lot of self-examination. Here are a few difficult issues companies are wrestling with right now:

• Who is responsible for creating the environment, culture, and creating the infrastructure for sales people to succeed?
• What elements comprise a sales infrastructure and who is responsible for driving the required coordination across disparate functional groups?
• During a downturn, is it more important to find more leads — or spend more time on the opportunities you do have?
• Should you invest more to promote products and services in growth markets; or concentrate on gaining wallet share of targeted buyers within key accounts?
• How do you drive adoption of new selling models, tools, or programs?
• How do you maximize sales and marketing resources to reduce S,G,&A costs while also improving performance?

Like canaries in a coal mine, most sales organizations have already started the long process of converting their sales engines from transactional, market-share oriented models to approaches that are more value-driven and focused on gaining a greater portion of key a key stakeholder’s wallet share.

 

However, most sales leaders I speak with comment on the difficulty they have implementing such a change and the “supply chain” behind the sales force is still wired to focus on its own products and services, rather than the problems a customer has and what those customers must do to realize an end result. One VP of Sales aptly described this situation with this analogy, “It’s as if I’m mounting a value-selling engine on a product-selling chassis.”

 

Consider the implications of this for a second.

 

An engine from Ford F150 (optimized for hauling power) doesn’t belong on a chassis for a Focus (designed for fuel economy) or a Mustang (acceleration). All of the pieces of the car are engineered to work together, to very specific and complex requirements based on: market segmentation, price/performance, customer requirements, etc.

 

This is exactly the same as your sales ecosystem, and what we’ll review in our teleconference (described below).

 

If you have too many people in your company worrying about the break pads, the catalytic converter, the cooling system, or the design — but few really focused on how the sum of the parts all come together; your car is destined to look like “the Homer.”

 

(For Non Simpson’s fans:  In an episode of “The Simpson’s” Homer connects with his long lost brother who is a CEO of a major car company and is enlisted to help design a car for the common man. Not only is what Homer designs a monstrosity, it also costs $82,000).

 

Join Forrester for a Teleconference entitled "Are you Mounting a Value-Selling Engine on a Product Selling Chassis?"

Date: September 17th

Time: 11:30 am ET

Register: http://www.forrester.com/Marketing/Campaign2/1,6538,2517,00.html

 

In our teleconference, we’ll discuss:

• The tectonic forces at work that are transforming buyer / seller relationships
• The buyers’ perspective of sellers
• Confronting the reality of complexity in sales
• Understanding the costs of your current sales system
• Measuring the efficiency of your sales engine
• Using outcomes as a design point
• How do determine where to get started

We'll have a Q&A session following a presentation, so I look forward to the chance to meet some of our blog readers (albiet virtually).

Who’s Your Real Customer? The Answer Might Surprise You

[Posted by Ellen Carney]

 

Every once in a while, I come across one of those situations where the answer seems so obvious that I have to wonder if they already know the answer, but just want to know what you’re going to say. You know, like Perry Mason asking the question, but he already knows the answer?

  Earlier this week, I had a call with a global client who was inquiring about some pretty basic functionality offered in some fairly standard software. Given who they were and their level of industry and technical smarts, I thought there had to be more to this than the obvious question that they were asking. Turns there was, but the “more” piece was completely different than I thought.

As I rolled off the list of packaged vendors and acknowledged compliance with their high-level requirements, the client seemed surprised that what they were looking at was, in fact, available as packaged software. Yep, throw in an industry framework or two, and you were probably 80% or more on the way to industry solution nirvana. There was . . . uncomfortable silence. OMG! Did I fail a trick quiz? Did I misunderstand what they were looking for?

Finally, they spoke. “What do we tell our developers?”

Turns out they were of the belief that what they wanted didn’t exist and instead would have to be built by a big team of app. dev folks that no doubt built a lot of their other applications . . . from scratch.

In this client’s mind, the real customer was the applications development team, not the employees who could be more efficient with the new software or the CFO who’d be able to show improved business productivity. Instead of a business justification, this client needed justify a packaged app to a group of employees on whom they would continue to depend to support other applications, while ensuring that they could still provide them with meaningful work, even if the app was largely off-the-shelf.

It got me thinking that a vendor sales team would logically go into this account thinking that they would be pitching to a line-of-business executive, a COO, or even a CIO, especially since this particular app was of the “company-changing” kind. Holy smokes, if they went in thinking they’d be selling to business management, the sale would be hosed! Instead, the vendors pitching woo to this client would have to target this clearly influential team of developers. That means a radically different storyline, demo, and cast of subject matter experts.

What to do? Turn your sales organization into a bunch of Paul Drakes.

 Paul Drake was Perry Mason’s ace detective (I’m clearly dating myself here), able to get the scoop that saves the case, gets the bad guy, and saves the widows and orphans. That means learning not only the industry, but the prospect’s organization, how they make decisions, who are the key stakeholders that can kill a deal, even without holding any budget at all.

How do you do it? Aside from the obvious relationship that a sales exec might have, back office staff also can play a big role — inside sales reps who support the day-to-day activities of the account can be a great source of info and influence, as can telemarketers looking to drum up leads, since they capture the comings and goings of client staff. The key for the marketing side of the house is capturing all these insights in a meaningful way, making it easily digestible and actionable, and getting it all into the hands of sales — fast.

Trusted Advisor Or "C-Rate Consultant" : Which One Are You Turning Your Sales Force Into?

Most of the companies I speak with are focusing on changing their go-to-market models and asking their sales people to call higher in organizations. The term “trusted advisor” is batted about within the halls and conference rooms of vendor organizations.

I’ve yet to run into a marketing or sales leader who IS NOT encouraging their sales team to elevate their access level. 

Who could have a problem with a sales organization focusing on gaining more consistent access to the budget holders that control their fate? 

The real problem here is that these organizations do not realize they are making a dramatic and fundamental shift from being focused on market share (promoting products and measuring their unit sales) to a wallet share (the percentage of available spend a particular executive has in the vendors category) orientation.

Incremental changes don’t work when you are fundamentally changing the game. 

What am I talking about?

Part of my job is to field inquiries (which is a 30 min scheduled call about a topic of our clients choosing.  We use this to help apply our research to their organization). I’m often speaking with organizations wondering what they can do to improve the adoption of a new selling model within their sales force.

Most want their sales people to be calling higher, and be “trusted advisors” to their customers. What have they done to date?

Sales people have been herded through a “corporate car wash” type training session where in a day or two they are trained on some ideas for how to gain access and influence executives. This material is usually generic, like executives want to know this or that — but doesn’t focus on the problems the vendor can help address. Sales people are asked to go “read the annual report” and “get to know the business”.  In some cases, sales people are asked to create a SWOT analysis of the business they are calling on.

Does this approach lead to "trusted advisor" level sales people?

No. Actually, we’re hearing from the executives you are trying to sell to that its actually getting worse. 

Here’s why.

No doubt there have been some significant improvements in how meetings are set up. Vendors have moved away from the big promises of “I can save you 20% of your infrastructure costs” that they cannot back up and don’t reflect reality. Sales and marketing groups are being much more targeted.

These targeted messages make executives think, “Wow, these people understand my issues — I can actually have a business conversation with them.”  So, these business leaders allot more time for these meetings, only to get the standard PowerPoint pitch as the pay out. To them, it’s still the exact same kind of sales pitch they avoided in the past, only this time, they have been duped. 

In order to help isolate these various bad practices, we’ve developed a term to describe this phenomenon.  We call it: the rise of the “C-rate” consultant. 

The idea is really simple — it’s basically when a sales person is trying to communicate with enthusiasm things they have “discovered” about the company they are calling on (by reading publicly available information) and have been able to make a connection between a business objective and their products that isn’t quite right.

Sort of like finding out a company is looking to boost its margins (no, really? Large corporations are looking to boost margins — wow, what insight!) and claiming the cost-take out offered by an outsourcing service would save a CEO of a $50B company . . . cue Dr. Evil… ONE MILLION DOLLARS! While $1m might seem like a lot of money, that’s not the kind of savings that are going to move the dials for a CEO, or even any of their direct reports. To put this in perspective — Pfizer has launched a multi-year effort to remove $4 billion out of their cost structure. 

Whose fault is this? While sales people are always accountable for their own actions, we actually think this is the result of a poorly planned and executed training and support program. In other words, it’s much more the environment with which sales people operate, than it is the sales people themselves.

What is a "C-rate" consultant?

A "C-rate" consultant is typically the by product of a poorly executed transition from a product-selling culture to a solution-oriented one. He or she is a sales person who is unable to effectively synthesize business information about a targeted account which is relevant to a particular topic, in context of a given executive’s perspective, and articulate specifically how their company can help that executive address those stated problems.

Because they are unable to achieve these outcomes, a "C-rate" consultant takes up more of an executive’s valuable time and offers no more insight than their product-centric peers. As a result, each "C-rate" consultant creates conflict with every executive they encounter. A sales force populated by "C-rate" consultants contributes to some major problems such as: rising costs of sales, wasted marketing resources, slower than expected traction of corporate strategy, and stagnate organic growth.

Are you creating a crop of "C-rate" consultants?

Unfortunately, the answer is probably yes.

Here are a five questions to help you determine if you might be retooling your sales force into "C-rate" consultants.

• How many people in your organization have ever held the position (CIO, CFO, etc) for a company you are looking to target? If that number is less than 30, how do you know you are getting enough of a sample size to build an engagement strategy to target that role?
• How much access do you have within your client base to that targeted role? Does your organization assist these executives through the entire problem solving process, or typically engage at key points in time?
• How do you develop hot button topics for that executive, and once you do, how do you maintain that information?
• How do you connect executive level hot button issues with industry accepted best practices, and then relate that back to the specific capabilities your organization can bring to bear for that customer?
• If you are creating this program, how do you validate what’s being said, and how do you make sure it’s different than what your competitors may offer?

For your sales teams to effectively execute go-to-market strategies which require elevated access, the information they use to engage with targeted executives must be: authentic, accurate, and actionable. Without that, you’re not really adding value and your sales teams are bound to become "C-rate" consultants.

 ssantucci@forrester.com

What Do Swedish Putty And Product Demos Have In Common?,

[Posted by Ellen Carney]

About 10 years ago, my husband and I moved into an old house located in a charming seaside town in Massachusetts. Not long after we moved in, we were watching a rerun of the PBS series, “This Old House”, and the show we happened to catch covered the exterior painting of an even more antique house than ours in an even more charming seacoast town, Salem, Massachusetts. This episode featured no ordinary paint job . . . nope, the focus of the show was all about how they were going to paint the front door.   

The host interviewed the painting contractor who revealed that he was using a product called “Swedish putty” to smooth the surfaces on the door and the reeded columns that flanked the grand entry to the house. He proceeded to have his crew demo the product and with a simple swipe up and down with the plastic applicator he cut, it was done. Later, the door was shown, now clad in Swedish putty and the very special paint, and it was something to see! I wanted to have my front door look just like it. I ran off to find out more about this miracle, Swedish putty.      After reading the web site, it became clear that I was going to need more than just one product to achieve the same result as on TOH, but rather a whole system that included Swedish putty, the special brushes needed for the special viscosity of the paint, their brand of special paint thinner, and the crowning touch, the paint (recall the timing: late dot.com). With one statement on the vendor website, ". . . it is possible to make a 200-year old door look like the fender on a Mercedes . . .", I was so in.  

I trekked to the 30 miles to the closest dealer, bought the “system”, carefully read the instructions, and opened the can of Swedish putty . . . only to see that it was NOTHING like how it was shown on the TOH episode. Instead of the smooth, pliable consistency I remembered, it was a pool of linseed oil topping a layer of stuff as dense as schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was a bear to apply, and the sanding left my front yard looking like a post-Chernobyl nuclear winter. Three weekends worth of work later, my front door didn’t quite look like the promised Mercedes fender, but at least the pizza delivery guy said it was the shiniest door in town.

So what happened?

I saw the demo on TOH, but missed that this wasn’t DIY homeowners like me but real professional painters (read: professional presenters) using it. I also saw the end product, but didn’t see all the dirty work — the sequence of steps, swearing, mistakes and mess that ensued to get to the end result. In a lot of ways, I succumbed to the marketing hook of something new, different, and better than what my neighbors had, that was “sold” by a trusted source, TOH.

What’s the point?

My Swedish putty story isn’t all that different from what happens when vendors market (and we fall in love with) new tech and approaches to old ways of doing business. We (and the vendor sales reps) believe the marketing and those professional presenters who guide the demo, and hope that our trust is well placed in the sales rep we’ve come to trust. But that trust comes from being upfront about what a piece of technology can, as well as can’t do, and what kind of resources are required for success. In a recent series of conversations with insurance IT executives, Forrester learned that insurance IT buyers put a lot of stock in the shared vision they build with tech vendor sales reps, and the value of that stock increases when those reps are willing to say that regardless of what the marketing says, what I have right now is not a good fit for your business. In the end, that tech might work out okay like my door project did, but it could well be the pain associated with getting there that the client ends up remembering.

Are Your Salespeople Stupid?

Come on, admit it. 

It’s what you think, isn’t it?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “our salespeople lack the skills or ability to (insert any of the following: cross-sell, sell higher, sell to value, get ahead of the RFP)” I would be a very rich person.

But are selling skills really the problem?

Most B2B companies today are moving to named account coverage models where a sales team has an assigned quota for revenue produced out of a given company or organization. Responsible for selling the entire product portfolio, the expectation here is that sales people will concentrate their efforts on a handful of targeted companies and grow them from $1M to $10M accounts. When it doesn’t happen, business leaders tell me the same thing, “we just don’t have the right people” or “our sales people just don’t get it."

What’s lost in this calculus is the sheer mountain of information that sales people must manage and communicate to customers in a valuable way.

To illustrate this point, consider this example.

Assuming your company has 10 products that all can be sold by your sales force, lets try to determine how much information a salesperson must process and manage on any given account they are pursing.

10 products or solution packages	(Doesn’t factor in multiple delivery options like license terms, software as a service, co-location, etc.)
5 value propositions for each product	(50 total messages to manage and communicate in the customer’s context)
5 different buyers involved in the decision	(250 total messages and their derivatives (50 value props X 5 different points of view from different stakeholders)
10 personal and business drivers to uncover for each stakeholder	(300 different messages to manage - 5 personal + 5 business goals X 5 stakeholders = 50 stakeholder goals + 250 total messages)
5 uncovering questions for each value proposition	(1300 different messages - 5 questions to prepare for each stakeholder and value proposition + 50 different stakeholder goals)
4 competitors with 1 knockoff for each	(1,500 different messages - 50 different value propositions X 4 competitors + 1,250 different messages and questions + 50 different unique goals)
5 collateral pieces and presentations for each product or solution set	(1,550 different elements of information - 1,500 different messages + 50 different combinations of prepared content)

In this scenario, a salesperson is asked to manage over 1,500 different forms of information for each account they are responsible for.

From one view point, selling an individual product or service could be viewed as easy, but when considering the entire breadth of the portfolio, the burden is overwhelming.

So, how much information can we expect sales people to successfully work with?

Cognitive psychologist, George Miller determined human beings are bound by the “magical number of seven” which means that people have a “channel capacity” of between 5 and 9 pieces of information or “chunks” of material they can hold in their heads and reliably communicate.

Only a handful of people have the ability to examine a complex system (like a technology sale) and abstract from that environment the optimum chucks of information and create their own model to consistently manage all of these variables to drive successful outcomes. Interestingly enough, most of the new business revenue your company generates (about 80%) will come from a small minority of your sales people (about 20%). A common attribute shared by these top performers, consciously or not, is they all have developed the ability to digest relevant information and communicate it in a way that is both clear and compelling to the customer.

It’s not that salespeople are stupid; it’s just that they are human.

Go-to-market models which place the burden of managing the multitudes of information and content on the backs of individual people are doomed to fail, regardless of the talent or skill of the sales force.

Managing complexity is not a sales person problem, but rather a company problem — one which requires an integrated effort of sales, marketing, and solutions experts to successfully solve.

The first step in any customer-centered approach is to research the steps your customers go through to solve problems (not buy things) and to identify their common decision-making patterns. By understanding the intricacies of your customer’s problem-solving behavior you can create a universal framework that can help more of your sales people successfully navigate the complexity of their customer's problem-solving process while decreasing their burden and improving their ability to communicate value.

A successful customer-centered framework should:
• codify the best practices to helping your customers solve common problems, in an authentic and genuinely helpful way.
• provide a simple and repeatable way for sales people to decode that knowledge in a way that accommodates a natural conversation and isn’t canned or routine.
• be flexibly designed to enable sales people to revise the materials and collaborate with customers in response to the contingencies that arise throughout the problem-solving process.

So before blaming the intelligence or skills of your sales force, first consider the scale of the task they face and ask if they are being sent into battle with the ability to add value throughout the entire lifecycle of your customer’s problem solving process.

What Science Do You Use For The Science Of Selling?

Most companies are acutely focused on their sales organizations, wanting to apply more structure, discipline, and measurement in order to maximize productivity, predictability, and transparency. A phrase often used to encapsulate this endeavor is “art to science.”

Having gone to a technical school (Virginia Tech), been swimmer in college (it’s all about objective measures — time), a father who worked for NASA (Apollo project) and has a masters in physics, a mother who develops teaching curriculums, chosen an industry dominated by engineering, and a profession (sales and marketing) about results — I’ve been surrounded by math and science my whole life.

Thus, I propose that “is sales an art or a science” is the wrong question.

The real question we should be asking is — "which science applies to sales?"

 

Think about it.

Here are few disciplines of science (let’s avoid the debate about which are really sciences for those of you who are true believers in your field) — you tell me which apply:

• Physics
• Macro economics
• Micro economics
• Complex systems (emerging field)
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Study of networks (emerging field, related to complex systems)
• Financial modeling (no, not those credit default guys — more what if analysis)
• Behavioral sciences
• Ecology
• Engineering (industrial and mechanical)
• Organizational research
• Industrial engineering

The point is that all apply somewhat, but not perfectly. Here are a few short examples (hey this is a blog entry — I know I've left out some examples and details — let’s stay focused on the bigger picture):

An individual sales person or sales team working on a given opportunity (micro view)

• Depending on the complexity of the offering — sales people will need to be able to build consensus across a departments, so some working knowledge of organizational behavior is helpful.
• Sales is emotional — so understanding personal risk factors and personal motivations is a big part of selling.
• Sales also involves micro-economics — how budgets work, how to make a case to get someone to part with money, etc are all very different than macro-level messages commonly supplied by marketing.
• Sales people are becoming accountants too — Not only do sales people have to make a business case to a group of individuals, but must also make a financial case as well (like internal rate of return, etc). In addition, having structure and discipline to manage and communicate their pipeline to management is, in practice, an accounting function because of how those reports are used as they roll up to finance and management.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s executive leadership. They are dealing with big numbers and large portfolios. To produce profitable growth targets across the enterprise — different sciences apply. (Macro view)

• Macro-level economics like: market share and trends provide the boundaries management uses to understand where aggregate revenue will come from.
• Systems theory applies because revenue, costs, and margins are the sum of many parts working together — not controlled as separate cogs.
• Sociology is important to understand the culture and the mood of customers so the corporate message resonates.
• Financial modeling is important to design the right compensation structures and performance metrics that should work to produce the desired metrics communicated to investors.

Regardless of the field of science, there is always a micro and macro yin and yang.

Micro view of a discipline (yin)	Macro view of a discipline (yang)
Macro economics (Federal Reserve Board)	Micro economics (your budget)
Sociology (behavior of groups)	Psychology (individual behavior)
Theory of relativity (big objects)	Quantum mechanics (very small objects)
Mass communications (to many)	Interpersonal communications (one on one)

So, what’s the point?

The science we need to develop for sales is dependent upon the altitude you are looking at it.

If “sales” means your aggregate performance of all of your sales people, then you need to take a more systems view. If “sales” means the performance of individuals, then we need to take a more “day-in-the-life” view.

There are two ways to look at this — tops down. . .

 

Use the macro-level sciences to focus on trends and mass communications activities to drive aggregate revenues. Coca-Cola comes to mind here. They don’t have a sales force out actively trying to persuade people they are thirsty, and then presenting an ROI to those individuals about the benefits of buying a Coke to quench their thirst.

and, bottoms up.

 

However, with B2B businesses, the world is different. Markets don’t really behave the same way they do in B2C — “markets” are collections of individual, significant purchases — which means, that the lens to look at optimizing sales for B2B needs to be bottoms up, rather than tops down.

When you look at the world from that perspective — you see things completely differently.

If you studied the individual demands on your sales force, how much time is spent dealing with internal minutia versus face time with clients, and how little information they have to communicate the micro-level value propositions with specific buyers, you’d quickly find many systemic problems to address that will result in huge performance yields.

Pick something simple to focus on — like “close rate”.

For starters, it’s very likely your company doesn’t have a standard definition to track this. For example does an opportunity in stage one that drops out count against your close rate calculation or not? Some would argue it should (like me), others would say we can’t really measure it so we only focus on proposal to contract conversation rates. The problem here obviously is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure and you mange to the things you measure. If you are only measuring things late in the sales cycle, you are missing out on all of the things in early stages of the sales process which play a much bigger role in winning a deal.

Once you investigate that issue thoroughly — examine how much of the activities required to improve the close rate are on the backs of sales people and how many resources you have that could help with those goals are not because those resources are misaligned. (We call this random acts of sales support.)

This is why our research agenda at Forrester is focused around the idea of “Engineering Valuable Sales Conversations” — it blends the objectives of senior management to produce a more productive sales platform, while focusing the efforts on the micro-level issue which is optimizing the interpersonal communications between your employees and their specific people that make up your customer base.

Metrics And Measures Really Do Matter

This morning over breakfast I was talking to my family about what happened yesterday while I was out of town at an off site client meeting. My wife was watching our four-year old son Mattox play Wii; in particular a mini golf game. Mattox played one hole over and over and over again — basically driving my wife crazy. When she asked Mattox to play a different game or even a hole — he had an interesting answer for her. It turns out the hole he was playing is the one that creates the most coins that he can use in the treasure chest to customize his player.

 

To bring this back to sales enablement — one of the key things I focus on is buyer alignment. In our ongoing quest to myth bust conventional wisdom about sales and marketing — we’re taking a “customer-first” view on all of the little details we use in our industry to drive our sales engines. One executive I spoke with told me that one of the things they will look at in a vendor is the compensation plan of the sales organization. His view was that at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the words are used — you get a much better feel for the true behavior of a given company based on their internal metrics.

Mattox is only four years old, but he figured out how to work a game to his benefit to get what he wants — the same is true with the metrics you set for your sales and marketing system. Here are a few common scenarios we see:

 

• Customer benefit realization pricing models — One company has moved off a price sheet and has developed a detailed questionnaire their sales teams work with prospective customers based on the problem they are looking to address, the current state environment, the desired end state, and a phased approach to benefit realization. This vendor ties its compensation to how they help their customers realize their business objectives. How effective is this approach? One of their projects was losing money so they shared with the customer the problem. Because all of their goals were aligned, the executives quickly showed the vendor what they could do to fix the problem and make more money. Think about that. Normally that relationship is the inverse (vendors margins are too high, buyer focuses procurement resources to reduce the spend).
• Abolition of commission structures — A microchip manufacturer, like a lot of other companies in our industry, has decided that its profitable growth strategy is tied to its ability to be intimate with its customers. They have taken this approach to new levels — abolishing all classical compensation structures; replacing sales incentives with a combination of team goals and customer success metrics. This company now has a 3% attrition rate, but more importantly margins have grown significantly as their customers are willing to pay a premium for the streamlined relationship.

The bottom line here is that the metrics you measure performance against drive the behavior — but this is often outside of the calculus of most sales enablement programs. To truly optimize your sales engine, you need to do some heavy lifting and deeply understand what is the end game. Are your optimizing a bunch of individual people, in disparate roles to generate a variety of deliverables or activities OR are creating a system that manufactures value for customers?

 

While there are many low-hanging-fruit sales enablement projects to tackle, at the end of the day the returns on investment are ultimately tied to the yield of the system; not by constantly monitoring the individual piece parts. Instead of focusing soley on measuring microscoping projects, deliverables, or activities - sales and marketing executives should agree on the specific measures for success for the whole system. Without that, there is no way to know if the individual goals set for: branding, demand generation, product marketing, sales engineers, sales management, or individual sales people align with each other or not.