The Sales Café

There is no doubt that at this stage of the economic cycle, smart investments in sales effectiveness can pay excellent dividends. Let's start with the premise that your board of directors has given the green light to discrete, strategic spending for 2010. The CEO has come to you or your boss and asked for a business plan on growing sales so that he or she can determine the payback if some of that strategic budget is sent your way.

What is your plan?

Before the recession started, you may have spent dearly on sales training, CRM and other productivity tools, but the combination of economic panic and resulting market pressures have conspired against your making real headway. Meanwhile, you believe that your products and services can deliver excellent value for your customers - right now, in this economy. So how do you set up an environment where your salespeople can get a big bump in sales before your competitors get the jump on you?

First, answer these three questions:

1. How much new revenue did the last sales training class deliver?
2. How much new revenue has your CRM delivered in the last 18 months?
3. How much new revenue did "non-selling" departments in your organization deliver in the last year?

If the answers to any of these three questions, or others you may have thought of, are underwhelming, perhaps the problem isn't a specific training, technology or process issue, but how these things integrate and work together. Study after study bears out that the best training in the world is worthless if your organization can't support it with reinforcement, process change, and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange. A great CRM system doesn't help close deals if people can't figure out how to access all the great stuff it contains. At the end of the day, were dashboards and forecasts what you were really after? And, if all of your "non-selling" departments aren't actively participating in creating value for new (and current) customers, it's unlikely your salespeople can carry your company to success on their shoulders alone. These are just three elements out of a multitude that affect sales organizations.

What should you do to to get the most out of discrete investments? Here are three tips:

1. Leverage. Unless you're very lucky, you don't have a blank check. Instead of searching for yet another magic bullet, think about how can you integrate your people, work processes and technology through a knowlege management system so the end result is an environment that makes it easier for salespeople to sell. After all, it's the ability to close deals, not create forecast data that matters most right now.
2. Plan. Keep your scorecard balanced. Your customers, people, finances and processes all matter. Limit your objectives to the critical few and within a time scope that is relevant to this economy - very few people know where we're actually headed yet. Make sure that your accompanying strategies and action plans address only these critical few objectives.
3. Communicate. A beautifully articulated plan does nothing if it sits in a file on your desktop. Engage and enroll your team in the process, let them know where you're headed, and let them help you create the ROI your CEO has asked for.

Guest blogger Dave Batt, CEO and Founder of StreetSmarts, Inc., discusses the challenges in sales effectiveness in a Sales 2.0 environment.

I reviewed some interesting findings from the Corporate Visions Inc. Quarterly Sales Messaging Report Q3 FY09 (www.corporatevisions.com) which surveys thousands of business to business marketing and sales professionals. The survey highlights the continued challenges around sales effectiveness, in that 74% of salespeople publicly admit to rewriting messages and tools created by marketing. There still seems to be a divide amongst many sales and marketing teams and the fact that selling time is being absorbed by sales people recreating marketing assets is not only inefficient but potentially dilutes or even damages a brand. It means sales professionals don’t feel confident in the messages they are being asked to deliver or don’t feel they are credible or compelling enough within the rapidly evolving competitive landscape.

Another key area of concern highlighted in the survey findings is that a staggering 87% of salespeople are looking for more coaching from their managers. The key area where sales teams felt there were gaps was how best to differentiate the company and communicate what makes the company’s solution different. Clearly classroom training alone is not the answer as things change quickly and most people will not contest that what is learned in the formal training environment is not used indefinitely or quite quickly forgotten. And one on one coaching is not really a scalable answer either. How can sales managers hold the hands of each and every sales person though each and every stage of the sales cycle?

The key to better enable sales teams and drive higher overall sales effectiveness is a more holistic approach to the whole sales and marketing function. What is needed is self help in an ongoing manner for sales and empowerment of the sales force to continue to learn and develop at their own pace. Marketing and sales are so often considered as separate functions in many organizations but customers assume they are dealing with a company and not a set of departments. What is needed is better collaboration to close the sales and marketing divide, where marketing assets are ranked and rated by the sales recipients so marketing have the insight from the field to make corrective action and build stronger business alignment. Though the use of enabling technologies this is now entirely possible and also means that consistent market messages are achieved, rather than recreating assets and creating several versions of the truth.

About StreetSmarts

StreetSmarts^® 5.6 is based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that unites company-wide knowledge and enterprise social networking components to deliver business value for enterprise wide knowledge based and line of business initiatives such as sales effectiveness channel enablement, training reinforcement and transforming intellectual capital into actionable knowledge through information management.

Because of its adaptive, lightweight nature and built in usability features, StreetSmarts^® is able to provide a working solution specific to each client’s business requirements in a matter of days, rather than months of complex software deployments.   In addition, this also allows clients to quickly react to changing new business practices and external market conditions without the need for massive customization or programming. For more information on StreetSmarts^®, visit www.streetsmarts.com.

At some point in their evolution, all sales organizations go through a thorough analysis of their sales process, with the goal of maximizing the efficiency of pulling customers through their new and finely tuned sales cycle. The prevailing notion is that if we just understood our selling process better – what the steps are, who performs them, the timing of each step, etc. – then we could optimize our selling process, thereby improving our closure rates and overall quota achievement.  Viewing the world in this way – what is best for us – is what I call an Inside-Out approach.

Instead, we should recognize that the only reason that our selling process even exists is because our customers have a buying process that they are trying to get through as efficiently as possible.  Once we make this realization, things can really start to fall into place.  Rather than trying to find all the ways to more efficiently pull our customers through our selling process (Inside-Out), we should focus on how well our selling process aligns to our target customer’s buying process, which is what I call Outside-In.

Let’s take an example of a potential sale near the close of our fiscal quarter (end of January) for $150k worth of forming equipment for a small lamp shade assembly plant.  In the normal Inside-Out (sales cycle) approach, our sales team would naturally be fixated on convincing the prospect how our forming machine is superior to anything on the market, and at a price that beats the competition.  We would focus on moving the customer through the stages of our sales process, including: 1) confirming that they need a new forming machine, 2) verifying that our machine meets all their requirements,  3) checking that the price of our solution fits within their budget, and 4) that we can deliver our solution in a timely manner.  Sounds like we have this deal in the bag, right? 

Wrong. 

If we had been focused Outside-In rather than Inside-Out, we would have put ourselves in the shoes of our customer.  Doing so would have indeed verified all the steps above, but would have also uncovered the fact that any purchase for over $100k requires Board approval, and that the Board only meets four times per year, just after the close of each calendar quarter.  Since that meant the Board held their recent meeting about a week ago, we now have no chance of closing this deal until next quarter!  Bummer . . .

This is Part 1 of a continuing series on Outside-In thinking.  Please let me know what you think – post your own “ah-ha” moments in the comment field – and stay tuned for more to come.