Sales Leadership Blog
“Focus on your customers, and lead your employees like their lives depend on it.” — Warren Buffet, to Anne Mulcahy (former CEO of Xerox) on their first meeting
Read more about Anne Mulcahy and the leadership turnaround at Xerox in this great blog post by Salesforce.com Sales Vice President Michael Weening: “10 Leadership Lessons from Xerox.”
We talked with Seth Patton, Senior Director of Marketing at Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for an article published last week in our Sales Management Digest. Patton speaks frequently to sales leaders at industry events like the Sales 2.0 Conference. Here’s what he said about the need for today’s sales teams to be quick and mobile.
“It’s not good enough to say, ‘Hey, I’ll wait until I get back to the office to get or share the latest information,'” says Patton. “CRM applications on mobile devices are becoming indispensable selling tools. Five minutes before going into an appointment, reps need real-time information about what’s happening with prospects. I need to know what conversations are going on about those prospects. And I need additional market data and news feeds. Did the prospect recently go through an acquisition? Is there an existing service issue with this customer that you might not know about? You can get that kind of real-time information on your mobile device.”
READ MORE: Four Characteristics of Dynamic Sales Teams
A lot of sales leaders let old myths about hiring get in the way of finding superstar candidates.
The myths I’m talking about are based on the idea that certain characteristics or qualities can magically help you identify your next top performer among a pool of potential hires. For example, how many times have you heard people endorse job candidates by saying things like:
“He’s a hunter.”
“She’s a great networker.”
“He’s an ‘activity’ guy.”
“She’s a road warrior.”
“She used to be an athlete.”
“He’s a cold calling animal.”
These things are all well and good, but something about the language reminds me of the book Moneyball, in which baseball scouts would make decisions about players based on assessments like, “He passes the eye candy test. He’s got the looks, he’s great at playing the part.” Again, I’m not saying these things are negative. But can you really tell how good a player someone will be from the fact that he somehow looks the part?
As a sales leader, do you really want to make a hiring decision based on the fact that someone has been described as an “activity guy” or has a background in sports? It’s awesome if a candidate used to be an athlete (I used to be one, myself). He or she is probably very competitive and has thick skin. These are two traits that help a lot in sales – but those aren’t the only traits you need to be successful in a sales position, and they’re no guarantee that a former athlete will succeed in your particular selling environment.
Sales managers tend to get hung up on these myths because they have no real idea about what makes their top performers tick. As Moneyball showed, however, a methodology can help you assess new hires more accurately and change the game. In my organization, for example, we identified the Top Performer personality traits of our most successful reps as:
I put this to the test by giving the Top Performer personality survey to my entire organization. No surprise that our top reps matched the personality traits of the Top Performer. Now I have a real way to identify and measure top reps – and I can hire an army of them.
As a sales leader, you have to watch out for descriptions of potential hires that are just empty words. Hunter. Networker. What do these words really mean? Dig a little deeper so you can identify whether or not a candidate has the specific traits that track to success in your organization. When you use methodology instead of myth, you’ll be able to spot the true gems.
In 1933 my grandparents, Armand and Virginia Govin, founded MarkMaster as a rubber-stamp manufacturing company in Tampa, Florida. While stamps are still a big business for us (we make upwards of 10,000 to 12,000 stamps a day), we’ve since evolved into one of the largest custom-marking companies in the world with a basic product line of custom banners, signs, and name badges.
My brother Mark and I still value the same prospecting tools that our grandparents used – trade shows, networking, and referrals. At the same time, growing new business and achieving sales success in a shrinking industry is tough, particularly when marketing and IT resources are limited. Still, we’ve managed to pull off some significant growth, even during the economic downturn. Here are the three keys to our success.
In fact, Ariba Discovery recently helped our company land a deal with a large bank that had not considered us before due to our small size. We now service nine of the top 10 banks and eight of the top 10 insurance companies in the U.S. These are still important industry focuses for us, but we’re also seeing a turn toward retail, as our product mix has been moving toward signs and marketing items instead of strictly stamps.
Like any good company, we want to provide value to our current clients and find new ways to reach prospects. The traditional sales team is finding new ways to accomplish both of these goals. Sales teams today are more flexible, adaptive, and creative. They’re driven by collaboration and social business. Our business is no exception. By embracing new technology, our family business has managed to navigate around some pretty significant challenges, see significant growth, and achieve sales success, even during the economic downturn.
Now is a great time to invest in new technologies and new ideas. As a minority-owned company in the United States, it feels good that we’re able to offer products that are made right here. We’re not only investing in our company, we’re investing in the future of our families and the families of our employees – many of whom have been with us for decades. That means everything to us.
I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This is an excerpt from my interview with Mark Burton, former VP of sales at MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems), where he was responsible for growing and managing MySQL AB’s entire international corporate sales force, indirect channels and partnership alliances. He has been involved in enterprise-level sales leadership for 30 years.
Anneke: What were your “failures,” or things that didn’t go as well as they could have? What would you tell another executive about what not to do, or what to learn from your past experiences?
Mark: Failures: We’ve had lots of them. Processes and systems are so important. It took us a long time to work with a team to figure out everything we really needed to manage this environment. Marketing tends to be more positioning- and messaging-oriented, and more about just putting it out there. That whole idea of what a qualified lead is, and having something that ends up in the hands of sales that they want to deal with — it’s a big chasm between those two functions.
Get a very objective and measurable set of definitions, processes and systems to do some system-oriented scoring, and then have a very clear and written description for what becomes a sales lead. Get the marketing organization on board with forecasting and measurement of conversion rates, and make sure this is an activity that is worked monthly to continually pursue conversion rates that drive the company to profitability. This is a big change for most marketing and sales organizations. I wouldn’t call it a failure, but I will say it takes a long time to make sure everyone understands this end-to-end process, and what is involved in managing and measuring it. That was hard work with a lot of iterations and false starts.
Anneke: I see that changing rapidly, though, in many Sales 2.0 companies, where success depends on marketing and sales being aligned and collaborating. Do you see that working? How are companies bringing sales and marketing closer together?
Mark: It’s still a challenge for many companies. One of the first thoughts is, “Great, we’ll just give sales and marketing to the same person.” It’s unusual to have any one person who really understands sales and marketing well enough to add value across both functions through the Demand-to-Close process. There also aren’t many CEOs who really understand it. I would say this is still developing. My suggestion is to get advice from others who have successfully implemented the new model. This can be accomplished through a combination of outside consulting and benchmarking with companies that have successfully implemented such models.
Read the full interview with Mark Burton.
It’s Monday morning and your newest salesperson is starting in an hour. What are you going to do? Show her the coffee machine and new desk and go about your business? Turn her away and ask her to come back another day?
Sometimes, it seems like it’s easier to keep doing more with less, even knowing your life would be simpler if you hire a new person, just because you don’t want the hassle of onboarding and training.
However, onboarding is a lot simpler if you think back to your own experience. Can you recall a job where the training experience was positive? What was that like? How can you repeat it for others?
Often, training a new sales hire can be a daunting task if you’re in a smaller business or department without established processes.
It’s best if you’ve just got a simple, prebuilt, uniform new hire orientation system. In order to build one, all you have to do is compile the basics. That’ll go a long way.
Orientation in sales is tough. Your team is probably made up with some fairly independent people. They’re in sales, at least partially, because they the like working on their own.
Build a new-hire orientation kit before your new-hire’s first day. It should include those basics and a whole lot more. Why did you hire this person? Share that; it’s probably a good indication of the ingredients for success. At the same time, what concerns did you have? Those are some areas for coaching.
As an aside, we offer an assessment instrument that generates an onboarding package based on the specific abilities of your new-hire AND the requirements of your position. Click here for more information.
As a sales manager and leader, are you measuring the right metrics for sales success?
At Vantage Point Performance, we recently wrote a book based on a groundbreaking research study we conducted about the metrics that leading sales forces are using to measure and manage their sellers. Interestingly, we discovered that thousands of sales metrics fall into one of three categories:
A key insight from the research is that only sales activities can truly be managed. Numbers related to sales objectives and business results are important to everyone, but these numbers cannot be directly controlled by sales management.
In fact, sales objectives and business results are trailing indicators of a sales force’s performance – they only show what you’ve accomplished in the past. Measuring sales activities, on the other hand, (which provide insights into current behaviors) are leading indicators that foretell whether those objectives and results will be attained in the future.
Amazingly, only 17% of the metrics in our study were focused on sales activities. Or, stated differently: more than 80% of the things sales forces are measuring are things that they cannot actually control.
You can’t control revenue – you can only control the things that your sellers are doing day-to-day. For example,
Clearly, many sales managers are only looking at metrics that tell them how successful they’ve been in the past. But as our research shows, a far more effective approach is to start measuring and managing sales activities instead. These are the critical inputs to success.
It’s important to remember that CRM is just a tool, and it only does what we tell it to do. Information goes in, and information comes out. Which information we request and what we do with that data is up to us as sales managers. Once we start using CRM to measure the right metrics, we’ll begin to predictably influence the future and manage sales teams that fulfill their highest potential.
To discover the best practices and frameworks you can use to influence the future, register to download a free chapter from Cracking the Sales Management Code, including a forward by Neil Rackham, best-selling author of SPIN Selling.
There are four very basic sales management questions that a great front line or senior sales leader should be able to answer “yes” to:
1) Do your people trust you?
2) Do they have clarity on overall strategy?
3) Do you make yourself available to them?
4) Do you exist to unleash their potential?
These questions might be basic, but the execution is always complicated. In a world where the speed of sales increases year-over-year, it’s easy to forget that when you peel back all the technology & innovation that have helped increase rep productivity, sales is basically about making connections. Connections with partners, with customers, and—most important—with your team.
Connections create credibility, and credibility drives sales success. But how do you become credible as a sales leader? Start with these evaluation questions:
Is it important for a sales leader to have first worked in sales?
Would you get in a plane with a pilot who has never flown? Of course not. Sales is the same. It’s essential that sales leaders and sales managers have a background in sales. Steven Covey says trust is built through competence and character, and both are only achievable after you’ve walked the walk. That’s why I only hire high-potential, top-performing sales leaders as part of our leadership development academy. With a sales force of 6,500 associates at ADP, it’s critical that we train the best with the best.
Do all great salespeople make great leaders?
No way! The question to ask yourself is, “Do you get more excited by closing the big deal, or seeing someone you coached close the big deal?” The traits that put the best salespeople on top are the same traits that make them terrible sales managers. They tend to overachieve because they’re selfish with their time and accountable to themselves. On the other hand, the great sales leader can channel that overachieving spirit and create one collective unit focused on team results. Being able to identify salespeople who have leadership potential is an art and a science. Fortunately, there are a number of selection tools that can help you identify sales leadership traits.
What should you consider as you move into a leadership position?
Your time is not yours. You exist to drive the performance of others. The great sales leaders who build trust, set a vision, and inspire their teams are the first to arrive at the office in the morning and last to leave at the end of the day. They have a servant’s heart and the clock never turns off.
What do you think it takes to succeed during a transition from a sales role to a leadership role?
I refer to this as “relationship reengineering.” Others need to see you in a new light. Focus on redefining sales success, setting time-bound, realistic goals, seeking feedback, gathering insight, and building a new sense of trust. Most important, new sales leaders that try to lead with the idea that “This is how I did it” generally fail. Be humble, observe others’ strengths, and lead each salesperson with an individual style.
As the world memorializes Apple founder Steve Jobs this evening, we’re meditating on how the innovations of one man have pushed so many sales leaders to go above and beyond their highest aspirations for their companies and their teams.
Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner has often noted that Steve Jobs has always been “at the center of the innovation process.” When the iPad was first released, Gschwandtner bought one immediately, and declared that the device was destined to fundamentally change how salespeople work, sell, and play. He outlined three ways the iPad represented visonary innovation:
Laptops are not designed for sharing. The iPad will pull people from isolation to a place of co-creation.
Laptop screens are not dynamic. The iPad screen automatically orients itself in relation to your movements. The image on the screen flips from horizontal to vertical and from top to bottom automatically.
Laptops emerged at a time when the world was still linear. The iPad allows people to leave that static world so they can connect with the dynamic flow of human intelligence online and offline.
In a conversation economy, driven by Sales 2.0 technology and process, social networks and real-time exchanges, the iPad has come to represent a new age for sales teams trying to start meaningful and engaging conversations with prospects and customers. Gschwandtner describes a meeting he had with a CEO:
I brought my iPad; he had his laptop. During our conversation, we discussed how many different tasks salespeople need to perform to drive customer value. The conversation brought to mind an interesting chart I received in an email the same morning. I pressed the start button on my iPad, and it came to life instantly (there is no staring at a blank screen for two minutes). Within seconds, I pulled up the email, clicked on the message, and handed the iPad to [the CEO], who studied it and asked for the URL so he could share it with his team. I simply forwarded the email and the conversation resumed.
The iPad added instant value to the conversation, and it blended in naturally, which added a touch of elegance to the discussion (and of course a little iPad envy). In this case, the iPad delivered content in real time. In effect, this experience would not have been possible with the use of a laptop. After all, who would want to wait two minutes to make a point?
To invent and produce this kind of technological product — one that courts customers with an unparalleled combination of elegance and function — Jobs had to maintain a ruthless focus on the end goal. During a presentation in 1997 (as outlined by Jon Steel in the introduction to his book Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business) Steve Jobs described innovation as an exercise in discipline. He drew more than a dozen boxes on a dry erase board and labeled them with names of Apple products still in their project stages: Cyberdog, OpenDoc, G4, iMac, etc. Jobs told the assembled group that Apple had invested millions of dollars in pursuit of each product. Then he began crossing them out.
“In the past days, I’ve killed this one, this one, this one…” Jobs said, until all that were left were G4 and iMac. “These two projects that remain represent what we always wanted this company to be about; they’re technologically superb and visually stunning. And I’m going to bet the future of this company on them.”
At the heart of innovation is change. Jobs’ legacy is a reminder for sales leaders that technology is a powerful driver of change. But the nature of change itself — the necessity of letting go of one thing to make room for something new — is also a reminder to seize the day. As Steve Jobs said in a 2005 Commencement address at Stanford:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I first got into marketing over a decade ago, the landscape was much different than it is today. Marketing and sales typically worked independently from one another; marketing managed things like trade shows and print collateral (with limited visibility into their impact on overall ROI) and sales managed the leads that marketing acquired.
This made marketing an overhead expense, and it was an easy target for cuts when budgets got tight. It was hard to show conclusive evidence that marketing made a measurable impact on the overall success of the sales organization beyond getting more leads. We knew it was true, but the data was elusive.
Fast forward to today, and things look somewhat different (but still far from perfect). As a marketer, I now have tools and applications that can more easily generate data and therefore quantify results of our marketing activities. I can follow the activity of a lead through the entire lifecycle, including if and when a lead turned into a serious prospect. And I can see the touch points that marketing created or influenced along the path from initial inquiry to a closed deal. Suddenly, there is real correlation between the campaigns we run and the ROI for my colleagues on the sales side.
With that in mind, I thought I would share a few insights I’ve learned along the way:
Make Marketing Your BFF: Sales and marketing teams actually have a symbiotic relationship. That means that despite the fact that we are different types, we each depend on each other and benefit from the relationship. Your marketing team should provide essential insights that help sales generate and identify the best leads, the best ways to interact with those leads, and provide the resources, messages and delivery methods to support those interactions. And sales should provide feedback from the front line to create a knowledge-sharing loop with marketing. Marketing and sales should have their goals aligned, work cooperatively toward those goals and, ideally, should be BFFs (Best Friends Forever).
Set Specific Marketing Goals: My income is tied directly to the number of qualified leads I can drive through marketing initiatives, among other measurable goals. Don’t be afraid to assign metrics to your marketing team and engage them in the process. And reward them for meeting those metrics. Nothing says motivation like dollars in your pocket! Sales reps have known this all along. Now it’s marketing’s turn to benefit from hitting their targets.
Use the Right Tools: While many of the marketing-specific tools on the market are relatively new, they have evolved quickly and can be quite powerful. Example 1: Marketing automation tools help marketers track and understand data behind campaigns, while also observing the behaviors and patterns of your prospects. We use Marketo and there are other great systems to choose from depending on your needs. Example 2: As part of our BigMachines software, we offer the BigMachines Document Engine, where our customers can store the most up-to-date templates for proposals, contracts and quotes, making it simple for sales team to generate branded, marketing-approved sales documents. This allows you to maintain corporate standards throughout the sales process, and when you present a consistent brand that reflects well on your company, you have a competitive advantage and can sometimes even command a higher price.
I’d love to hear what other marketers and sales executives are seeing. Are you noticing more alignment between the marketing and sales groups at your company? Have you implemented strategies within your organization that help sales and marketing work better together? Leave a comment below or reach out to us on Twitter @bigmachines.
