Category: Sales Leadership

By Jim Cathcart

In a speech years ago to the executive team of Wal-Mart at their Bentonville, AR, headquarters – after meeting Sam Walton himself in the hallway – I explored the concept of where power comes from in an organization.

The traditional view has always been that power “comes from the top” and flows downward through the organization. We use organization charts with boxes to indicate the players, with lines to show reporting roles between them.

The boss or owner is always at the top and the hourly workers are at the bottom in a wide row. It’s a pyramid. The problem with this structure is that it isn’t true to life. That is not how good organizations get results.

In truth the only power that really matters is the power of customers. As a company, we are working to find what the customer will value – and design and deliver it in a way they’ll be eager to pay for. We want the customer’s allegiance and enthusiastic loyalty. They give that both through money (revenue) and through support (testimonials, referrals, and feedback).

When I received my orientation to Wal-Mart prior to my speech, I discovered that they operate quite differently from most organizations. No wonder they are one of the world’s most successful! They refer to their coworkers as “associates” instead of employees, superiors, subordinates, or bosses. The store managers don’t have traditional offices because they are expected to spend most of their time walking around and actively engaging with others. They see their stores as outlets designed for the convenience of their customers and they negotiate the lowest possible prices from their suppliers. They were the originators of “greeters” at the front door and many other friend-building innovations in retailing.

Pyramid-shaped org charts don’t describe Wal-Mart. And, in actuality, neither does that structure describe any customer-facing organization. The owner or CEO, in truth, is at the bottom of a pyramid – with all of the weight of the organization on his or her shoulders. The people who touch the customers most are at the top, like the ice cream in a cone. But there’s another element that doesn’t show in this symbol: the resource network – the suppliers and industry colleagues.

A much better symbol, as I told the execs that day, is a tree. Trees have two systems: one seen and one hidden from view. The seen system is made up of the trunk, branches, and leaves reaching toward the sky (opportunity). The unseen system is made up of the root system and taproot reaching down for the resources and nutrients in the soil.

The branches represent the growth system of your organization: sales, marketing, customer service, product development, etc. The roots represent your strength system: suppliers, distributors, research, finance, engineering, quality control, etc.

If the strength system is weak, you might outgrow your ability to deliver or sustain growth; and, if the growth system is weak, you could die from lack of sales. Seeing ourselves in this way within the company gives us a much better sense of our responsibility to each other and to our marketplace. The purpose of selling is to make life better for people at a profit so it also makes life better for us.

Years later I encountered then-president of Wal-Mart, David Glass, at a banking conference where we were both speaking. He told me, “We are still using many of your ideas from that day.” Cool.

Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE is the original author of Relationship Selling and one of the world’s leading professional speakers. Jim is a regular contributor to Selling Power and a certified Peak Performance Mindset Trainer. Contact Jim at Cathcart.com.

By Kevin F. Davis

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the difference between sales managers who fail their teams, those who do a competent job, and those who excel.

One of the factors that has the biggest impact on a manager’s success is how effective he or she is as a coach. Research has shown that effective coaching is part quantity and part quality. Doing more coaching means controlling your time and priorities – a topic I won’t go into for the purposes of this article. Better coaching is a matter of focusing on actions you can take that will do the most to help your reps improve in the long run, not just win one deal. Here are three tips to get you started down that path.

Tip #1: Don’t try to coach based on a scorecard. I’m an avid golfer and, like everyone, keep track of each game on a scorecard. Suppose you were a golf pro and I handed you the scorecard from my most recent round and asked you how I could get better. You couldn’t really help me because the scorecard tells you only the aftermath of what I did when I was golfing  – it doesn’t tell you where I made good and bad swings or what decisions I made. Any feedback you gave me would be based only on the results I got, and it couldn’t be specific enough to be helpful. All you could say is something like “try harder” or “don’t make a bogey on hole 5.”

If you really wanted to help me improve, you’d have to observe my game and come up with strategies to help me learn what I was doing wrong and what I could do better.

Reviewing your reps’ sales results once a month or every quarter works the same way. You can’t help your reps improve if all you do is examine their results  – their “scorecard” – after the fact. You have to start looking closely at what they’re doing upstream. Talk to your reps during the early stages of working a sales opportunity, and observe their call preparation and interactions with customers. When you ask questions that challenge them on what they know and don’t know about their customers’ needs, you provide more specific and helpful coaching that they’ll be very motivated to implement.

Tip #2: Focus more on identifying deficiencies of skill and will. Back in 2014 and 2015, the Sales Management Association did some research on how often sales managers discussed 13 specific topics when coaching their salespeople. The kicker is that they also studied the connection between how often each topic was discussed and revenue growth in the organization.

By a big margin, the topic that had the biggest positive influence on revenue growth was “identifying skill deficiencies.” Now, can you guess how often that topic was discussed in coaching conversations? It ranked 12th out of the 13 topics. That means talking with reps about their skill deficiencies happened far less often than discussions about things like “advancing a sales opportunity” and “crafting proposals” – and even the 11th-ranked item, “instruction on administrative processes.”

In my mind, if you are not having regular conversations with your reps around their skill deficiencies, then you’re not really coaching. At least you’re not providing the kind of coaching that will have the biggest impact on your team’s results and your company’s revenue. To help your reps be more successful, you have to make the time to identify each rep’s skill and will shortfalls. And you have to coach them on how to improve in those specific areas.

Tip #3: Take your sales coaching to your reps. There’s a well-known principle in the field of psychology called “the self-serving bias.” It’s the tendency for a person to take credit for their successes but blame external factors for failures. You see it when, for example, sales reps who have a great month attribute their success to their strong work ethic and top-notch skills. But, when that same rep has a bad month, they blame external factors such as lousy leads from marketing. Sound familiar? I fell into that trap at one point of my sales career, and think most salespeople do the same.

Here’s the thing: people with a self-serving bias think they’re doing better than they really are. They are blind to their own mistakes. So they will NOT come to you to ask for coaching. And that means they’re losing deals they should win – and they may not know why.

The best way to combat self-serving bias is to be a strategic sales coach! Take coaching to your salespeople. Don’t sit back and wait for them to ask you for coaching.

A sales manager may well be the most talented sales professional on the team, but what matters now is whether they can transfer that greatness into the hearts and minds of your team members. Great sales coaches focus their attention on the input side of the sales performance equation – the behaviors and activities – not just the results. Great sales coaches make “identifying skill deficiencies” in a sales rep a key objective during every coaching conversation. And great sales coaches are proactive – they don’t sit back and wait to be asked for coaching. They take coaching to their people. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be on your way to building a championship team.

Kevin F. Davis is the founder and president of TopLine Leadership, which has provided sales and sales management training to leading corporations around the globe. One client put more than 3,000 sales managers through Kevin’s two-day workshop. He’s the author of three books, including The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness (March 2017).

By Adrian Davis

Are you facing increasing sales targets and increasing challenges in achieving these targets? Well, it’s going to get even harder because of some fundamental shifts in our economy.

I’m currently working in the robotics industry. Exposure to this has sensitized me to the growing prevalence of automation. Many professionals feel that automation is not something we have to worry about. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Automation: Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

Sales is polarizing into two approaches. The first path is transactional. Salespeople who engage in transactional selling are order takers. Order takers deal with problems that are well defined. Furthermore, the solutions purchased are well understood.

The only questions in buyers’ minds are: how much and how soon? The sales rep who is cheapest and fastest wins the business. More and more, that sales rep is showing up as not a person, but a slick e-commerce Website. E-commerce sites work 24/7. They respond to buyers with unprecedented speed. They guarantee the lowest price. The traditional sales rep is becoming obsolete.

Is Consultative Selling the Answer? (No.)

This is driving sales leaders to get their teams to focus on “consultative selling.” In a previous blog post, I explained that the consultative sales approach is obsolete. Sales reps who show up asking too many questions end up annoying buyers instead of pleasing them. Buyers complain about reps who take their time before they provide anything of value.

Sales leaders realize they have to up the ante. They have to teach their salespeople how to create value for the buyer up front. The buyer must immediately recognize the benefit of developing a relationship with them.

Debating with the Younger Generation

But wait! Isn’t challenging buyers safe from the encroaching threat of sweeping and inevitable automation? That’s what I thought…but an article I tripped over jolted me awake.

Years ago, my son Ryan – who is very articulate – said he wanted to pursue a career as a software developer. Being a seasoned and passionate sales guy, I tried to discourage him. I explained that companies are automating back-office jobs. Companies will outsource those that aren’t automated to China and India. I asked him to leverage his incredible communication skills. I asked him to focus on being in front of the customer because that’s where he could create real value.

This conversation took place about five years ago – which, as we all know, was a long, long time ago! So much has changed since then. Ryan recently shared a YouTube video with me called “Humans Need Not Apply.” This video captures the implications of the work my son is now doing. I watched the video. I thought, “Yes, but companies will not automate professional work. Professional work requires human judgment!”

I woke up when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review. It was “Technology Will Replace Many Doctors, Lawyers and Other Professionals.” The gist of this article is artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives are now unstoppable. AI machines are outperforming human beings in many cognitive tasks. Professionals use approaches that seem immune to automation. Unfortunately, AI enables new approaches. Moreover, AI learns from itself and teaches itself how to be even more efficient.

In the next 5-10 years, professionals all over the world will get the shock of their lives. Automation and AI will replace routine and mechanical tasks. It will also replace “sacred” and insulated professional roles. This relentless drive toward automation will challenge us. It will, most likely, unravel our entire capitalism-based economy. In the future, the majority of human beings will be unemployable. Automation and AI will do meaningful work instead of humans. Humans may only find meaningful work in activities of social unrest. Economies may no longer find it possible to be based on the upward mobility of the middle class. Unemployable people may demand socialistic or communistic approaches to the distribution of wealth.

In the meantime, today’s sales leaders must execute the following imperatives:

1. Stop messing around with your CRM. Embrace it. Master it. Enhance it and use it to understand your most important customers.
2. Acknowledge that “Thing-to-Thing” selling will completely replace order-taking salespeople as the Internet of Things matures and sellers’ devices transact and negotiate with buyers’ devices.
3. Invest in mastering Human-to-Human Selling. Invest in your best salespeople. Develop them to become even greater strategic, critical, and creative thinkers. Encourage them to up the ante. Find new, unprecedented ways of creating value. Be committed to work with your customers who must also cope with the seismic shifts in our economy.

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and Dupont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).

By Mike Kunkle

I’ve written recently about why we should focus more on sales manager enablement in 2017 and shared a story about what often gets in the way. It’s important to clear those obstacles since sales managers play critical roles in driving sales productivity.

As a next step, in this post, I’ll share how you can work with frontline sales managers to significantly improve sales results by helping them apply a little logic along with simple field training and coaching methods.

The Back Story: What Impact Will Coaching Training Have?

I once approached a potential client cold and created an opportunity to train sales managers on how to be better coaches. I was able to get everyone on board and aligned except, oddly, the senior sales leader, who was skeptical that it would be worth the time investment for his managers. This leader had come up through the ranks, hadn’t been coached a lot himself, and wasn’t convinced of the impact the coaching training would have. And, while the CEO was a believer, he wouldn’t overrule the sales leader and do a full implementation without the leader’s support.

So, as a test run, I sold a pilot with one of five divisions. I interviewed all the sales managers and selected the one I thought would truly try to use the training and give it a fair shot.

What We Did: Facilitating Real Change with Sales Reps

For the pilot, I trained the manager – on using reports and discovery with each rep to create a performance gap hypothesis and on applying observation to validate the hypothesis and diagnose issues.

Then, I taught the manager Ferdinand Fournies’ acclaimed 16 reasons why employees don’t do what they’re supposed to do – so he could overcome employee inertia and select and approach an appropriate solution (involving training, coaching, counseling, or changing something). The analytics, hypothesis, diagnosis, and reasons are the logic behind this powerful approach.  

In addition, so he could engage with reps in ways that would lead to real change, I taught the manager a simple and effective field training model (Tell/Show/Do/Review), which incorporates role play and reinforcement, and a coaching model (Diagnose/Plan/Do/Review).

Practice what you preach, right? When teaching and coaching the manager, I used the same methods I expected him to use. Then, to help him transfer and apply the skills, I guided him on using those methods with his reps. I also helped him implement a management operating rhythm in his division – with regular team and individual pipeline coaching meetings as well as targeted ride-alongs with coaching.

Results You Will Want

In four months (at the end of the next quarter), the manager’s division performance had improved by 36 percent over the previous quarter – and he led the country. His team also had improved profitability by 11 percent; plus, had a greatly improved win rate, with fewer and higher-quality opportunities to focus on since he had culled garbage from the pipeline.

When the sales leader and CEO saw these results, they did a company-wide implementation and went on to surpass their annual quota by 16 percent – achieving their best company performance in four years.

Models & Takeaways

Confession: None of what I or my pilot sales manager did was incredibly difficult. However, it did require some practice, commitment, and the flexibility to work differently for a while. The results were worth it and the implementation of new processes and efforts – led by the frontline sales managers – transformed the sales organization from the inside out.

As sales leaders, you, too, can get dramatic results by enabling managers to

• Use sales analytics wisely: Train managers how to use reporting to identify where sales reps may need help and to form a hypothesis about what behavior gaps exist and are causing performance lapses. We assume managers make these connections, but we rarely train them to do so or enable them to validate their observations. With a better foundation, managers can focus their coaching on real issues that improve productivity rather than conducting haphazard sessions or allowing reps (or themselves!) to settle into a “comfort zone.”
• Dig deeper with dialogue and observation: Interestingly, many managers – formerly top sales reps – previously did deep discovery with prospects to understand their pain points and needs. But now, as managers, they don’t default to using the same discovery skills when coaching their reps (moving into “tell” mode instead). So train managers to conduct discovery sessions with reps and observe live calls to validate or modify a performance hypothesis and decide how to best address it. This is a quick hit that can dramatically improve coaching quality in your company.
• Field train for skills, when appropriate: When individual field training is required for skills (e.g., reps don’t know what to do, why to do it, or how to do it), train managers so they can train reps effectively.
• Coach reps to mastery: Teach managers to help reps apply their training through the use of an effective coaching model. I recommend the models discussed here to guide reps over time to achieve mastery.
• Get into a cadence: Get your frontline sales managers into an organization-wide, agreed-upon management operating rhythm with performance management methods, such as pipeline meetings, forecast calls, team meetings, one-on-one meetings, and coaching ride-alongs.

Once again, when applied and executed consistently through frontline sales managers, a little logic backed by simple field training and coaching methods can radically improve your company’s sales results.

Mike Kunkle is a renowned sales transformation strategist, practitioner, speaker, and writer. He’s spent 22 years as a corporate leader or consultant, helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class learning strategies and his proven-effective sales transformation methodology. Today, Mike is freelancing as a writer, speaker, webinar leader, and sales transformation consultant, while exploring the market for his next career adventure. You can connect with Mike on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter at @Mike_Kunkle.

By Sundance Brennan

In a crazy world of quotas, deadlines, pipelines, and paperwork it’s easy for a sales leader to get distracted by the urgent fires that constantly come up. It’s easy to look busily at a computer screen for 8-12 hours a day. Those emails never, ever, ever stop.

I have had those days that go by in a flash and I have no idea what my teams actually did. What was their focus? What interactions did they have? What help did they need? Maybe you have had six hours of meetings, interviews, and issues to tackle and know what I mean. Who was watching your team then?

A quick and easy way to keep the team motivated and focused while you are away is to set them on auto-pilot with a crazy incentive.

These five crazy incentives can be used in pinch and can be rolled out with very little preparation. I’ve been accused of being “gimmicky” over the years and leaning on these techniques too much, but the only people who ever said that were other managers or salespeople from other teams. My team was too busy giving high fives, learning to work together, and heading out to dinner after hitting goals. These fun activities will build a fence around your team and encourage the team dynamics that lead to long-term success.

1. Desk Swap – Many sales agents work in a sea of cubicles. Offer to allow top performers to swap seats or designate an open office for the top performer. Better yet, stack rank the team and let the top guys choose first. Your bottom performers will end up sitting near the bathroom. This is easy to start, fun to execute, and it’s really obvious where your weak links are.

2. Cigar Czar – Offer a top performer your cigar of the month. Go to www.cigarmonthclub.com and buy yourself an annual subscription. If you are near a cigar bar, you can offer to take a few winners to the actual cigar bar with a boss. I don’t smoke cigars myself – and my teams often include non-smokers – but the prestige of winning is worth it.

3. Maid to Order – Offer a local maid service for a month as a prize. This frees up personal time and eases some stress! The single people on your team love this. The married people on your team love this more. The married people with kids love this the most! Give them a break; give their spouse a break. This is something your average salespeople don’t buy themselves.

4. Boss Humiliation – If a certain goal is reached, the boss has to shave his/her head, get some tattoo, or wear a crazy outfit. I’ve had to shave my head twice. I’ve had to ride to work on a Vespa dressed up like Elvis. I’ve almost had to get a giant tattoo of Texas on my back. I make the goal a stretch but within the realm of possibility. I smiled all the way to work as I rode that Vespa – because my sales team had hit its goal and everyone had gotten paid.

5. Sing Me a Song – Match up two teams and the losing team has to serenade the winner with a song sure to inspire laughter. Either the entire team has to sing, or perhaps just the leaders of the team. I tend to pick songs that are over-the-top repetitive like “Gangnam Style” or “What Does the Fox Say?”

I’d encourage you to try various forms of these incentives to see what works best for your team. Group buy-in is the scenario where your salespeople care not just for their own goals and success, but also about the team goals, reputation, pride, and overall success.

Take responsibility for motivating, cheerleading, painting the target, and getting your team to where they want to be. The hard work is all worth it if you throw in a little fun now and then. Your people need you to plan out and coordinate a workplace that will keep them engaged and moving toward their goals.

Sundance Brennan is the author of The Art of SalesFu, a sales professional and coach with more than 20 years of experience in consumer direct sales. You can read his blog posts, which usually consist of sales rants and book reviews, at www.thesalesnerds.com. Tweet him @salesfumaster or join the conversation at www.facebook.com/groups/SalesFu/.

By Russell Sachs

The sales industry is in the midst of a transformation due to the surge in sales enablement technology aimed at making sales reps more successful. In fact, venture capitalists have invested approximately $10 billion into the B2B sales enablement space since 2013, and this year we witnessed Salesforce and Microsoft raise the stakes with artificial intelligence (AI) technology for sales reps, debuting Einstein and Dynamics 365, respectively.

Sales technology is already changing the way we sell – from delivering social selling capabilities to automated follow-up reminders and predictive analytics – but it’s still in its relative infancy. That said, sales organizations are already exploring the best approaches to incorporate these tools into their larger selling process to impact their results.

The relationship between sales technologies and the sales organizations that use them will continue to evolve in the coming year as companies look to strike the right balance between tech and process. Here are three trends I believe will continue to emerge in 2017.

Social Selling Will Force Sales to Evolve Its Outbounding Efforts

The proliferation of social selling in 2016 caused many to reconsider traditional methods of sales – namely phone- and email-based selling. Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn proves that social selling is here to stay, as the company looks to enhance its Dynamics CRM solution with LinkedIn Sales Navigator (LinkedIn’s social prospecting tool) “to transform the sales cycle with actionable insights.”

While social selling does have a seat at the table, sales reps need to be cautious of how they utilize it. The reliance on social selling as a primary mode of selling – rather than as a useful tool in their overall tool chest – is overwhelming, leading to information overload and causing many buyers to “tune out” the white noise of multiple emails, LinkedIn messages, direct tweets, and other social solicitations. As a result, sales development reps will need to be more consultative and thoughtful in their approach when prospecting. The key when using social selling tools is to be relevant, respectful, direct and transparent.  Buyers are becoming desensitized to the overused social methods and tactics – and those who fail to adjust their methodologies will suffer from decreased hit rates.

Customization Is the Key to Revenue Growth

In 2017, sales organizations will continue to place greater importance on defined and specialized roles. In particular, targeted and coordinated efforts between marketing, the SDR, and account executive (commonly referred to as account-based selling) will continue to develop and grow in importance as organizations move away from a “one size fits all” sales methodology.

To achieve success here, sales organizations will need to employ a customized approach that demonstrates the value being delivered to each individual client, rather than rattling off a standard value prop with the bells and whistles of a product in hopes that it catches the eyes of prospective buyers in an active sales cycle. As the buyer continues to mature and grow weary of the noise and perceived overlap between products, sales professionals will be forced to focus on solving a customer’s unique problem or addressing a specific need of the client. The qualify, demo, and ask-for-order method only goes so far, and revenue will likely be stunted by those who stick to this approach.

In addition, as part of this trend, customer success and account management will continue to emerge and grow in prominence as companies look to improve retention rates and overall customer experience. Those who place a heavy investment and emphasis on customer success by aligning their efforts to their customers and strategic initiatives and focusing on delivering value will be handsomely rewarded by more loyalty, higher retention rates, and more revenue out of their existing customer base.

Sales Technology Will Continue Its Maturation Process

If 2016 was the year of sales tech innovation, then 2017 will be the year of sales tech refinement – especially around AI. As more customer data becomes available, we will continue to see the evolution and maturation of technologies that provide critical insights into buyer behavior. For example, products that uncover or clarify buyer propensity will make dramatic improvements in the coming year. We will also see an improvement in technologies that allow organizations to use data to enhance and improve forecasting and uncover which deals are most likely to close, which allows sales leaders to drive greater accuracy into the state of their pipelines and make specific recommendations on what needs to be done to close the gap and hit their revenue targets.

While it is exciting to see how predictive capabilities will drive efficiency into a sales rep’s day – such as allowing them to spend more time prospecting the right leads with the highest propensity to close – enthusiasm should be tempered as this simply will not replace the need for human interaction and interpretation of data. While it won’t teach sales reps how to sell, my hope and expectation is that it will keep them from squandering their most important asset: time.

We’re at an exciting time in the sales industry, and the right convergence of state-of-the-art sales technology and a customer-centric approach means unlimited potential for sales leaders and their teams. I, for one, am looking forward to the opportunities the New Year will bring. How do you see sales changing in 2017?

Russell Sachs is chief revenue officer at BetterCloud. He a veteran sales leader with more than 15 years of experience building winning sales teams and driving dramatic revenue growth for SaaS and enterprise software companies. Prior to joining BetterCloud, Sachs served as executive vice president of Sales at Work Market, where he grew top-line revenue tenfold in just three years. Sachs also previously held the position of sales director for Large Enterprise Services at Dell, Inc. Find him on Twitter at @RussellSachs. 

By Adrian Davis

Everywhere sales leaders are grappling with unprecedented, constant change when it comes to industries, customers, and competitors. As a result, sales leaders have to rethink their go-to-market strategies.

Often, they reach out to consultants to help them rethink their sales objectives, strategies, and processes. Getting external help when facing transformative change is not only a good idea – it’s often the foundation for fresh and innovative approaches.

One thing that can’t be overlooked, however, is that new strategies and new processes have no value unless they are actually implemented. Execution is the only thing that matters.

A Lesson from NASCAR

When it comes to winning, we can learn a lot from NASCAR. Not unlike NASCAR, we are in a race. Ours is a race for value, which requires us to make pit stops from time to time.

One of these “pit stops” is the annual sales conference – often when sales leaders introduce change to the sales team. This is not, however, where change happens. Change happens when talented salespeople are in front of qualified prospects and they implement the new strategies and processes.

When reflecting on a recent win, one best-in-class NASCAR pit crewmember said this:

“Victories aren’t always determined behind the wheel. With the cars these days, you can’t really pass that well. Most races now are won in the pit.”

The relevance of this quote to sales teams undergoing change is significant. NASCAR has reduced the time in the pit to 8.5 seconds. That’s 8.5 seconds to change tires, refuel, and do any other necessary maintenance. Because of parity on the track, it is the team that can get its car in and out of the pit the fastest that now wins the race.

In the same way, every sales force must change or die. The adoption and use of CRM is no longer a “nice to have.” The ability to engage all stakeholders in meaningful and strategic relationships has become compulsory. And the ability to understand and contribute to the client’s total economic equation has become the only way to create real value.

These are just a few examples of the many changes through which sales leaders must guide their teams. With these seismic shifts in the marketplace, sales leaders are forced to pull their teams off the road and educate them on their new strategies and processes. The sooner the sales teams can fully grasp and implement the proposed changes, the more quickly they can get back into the race for value. With the unrelenting changes and intense competition these days, this is where the race is won.

Coping with the Shock of Change

Unfortunately, implementing change in a sales team is far more difficult than it sounds. The type of unprecedented change sales organizations are undergoing leaves many salespeople in a state of shock and bewilderment. They find comfort in doing things the way they’ve always done them. Rather than see the new vision and associated opportunities, all they see is something being taken away from them and they react accordingly. Often, they drag down the morale of the whole team and ensure your change efforts are stalled (at best) or abandoned altogether (at worst).

Six Steps to Success

Understanding the states people go through when facing dramatic change can help you coach your people to success and get them out of the pit and back on the track. The following stages are loosely based on the Kübler-Ross model of coping with loss.

Hiring external consultants to provide thought leadership with respect to sales transformation is critical. Bringing in a powerful keynote speaker to galvanize the sales team at your next sales conference will help win over hearts and minds and kick off your change effort in a position for optimal success (please reach out to me if I can help you here).

However, the most critical step in change is using a strategy for adoption to prepare management to coach and validate your people through the change. This is where the real transformation takes place. In the end, it’s not systems or processes that change, it’s people. The sooner they change, the faster you can get out of the pit stop and back into the race for value. In a world of constant change, the speed in and out of the pit stop is where the race for value is won!

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and Dupont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).

By Mike Kunkle

As 2016 draws to a close, sales organizations are assessing what worked – and where improvement is needed – to drive even better results in 2017. With one in five companies offering their sales managers no training at all (CSO Insights), there’s ample room for improvement in sales manager enablement.

Buoyed by the strong results it generates, sales manager enablement will, I predict, continue to blossom and become more mainstream next year. Am I right? Only time will tell, but maybe we can give it a collective nudge.

Sales Manager Enablement Momentum

Some thought-leaders are already championing the cause. Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights has been at the forefront, citing the need for and impact of sales manager enablement. Consultant Mike Weinberg speaks frankly about the folly of how we get in the way of sales success. And thought-leader Dave Brock recently published a book that could be the foundation for an entire sales manager enablement program. These are just three great examples.

A True Story about Sales Manager Enablement: The Request

Personally, I often quip that, if I had a dollar to spend on sales training, I’d spend 75 cents on managers. There’s a reason for this, and I’d like to share a quick story and takeaways to help you take bold steps toward better enabling managers to transform sales results.

Back when I was consulting, a senior sales leader at a mid-market technology firm approached me, concerned that his frontline sales managers weren’t coaching. When I asked how he knew that, he cited a recent survey with lackluster feedback from reps on how they were (or mostly weren’t) being coached.

The Analysis: Too Many Meetings, Too Much Reporting, Too Much Bureaucracy

The leader wanted me to train his managers to be effective coaches. However, I’ve never been much of an order-taker without validating the performance need, so I first reviewed the survey results and set up conference calls with the frontline managers and their sales leaders.

What I heard from managers was that they were swamped with too many meetings, too much reporting, bureaucratic “C.Y.A.” activities, and more that prevented them from coaching in the first place. To validate that, we did a focus group, laying out all the things managers were being asked to do and documenting estimates for how long each should take.

As it turned out, managers were being asked to fit 110 hours of work in a week (which leaders deemed a conservative estimate). Obviously, not everything could get done, and managers prioritized based on what headquarters or executives were reviewing – none of which centered on coaching or performance management.

The Solution

Senior executives and sales leaders had an “aha” moment, took ownership, and made changes, including

• Offloading many of managers’ administrative tasks
• Reducing meeting requests
• Redefining sales manager roles, with a primary focus on hiring, field training and coaching, pipeline management, forecast management, customer/prospect issue resolution, strategic account development guidance, and team leadership and performance management
• Defining sales manager competencies and assessing frontline managers against them, with individual development plans
• Developing a manager training curriculum and implementing an effective learning system to ensure managers’ knowledge sustainment, skills transfer, and mastery – culminating in a sales manager certification
• Establishing a cadence or management operating rhythm and holding managers accountable for executing on it

Takeaways to Make 2017 the Year of Sales Manager Enablement

The investment and discipline paid off. Manager training was completed in late Q1, and, by year-end, the company had a top-line revenue lift of more than 34 percent, finishing the year over quota. The company subsequently reported a decrease in rep turnover, along with faster ramp-up times for new sales hires.

The strategies implemented represent best practices other organizations can incorporate. Additional tips and takeaways to make 2017 the year of sales manager enablement include:

• Make the commitment. There’s a lot of boardroom head-nodding about the importance of frontline sales managers, but taking aligned action with top-down support is what produces results.
• Get the role expectations and competencies right. Train to those competencies.
• Provide the right tools to help managers work more efficiently and enable them to increase their time with reps and focus on what really matters.
• Hire (or rent) someone to coach your coaches. Just as with reps, managers need knowledge sustainment, transfer support, and coaching too, so training sticks.
• Measure the behaviors and outcomes you expect, and report on them transparently.
• Capture the output of sales coaching sessions. Regardless of where you do so (be it your CRM, LMS, or HRIS/performance management system), capture them somewhere so analytics can be run pre- and post-coaching to see the impact, and so sessions and action plans can be viewed and reviewed by others.

When you enable your frontline sales managers in these ways, you’ll get far better results from your sales force and have the best chance of meeting or exceeding your sales plan. Good luck in 2017!

Mike Kunkle is a renowned strategist, practitioner, speaker, and writer in the field of sales. Mike has more than two decades of experience leading sales training, productivity, and performance initiatives. He is senior director of sales readiness consulting at Brainshark, a leading provider of sales readiness software. Prior to Brainshark, Mike spent 21 years as a corporate leader and consultant, helping companies drive dramatic sales results through best-in-class learning strategies and sales performance methodologies. You can follow Mike on Twitter at @Mike_Kunkle.

By Sharon Gillenwater

Pity the poor chief information security officer (CISO). Once engaged in a role buried many layers down in an organization, the person in this position is  now a business leader, CSO from IDG wrote recently.

According to Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director in the Office of the CISO at Optiv, “The new CISO is more the CIRO (chief information risk officer) tasked with managing risk to data and technology.” It’s a high-pressure job and, on top of that, they’re dealing with “vendor overload.”

A Glut of Vendors

CSO from IDG noted there are more than a thousand companies pitching security tools and solutions. A 2015 report by CB Insights found that, over the past five years, $7.3 billion was invested into 1,208 private cybersecurity startups. Yikes! Who has the time to evaluate each offering – and still do their job?

As a vendor for enterprises in any industry, the last thing you want is for your team to aggravate potential customers like these CISOs with irrelevant information. The customer is hand wringing over problem X, but your folks are eager to download product details that address problem Y – or, even worse, rat-a-tat-tat about all your products, hoping to score with something.

Why Customers Are Overwhelmed

The customer, who is likely being pitched by scads of other vendors besides you, is justifiably irritated on any number of levels. The problem isn’t being solved. It’s a selling exercise – not an effort to solve problems. And, of course, a waste of their limited time.

In a recent article in Channel Partners, CenturyLink chief security officer David Mahon said that a lot of people are being pitched “gold-plated security tools” to solve a range of problems –  some more pressing than others. He noted that, with so many vendors, enterprise customers are confused and he likens the situation to a construction project with too many subcontractors in the mix. “Something goes wrong, you have the plumber blaming the electrician, the electrician blaming the framer,” he said. “We need a consolidation, for a number of reasons.”

In the face of the ever-changing technology landscape, vendors overwhelm customers with irrelevant information when what is called for is precise targeting – especially if you are pitching to a busy executive.

Sure, the temptation is to tell them about everything in the hope of hitting on something they need. But a smarter approach is to do your homework and find out what the customer is focused on and then connect the dots between their needs and your products and services.

Five Tips to Stand Out from Your Competitors

With that in mind, here are five tips for targeting your pitch and cutting through the vendor “noise:”

• Do your research: The basics are key. Who are you going to be talking to? What are they focused on? What are the company’s goals and priorities, their setbacks and strategies, and their competitive position? What threats are they facing?

• Address market realities: You not only need to know their competition, you need to have a firm grasp of yours and how you are different. Your customer is facing a landscape in which the vendors and products – and the very technology itself – are constantly changing. Focus less on this “noise” and more on how your product or service alone can help them meet their business goals.

• Listen: If you go into a meeting anxious to download information, you’re going in to sell. But no one wants to be sold to. Instead, ask intelligent questions that reflect your knowledge of the customer’s business. Listen carefully to their answers and make real and clear connections between your offerings and their needs.

• Start with the basics: Instead of trying to be all things to the company, try to focus on their biggest priorities first. This will help you build credibility and earn the right to expand the business relationship.

• Be a collaborator and an advisor: Help your customer figure out what’s coming down the road by providing a steady drip of relevant, useful nuggets of information – anything that will help them plan for the future. Instead of wasting their time, you become a go-to advisor.

As technologies evolve and vendors grow in numbers by leaps and bounds, meeting customers where they live becomes essential. Instead of being the bore who annoys CXOs with too much that addresses too little, do your research and tap into their concerns and needs with just enough of the right details to pique their interest.

Sharon Gillenwater is the founder and editor-in-chief of Boardroom Insiders, which maintains an extensive database of the most in-depth executive profiles on the market, from Fortune 500 companies to independent non-profits, to help sales and marketing professionals build deeper relationships and close more deals with clients. Gillenwater is a long-time marketing consultant with expertise in marketing strategy, account-based marketing, and CXO engagement programs.