Selling Power – Page 19 – Sales Leadership Blog

Thu, November 10, 2011Fri, August 16, 2013

Why Sales Success Starts with Credibility

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.

Ken Powell is Vice President of Worldwide Sales Enablement at ADP.

Wed, October 12, 2011Thu, May 20, 2021

3 Sales Management Challenges & How to Solve Them with Science

Are great salespeople born, or made? With today’s advanced scientific sales analytics and measurement tools, sales managers can actually find out.

First, behavioral assessments give sales managers insight into a salesperson’s nature and psychological makeup (“born”), while skills assessments provide concrete data on sales knowledge and skills learned via experience, lessons, observations, etc. (“made”).

This combination of information gives sales leaders new ways to tackle three perennial sales-management challenges:

Sales Management Challenge #1: Hiring
Sales teams are only as good as the salespeople themselves. Sales managers need individuals who can work within the culture of the organization, leverage their unique strengths, and find satisfaction in getting great results. This is simply about job fit.

To find the right people for your team, you have to know what kind of salespeople you’re looking for. Hiring the right salesperson starts by defining the role. Sales managers need to take the time to complete a job analysis that defines the behavioral needs of the position. You can imagine the different needs of various sales positions—including B2B, B2C, outside sales, inside sales, and call centers. By defining the job, you have a “target” to measure candidates against. The next step is to administer a behavioral assessment on solid candidates, review and compare it with other critical data about experience, education, and past successes. You’re now using science and multiple data points to find a good fit.

Sales Management Challenge #2: Motivation
Sales is the one job inside every company where you cannot hide from results. Sales professionals are measured every day; and if one hits a slump, has a bad week or month, not only does that individual feel it, the results are also highly visible. While the visibility can help motivate some people, it can also create a “pressure cooker” environment where morale is difficult to maintain.

In addition to pressure to produce, external factors like these can also impact a rep’s motivation levels:

tough economy,
increased competition
shift in the individual’s role
change in the company’s direction or vision.

For example, an inside sales team that goes from 95% inbound calls to 95% outbound calls might experience a drop-off in production, which would create a significant challenge for the sales manager to keep the team focused, motivated, and productive. Behavioral assessments provide essential insights to how an individual is motivated. Armed with data on motivation, the sales manager can stay ready to accurately guide his or her team through change of any kind.

Sales Management Challenge #3: Retention
Hiring the right people will always be a concern, but retention will be an even greater challenge over the next decade. Top producers always have and always will have choices of about where to work. As drivers of revenue, they are a huge asset to any company and remain in high demand. In addition, top sales professionals expect great leadership and a high level of job satisfaction. Most organizations find that there are not enough candidates to fill critical roles; this problem is likely to get more serious now and in the future.

How can science help? For one thing, people stay in jobs when they’re engaged, learning, challenged, and believe they can succeed in the environment. Science provides two key aspects to combine nature and nurture and help keep producers actively engaged and reduce sales personnel turnover.

While behavioral assessments provide insight into what makes each rep tick, sales skills assessments provide data on their strengths and areas of growth. With the combined data from a behavioral assessment and a skills assessment, sales managers can take the mystery out of retention and figure out ways to keep their top performers happy and engaged.

Ultimately, leveraging science to drive sales performance enables organizations to increase efficiency, manage effectively, and produce outstanding sales results. The result is predictable, sustainable, and repeatable success.

Today’s post was contributed by Nancy Martini, President and CEO of PI Worldwide, publisher of science-based sales analytics including the Predictive Index (PI) and the Selling Skills Assessment Tool (SSAT). Contact her at nmartini@piworldwide.com.

Thu, October 6, 2011Fri, July 27, 2012

Sales Leadership & Innovation Lessons from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Apple homepage

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.

Sat, September 24, 2011Thu, May 20, 2021

What Does Successful Sales & Marketing Alignment Look Like? (Part II)

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.

Will Wiegler is Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. Follow BigMachines on Twitter @BigMachines.

Fri, September 16, 2011Thu, May 20, 2021

What True Sales & Marketing Alignment Looks Like (Part I)

For many sales and marketing leaders, there is still work to be done when it comes to improving the relationship between their teams. Recently, my company, BigMachines, released a 2011 Benchmark Survey on the state of the sales industry, featuring responses from 100 sales executives. The aim of the survey was to uncover the biggest pain points affecting their jobs today. The top result? Two-thirds of respondents said that the biggest pain point is the disconnect between sales and marketing.

This is troubling to hear because when the lines of communication are broken, opportunities might be missed, errors can occur, and deals can even be lost. I’m fortunate to work for a company that takes the relationship between marketing and sales seriously and highly values collaboration. Here’s a portrait of how sales and marketing work for us:

My marketing team is an integral part of the sales process. We work closely with both inside and outside sales teams to provide the right messages to prospects and customers at the right times. We also provide them with an ongoing stream of sales leads and help them prioritize those leads based on demographics and interest levels.

Sales knows that marketing is here to help them meet their sales targets. We provide the intelligence and expertise to help them win. Our job is to build the supporting infrastructure to deliver selling messages via the most effective channels, and then monitor the results.

Our goals are aligned and we work (and play) as a team. Month after month, members of our sales team nominate members of my marketing team for “Star of the Month” awards. Sales thinks we rock (and we do)!

Have you implemented strategies within your organization that help sales and marketing work better together?

Will Wiegler is Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. Follow BigMachines on Twitter @BigMachines.

sales-amp-marketing-20-conference-oct

Fri, September 2, 2011Fri, August 16, 2013

Are Sales Reps Just Complaining, or Is Lead Quality Really Down?

One of the first complaints a sales leader will hear from an underperforming salesperson is that the leads from marketing are not up to par. “It’s not me — it’s the leads. They’re terrible.” The next thing you know, all your other salespeople are also convinced that the leads are terrible, and suddenly you’ve got an entire sales team demotivated to perform.

For a long time, there was no way for sales leaders to assess the accuracy of complaints about sales leads. Are the leads truly low quality? Or has the rep not been trained properly on how to deal with this particular kind of lead?

This is a sales leadership issue that has bothered me for years. But at HubSpot, we’ve been as proactive as possible in taking the subjectivity out of the issue of lead quality by using data and metrics.

One framework for lead intelligence data is demographic data (for example, company size and revenue) versus engagement data (for example, how many times the prospect visited your site and/or downloaded materials). We use this kind of information to develop our lead quality score. We can then have more quantitative discussions about lead quality. For example, as opposed to “the leads suck,” we can gather feedback such as: “The percentage of B2B companies with greater than $100 million in revenue has dropped by 24% in the past week. This trend is problematic, as these types of leads close to customers 37% more than the average sales qualified lead”.

The other aspect of lead quality we examine is salesperson performance on specific lead segments across a broader set of salespeople. When a segment of leads is under-performing, typically this result is either because the sales team is not adequately trained on how to handle these leads or the leads are in fact not a great fit for your offering. If you find that all your salespeople struggle with the lead segment, then the leads are probably not a great fit for your offering. But if, say, four salespeople performed well with the lead segment and 11 did not, then you have a sales training issue. Your next step would be to look at the four reps who are doing well, find out how they’re approaching those leads, and get the rest of the team trained on those techniques quickly.

A good example of this at HubSpot is our non-profit leads. Our reps used to avoid selling to this segment like the plague: “Don’t give me nonprofits – there’s too much red tape and they don’t spend a lot of money.” The data showed a different story. In fact, nonprofits did have a longer sales cycle, and it took a deeper qualification process to find out who the decision makers were. But when you got them to sign up, they became phenomenal customers, which made its way back into the salesperson commission plan.

It’s amazing how often the data differs from the gut feel of the salesperson. If you make that data known, reps stop complaining and instead start figuring out what they need to do to translate leads into deals.

Mark Roberge will share insights about lead quality and sales and marketing alignment on September 20, 2011 in a webinar sponsored by Selling Power. To register, click here.

Mark is responsible for the entire sales function at HubSpot, having grown the team from 1 to 80 employees in five years. Prior to HubSpot, Mark founded and/or held executive positions at start-ups in the social media and mobile sector. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Mon, August 15, 2011Thu, May 20, 2021

Where Do Great Front-Line Sales Managers Come From?

Managing a sales team is one of the most important positions in a company. Great sales managers have a profound impact on the productivity of their sales teams and produce better sales results. Managing a sales team is also one of the most challenging positions in a company, and it requires a unique set of skills. Unfortunately, most front-line managers start their sales management careers ill-equipped to effectively manage a team of salespeople. So, where do great front-line sales managers come from?

Star-Athlete Syndrome
I hear about the “Star-Athlete Syndrome” frequently in sales organizations. A star sales person grows tired of the daily grind of being an individual contributor and aspires to something “greater,” such as sales management. Meanwhile, the vice president of sales is under time pressure to fill a vacant sales manager position. The vice president assumes that the star sales rep will know how to produce great sales results from a sales team.

The challenge is that salespeople are frequently unable to make the transition from being an individual contributor — achieving results through individual expertise, effort and determination — to being a manager, achieving results through the performance of others. This problem is not unique to sales. Think of all of the great athletes who never developed into great coaches.

Key Sales-Management Abilities
While a sales manager needs sales experience in order to have credibility with the sales team, the key driver of long-term success as a manager is mastery of specific sales-management skills. In order to produce exceptional sales results from the team, a sales manager must excel in the following critical sales-management abilities:

1) Managing sales performance by focusing on the underlying behaviors that drive sales results.

2) Sales coaching to help salespeople develop their full potential.

3) Building a team of great sales professionals with the requisite competencies to succeed.

4) Leading and motivating the team.

Return on Investment
Often some training is needed to develop these critical sales-management abilities. I find the return on investment training sales managers offers truly exciting. A sales manager can leverage improved management skills over the entire sales team. For example, if a sales manager manages 10 salespeople, improving that manager’s effectiveness represents a 10:1 return on investment opportunity.

Just think about all that untapped potential.

Norm Behar talks about developing highly effective sales managers with Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO of Selling Power.

Norm Behar is CEO of Sales Readiness Group. This post originally appeared here on his blog. Follow Sales Readiness Group on Twitter @SalesReadiness, or email Norm at nbehar@salesreadinessgroup.com.

Thu, July 28, 2011Thu, May 20, 2021

How We Use ‘The Pitch’ to Achieve Sales Success

elevator pitch I recently read a blog post by Gerhard Gschwandtner which posed the question: “Is ‘the pitch’ dead?” Ya know, the good old-fashioned elevator sales pitch — is it still relevant?

It got me thinking about when I first came to Dyn two and a half years ago from WhippleHill (a software company for private schools) because Dyn had no ‘pitch.’ We had no singular message or way of talking about our brand identity in a way that people could relate to. We needed to craft a genuine story that people could get behind, believe in and yearn to be a part of. I didn’t know a ton about the technology at Dyn (DNS – Domain Name System), so it was also a great way to get up to speed.

Before phones, radio and television, people looking to make a transaction and achieve sales success actually met in person to do a business deal. (Imagine that!) There was a straight-in-the-eye look, trust-building conversations, and a firm handshake that led to contracts getting signed.

Today, the same thing happens but the look, trust building and handshake doesn’t simply occur between two parties. It happens between employees, fans, prospects, customers, followers and friends. There is an abundant supply of online reviews, magic quadrants, hungry competition, analyst briefings, crazy analytics, community sites, Twitter, Facebook, customer references and more to sift through. You simply can’t slack off, because competition can pounce at a moments notice.

The function and business of sales itself always seems to carry a negative connotation. I know it did for me growing up. It’s no secret that there are plenty of sleazy sales jobs out there or overly corporate slick practices to convince people to buy whatever wares are being served up. The amount of spin and BS being spit out has given sales — and more specifically ‘the pitch’ — a bad name. It’s up to sales leaders like us to reinvent ‘the pitch’ and ensure that its genuineness shines and that dialogue (not monologue) flourishes.

When we bring sales people aboard at Dyn, they must learn four key things before they’re truly unleashed to rep us. All four things are what end up making up our unique pitch — one that continues to evolve with every customer win, technology advancement, industry shift or overall achievement of company milestones.

Here are the four key aspects of the Dyn Pitch:

1. The Dyn Story
Our roots: how we were founded, how we grew, how we were our very own first customer, how everything we’ve ever done has been because of customer demand and how we’re really just like those we want to do business with: dedicated.

2. The Dyn Difference
Our straight–forward, transparent (we overshare), high road, direct, and impassioned approach. We love to talk about and show our commitment and loyalty to our customers, our strong relationships that go beyond the dollar value of an account, our obsessive account management and support, and our flexibility in contracting, pricing, and product enhancements. We keep it real in an industry that tends to be old school, slow and very corporate.

3. The Dyn Customer, Case Studies & Vertical Markets
We are just like our customers. We’re fighting tooth-and-nail to grow and experience great success in a unique way that we can be proud of. We focus on everyone who values his or her presence online. We’ve redefined what it means to be enterprise, how to practice a customer-centric and solution-selling approach, and drive ahead with our customers and vertical market focus in the spotlight.

4. The Dyn Technology
We are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for managed DNS and email delivery, but what is DNS? What is email delivery? Why outsource? How does our technology work? What problems does it solve? Smart customers want the keys to the car and want to test drive the services themselves. We let them, and expose them to experts from the word go. When technology stands on its own two feet, it’s easy to sell. The technology is the last thing we have people learn. (Again, imagine that!)

The two most important things I tell anyone coming into our sales organization are: 1) people buy from people they like, and 2) you know what you don’t know.

We explain that even if you don’t win a deal at the end of the day, do everything in your power to ensure that the prospect likes you so much that he or she feels terrible about letting you down. Sales success is about using all your resources to deliver for your prospect or customer.

Recently, the VP of Sales at a large public competitor, whom I respect very much, asked me how we were finding DNS sales reps in New Hampshire. I told him very pointedly that we’re not selling just DNS and we’re not just hiring sales reps. We are hiring honest, passionate and persistent people to round out our sales team and that they must possess two key characteristics: fit and hustle.

Once they learn ‘the pitch’ and how to share it, the sky is the limit for them and for Dyn.

Kyle York is the VP of Sales and Marketing of Dyn, an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) leader that features a full suite of DNS and email delivery services for enterprise, SMB and personal users. Follow on Twitter: @kyork20 and @DynInc.

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