Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

A useful exercise that we use in our management classes is to take each of the 10 P’s and rate your top three performers and your bottom three performers in a job category to see the relative importance of each attribute to that specific job.

Start Performance Management in the Interview

How long does it take to do a performance review? The answer is six months to a year because the first step in managing performance is to set the standards, values, tolerances, and expectations. You should give your candidates the performance review form and set their expectations as part of the interview process.

New hires are like wet cement. You can mold them and shape them early, but as time passes, habits form — both good and bad. After 90 days or so, their attitudes begin to calcify to the point where it may take a jackhammer to change their bad habits.

But how is the performance review actually handled in most cases? Performance reviews are seen as a necessary evil from HR, often written by HR, and often don’t include the behaviors, skills, and competencies needed to perform the adopted sales methodology. They are often seen as just checkboxes to get the HR people off your back.

If the performance review doesn’t include the sales methodology, then perhaps it should be ignored. However, if performance management is driven by the ideal sales cycle, it can be a very constructive performance coaching tool that actually should be reviewed on a quarterly basis rather than annually. This allows sales managers to coach not just deal competence, but the other factors of overall performance such as character, chemistry, competence, commitment, communication, and cognitive skills.

The time to start this process is in the interview itself, where expectations about how you want things done in your organization can be set early.

Talent Scorecard
Best Practice, Talent	Importance	Execution
	Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high)	Agree but we never do this	We sometimes do this	We often do this	We do this consistently
Individual
We have written, tested profiles for each sales position.
We have questions, assessments, and an interview process that produce consistent performers.
We generally have the sales talent in the right roles.
We have sales performance reviews that include our sales methodology and are introduced during the interview process.
New managers are trained how to hire effectively.
We have a training curriculum, built on our best practices, that includes skills, opportunity strategies, and account management.
Opportunity Management
We have junior salespeople ready for territories when they open up.
We have a pool of candidates in our industry on which we can draw when we have an opening.
We have full-time internal recruiters.
We have a high win ratio in head-to-head competitions.
Account Management
Our customer service people consider themselves part of the account sales team.
We have sales reps and managers who have earned trusted advisor status with their clients.
Industry/Market
We have industry knowledgeable sales consultants available to our sales team.
We are recognized thought leaders by the customers in our industry.

SECTION III: Technique

CHAPTER 5: Technique

Never mistake motion for action.

Ernest Hemingway

Jim Dickie is a partner in CSO Insights, a sales consulting practice that surveys hundreds of sales organizations every year and publishes an excellent benchmarking study. In their 2005 State of the Marketplace Review of 1,040 firms, he says that only 23.3 percent of companies spend more than $2,500 per year training their sales forces. And this includes all types of training.

On average, this represents the expected value generated by one rep in about two hours. And yet 84.5 percent of reporting companies in the study stated that their sales methodology either had a noticeable or significant impact on sales performance. It seems that additional investment in training would yield significant returns. But only a third of reporting firms said that adherence to their sales methodology is either structured or optimized.

Inspect what you expect. Defining a formal sales process and/or investing in sales training has little residual impact if it is not reinforced and enforced. Higher quotas and higher quota attainment do not appear to be the result of defining processes, but of using them. [3]

3

Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer, Sales Effectiveness Insights—2005 State of the Marketplace Review (Boulder, CO: CSO Insights, 2006), pp. 164–165.

In Hope Is Not A Strategy, we detailed two sales processes that are best practices in the complex sale: The R.A.D.A.R.^® (Reading Accounts and Deploying Appropriate Resources) methodology for winning competitive opportunities and the T.E.A.M. (Total Enterprise Account Management ^®) process for managing strategic accounts.

So that this book is fully self-contained, this chapter not only will review but also will focus on advancements, refinements, new developments, and the impact of the up-and-down economy on how salespeople sell in each one of these processes. Rather than address the R.A.D.A.R. process in detail, we will provide a summary here and an in-depth appendix at the end of the book. Because readers have asked for more detail on the T.E.A.M. process, we explore it in more depth here.

We will then focus on best practices in coaching the process and increasing forecasting accuracy.

R.A.D.A.R.®: The Six P’s of Opportunity Management—Summary

The R.A.D.A.R. process is used for managing complex sales evaluations by committees. It brings together the best ideas in consultative selling, competitive selling, political selling, and team selling. It focuses on selling strategic benefits to strategic buyers and technical benefits to technical buyers. This methodology allows salespeople to control the competition, politics, and the decision-making process to increase their chance of winning.