Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
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Dominate
Dominate doesn't mean manipulating the client. It means changing the client's decision-making process to give you the inside track as a preferred vendor. This will occur only because of lowered risk through superior performance and relationships. It means building company-to-company trust, in which the client doesn't have to put you out for competitive evaluations every time, or if they must, you get the inside track or high ground before it begins.
Inoculate
To inoculate means to provide solutions that are
What is qualified for long-term account management is not qualified for a short-term quarterly-driven "hunter."
It also means building allies and listening posts for competitive intrusions because competitors will try to penetrate your account the same way you did in the first place. If you do account management well enough, you may not have to do opportunity management at all, or if you do, you are well established on the issues and have powerful people who prefer you before a formal buying process begins.
Coaching: The Key to Organizational Sales Discipline
Additionally, the salespeople who grew up in the 1990s are now sales managers. In many cases, we've taken our best salespeople and made them managers with little preparation. You can't afford to take two years to send them away to earn an MBA, and that wouldn't work anyway. In MBA school, they teach you how to be a vice president and how to analyze problems—not execute solutions.
What sales managers are really asking for at this stage are tactical skills and training for new managers on how to hire effectively, coach performance, weed out weak people, and develop future leaders. Otherwise, you are taking sales-people—whose strengths as salespeople not only may not work for them as managers but might actually work against them — and promoting them.
As managers, they then clone more salespeople with bad habits. At the same time, there is a whole new generation of salespeople out there who not only need the fundamental skills of selling but also need to understand the complexities of committee sales and major accounts.
Sales managers have an even more difficult challenge than others because the skill sets they need to coach their people are much different from what is needed to coach a deal, yet they are intricately entwined. The trap is that many managers become “inspectors” instead of coaches, doing deal reviews without asking the tough questions or adding value by improving the strategy.
Many sales executives are figuring out that they can no longer grow with the sales techniques that have gotten them to where they are now. While coaching deals might have been an option in the up economy, it is essential in a down or flat economy. The new managers who were salespeople in the up economy may never have learned how to really analyze and coach a competitive deal.
Today’s Economy Affects the Way We Sell and the Talent Pool
One discovery we’ve made since the last book is the impact of an up economy and a down economy on the way sellers sell and the way buyers buy. The change in the economy has had a significant impact on the talent pool for salespeople and managers and the competencies they bring with them.
In the boom economy of the 1990s, a lot of bad habits were allowed to continue. As Jim Dickie, of CSO Insights, says, “In a hurricane, even turkeys can fly.”
There were some poor role models among salespeople and managers and a lot of mediocrity in selling that still resulted in high sales because it was a seller’s market.
These poor selling habits came back to roost when the market turned down. Many of the “one-year wonders” could not compete effectively in the new, tougher selling environment.
Several things began to happen. First, in the consulting world, salespeople had gotten used to proposal lobbing—answering 10 RFPs, throwing them over the castle wall, and winning two, which was enough to keep people off the bench.
In the down economy, there was no longer enough business to keep consulting firms busy. Our phone began ringing off the hook as those firms realized that they needed to get more competitive and better at selling in order to win their share or even grow.
Many consulting firms began to develop sales processes, hire outside business developers, and focus on sales training. While making significant improvements, one challenge still remains in the consulting industry—and that is the lack of an overall sales hierarchy and sales management and accountability infrastructure, as well as a hiring profile that leads to a competitive culture.
The Lost Art of Prospecting
In the rest of the sales world, we began to get a lot of calls from sales executives who said, “You told us how to win deals, but we don’t have enough deals to work on in this economy. Our pipelines aren’t full enough.”
Salespeople had forgotten how to prospect because they didn’t need to for the past 10 years. Instead, they had let marketing handle this responsibility. They had forgotten how to pick up the phone and call a stranger or felt that they were past that in their careers.
At the same time, executives today are barraged by more people than ever trying to get to them—through e-mail and voicemail—so the clutter is even greater. We work with a number of firms to help them refocus their prospecting efforts and demand-creation selling: how to get to executives, how to do research before you get there, and how to identify their top two or three issues so that the chances of a voice-mail or e-mail creating a 30-minute meeting actually may have some chance of working.
The goal is to identify an executive who will sponsor a project and find a budget in the absence of an evaluation.
Procurement Grows Stronger — Commoditization
Another impact of the down economy is that procurement has gained more power. Procurement has always been a stakeholder, with greater strength in government than in the commercial sector. In the down economy, though, its strength has grown as efforts have increased to drive cost out of companies so that they can compete globally.