Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
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Third-party methodology vendors can give you a jumpstart in this area, but the outcome should be your own unique best-practice sales cycle for your company and your industry. Your sales technique should include the concepts from the methodology and form the basis of your training effort.
Defining your sales technique also will secure buy-in from your sales managers because it is their own work. The entire coaching discipline hinges on their reinforcement. It should be in both their performance review and comp plan, or you will get no more than a passive effort.
This can become a huge overkill project if you let it. It should be done in less than a week.
4. Positioning—What Do We Say About Us?
Would you persuade, speak of interests, not reason.
As outsiders, when we review sales messaging, we often find unfocused “me too” messages that sound exactly like the competition. Too many features, too few benefits, lack of focus on solutions for buyers, and poor differentiation — all delivered in brochure format to the sales force.
An objective, and often brutal, evaluation of your techniques in this area usually is needed to make sure that you are not “eating your own dog food.” The vice president of marketing’s buy-in here is essential to avoid defense and denial.
5. Creating a Winning Sales Culture — Align the Infrastructure
Priorities in this area include alignment of the new sales process with the rest of the sales and marketing infrastructure.
Unless compensation, rewards, roles and responsibilities, support, and policies are aligned with the new selling process, you will simply increase frustration by training salespeople to sell one way while the rest of the organizational systems incent them to act a different way.
Sometimes your new process may drive new roles for some people. These must be defined clearly and sold internally. Finally, the whole organization needs to support a selling culture as one team. This is where the support of the CEO is not an option.
6. Execution—Level Selling Skills
Some sales managers prefer to address individual selling skills first and then move to competitive strategy. Others prefer to make sure that they are selling to the right accounts and the right people before they focus on developing the skills necessary to create individual preference. Many companies have used two different vendors simultaneously to address these competencies.
These individual-level skills include discovery, listening, probing, linking solutions to pains, vision creation, presentation and writing skills, objection handling, time management, and negotiating, among others. Who needs and who gets this type of skills training should come from the performance review, which should come from your ideal sales cycle. The application of the skills should fall out of your sales strategy for that account. The result is more realistic strategy-based execution skills training rather than generic classes.
Using a single vendor allows a completely integrated strategy and training approach. Whatever the priority, though, both skills and strategy are needed to identify the key decision makers and win their hearts.
7. People and Process First — Then Automate
Why is technology so low on the list of priorities? Because if you take a bad process — combined with weak people — and automate it, you will just accelerate mistakes and frustration.
Joe Galvin, of Gartner, Inc., states: “Sales culture dictates to a large degree technology adoption and that technology alone will not change behavior… Sales productivity will be improved by sales technologies only when it is deployed into a sales culture of leveraging its potential.”
The graveyard of failed sales force automation initiatives has taught us that refining your processes first—selling the right messages through the right people—should precede any sales force automation effort.
8. New Metrics and Feedback for Perpetual Advantage
A transformation demands sustainable change. Too many initiatives wane after the first few months. Sales messages quickly lose effectiveness due to competitive responses. It shouldn’t take a year to find out whether or not a salesperson can cut it, and by the time a deal hits the forecast, it is usually out of control.
Permanent process change to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition requires faster feedback and newer metrics than ever before.
Since not all sales improvement efforts are alike, setting your priorities depends on where your sales force is and where it needs to be. Based on the successful transformations we have observed, we have built an assessment tool to help you compare your organization with the best practices of top sales forces.
CHAPTER 3: Defining the Scorecard
Quality is not an act. It is a habit.
Once you agree that your sales force is in need of improvement, where do you start? How do you assess your sales organization in addition to just revenue? How do you identify your weaknesses?
The principals of our firm, all successful sales executives themselves, have worked with more than 250 leading sales organizations worldwide. Together, we have identified five universal areas of sales effectiveness — Talent, Technique, Teamwork, Technology, and Trust — and how they differ at each of the four levels of sales strategy: Individual, Opportunity Management, Account Management, and Industry/Marketplace. In Chapter 9 we discuss essential elements of achieving and maintaining Transformation for permanent change.
Although most sales organizations execute best practices in some areas, rarely do they achieve best practices in all areas. And certainly, these are not all the best practices in selling, but they should be enough to get you ahead of your competition and closer to your true potential as a sales force.
The result is a scorecard that we have developed to provide sales managers with a gap analysis of their organization. Through this scorecard, we’ll show you how you compare with some of the best sales forces in the world.
Here we will briefly introduce the criteria. In later chapters we will go into much more depth.
Talent
The first step in sales effectiveness is finding the right people. Selling in a complex sale requires a unique combination of sales competencies. Most of the sales managers we talk to say that fewer than 20 percent of their salespeople can consistently manage a complex sale independently.