Signorelli Sales Force Effectiveness

A discussion on Linked In (http://lnkd.in/bAwWaK) provoked a question about using consultative selling processes, how well they work, and how hard they are to implement. Although there is a lot more to say about, here were a few initial thoughts I shared in the discussion.

Thanks for the question Bill. I use a consultative sales process, and I have helped many clients adopt the same over the past many years. Although each consultative selling process tries to differentiate itself with various terminologies, most are pretty similar. Some are better for services, others are better for software, still others are better for large companies versus small ones. Which one to use really all depends.

The general trend I am seeing is that consultative selling processes are decreasing in effectiveness these days. Customers are growing increasingly impatient with sales reps who ask a lot of questions–customers are looking for answers. We are seeing a premium on rep expertise and a kind of assumptive selling in which one assumes a value, proposes to test for its actual relevance, and then reports results. This is different from a list of probing questions and customizing a solution, which lies at the heart of most consultative selling processes. It’s not that consultative selling is bad, it’s just that certain markets are growing weary of it, and assumptive selling is a stronger bet–albeit much harder to do.

That said, I have a run a small consulting company for many years, and sold consultatively until recently. If you are going this direction, the one problem we had was that too much consultation can become an awful lot of free consulting, and a few prospective customers ripped off our expertise that way. Be careful.

One last thing: You asked if people are using the consultative selling process. They do and they will, but only if everything else in your customer engagement process is oriented to that new process. People sometimes think all they need to do is adopt a new process, announce and train it, and voila! All will be better. Our clients who view it holistically and make the investment to change sales tools, positioning, training, metrics and measures, and even the marketing to support the new process generally succeed. Those who don’t take that complete approach generally experience far lower rates of adoption. Hope this helps.

In a conversation the other day on LinkedIn, someone asked:

What is your favorite sales training for professional services sales, especially to Government buyers, and why? Sandler? SPIN? Miller-Heiman?

Here was my response:

None of these are great for most government buyers. The problem is that government buyers do not function the same way as most corporate buyers do. The user of the product or service is completely different from the buyer, who is usually a procurement officer of some kind. Procurement officers have a set of interests, issues, and concerns that are not similar to CFOs or other corporate economic buyers, and which typically are not successfully uncovered with probing questions, discovery, or assertions of increased value. That’s why none of the popular selling methodologies are very successful in this environment.

You really need to start with a thorough understanding of the buying process in your government customers, and then create an engagement selling strategy that responds to the needs, interests, and concerns of those customers. Any off-the-shelf approach is most likely to come with a lot of booby traps for your sales team, which can undermine your efforts.

I would add one more thing: We are finding increasingly that SPIN, Miller Heiman, and similar approaches to selling are coming up short today. Customer expectations and requirements are soaring, and they seem to have decreasing tolerance for, say, a sales rep who comes in to ask a bunch of questions. The value to the customer is questionable. Expertise is becoming the valued commodity, and a rep asking tons of questions is not viewed positively in that situation. If I were to look at one direction, I would think about the complex sale, and Jeff Thull’s Exceptional Selling. We recently innovated on that approach with much success in one of our client organizations.

A discussion group leader asked this question:

If you with 3 bullets/points had to describe the most important tasks/activities for a product manager – what would they be?

My response:

Brian has this right, but one thing needs to be added: Marketing and sales channel optimization. Product managers I have worked with have marketing responsibility, and often pull their hair out trying to get attention in the sales channel. As Brian suggests, you  need to have products that meet customer needs, but you also have to understand how customers buy, and alter the engagement process to meet those needs. This is especially important when the new product is actually a different category of product, say when a sales force is used to selling disposable items, and suddenly has a capital product to sell, or when a company adds the sales of software tools to its base business of selling online access to information. Typically, the change means that the sales process, which may have worked well up to now, is not set up to handle the new category of product. This kind of product manager will have his or her hands full, especially if, as Brian suggests, he or she has P&L responsibility.

to see the whole discussion on Linked In, go here: http://lnkd.in/btK3CG

Someone asked this question in a user group I belong to, so I shared these thoughts.

The number one reason CRM is not adopted by a sales force is the perception that CRM adds no value to the sales rep, and in many cases this is true. The only way to add value to the rep is to fully understand and document the sales process, and design the CRM system to the process. Far too many sales executives resist sales process, opting instead to allow for “creativity” in the sales force. Unfortunately, when supposed creativity substitutes for process, there is very little that can be done to drive adoption of a CRM system–which is, by definition, process driven. The system is almost defined to be irrelevant in such situations.

On the other hand, a really well thought out, well-organized CRM system is an incredible tool. My small company uses salesforce.com, and I can hardly say how valuable and important it is to us. It is a backbone for everything we do in sales and marketing, and we have customized it to fit our sales and engagement process. As a result, it is easy to tell when I am where I need to be, and what steps to attack when I am not meeting my goals. But that is only because we know what we are trying to do, and have detailed maps of that process.

Clients of ours have put in Seibel, Oracle, SAP, and other systems. In every case, it is essential to have the tool reflect a carefully thought out sales and marketing system–the process–and it is equally critical to manage to the tool. If the managers don’t use it every week for pipeline review, why on earth should a rep use it–especially if it seems to distract them from their work of selling?

In the context of CRM, I always remember this little proverb: “It is better to wander lost in a dark forest than to follow a map made by tourists.” Many reps reject CRM because it looks like a map made by tourists!

Linked In Conversation: http://lnkd.in/GVYjmy

The question above was presented to a group of sales management professionals on a group at Linked In. Many people said it depnds on the products and how similar they are. That’s an important consideration, but the product is only one small part of  the overall  consideration. Here are three more critical factors to consider: A) Do the products require interactions with different roles on the customer side? B) How frequently will any new skills be used with a new product? and C) Do the realtionships that matter overlap and are they truly leveragable or not?

The answers to these questions will tend to suggest either segmentation, additional sales team roles, or consolidation. For example, these questions often come up when a new product is added to the rep’s bag. If the product is very similar to other products in terms of how the customer buys it and who is involved, there is little indication for segmentation. On the other hand, if the product is different enough that a new player is involved in the purchase decision–say IT, or a CFO, or a Change Management expert–and the reps are not used to dealing with that person, a segmentation or sales specialist strategy is often considered.

I would also consider frequency of use of any new skills, because that will affect mastery and the potential effectiveness of the rep in selling the product being considered for segmentation. You probably don’t want an ineffective rep carrying any product, and if the potential sales opportunities are few but large, reps can have a hard time getting to the mastery they need.

Finally, if relationships that reps have are not leveragable and common to the sale of two products or product lines, there is frequently little reason not to segment. Some companies have 6, 8, or even 10 people calling on the same individual in the customer organization, and that’s a recipe for customer anger. This is segmentation having gone astray the wrong way.

Hope that helps. I’d appreciate any thoughts and fedback if it does.

Sales process is essential to success in complex sales. Here’s why:

• Mental Map: The sales process is a mental map of what is happening in the sale. In a well-managed sale, a good sales executive always know where they are in the process.
• Cover Bases: Customers will inevitably skip steps. A good rep knows that when certain key steps are skipped, the likelihood of a successful complex sale goes down. He makes sure the customer covers those steps somehow.
• Target Your Team: By knowing the map of the sale, a good sales executive knows exactly where to target his team. If you don’t; know, you cannot direct resources properly.

In a one-to-one sale, the power of persuasion can move a sales professional along rather nicely. In a large, complex sales environment, persuasion often matters less—a lot less. Intelligent organizations try to rationalize the buying process to ensure that large expenditures are vetted properly. Many have been burned before. That’s why you have complex sales.

For anyone involved in a complex sale, the only way to keep your feet is to understand the process. Customers will have their own processes, to be sure. But you need to have yours. You know what it takes for customers to successfully buy because your company supports those decisions day in and day out all the time. Your customer does do only rarely. Harness your own internal expertise on your product, and guide the customer through a successful process. They may or may not even realize you are doing it, but at the end, everyone will be more satisfied.

Here is a startling fact: Average sales people spend one quarter to one third of their time handling administrative tasks, including meaningless email.

Here is another: Average sales people spend less than 21% or their time in actual selling activities.

If you are a sales rep, you make your money selling. That’s it. Everything else, whether required by your employer or something you think you need to do by conditioning, is a distraction. Some people look at this and think: But I can’t always be in selling activities! Probably true. There’s prep work, customer research, and a lot of other requirements. If you are diligent about doing them to increase sales effectiveness, that’s probably a good thing.

On the other hand, even a small shift to increase time in sales activities can yield a huge change in your sales productivity—or that of your team. Let’s say you are making quota while committing only 21% of your time to true sales activities that make and close deals. That’s average according to the research. Let’s also assume that you are pretty average and spending about 25% of your time administratively—dealing with email from sales team colleagues, getting pulled into the email pit, handling administrative duties, scheduling your own appointments, etc. You will never be able to eliminate all of this work, but you can probably eliminate or delegate a lot of it. Most people who take a careful look at their activities can easily find 10% of their time that is just wasted and dumped down the drain. (That’s what happened to me—except that I found almost 30 hours per week, out of a 55 hour workweek, of ineffectively used time.)

Using productivity techniques like elimination and delegation, you could almost certainly squeeze 5 hours per week out of your schedule. Once you have that time, redeploy it to sales activity. That five hours represents about 10% of your average week, so your dedicated sales time moves from 21% to 31% of your time. That should be a small shift in your business practices, but look at the huge impact.

If you earn your quota of a million dollars per year using 21% of your work time, what happens if you make this small shift and go to 31% of your time making and closing sales? Well, 31% is almost 1.5 times 21%, so you could expect that sales will also multiply by 1.5%. All of a sudden, your sales can go from $1 million per year to $1.5 million per year—a 50% increase year over year, simply by changing the deployment of ten percent of your time.

Does change look good to you now?