"Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Page Rick)CHAPTER 2: Pathway to Perpetual AdvantageIf there are gaps in your sales performance in comparison with your potential, how much change do you need? Do you need better execution, continuous improvement, or a major transformation? The answer, to some degree, depends on whether you are new to the organization, how it has performed in the past, your own expectations, and those of your management. In talking to several executives who have successfully achieved quantum leaps in sales effectiveness, we have found that they have used similar approaches to define, prioritize, and execute the changes needed in their sales organizations. After the sale of American Management Systems (AMS), a Fairfax, Virginia-based consulting firm, to CGI, Donna Morea was named president of the newly formed U.S. subsidiary, one of our principal Peter Bourke’s accounts. Prior to the merger, AMS and CGI had very different sales organizations. AMS was highly centralized and organized by industry—CGI was highly decentralized and organized by geography. Donna’s approach to changing the new organization to a more sales-driven culture concentrated on three legs of a stool.“We focused on (1) how we sell, (2) who we sell to, and (3) what we sell,” she said. The first focus area centered on the need to adopt consistent and proven sales disciplines across CGI-AMS (the how). Second, Donna pushed the organization to adopt a new approach to segmenting the market (the who), with the goal of focusing the majority of CGI-AMS’s account management and business development resources on a smaller number of strategic accounts. Finally, she worked with her leadership team to “overlay” the geographically oriented organization structure with an industry focus-enabling CGI-AMS to articulate a clear go-to-market strategy for each of its core industries (the what). The result was less focus on pure one-off customer consulting and more focus on their core competencies and industry solutions where they already had deep expertise and a solid track record of performance. This was more profitable and lower risk. In the “how” leg of the stool, they adopted new processes for account and opportunity management. They also redefined roles and responsibilities for the sales teams to reduce the “swarming” approach used in the past. To make this new sales culture “stick,” Morea said she had to get leadership to embrace the new vision initially on faith and ultimately through experience. “Those were the ‘noble’ means,” she said.“The ‘less noble’ means included money. We had a fund that we set aside that included discretionary money for our most important opportunities.To get the money, they had to learn and use the process and the tools.” “We wanted to inspire people,” Morea said.“To sell the vision, it was really important for us to find some quick wins using these principles. It’s amazing what a little bit of success can do to convince the skeptics.” “I figured 10 to 15 percent would be early believers and sign up.Then, another 60 to 70 percent would follow a win. But there will be 10 to 20 percent who never sign on, no matter what,” she said. “The 60 percent majority is made up of good people. Once good people see that you have good tools, they will behave rationally. Good people understand that good tools will help them execute.You’re never going to get everyone.” Performance reviews—ensuring that sales managers were reinforcing the new culture and coaching—were introduced, and an internal coach, available at large, was added. The internal coach’s job was also to monitor the forecast for sales phase changes and to make sure strategy sessions were being conducted at the right time. The new sales culture is a success. And the company recently closed a $350 million government contract. The first step is identifying the gaps in your performance potential and execution. On a scale of 1 to 3, rate the following pains as they apply to your organization:
A vision is important, but the last thing that we suggest you do is organize a committee and spend several months thrashing out a vision statement. It shouldn't be that hard. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford, in his excellent book, Bill Hybels, who has grown Willow Creek church into a megachurch near Chicago, says that "a vision is a picture of the future that produces passion."[2] When we work with sales organizations in this area, we simply ask them for descriptive statements about their organization as it is now and how they would like it to be three years from now from the point of view of (1) customers, (2) competitors, and (3) the sales force. After talking about each one and eliminating some, the usual revelation is "Why not?" Good visions are usually achievable, but a stretch. The next step, of course, is to translate this into goals, objectives (which are measurable and date-driven), strategies, and, finally, action items and owners. The greatest vision statement of the last century was John Kennedy's declaration in 1961 that the United States would have a man on the moon and back by the end of the decade. It happened on July 20, 1969. The purpose of this book is to help you create a vision of what you could achieve by sharing best practices of other great sales organizations, as well as the process for making it happen and a process for making it stick. Every sales executive is playing a game of "beat the clock." One of the important variables in your approach to improving sales effectiveness is the relationship between the sales leader and the CEO. If the board and the CEO recognize the depth of the sales problem, and you are a new hire, you need to set expectations that this will take one to two years for a full transformation. If you can't get that commitment, don't take the job. Of course, you will have to show progress along the way. And you can't go in and fire everyone immediately. You have to fight the battleship while you fix it. But if you don't have a firm resolution and change things proactively, the organization can absorb you like a bullet into butter. If, on the other hand, your company is a public company and the CEO is managing the company to the analysts' expectations, or if venture capitalists are involved, don't believe for a minute that you can avoid showing quarter-to-quarter improvement. When financial strategy drives sales strategy, the result is usually short-term thinking and sub-optimization of full sales potential. This is a reality of life. When we were selling to PeopleSoft in 1998, we met with their executive team just as a period of rapid growth was beginning to slow. While the meeting was about sales effectiveness, we gave them this warning: " Next year, you'll grow by 50 percent, but your stock price will fall in half. And there is nothing that you are willing to do about it." They were stunned. The reason we could make such a bold prediction is that we had seen it many times in the software industry. The previous year, they had grown by 80 percent, but competition had finally matched their technological advantage in their core products. But PeopleSoft had planned on an 80 percent growth again and had planned expenses accordingly. So, as predicted, sales grew 50 percent, expenses grew 80 percent, profits took a hit; the stock fell hard. Most companies would die to have a 50 percent growth in the coming year and would make a lot of money. But who in an organization is going to go in and tell the analysts that their growth is going to slow next year? The hit on the stock price was twice as hard as a surprise than it would have been earlier. Letting the analysts set your sales goals is a prescription for new horizons on your career path. The executives we've worked with who have made dramatic improvements in sales effectiveness are able to prioritize the gaps in their performance and balance short-term quick-win initiatives with longer-term infrastructure changes. Although sales improvement initiatives obviously can be conducted simultaneously rather than sequentially, in general, they approached their priorities in the same order. You may choose priorities differently, but we share the experiences here of three successful executives who have achieved significant sales improvements as a benchmark. Terry Turner is a veteran sales executive who has experienced changes in buying habits in three different industries—manufacturing, supply chain, and now, education. He is currently senior vice president, sales and marketing, for Harcourt Assessments. «This was my third time transforming a sales force and each one has been different. At Harcourt, the way the buyers buy in this industry had changed, but the sales force had not. Sales had been taking orders for existing clients on educational assessment tests and developing and informing clients about new products. The industry changed from sales to local school districts to highly competitive test adoptions for entire states — a much more complex sale for higher stakes. In the initial assessment, we knew we needed to change the selling culture from product-driven to sales to customer-experience-driven. We were more focused on protecting turf and guarding silos than on winning or building relationships with clients. As Jim Collins says in I replaced most of the front-line managers with people I knew from my network who shared the same values, sales process, and hiring profile. People who are cynical or indifferent about change will kill your efforts with passive resistance or poor attitudes. The second step was to change our sales messaging to more accurately convey our strengths, benefits, and differentiators rather than features. The third step was to redefine our sales process to give everyone a playbook defining what a good sales effort looked like and what questions, information, and action items were needed in each phase. This training gave the reps a roadmap for managing a complex sale and the managers a common set of expectations for selling and coaching. We also changed our team structure, roles, and responsibilities. We are blessed with outstanding products and people who have a great deal of expertise in educational testing. Many of them came from client backgrounds. Teaming them with professional salespeople to lead the team has allowed us to leverage our talents by getting the right people owning the right parts of the sales cycle. The fourth step was to start redefining and reinforcing a new culture for selling and servicing customers and building relationships. This impacted every division of the company, so I needed upper management's support to handle the inevitable power struggles. We also turned over around a dozen reps out of about a hundred who were unable to change or grow. In the next year, we will focus on improving the foundation selling skills of discovery, linkage, presentation, and objection handling. Now that we have the right people and the right strategies, next follows execution-level skills. I initially set management expectations that it would take over a year to realize any progress. I gained influence and bought time with upper management when they saw the types of sales managers I brought in. Then, after the sales process training, we won several large deals where the new process was acknowledged to have played a significant part. We are now focusing on the necessary coaching and metrics to make the process permanent.» Another example of how managers set priorities to achieve dramatic sales improvement comes from Lexmark: When I spoke at Lexmark in 2002, I could tell that Bruce Dahlgren, the vice president and general manager, understood sales performance and how to make it happen. He knew that the strategy of building an installed base of printers—and their related supplies—needed to be complemented by unique service and solution offerings. Simply put, they had to build more value. Lexmark was previously the IBM printer division and had remnants of that culture. But Dahlgren changed the way the company sold with new people, new process, and new positioning for his solutions. And he reinforced it with coaching. Rather than simply moving printers and ink, Dahlgren’s team focused on the larger strategy of “Print, Move, and Manage,” a spectrum of industry-focused solutions aimed at helping Lexmark customers address real printing and document process challenges. That meant more consultative selling and new roles for some people. “Turnover had been at around 25 percent before, and we kept it there for a couple of years,” said Dahlgren.“But we were much more purposeful at bringing in a new profile of salesperson able and willing to sell solutions. Now the turnover rate is down to 3 percent.” With the right people and processes in place, Dahlgren turned the attention of his management team to account strategy development and coaching. “My managers had a challenge merely finding the time to coach,” Dahlgren said.“So I looked at their administrative workload and eliminated several reporting activities that weren’t really needed.We had to convince finance, but it freed up the time.The other thing we did was to designate every Monday as a coaching day in the office. Each manager reviews each major account and the action items for the week compared to our plan. We also wanted to send the message that I actually read the forecasts and account plans. This let them know that our focus on coaching was not some half-hearted initiative they could ignore and hope would go away.” “At Manhattan Associates, one of the things we’ve done right is that we have always had a mantra that ‘everyone is in sales.’ It’s in our DNA—to do whatever it takes to best address the needs of our customers and to continue to deliver ongoing value,” “When I began this job, other than cultivating a sales culture, my focus was probably on people first.We are a culture that believes in very strong processes, methodology, and a common language. Now, we focus on business execution.We focus on lots of things in the beginning and middle of a sales cycle that you have to execute well in order to put you in a winning position on ‘game day.’ We do manage the sales process with technology. It’s important, but not one of our top three items. Instead, we focus first on our people and the domain expertise they provide to our customers; second is the value proposition our solutions provide; and third we focus on our management people who are here to ensure successful execution. Then we focus on leveraging technology to further improve and extend the capabilities and deliver for the above. For example, before we built our sales and marketing and implementation tools, we focused on raising our value proposition to a more strategic level. You have to ask the right questions first and really understand the business problems trying to be solved. Once you get all of the questions, the tools are the easy part. Before, the sales reps just had to get the solution consultant to the presentation. Now the sales reps do so much more in the discovery phase—leading up to the presentation— to ensure that everyone is ready for game day. The scope of our offering is such now that one solution consultant can’t be expected to bring 100 percent of the domain expertise to the table single-handedly. So much of the strategy for success and overall coordination happens before the demo. As far as coaching is concerned, we prioritize it. Most of our people have the expertise and can coach a deal, but doing it day in and day out has to be part of your culture.” 1. Assessment—Where Are We Now? There are two approaches to assessing benchmark strengths and weaknesses. You can use experience and intuition, or you can do a more formal assessment. Or, depending on the amount of time you have, you can do both. Some weaknesses are immediately obvious to a new manager, and you can begin taking action right away. Sometimes, however, when you have been there a while, the real weaknesses in a sales force may be harder to detect. I’ve been in evaluations where it was obvious that the management had a gut feel for what they needed but really didn’t know because they hadn’t measured it. This book should help you with an overall organizational assessment scorecard. Assessing individual sales rep talent can’t really be done effectively until you have defined your ideal sales cycle and the skills and competencies that this demands. The quickest and most effective way to start is with a win/loss analysis by an outside third party. This will give you the quickest feedback on why you are winning or losing and where your fastest returns for improvement lie. All this can and should be completed within 90 days to determine your initial priorities. 2. Start with People—Managers First To put it simply and starkly: If you don’t get the people process right, you will never fulfill the promise of your business. Front-line sales managers are the key to any sales initiative. Most managers fail because they stick with poor performers too long. Without sales managers who share your vision and values and who can and will reinforce your process, new hires will be like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Most successful sales executives have a following of loyal lieutenants whom they can call on in these situations. For those who have burned their bridges, this takes a while longer. Once front-line managers have defined a new hiring profile for reps, they can begin upgrading the talent, replacing those who can’t or won’t change. 3. Next Is Your Sales Process If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. 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 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. |
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