The punch line to this story is that management claimed to understand what discovery was and how important it was to an effective enterprise sales process, yet they consistently demonstrated through their actions that they thought discovery was really thorough qualification. I’m really passionate about discovery because in 20+ years of selling to the enterprise, I have never met a single top sales performer that didn’t fundamentally understand that effective discovery is the cornerstone of any successful sales engagement. I’ve been preaching the importance of a sound sales discovery process for years and have conducted numerous training sessions with sales teams to help mentor this area that is sorely lacking.

.

The post Discovery-the missing piece of the enterprise sales puzzle first appeared on True Sales Results.

The best sales people view their sales efforts as a strategic investment of their time and resources-they are “CEOs” of their territory.  As such, they carefully and constantly assess where they will receive the best return on their investment. Expressed differently, they are constantly thinking about how they can maximize their earnings. The best way to do that is to develop an ideal customer profile that you qualify hard against. But it goes much deeper than the initial qualification step as great sales people can objectively ask themselves at the end of each step in the sales process “a go or no go question”. Top sales reps use their discernment skills to determine through initial qualification, discovery, and negotiation process whether it is a winnable deal and a deal that you want to win. They will walk from a sales opportunity that is not a good fit or not worth the resource investment.

Here is a real world anecdote that illustrates the importance of discernment. A small software start-up that I was working with was involved in a highly competitive and lengthy enterprise sales cycle with a F100 company. One of the key inflection points in the sales cycle was a multiple day off site strategy session with the prospective customer, which we were invited to participate in as one of the vendor finalists. The first day was filled with marathon technical sessions and a conference room that rotated with up to 25 people from the prospective customer’s end with different agendas. We were in the proverbial “hot seat” all day with rapid fire questions and various tests that we had to satisfy. At th eend of the day, we went to a nice dinner with the core project team including the key infleuncers and decision makers. We strategically placed our team around the table so that we paired up with our peers. I was siting next to the decision maker and the project manager along with our CEO. It was a wonderful meal accompanied by some delicious wine which both the decision maker and I were quite fond of. The dinner conversation tone was friendlier the fire drill session tone that we were in all day and afforded us the opportunity to bond and ask some questions with their guard down.

At the end of this marathon day, our team regrouped in the hotel for a debriefing on how the day had transpired. Our CEO took the lead and effectively said that the deal was lost and gave the rationale behind that assertion. My sales rep who was verbally liberated courtesy of the wine and exhaustion of the 15-16 hour day at this point, asked “What meeting were you in today?” Our entire team was exhausted and thankfully that question made us all laugh. We went on to share our interpretations of how the meeting went and the signals that we received during the day and dinner. We were able to convince the CEO that there was strong evidence that supported us being in a strong competitive position based on the feedback from the prospective customer and we decided to stay engaged in the evaluation. We went on to win a $1M+ deal with this customer and it was a seminal moment in the company’s history. The irony was that if the decision was purely left to the CEO (with poor sales discernment skills), the deal would have been lost as we would have cut bait.

The post Why is discernment important in sales? first appeared on True Sales Results.

1. Marketing is measured and rewarded on leads not revenue- How can you have alignment if the two groups are focused on different goals and results? The simple answer is that you can’t. The beauty of measuring and aligning marketing and sales purely on revenue is that you save a ton of time that is constantly spent debating the definition of a lead:-) At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to sales people if marketing is generating 1000 leads or 1 lead. What does matter is that marketing is helping to provide the necessary air cover and finding the right leads that turn in to real opportunities which get converted in to sales.
2. Marketing is not held accountable- Many years back, I was a passionate sales director meeting for cocktails with an equally passionate marketing director that I worked with. He is one of the most exceptional marketing professionals that I have had the pleasure of working with. As a general rule, when I find people that are exceptional at what they do I tend to find ways to work with them again as evidenced by the fact that the aforementioned marketing gentleman and I have worked together at 4 different companies thus far and counting! During our cocktail conversation, he expressed tremendous frustration at not feeling appreciated by sales. He did work very hard at trying to understand what our needs were and help support them through his team and their efforts. He actually thinks very much like a sales person which is one of the reasons why he is so good at what he does. I explained that one of the things that always separated sales and marketing was the level of accountability that sales people were held to versus marketing. Sales people live in a quantifiable black and white world whereas marketing tends to live in shades of gray. Sales people have to meet and exceed certain revenue thresholds or they lose their jobs. What is the average tenure of a VP of Sales versus a VP of Marketing? How long are mediocre people tolerated in sales for? Marketing tends to have squishy goals with lots of caveats. Sales isn’t afforded that luxury. One of the best things that a company can do to foster better alignment between sales & marketing is to establish clear goals for marketing and hold them accountable. I trust that you will find sales “appreciating” marketing a lot more when they are measured and held accountable in the same ways that sales is.
3. Marketing does not spend enough time out in the field- One of the biggest frustrations for sales people is that they are on the front lines every day talking to prospects and customers. Sales people know what their competitors are doing that are winning deals. They know what the customers want in products and solutions that are missing in their products and costing them deals. Sales people know what the general market perception is of their company and whether they  are known or not. Marketing needs to proactively go out in the field with sales and learn firsthand how they can better help support sales to sell more effectively. Most marketing folks tend to be viewed as “ivory tower” types that very rarely leave the office  and spend quality time in the field in front of customers. To compound matters, these are the same types that constantly represent that they know what the customer wants or what the competitor’s tactics are. That information is typically outdated and undermines their credibility with sales.

The post Top 3 deadly sins in dysfunctional sales & marketing relationships first appeared on True Sales Results.

At the end of the day, I submit that all employees and functional areas should be given quantifiable sales goals and rewarded primarily on that basis. If the company fails to meet their sales goals, how can you justify awarding bonuses based on other goals? That perpetuates the cultural bias that sales is solely responsible for revenue generation and the only group held accountable.  The most successful companies have that hard wired sales DNA where everyone in the company is marching as one cohesive sales machine. What are some signals to look for that demonstrate your company sales culture? Ask employees from different functional areas other than sales what the quarterly, annual and year to date (YTD) sales goals and results are? What percentage of bonuses are based on sales performance across the different functional areas in your company? How does your functional area and do you support sales?

The answers are very telling and will clearly show if you have a unified sales culture or not. Assigning sales quotas across the company and holding people accountable for meeting those quotas is paramount to succeeding in the competitive business world that we live in today.

The post Have quota, will be held accountable first appeared on True Sales Results.

How many sales teams assess their sales people’s ability to close? I’ve seen countless examples of when too many deals “slip” from one quarter end to the next and the company doesn’t make their number, then the company institutes a “closure plan” process. The closure plan process is where sales reps are tasked with gathering details about the decision maker(s), timeline, business drivers related to the deal, etc. in hopes of having a better handle on when the deal will close and preventing more deal “slips”. The problem with this approach is that they are treating the symptoms but not the underlying ailment of having sales reps that aren’t good closers. Good closers are easy to spot and as a long time VP of Sales they are quite simply your favorite sales people because they make your life so much easier:-) Natural sales closers view closing as the most important part of the sales process and something that you start seeding in your initial conversations with the prospect. Closers are like great conductors of a symphony that know when to bring in the proper instruments and how to effectively leverage all of the instruments available to them to build to a crescendo that rouses the audience to a standing ovation at it’s conclusion. Great closers have conviction and intestinal fortitude. Their time and solution is valuable, as such you will never find them groveling with prospects. They insist on building mutually respectful relationships with customers. Closers are experts at getting incremental commitment throughout the sales process. Closers aren’t afraid of having conversations about price and terms; in fact they invite that dialog and are completely at ease with objections around price or terms. Not surprisingly, great closers are great forecasters and are never blind sided at the end of a quarter or fiscal year.

I once developed a guaranteed results program to assist an enterprise software start-up selling to F1000 companies. Essentially, the program was our sales process reverse engineered in to an evaluation plan from the prospective customer’s end complete with mutual resource commitments and milestone dates. The plan was aggressive as we needed to close a “proof point” F1000 customer in less than 120 days or we would run out of money. The program called for a 90-day evaluation engagement from both parties and either party was able to walk away at the end of each step in the process if they did not feel that the reality was living up to the promise. We successfully engaged with a F100 company and closed a mid six-figure deal in 89 days. They actually apologized for being a day or two late according to the program milestone dates during the sales process. This deal was the proof point that we needed to finally close over $8M in funding during one of the most challenging VC fund raising climates of all times. Closing is valuable!

The post Calling all Closers first appeared on True Sales Results.

The post Enhance your telesales calling script-great value! first appeared on True Sales Results.

* lead * qualified prospect (meets BANT criteria) * qualified sales opportunity (engaged in actual sales process) * closed new customer or revenue

There are conversion ratios for each stage of the funnel. It varies for every product or service, new company versus established company but an example would be the following:

* 10% of leads convert to qualified prospects * 25% of qualified prospects convert to qualified sales opportunities * 50% of qualified sales opportunities convert to closed customers/revenue * you can even have a conversion ratio for additional sales to existing customers as a metric

Once you have accurate sales conversion ratios, you need to know the average sales cycle length and the average deal size. Marketing should be responsible for the lead gen conversion ratios above the sales funnel; they should be able to predict based on historical evidence the leads that they can generate from their various lead gen campaign investments. Assuming you have all of those metrics and they are accurate, you can plan what lead gen campaigns, how much of the mix and when you need to do them to produce enough qualified sales opps to produce the revenue the company needs.

When sales funnels work and are accurate, they are a thing of beauty. I was VP of Sales at an established company and 6 weeks in to every quarter we could look at our sales funnel and know that we would close 28-30% of the qualified sales opportunities. The good news is that our forecasting was very accurate. The bad news is that by the time we could accurately predict what that quarter’s revenue would be (i.e., 6 weeks in to the quarter), it was too late to back up and generate new leads and allow enough time for the sales cycle to make up any revenue shortfalls. That leads to end of the quarter discounting and trying to commit heroic sales acts, such as closing a deal a quarter or two before it would naturally close without the customer having the same sense of urgency.

The problem is for a start up there isn’t historical data to base your sales funnel on. The other challenge is that the market tends to be very dynamic so what worked last year may not work this year or works at a very different conversion ratio.  Has the definition for a sales funnel changed? I would submit that the high level definition for a sales funnel hasn’t changed but that the dynamics of a sales funnel has changed dramatically. Specifically, you need to figure out how to engage prospects effectively much higher up in the cloud and nurture them. It is a huge sales & marketing problem/challenge these days. As much as sales would like to believe that it’s a marketing problem, it is a joint sales & marketing problem.

Well, who had the audacity to change the sales funnel? The answer is the market did☺ Buyers are now researching, evaluating and making decisions far differently than ever before. They can easily avoid sales interaction and they do. With the proliferation of free content everywhere (web 2.0) that allows you to interact and get information without having to speak to a live person, companies and buyers are doing exactly that. This new dynamic is further complicated by the fact that most companies do a poor job of messaging, differentiating and conveying their value proposition. Due to this, it only motivates the buyer to try to avoid engagement with sales reps at all costs because they are not perceived as adding value. Rather, the sales reps are viewed as adding confusion and pressure to their evaluation and decision so the buyer will try to avoid them at all costs. Also, most companies don’t do a good job of developing valuable content and then leveraging it to engage with the prospect.

How do you engage your customers in the blogs/communities/forums where they spend their time and they trust? How do you reach and engage the influencers so they can make others aware? It’s all about building credibility, trust and domain expertise. That’s why the new world sales funnel needs to extend upward in to the cloud (blogs/forums/communities) where you start to educate, make aware and engage prospects. This is very different from the old world sales funnel where you started paying attention at the prospect/lead or inquiry stage. Sales conversion ratios have fallen for the 5th consecutive year according to CSO Insights 2010 survey. Are you still doing things the same old way and expecting different results? Start engaging in the new sales funnel world primarily through better content and sales engagement processes and watch your sales conversion ratios improve dramatically.

The post Who changed the sales funnel? first appeared on True Sales Results.

Context doesn’t exist in a spreadsheet cell. It doesn’t appear as a footnote in a Salesforce.com report. Context is nowhere to be found in benchmarking metrics. Yet context is the most vital factor in every formula, because without it, you are operating in a vacuum. You are making decisions devoid of the most important dimension, which is what I refer to as ‘business reality’.

Harkening back to my college days, I was struck by what my Statistics II professor would always tell us; “You can make statistics say whatever you want them to. You can make statistics lie.” I recall being very confused by that notion and approached him after class to ask him what he meant by that. He told me that all statistics are predicated on samples. And that its quite easy and common practice to manipulate the samples to support whatever assertion you are trying to prove with metrics that do. He further explained that statistics and metrics are used and cited as the basis for making virtually every decision made in the world, yet no one bothers to question the samples used to generate the statistics in the first place. He ended the lesson by saying that the vast majority of statistics are not accurate because the samples used were not statistically relevant in the first place.

This lesson and business reality was further driven home with me when I worked for a large, prestigious market research firm in Boston during college. I ended up becoming a manager and got involved in the creation of surveys and focus groups that we would use on behalf of our clients. All of the market research was supposed to be objective and accurate. Our clients would pay us big bucks to conduct the market research and they were mostly blue chip Fortune 1000 companies that we were working with. Here’s the dirty little secret, we tailored the surveys to elicit the responses that were most favorable to our client. We doctored the results by ‘selectively’ including in the survey results the responses that our clients were looking for, rather than all of the survey results that would skew the outcome and possibly show our client in an unfavorable light with their customers or markets. This was done intentionally and as I learned, completely common in the industry.

It would be analogous to looking for a doctor that would only tell you that you look great, don’t need to lose any weight and shouldn’t cut back on your caffeine or alcohol consumption. Everyone laughs at how absurd that sounds but most people prefer the Hollywood ending rather than the reality of the world. It’s no different in the business world. I’ve been in sales and sales management for over 20 years in my career and it never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t look for the context or meaning behind the data and metrics. Most seasoned sales managers simply have a visceral sense when the data or metrics are wrong and most tend to be proactive about getting the context before citing or using any data for decision purposes.

How do you get the context behind the data? You ask smart questions to the people that are creating the data in your systems of record like Salesforce.com. Is ‘all’ the data being entered in to your systems of record? Is it being entered objectively or subjectively? Are there things happening in the real world that can explain vitally important trends that simply aren’t captured in the data or metrics? Are the system of record rules of engagement well understood by everyone that uses them and are they applied consistently? My experience shows that most sales teams and companies do a poor job in this area, and yet they are the first ones to cite reports, metrics, stats and reference spreadsheet formulas as to how their business is doing.

It’s like the old United Airlines commercial where the company has lost touch with their market and customers. The grey haired CEO passes out airline tickets to all of the execs around the conference room table and tells them to get out there and visit their customers. Don’t lose touch with the real world; you need to talk to your field sales people and customers to find out what is really happening out there. Don’t get lost in spreadsheets and metrics because without the context or meaning behind the data, you most likely have flawed assumptions that you are basing your business decisions on.

We help companies improve their sales conversion rates or effectiveness. As part of any audit engagement, we look at both the data and the context behind the data. Typically, we glean far more insight from conversations with sales reps and customers then we do from the Salesforce.com reports or spreadsheets. In fact, we commonly find embarrassing flaws in the metrics that are being used to make the business decisions through the context. So get out there and find the context behind the data, you’ll be making informed decisions when you do!

The post The Context Behind the Data first appeared on True Sales Results.

The post B2B Sales Cycle Insight first appeared on True Sales Results.

Every company and sales manager wants to “clone” certain sales reps-think of the 80/20 rule. How can we improve the other 80% of our sales reps sales contributions so that we aren’t always relying on the 20% of your top producers to generate 80% of sales results?

The issue becomes more pronounced as your sales team rapidly expands and you need to “hit on all cylinders” to achieve your overall sales goals as a company. You simply cannot sustain high sales growth rates if you are stuck in the 80/20 sales productivity mode.

Sales playbooks are a tool that can be leveraged to help improve the overall sales productivity and consistency of your results. One clear symptom of being stuck in the 80/20 sales productivity mode is the roller coaster quarterly results where you exceed quota and then miss quota the following quarter. This is largely attributable to having only the top producers close in the good quarters and then effectively rebuild their pipeline the next quarter without other sales reps picking up the slack.

By interviewing a good cross section of your top performing sales reps as well as your bottom performing sales reps, you can develop a better understanding of what is working well in your sales engagements, what isn’t working well and why. Combining that with general best practices allows you to craft a road map for sales success, also known as a sales playbook.

In many cases, it is just as important to incorporate what you should not do as sales rep in to a sales playbook as what you should do. That could include many things like whom you should be engaged with and selling to as opposed to whom you shouldn’t be selling to or investing time with.

What sales tools should you use and when in the sales process? How do you orchestrate the sales process to build to a crescendo and the optimal outcome? What resources should you leverage and when in the sales process?

Sales playbooks always should include properly setting expectations and managing them with the prospective customer, also known as earning the right to the next step in the sales process and ultimately earning their business.

Sales playbooks should always include a go/no go stage at the end of each step in the sales process along with criteria that assist in making informed decisions about whether to continue to invest your companies resources in the opportunity. Most sales reps never consider walking away from a sales opportunity even though the odds for success are slim or if it’s simply not a good deal to win.

Strategic sales reps always are assessing whether to continue investing their resources or not-qualifying is ongoing not a discrete step at the very beginning of the sales process. The discovery stage of developing a sales playbook is always enlightening in terms of what is really happening in the field; good, bad and indifferent. It also highlights sales tools, process steps and refinements in the sales process that are needed to sell more effectively. Lastly, it’s something that should be revisited and updated every 6 months as the market evolves and demands improvements in the way that you sell.

The post The Sales Playbook: Roadmap for Success first appeared on True Sales Results.