One anecdote that sums it up best involves a CIO that I’ll call Jim Dayton for anonymity purposes. Jim worked for a F100 company that had lots of projects that could leverage the software that my company was selling. I inherited a legacy sales rep as part of a promotion that I received to build a North American Strategic Named Accounts team. The legacy sales rep that had been working the account for two years and had no revenue to show for it yet. I sat down with him and asked what was going on with the account, what progress had he made and what was his plan of attack. He had held countless meetings with various low level people and done several proof of concepts without yielding any revenue. His plan of attack was to get to Jim Dayton and take Jim to an expensive steak restaurant and order lots of costly wine. I inquired as to how he had arrived at this as his strategy for penetrating this rich account and he replied that this was the intelligence that he had gathered from the various low level folks that he had worked with at the account over the last two years. The irony is that this “strategy” was now being bandied about in our company as we need to get the steak dinner with Jim Dayton, as if that would result in a seven figure deal.

Needless to say, this legacy sales rep lasted 90 days on my strategic named accounts sales team because he was anything but strategic. I then assigned the account to one of my strategic sales reps who was an excellent strategic enterprise sales rep. His favorite expression when discussing this account and opportunity was “gathering up all of the bits and pieces” to develop an effective sales strategy. And that is exactly what he did. He dug deep and learned what their business pain was and how our technology could provide unique value. He earned the right to get sponsored higher up in the organization by bringing strategic insight to the business discussions. And it culminated in a $1M+ initial deal after about 6 months of work, with a lot more follow on business. The punch line of the entire thing was when he called me and was laughing hysterically. He went on to share with me that he just had dinner with Jim Dayton and that Jim doesn’t drink wine or eat steak anymore after having a heart attack two years earlier. I’m certainly not making light of the heart attack, rather just how far off base the legacy sales rep was. You want to talk about being disconnected from reality, how embarrassing!

Earn credibility by adding business insight to customers and their senior execs, I trust that you’ll find that to be a much more effective way of selling in 2009 and beyond rather than trying to take people out to expensive dinners:-)

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Strategic selling is like a complex symphony. And the conductor of the orchestra is the sales rep. There are various inflection points in a complex sales cycle and good sales reps understand when they need introduce the appropriate “instruments” within their arsenal (i.e., corporate resources, tools, customer references, etc.) to build to the crescendo and close the deal. Conversely, bad sales reps aren’t able to discern those inflection points, tend to have little to no control over the sales process and fire their proverbial “silver bullets” in to the air hoping it strikes at the heart of the vampire. In an enterprise sales environment, you need to earn the right to meet with power. Continuing on the silver bullet metaphor vein, the vampires are the senior execs responsible for making the decision and controlling the budget. You shouldn’t bring senior or strategic resources from your company in early stage sales meetings or before the right people are in attendance.

Back to the symphony metaphor:-) Good conductors “move” through the musical composition engaging the audience and adeptly building to a crescendo. This is analogous to good sales people driving through the sales process building value, differentiating their solutions and ultimately consummating in a closed deal that was a true collaboration with the customer.

When you have sales people that continually tend to get stuck in stages of the sales process and try to throw resources at the problem (i.e., wasting your silver bullets) in hopes of resolving it; it is a clear signal that you have a sales rep that isn’t capable of managing/driving a strategic sales process.

The picture is the late great conductor of the Boston Pops, Arthur Fiedler. I grew up in Massachusetts and went to college in Boston, so I have fond memories of Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops at the Half Shell every July 4th in Boston.

Here are some helpful strategic sales ‘conductor’ tips:

• Like a great conductor, never try to rush, skip pieces of or cut corners with the ‘concerto’ (sales process)
• Engage your audience and tailor your performance to appeal to different members of the ‘audience’ (buying committee)
• There are parts of the ‘concerto’ (sales process) where it’s okay to be playful and other parts where you need to be serious
• Always focus on where you are in the ‘concerto’ (sales process) and how you need to effectively transition to the next stage
• Make sure the ‘audience’ (buying committee) is aligned with you through your ‘concerto’ (sales process)
• Building to a ‘crescendo’ (value) and ‘closing’ with authority is how you receive a ‘standing ovation’ (successful sale):-)

The post first appeared on True Sales Results.