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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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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Personally, I find myself invigorated thinking about the new decade and all the ways that I can improve myself professionally and personally. I have decided to do more public speaking and professional travel in 2010 and beyond. Public speaking is something that I always enjoyed and thrived in doing. In this “virtual age”, I have allowed my professional travel and speaking/presentation opportunities to dwindle too much. Nothing can compare to the positive impression that you can make in a face-to-face environment.

I have started writing more through my blog and creating white papers. Sharing personal and professional experiences is something that generates goodwill and has lots of positive karma associated with it. I’m always interested in learning new and better ways to do things.

I’m seriously considering some executive extension programs as a way to collaborate and learn through other professionals with over 20 years experience in their respective fields. It seems a tad ironic that we are constantly thinking about upgrading and adding new programs for our cell phones, our computers, our TVs, audio devices, etc. but don’t do give the same basic consideration to ourselves.

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