Don't have a customer org chart? You lose!

An org chart is invaluable in a complex sale.  When I was coaching sales teams, I refused to help a rep with a deal unless they had an up-to-date org chart.  If a rep can’t get someone in the account to give them an org chart, they should be able to build one with help from their contacts.

Org charts are so important that several sales training companies require them as a critical component of their opportunity and account management plans.  More advanced opportunity and account plans (and supporting software) allow you to overlay a political map on top of the org chart so you see the relationships between influencers, decision makers, your supporters and your enemies.  (By the way, if you’re in a complex selling environment and your team isn’t taking the political landscape within the customers’ organizations into account when developing a strategy to win, you need help.  Yesterday.)

In a comment to Brian Lambert’s post on the Sales 2.0 Network blog, Walter McConnell reminded me about Forbes Corporate Org Chart Wiki.  Try it.  Think about what impact org charts and the skills to understand them would have on the outcome of your team’s sales opportunities.

Karl Goldfield contacted me the other day.  illumio flagged one of his posts, so I read it. 

In this post, Karl goes on a rant about technology and sales training.  Here is my favorite part of his (unedited) challenge to sales trainers:

If you are not tweeting your blog posts and sending newsletters to keep your mind trust strong in the frontal lobe of your prospects and customers; if you are not joining groups and connecting on Linked In or E-cademy, Facebook or Plaxo; if you are not using Jigsaw or Salesconx to find your the top level prospects; if you do not set up google alerts and research news aggregators for trigger events; if you do not use Genius or Leadlander, then Landslide or another Process driven tool to manage your lead cultivation, what on earth are you doing? I don’t mean to get on a rant here (Thank you Dennis), but it is 2008 and if you are not using VOIP and SAAS, or this whole paragraph is in a new language, get off the soap box and go back to the classroom. It is time to learn a new game, then teach others. Go, now, get moving!

I love it!  Karl is absolutely right.  Sales trainers who procrastinate, waiting for their clients to drag them into the Sales 2.0 era are going to lose any competitive edge they might currently have.  Sales trainers need to understand, embrace, and integrate sales-enablement and learning technologies into their IP (intellectual property) and the delivery of their IP. 

Are we headed into the TheEndOf-Zoic era?

I’m still loving my Kindle. 

Last night I was reading a fantastic book: Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.  (Hopefully my blog posts and columns will be more enjoyable for you to read as a result.)  A good friend of mine had recommended that I read Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World.  So I went browsing through the Kindle bookstore from my Kindle (regretfully this feature has caused me to slide into instant gratification mode—something I have spent a fair amount of time and energy getting out of), and came upon a number of books whose titles all began with “The End of.”

Is this a sign that we are entering a new era?  Perhaps now, after the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and the present Cenozoic era, we’re entering the TheEndOf-Zoic era.  You want evidence?  Here it is, in the form of just a few of the many book titles I found on Amazon with a quick search: 

• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
• The End of Food
• The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
• The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
• The End of Days: Armageddon and Prophecies of the Return (The Earth Chronicles)
• The End of Nature
• The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists
• The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
• The End of History and the Last Man
• The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World
• The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant)
• The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor
• The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever
• The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise

So I’ll ask you again, are we entering a new era? 

Maybe I need an end-oscopy to find out.

I wish I could remember where I first heard, “salespeople will do what you pay them to do.”  That’s a timeless truth about selling if there ever was one.

During the research process for an article I’m writing, I came across a piece written by Maureen Hrehocik entitled, “Secrets of a Successful Comp Plan.”  Only now do I remember having been interviewed for the article.  I also remember passing the name of my colleague Steve Grossman, a partner with Mercer, along to Maureen.  He is quoted in the article as well.  He’s an expert in compensation, among other areas relating to sales effectiveness.

I am bringing this up because compensation is another dysfunctional area within many companies.  During the past quarter, I’ve been engaged with several clients where “errors of commission” are preventing them from achieving their team and corporate goals. 

There are a number of symptoms of a dysfunctional comp plan.  Here are two:

• Salespeople aren’t selling what the company needs to achieve its corporate goals and objectives.  The best example: a company has a goal of bringing on a 150 new accounts during the year and the salespeople are mostly selling add-ons to existing customers.  On the present course the company will fall far short of the objective. 
• Salespeople are distracted and confused because the products or services they are being paid to sell don’t match their customers’ requirements.  Deals are lost and when deals are won, new customers are dissatisfied.

One important point: Having the right people in sales jobs comes first.  The best comp plan in the world doesn’t mean much when the salespeople it is intended to motivate don’t have the requisite skills and traits to succeed. 

Rather than repeat what I and others said in the article, I recommend that you read it.

Help me through this logic, please.

Ann All (with ITBusinessEdge.com) posted an entry in her blog today about the optimistic outlook for CRM sales.  She wrote, “Datamonitor, KensingtonHouse, CSO Insights and Gartner are among the companies with an optimistic outlook on CRM.”  She then added AMR Research to the list.

I won’t dispute the prediction. 

What I will say is that progress is painfully slow with respect to CRM meeting the requirements of salespeople.  Help me through this logic, please: 

• CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, right? 
• Sales, Customer Care, Marketing and Finance managers all need their reports from the CRM system to do their jobs managing customers, right?
• Who inputs a fair amount, if not most of the data?  Salespeople, right? 
• They have to be prodded, threatened, incentivized and shamed into keeping their information up to date, right?
• Follow me on this, please.  If the salespeople don’t sell anything, there aren’t going to be customers and customer relationships for a CRM system to manage, right?
• So, why isn’t there anything in it for the salespeople?  In fact, don’t most of your salespeople use your company’s CRM system for little more than basic contact management? 
• So why does the task of keeping the CRM system up to date at the expense of their selling time make any sense at all? 
• Why don’t the CRM companies design systems help salespeople sell more?  Because salespeople aren’t their customers.  Management is.

What we need is more companies like White Springs and The TAS Group that understand the size and the impact of the CRM problem and are providing solutions.  And we also need CRM companies to start adding capabilities that will contribute to, rather than hinder, a sales person’s ability to sell.  When that happens I guess we should call it CRM 2.0.

Will the seasoned CEO buy from the new salesrep? Are you willing to bet your job on the answer?

I came upon a terrific blog post a while back written by Martice Nicks.  That post followed an earlier one Martice wrote.  They both discuss a very important and always relevant question: Should I hire experienced or inexperienced sales reps?

Without stealing all of Martice’s thunder, I want to hit you hard with something from his post I found compelling:

The new hire with no sales experience has to develop the following knowledge and/or skills in order to become productive and effective:

• the industry
• the products
• competitors and their products
• value proposition(s)
• sales terminology
• sales process
• buying process
• sales methodology
• prospecting/marketing
• setting appointments
• opening the initial meeting with prospect
• evaluating the prospect’s situation
• asking high impact business questions
• the decision-making process
• who has power and influence
• what’s the sense of urgency
• prioritizing the objectives
• putting together the solution
• constructing the presentation
• presentation and demonstration skills
• handling objections
• negotiating
• preparing the proposal
• preparing the contract
• following up to build satisfaction
• obtaining referrals
• managing the pipeline
• managing their opportunities
• managing the territory
• managing existing accounts
• organizing their day
• sales metrics and what they mean
• using sales tools
• navigating your companies internal departments and systems
• completing administrative requirements

Here’s my take.  For successful B2B, non-commodity selling (where we aren’t selling railcars full of common chemicals or hundreds of tons of soybeans, for example) experience rules.  Sure, I can recount examples of VPs of sales pulling engineers from their jobs in manufacturing and putting them on quota.  But I can give you many more examples of when that approach failed miserably—miserable being defined as the engineer failing in his new selling job, angering some customers, letting the competition win some deals they shouldn’t have won, and the engineer finally quitting in embarrassment and frustration.

We’re all faced with tough competition and often, even tougher buyers.  Do you want to roll the dice and cross your fingers on the potential success of on-the-job training with someone who is two years out of college or someone else who decided they want to sell because they think salespeople make lots of money and don’t work all that hard?

The days of a company training a salesperson for six to twelve months before letting them call on a customer alone are gone.  Forever.  Unless you have an established, formal program for getting inexperienced salespeople to the point where they are productive in a timeframe that doesn’t impact your ability to meet or exceed your bookings or revenue targets, please let me know.  Seriously.

I’ve been involved with too many companies that lost deals, important customers, market leadership, and plenty of money because management hired salespeople that couldn’t get the job done.  I’m determined to put an end to that.

I’m weighing in on Martice’s side on this one.

Earlier this month Miller Heiman was acquired by Sterling Investment Partners of Westport, Connecticut.  From the press release: “The business was acquired from Leeds Equity Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, for an undisclosed price.”  (Disclosure:  Miller Heiman subscribes to ESR’s research.)

On Monday, I spoke with an enthusiastic Sam Reese, Miller Heiman’s CEO.  Sam walked me through Leeds’ divestiture of his company.  According to Sam, Leeds is one of the most disciplined private equity firms. They had set aggressive performance objectives when they acquired Miller Heiman in 2005.  Once Miller Heiman achieved those objectives, Leeds did as they promised their investors they would do, they divested.

Sam told me that one of the challenges he faces is not growing Miller Heiman too fast.  He is intent on maintaining quality and a high level of customer satisfaction.  He talked about record-setting revenues, landing big new clients and expanding their global presence.  Sam said that he tries not to be over-confident.  Sam is the second sales training company CEO I spoke with in two days that said they were overperforming against their goals and objectives.  Interesting during these challenging economic times.  That’s a subject I’ll get back to over the next few weeks.

Miller Heiman’s clients should expect to see a new focus on front-end prospecting tools and process as well as back-end coaching.  These are two prominent areas that ESR has identified as critical for companies seeking to derive more value from sales performance improvement initiatives.  Miller Heiman’s clients should see investments in these area as good news.

My intent in this post is not to provide an in-depth analysis of Miller Heiman.  I’ll leave that up to ESR’s analysts.  But one point is worth mentioning.  Miller Heiman enjoys significant brand equity resulting from a 30-year history and large numbers of companies and sales reps having gone through Miller Heiman training over the years.  They’ve got a lot of fans out there.

With that strength, though, come two potential weaknesses as perceived by some of the buyers of sales training we work with: First, a diminution of sales process and training as competitive advantage when competitive sales forces use the same methodology.  In other words, if my competitor is using Miller Heiman, I should choose something else—going with Miller Heiman as well won’t give my team an advantage.  (Actually that’s flawed thinking, but I’ll cover that at another time as well.) The second perception is that Miller Heiman’s approach, IP and coursework are dated.  That’s a challenge Sam and his team will have to overcome.

Last week I downloaded illumio (beta).  (Disclosure: My friend, Rick Hartung—he’d always say to his new salesreps: “You can take vacation anytime you’d like as long as it’s not during the first three months of any quarter.”—works for the company.)

I’ve got a major challenge trying to keep up with the latest in sales performance improvement, sales-enablement technology, learning and training, sales trainers, marketing trends, the economy, the presidential race, what’s going on in Ireland, etc., etc., and that’s just the business-related content.

I found Bloglines a few months back and have been using that to aggregate my favorite RSS feeds.  It did that job for me, but I found it limited.  Google alerts helped a bit, but it still took way too much of my time gathering intelligence.

my illumio front page - click for full size

Enter Illumio.  Illumio creates a virtual content management system within a company by privately indexing each user’s email, contacts, documents, web favorites and web history. With this information, the plug-in (highly secure, downloadable to your PC) creates a comprehensive profile of the user, eliminating the need for a user to manually create and maintain an expertise profile (an important Sales 2.0 function).

illumio enables individuals to connect with the right people within their companies (and outside as well, which is how I’m using it) via an innovative question and answer exchange system. Using illumio, individuals send out questions and illumio routes them to people with the most knowledge on the topic. How illumio finds the right people to respond to a question depends on the type of questions asked.  This is another critical Sales 2.0 capability.

illumio’s ”Attention Management” capability is important to me.  Feed aggregators (Feed Demon, bloglines, etc.) simply funnel a large number of feeds into one place.   illumio, however, ”automatically” and privately learns about the user, but additionally the user has the ability to teach illumio more about specific preferences, likes, dislikes—tuning what illumio delivers to them.  Everything is private and controlled by the user.  Nothing is “public” unless a user chooses to share—an answer, a file, a contact—and the response to a question can be available only to the requestor or, if the recipient chooses, can be shared with other members of the group to which they belong. Essentially illumio allows a user to set up what critical information they need to come to them, so the feeds are filtered and personalized and then funneled into a form like a personal newspaper (see the screen shot — click on the graphic for a full-size view).

Anyway, the beta release of the latest version is available for download—personal use is complimentary.  Give it a try.

The We Live in a World That Requires Revenue post from last week has become the most popular post on this blog so far…  So here’s one more funny one, this time from Don McMillan.  I’ll get back to the serious stuff shortly.

There are more videos on Don’s site.

Is this how your customer sees you?

Paul Lanigan is the Sandler franchisee for Ireland.  I’ve been reading his newsletter for a while.

Paul posted a recent comment about an article published by ZDNet UK entitled, Top 10 reasons to avoid IT salespeople. Whether you work for a tech company or not, you need to read this article.

It’s not often we get such uncensored feedback from our customers.  I didn’t take this lightly.  I hope you don’t either. 

Here are excerpts from each of Sally Whittle’s ten reasons. 

1. Faux friendliness — “IT salespeople always act as though they’re my long-lost buddy. I get all these messages asking how I am, saying we really need to ‘touch base’ because it’s ‘been too long’,” Lowman said. “And, most of the time, I have no idea who they are.”
   

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2. Stalking — “They are trained in how to overcome almost any variation of ‘no, thanks’ or ‘I’m not interested.”
   

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3. Getting the basics wrong — “The reality is that most salespeople don’t listen to clients. They only want to know what the budget is, then they’ll tell you they are the market leader and their solution is fully customisable to meet your needs — whatever that means.”
   

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4. Mindless optimism — Sometimes, salespeople simply lose all perspective on what they are selling, added Peter Dunkley, a director at depo consulting: “No matter how you look at it, you cannot differentiate yourself from the competition in any meaningful way by buying a new router.”
   

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5. Somehow they skipped #5 in the article
   

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6. Bad science — “Any statement that includes the phrase ‘return on investment’ should be met with extreme caution,” said Dunkley. “My personal theory is that the salesman overheard the phrase being used by accountants and thought it sounded impressive. But they rarely understand exactly what they’re talking about.”
   

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7. Discounts — It’s possible to use the sales cycle to your advantage, said Hooper. “You have much more leverage at the end of a sales cycle, so keep your cool and don’t commit to final numbers until the last minute,” he advised. “Salesmen will give you extra value-adds or come down on price as the pressure is on for them to meet targets. You just need to keep your nerve.”
   

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8. The “upgrade path” — What’s more, if you’re looking at future functionality, that really means the product doesn’t currently do what you need it to, Dunkley added. “This gap is so significant, the salesman is making a huge gamble that you’re not going to wait until the functionality is delivered — not a good sign.”
   

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9. No credibility — Remember that a customer reference is no substitute for a site visit — without the salesperson in attendance. Try to find a company in a similar industry or at least of similar size, said Dunkley, and ask questions.
   

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10. The lingo — The best way to avoid being flannelled by an over-enthusiastic salesman is to have a clear objective for any meeting, suggested Hooper. “Salesmen will want to show you pretty PowerPoint, but you should outline objectives and agree the agenda by email in advance,” he said.
    

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11. Finally, just like with salespeople, there’s always one more thing — A software licence audit specialist frequently disguises their attempt to sell as a desire to “help” your company, said Roberts. “They’ve been known to use scare tactics and to point to a range of large fines that can result from non-compliance with licence terms. Quite often, they show up around the time of mergers and acquisitions or other major corporate upheaval, when they suspect rich pickings can be found.”