One of the top firms among the 26 sales performance improvement providers ESR covers is Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI).  Founder and managing partner Steve Andersen is recognized as a thought-leader in the demanding and often misunderstood area of strategic account management. (Listen to Steve in an ESR/Podcast.)

To understanding what a strategic account management methodology is you’ve got to look at that old word “strategy.” Your salespeople are simply not going to be able to drive the kind of long-term, mutually profitable relationship with a customer by the seat of their pants, employing  tactics, tips and tricks.  Strategic account management is serious business.  In the U.K. I worked with a Hewlett-Packard SAM whose team of 40 HP account managers serviced a Europe-based global consumer package goods company.  Even your best heavy-hitter sales hunter would fall flat on their face in a business situation like that.  Believe me.

Over the years, ESR has recommended that some of our clients join The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) for the programs, resources, expertise and ability for their SAMs (strategic account managers) to network with other SAMs.  Steve Andersen is one of the experts that present regularly at SAMA events.

I posed a few questions to Steve as we come into this challenging new year:

Dave Stein: What actions are some of the more strategic of your clients taking during this economic crisis with respect to managing their strategic accounts?

Steve Andersen: Everyone knows that a supplier’s most important assets are their customers, but I continue to be surprised at how little some organizations are doing to become more strategic to their most strategic customers. Despite the economic downturn, many of our clients are investing in best practices that will position them to become more strategic to key customers through the deployment of advanced selling skills and the strategic account management efforts of their sales organization. We’re seeing a renewed commitment to understanding how important customers define value, sell, create and deliver this value, and then follow-up with customized metrics and measures that have meaning and significance to both the customer and the supplier. (Note: ESR audited and certified PMI’s sales performance improvement measurement methodology.)

DS: What are they doing in-house to weather the storm?

SA: Many of our clients are re-assessing their value propositions for their most strategic customers and are now deploying programs that will connect them more directly with what these customers value most. Other are expanding the level of field coaching that they expect from their first and second-level sales managers and equipping them to be more proactive with sales coaching best practices that will help them create value for their reps and salespeople ‘out on the street,  reducing rework in the process. We have several clients with travel restrictions going into effect for 2009, and we’re building customized, blended training and reinforcement programs for them (utilizing WebEx, Sales 2.0, Web 2.0/3D and Second Life technologies) to maintain the momentum of their current training initiatives, and in some cases, to launch new, “next level” initiatives. Other clients are planning to get more out of their investments in CRM solutions, and we’re working actively with them to technologically enable their sales best practices solutions to provide more value to the end-users.

DS: Do you see any new or innovative approaches in the area of strategic account management?

SA: Yes – many! So many, in fact, they PMI is offering a new “sales best practice” solution area to our clients that we refer to as “Innovate to Differentiate.”  Through our client work, we have had the good fortune to observe the best practices of some of the top account managers in the world and have documented and organized our findings in what we call the “Zones of Innovation.” When we observe an innovative best practice, particularly those that either create customer value, provide supplier competitive advantage/differentiation, or as is usually the case, both, we add this to the appropriate “Zone.” In a smaller 2009 market, we believe that innovative best practices can be the difference between winning and losing business, and of all of the innovative best practices that we’re observing, perhaps the “hottest” is planning collaboratively with strategic customers—our clients’ customers, that it.  It’s surprising to see just how much can be gained by simply changing the way that you engage with your customer so that the supplier is more aligned with their customer’s decision process.

DS: What are PMI’s prospects for 2009.

SA: 2008 was one of the most successful years in PMI’s history, and I believe that this was because of the type of value that we are creating for our clients. Much of our work is at the strategic customer/supplier level, as opposed to basic Sales 101—type training, and these types of projects are more important than ever in a down economy. To illustrate, we kicked-off a new client project in November with the SVP of Worldwide Sales taking center stage and informing the audience (his entire sales management team) that he could either “invest in the future” or shut-down all discretionary spending. He explained that his decision was the former and he made it quite clear that he expected them to do their part and win a “bigger piece of a smaller pie” in 2009. This client is deploying several of PMI’s SAM programs. This evaluation was quite competitive, with several vendors covered by ES Research in the mix, as well as an incumbent “strategy consultant.” With clients like this, we are forecasting another strong year in 2009.

Note: ESR has found that many sales training providers do not have specific methodology, curricula and content for strategic account management programs.  Yet, they try to convince their buyers that they do.  In 2009 ESR will target coverage of challenges and solutions around strategic account management and the providers that excel in that discipline. This is the first part in a series.

Disclosure: Performance Methods, Inc. subscribes to ESR’s research.

Photo credit: © Jason Branz – Fotolia.com

Are your salespeople sitting around just waiting to be outsold?

Part of what ESR does is to identify, size, and prioritize the gaps that exist between our clients’ sales teams’ skill sets and what is required for them to win more business, sooner, and at higher contract values.

There are different ways to categorize those gaps.  For the purposes of this post, let’s look at basic versus advanced selling capabilities. 

Here is are just a few basic selling capabilities:

• Managing a territory
• Cold-calling
• Planning and executing an end-to-end sales campaign
• Uncovering and understanding the customer’s business challenges and opportunities
• Planning and executing a successful meeting with a prospect
• Ability to understand and state their company’s value proposition to customer executives
• Delivering a presentation about their company, their products and basic information about their customer’s business
• Ability to follow their company’s sales processes
• Having a basic understanding of their competition’s company and products
• Managing objections (should they arise)
• Negotiation
• Closing

And some selected advanced selling capabilities:

• Determining the competition’s selling strategies and devising effective counterstrategies
• Successfully employing competitive selling tactics, such as setting traps and immunizing the customer against a competitor’s negative selling
• Ability to link the strategic value of a product or service to the customer’s long-term business objectives
• Identifying, recruiting and leveraging politically powerful people to influence an evaluation team or decision-maker
• Employing personal capital to effect an introduction to the CEO of a targeted company
• Being seen as a trusted peer by customer executives
• Effectively managing the long-term relationship with a strategic account

Here’s the problem:  There isn’t enough sales skills training going on.¹  What is taking place is mostly Sales 101—basic selling skills.  Not enough attention is paid to the advanced selling capabilities I listed above, among others.  There are several vendors that meet or exceed their clients’ requirements and expectations with respect to advanced selling IP, processes, coursework, and coaching.²  But, many vendors don’t.  Even vendors with well-known brands.  The problem with that is they can only get you so far.  They can’t provide you with what you need to consistently and predictably outsell your competitors. 

The basics are critically important for sales effectiveness.  But they alone aren’t enough.

So, what happens when you have four companies with basically comparable offerings competing for the same business and none of the salespeople managing the deals have the advanced selling capabilities mentioned above?  Decisions made on price, features, a sexy demo or the most well-known brand. It’s a toss-up as to who is going to win.  But if one company’s sales team possesses advanced capabilities, how do you think they’re going to do?

Not every salesperson needs advanced selling skills.  But, if you’re in a complex selling environment and your salespeople don’t have all the skills required to win, you’re asking to be outsold.  

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¹ A 2007 DePaul University Study reported that only 43% of companies responding said they had a formal sales training program. Of those, only 50% provided sales skills training.
² Performance Methods, Inc. is one vendor that provides advanced selling solutions. Disclosure: Performance Methods subscribes to ESR’s research.

Quiz: Name one professional athelete that doesn't have a coach.

Coaching is the component of a sales effectiveness initiative that is most often sacrificed when costs must be contained.  (More accurately, coaching workshops and post-program reinforcement for first-line sales managers are what gets cut.)  Considering that coaching is the most important single mechanism for reinforcing and sustaining the impact of learning, this is a big problem. 

During a podcast interview I recorded Tuesday with Barry Trailer, partner with CSO Insights, the subject of coaching came up.  Barry feels as strongly about the subject as I do.  He considers getting a coach to be the first step on the path to sales mastery.  Both Barry and I have had coaches during our careers.  We agreed that if a salesperson is serious about selling as a lifetime career, then hiring a coach on their own, if their company won’t provide one, is mandatory.

Coaching is a skill.  It can be learned. The impact of coaching on an individual salesrep’s performance can and should be measured.  In my view coaching is a required capability for a sales manager.  It’s right up there in importance with hiring.  HR Chally’s The 2007 Chally World Class Sales Excellence Research Report  states, “World class sales forces implement processes and measurements to make coaching a top priority.”

We rarely see effective coaching in the companies we have worked with.  There are a number of reasons for that: 

• Managers don’t have coaching skills when they are hired and their companies don’t provide training and coaching for coaches, so they are never trained on the skill.
  

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• Managers don’t understand the impact coaching has on performance, so they don’t pursue it.
  

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• Managers are unable to extricate themselves from a selling role to that of an observer and coach.  There are two major reasons for this:  First, some of their salespeople are unable to win a deal on their own so the manager takes over. The other reason is ego.
  

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• The comment we get most often from first-line managers is, ”I’m too busy to coach.”  It’s the old, “I don’t have time for you to show me your word processing software because I’m too busy changing the ribbon on my typewriter, plus I need to go out and by some more White-Out.”
  

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• Managers don’t know what to coach to.  Coaching to the manager’s individual and personal selling style is NOT the answer. 
  

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• The company doesn’t have a process in place to inspect what sales personnel are doing.
  

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• There are no methods or guidelines for changing salesreps’ behavior.
  

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• There are no performance standards for each step of their sales process, if there is a sales process at all. 

Some of the sales training companies ESR covers have very strong coaching processes and coursework.  Richardson, Performance Methods, Wilson Learning, The Complex Sale, The Brooks Group, and FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group are just a few.