Sales Scale Partners http://salesscale.com Sat, 17 May 2014 22:57:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2 Part IV – Operationalizing Storytelling with SharperAx http://salesscale.com/part-iv-operationalizing-storytelling-with-sharperax/ http://salesscale.com/part-iv-operationalizing-storytelling-with-sharperax/#comments Sun, 02 Mar 2014 22:33:48 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?p=1484 ]]> This is the final and fourth post of ‘The Storytelling Enterprise’ series. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced, coached and mastered.

Our story so far:

Part I of the Story Telling Enterprise blog series outlined the power of everyone in your company capturing stories for the sales team and gave some good examples of selling stories.

Part II outlines how to capture your stories in a story deck that is easy to use and in a format that a sales person can easily digest and practice.

Part III shares a successful way to organize your weekly story workshops to get your reps comfortable learning new stories and mastering them.

Part IV addresses the question – how do you navigate busy calendars and multiple time zones to make role playing your company’s selling stories convenient and scalable?

 

Please click here to continue this post on the SharperAx blog site

]]> http://salesscale.com/part-iv-operationalizing-storytelling-with-sharperax/feed/ 0 Part III – The Weekly Storytelling Workshop http://salesscale.com/part-iii-the-weekly-storytelling-workshop/ http://salesscale.com/part-iii-the-weekly-storytelling-workshop/#comments Fri, 21 Feb 2014 22:18:24 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?p=1479 ]]> This is the third of a four part series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

Hubspot approached me about posting the third installment of the Storytelling Enterprise on their sales blog, which I was delighted to do.  Please click here to continue reading, thanks!

]]> http://salesscale.com/part-iii-the-weekly-storytelling-workshop/feed/ 0 Part II – The “Story Deck” http://salesscale.com/part-ii-the-story-deck/ http://salesscale.com/part-ii-the-story-deck/#comments Sat, 08 Feb 2014 02:10:06 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?p=1466 ]]> This is the second of a four post series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

Our story so far

Part I of the Story Telling Enterprise blog series outlined the power of everyone in your company capturing stories for the sales team and gave some good examples of selling stories.  But what format do you use and how do you deliver these stories to your sellers?

The evolution of the story deck

Although it is now an integral part of our standard playbook, the story deck took a long time to evolve into its current form.

When I started my playbook consulting practice, I was focused on capturing the key selling magic in the sales tools that make up the sales playbook.  The focus would vary from engagement to engagement, but there was usually a need to tighten the focus on a sweet spot, further differentiate the evaluation process, bring potential deal breakers forward and qualify harder early on, communicate business value more frequently, be prepared with competitor silver bullets, be ready to respond to prospect questions and objections etc.

But a funny thing always seemed to happen.

Please click here to continue this blog on the SharperAx blog site.

 

]]> http://salesscale.com/part-ii-the-story-deck/feed/ 0 Part I – ‘The Storytelling Enterprise’ Promise: Conversation-Centric Selling http://salesscale.com/part-i-the-story-telling-enterprise-promise-conversation-centric-selling/ http://salesscale.com/part-i-the-story-telling-enterprise-promise-conversation-centric-selling/#comments Thu, 24 Oct 2013 18:11:16 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?p=1444 ]]> This is the first of a four post series on The Storytelling Enterprise.  This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

‘Selling’ Stories Are Key to Good Selling

Companies hire salespeople to have influential conversations that compel prospects to consider — and ultimately buy – their offering.

When a good salesperson is having a conversation with a prospect, they are usually asking thoughtful questions, listening actively, and telling relevant stories.  These “selling” stories are typically short (no longer than three minutes—think four to six bullet points) and are usually about the salesperson’s industry, company, customers, competitors, or offering. They are often told in response to a prospect’s question or objection (stated or implied).

Please click here to continue this blog on the SharperAx blog site:

]]> http://salesscale.com/part-i-the-story-telling-enterprise-promise-conversation-centric-selling/feed/ 0 Scaling Sales – Welcome! http://salesscale.com/scaling-sales-welcome/ http://salesscale.com/scaling-sales-welcome/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 01:37:00 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?guid=dd4a7a8253eaf06a98a1c7ae537db6e3 ]]> Increasing sales productivity in business-to-business environments with complex sales cycles has been a never-ending pursuit.  In his book 'Birth of a Salesman',   Walter Friedman chronicles the 200 page playbook (later scaled down to 55 pages) that John Patterson, the founder of NCR, assembled in the late 19th century in his attempt to get his salepeople to systematically present and sell his cash registers.

Patterson was unusually focused on sales tools for his salesforce and was rewarded with one of the most successful companies in business history.  But this level of focus on tools to scale sales is unusual and the problem of low sales productivity is still very much with us.  CSO Insights documents in their annual survey of 1300 sales executives that only 52% of sales reps made their quotas in 2009.

This blog will pursue the conversation of B2B sales productivity, its role in scaling sales organizations and the critical role of sales tools in capturing sales best practices and driving sales growth.
]]> http://salesscale.com/scaling-sales-welcome/feed/ 1 Best Practice Customer Stories http://salesscale.com/best-practice-customer-stories/ http://salesscale.com/best-practice-customer-stories/#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:17:00 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?guid=a9e725970c59eb4c3d6d044597825612


We’ve been busy delivering sales playbooks and haven’t posted in over a year. We’ve learned a lot from the 12 projects we’ve delivered since the last article and would like to share some of these insights here.  This post is about the best way to frame and deliver an important sales tool, the customer story. 

 

Customer Stories Are Key to Establishing Credibility

For the sales rep, credibility is king.  The more credibility a sales rep has with a prospect, the more likley a win.  But how do you establish credibility?  Knowing your product and features is a good start, but it won't be enough in most sales cycles. 

Heath and Heath’s book ‘Made to Stick ’ does a nice job outlining three categories that create credibility.  It talks about leveraging authorities like experts and celebrities to get ‘external’ credibility, using vivid detail, humanized statistics and examples of high-level achievement to give your stories ‘internal’ credibility and using testable credentials – tests prospects can perform on their own to substantiate a claim – as a third way to establish credibility.

Relevant, timely, succinct, well-told customer stories are one of the best ways for a rep to establish internal credibility.  And, if the story is about a respected company and is offered up with a chance to speak with the customer (when the time is right!), it spans all three credibility categories.   

Why, then, are most sales forces lousy at telling compelling customer stories?

It turns out there are lots of reasons.  Here are five.


Telling a Good Customer Story is Tricky

The first problem is exposure.  Most reps can tell a pretty good customer story about customers they have sold but not about customers they haven’t sold.  This is a problem if the right story is about an account they haven’t sold or for new reps, who haven’t yet sold any accounts.

So marketing steps up and takes on writing customer case studies.   Case studies can be very powerful.  However, and this is the second problem, marketing-developed case studies are typically aimed at prospects, not sales reps. 

Their purpose is to be read by a prospect in a quiet moment, not told by a rep in the heat of a presentation or discussion. They are usually long and, because they need to be approved by the customer (and often the customer’s legal department), take a long time to produce and cover only a fraction of the customer base. 

On day 1, sales reps need to know lots (20?) of compelling, 60-second customer stories across multiple markets sprinkled with ‘vivid detail’ that they can deal out like playing cards. These stories need to quickly cover the business issue and problem the customer faced, why their company won, what results have been delivered and how the relationship is expanding based on this success.  Prospect-focused customer stories don’t fit this bill because they are too long, too few and not in a rep-friendly story format. 

The third problem with getting reps to tell compelling customer stories is visibility -the seeds of a good customer story span multiple departments and time frames.  The rep that sold the account has a good grasp of what problem the customer was trying to solve and why they won, but the services group usually is closest to the success metrics of the customer.  And customer success lags the sale anywhere from one day to one year or more, depending on what you’re selling.  So you need to poll multiple groups – and poll the customer directly if services isn’t doing a good job of tracking success metrics - to get even a one-minute customer story.   

So, if we navigate these three hurdles and write tight stories aimed at reps and make them easily accessible, we’re home free?

Unfortunately not.  We’ve still got two hurdles to go!


Systematic Practice is Unusual  

To make these customer stories second nature, the reps need to practice them.  And that is the fourth problem - most sales forces do not place an emphasis onpractice, the most obvious form of practice being role-playing.

This is surprising. To make just one analogy, professional football players, who are typically already highly expert, still practice all the time.  With training camp, pre-season practice, in-season practice and film sessions, football players' practice 20+ hours for every hour of playing time.  Are sales calls simpler than football plays?  Some are, many are not.  In my experience, though, sales reps practice a whole lot less than football players. 

Reps need an easy way to read , hear or see how the rep that sold the account is telling the story and practice on their own, over and over. As Ericsson  told us and Gladwell  reminded us in Outliers, deliberate practice is the way to develop expertise.

The fifth and final problem is systematically delivering feedback to the rep to improve how they are telling their stories.   Sales rep coaching is usually delivered on the fly after sales calls, during pipeline reviews or at quarterly sales training sessions or kickoffs.  Sales forces are usually not seeing the benefits of systematic coaching, which are substantial.   Oliveros shows us that follow-up, one-on-one coaching increases productivity 4x.


Consistently Telling Great Customer Stories

The first thing needed are lots of rep-focused customer stories spanning selling and customer success information delivered in an easy-to-use format.  We’ve had success delivering customer stories in a powerpoint format using a logo slide as a clickable index to the different customer stories.

Each story is 5 bullets, fits in a single slide and is designed to be told in 60 seconds.  The bullets are:   

  • what does the customer do?
  • what was their business issue and problem?
  • why did they choose to do business with your company? 
  • what success metrics have they had?
  • how are they extending or expanding usage based on this success?

You can click back to the index from any story slide to facilitate self-guided practice. Grouping the logos by vertical market and having an introductory slide by market is also a good idea.  Use 3 bullets to tell the vertical story - what the vertical means to your company (largest, fast growing etc.), what's unique about tte vertical that makes it select your solution and a list of customers in that vertical.

This is designed to be a 30-second prelude that further enhances the credibility of your customer story.  Establish expertise by showing that you know the specific things that their market generally values and demonstrating your company already has momentum in their vertical is a great intro to the customer story.


Practicing as a team

Getting a field sales forcetogether at least once a week for one hour to role play your differentiated selling stories (including customer stories) is recommended. Friday morning  8 – 9 might be a slot that works for a national salesforce.  Have all the reps in the room or on a GoToMeeting, display the story on the screen and have the rep that sold the account spend 10 minutes fleshing out the details of the customer story.  You might even update the story on the fly during this process as the reps watch.

Then that rep that sold (Intel) turns to the rep on their right and says, “Joe, how is your company helping (Intel)?”  Joe tells the 60 second version of the story and turn to the person on his right and says, “Jill, what are you doing at (Intel)?” etc. The sales manager and team may throw in a bit of coaching after each story.  

At the end of this session, every rep has heard the story 10 or so times and they all vote on who told the best version.  The combination of hearing the rep that sold the account tell the story, hearing the story told 10 times, getting some personal coaching and the pressure of competing in front of your peers makes for an intense and effective weekly learning experience.

However, it is sometimes difficult to get your entire sales team together every week due to distributed sales teams, multiple time zones, scheduling conflicts etc.  Also, many reps would prefer to practice the customer stories on their own before being subjected to the peer pressure-cooker. 

What is the best approach here?


Practicing Individually

The clickable powerpoint format outlined above is a good baseline for individual rep practice.  However, it doesn’t give the practicing rep the benefit of hearing or seeing the best practice customer story being told and it doesn’t allow the rep to watch themselves delivering the story.

I’ve found a video coaching system that nicely addresses both of these issues.  It is created by Dasko Communications and is targeted at sales forces.  The Dasko Response Coach is an easy-to-use, cloud-based video coaching system that lets reps watch videos of top reps in action, practice the sales stories with their webcams and get coaching and feedback from their managers and trainers – all when it is convenient for the rep.  Here is a Prezi outlining the sales coaching challenge.


Conclusion

Telling selling stories well – including customer stories – is an important way for reps to establish credibility with prospects.  Packaging the stories up for the sales reps and making it easy for them to practice and get feedback is the secret sauce to systematically getting your sales force to tell great customer stories.  Good luck!

 

Ericsson GladwellOliveroscustomer stories]]> We’ve been busy delivering sales playbooks and haven’t posted in over a year. We’ve learned a lot from the 12 projects we’ve delivered since the last article and would like to share some of these insights here. This post is about the best way to frame and deliver an important sales tool, the customer story.

Customer Stories Are Key to Establishing Credibility

For the sales rep, credibility is king. The more credibility a sales rep has with a prospect, the more likley a win. But how do you establish credibility? Knowing your product and features is a good start, but it won't be enough in most sales cycles.

Heath and Heath’s book ‘Made to Stick ’ does a nice job outlining three categories that create credibility. It talks about leveraging authorities like experts and celebrities to get ‘external’ credibility, using vivid detail, humanized statistics and examples of high-level achievement to give your stories ‘internal’ credibility and using testable credentials – tests prospects can perform on their own to substantiate a claim – as a third way to establish credibility.

Relevant, timely, succinct, well-told customer stories are one of the best ways for a rep to establish internal credibility. And, if the story is about a respected company and is offered up with a chance to speak with the customer (when the time is right!), it spans all three credibility categories.

Why, then, are most sales forces lousy at telling compelling customer stories?

It turns out there are lots of reasons. Here are five.


Telling a Good Customer Story is Tricky

The first problem is exposure. Most reps can tell a pretty good customer story about customers they have sold but not about customers they haven’t sold. This is a problem if the right story is about an account they haven’t sold or for new reps, who haven’t yet sold any accounts.

So marketing steps up and takes on writing customer case studies. Case studies can be very powerful. However, and this is the second problem, marketing-developed case studies are typically aimed at prospects, not sales reps.

Their purpose is to be read by a prospect in a quiet moment, not told by a rep in the heat of a presentation or discussion. They are usually long and, because they need to be approved by the customer (and often the customer’s legal department), take a long time to produce and cover only a fraction of the customer base.

On day 1, sales reps need to know lots (20?) of compelling, 60-second customer stories across multiple markets sprinkled with ‘vivid detail’ that they can deal out like playing cards. These stories need to quickly cover the business issue and problem the customer faced, why their company won, what results have been delivered and how the relationship is expanding based on this success. Prospect-focused customer stories don’t fit this bill because they are too long, too few and not in a rep-friendly story format.

The third problem with getting reps to tell compelling customer stories is visibility -the seeds of a good customer story span multiple departments and time frames. The rep that sold the account has a good grasp of what problem the customer was trying to solve and why they won, but the services group usually is closest to the success metrics of the customer. And customer success lags the sale anywhere from one day to one year or more, depending on what you’re selling. So you need to poll multiple groups – and poll the customer directly if services isn’t doing a good job of tracking success metrics - to get even a one-minute customer story.

So, if we navigate these three hurdles and write tight stories aimed at reps and make them easily accessible, we’re home free?

Unfortunately not. We’ve still got two hurdles to go!


Systematic Practice is Unusual

To make these customer stories second nature, the reps need to practice them. And that is the fourth problem - most sales forces do not place an emphasis onpractice, the most obvious form of practice being role-playing.

This is surprising. To make just one analogy, professional football players, who are typically already highly expert, still practice all the time. With training camp, pre-season practice, in-season practice and film sessions, football players' practice 20+ hours for every hour of playing time. Are sales calls simpler than football plays? Some are, many are not. In my experience, though, sales reps practice a whole lot less than football players.

Reps need an easy way to read , hear or see how the rep that sold the account is telling the story and practice on their own, over and over. As Ericsson told us and Gladwell reminded us in Outliers, deliberate practice is the way to develop expertise.

The fifth and final problem is systematically delivering feedback to the rep to improve how they are telling their stories. Sales rep coaching is usually delivered on the fly after sales calls, during pipeline reviews or at quarterly sales training sessions or kickoffs. Sales forces are usually not seeing the benefits of systematic coaching, which are substantial. Oliveros shows us that follow-up, one-on-one coaching increases productivity 4x.


Consistently Telling Great Customer Stories

The first thing needed are lots of rep-focused customer stories spanning selling and customer success information delivered in an easy-to-use format. We’ve had success delivering customer stories in a powerpoint format using a logo slide as a clickable index to the different customer stories.

Each story is 5 bullets, fits in a single slide and is designed to be told in 60 seconds. The bullets are:

  • what does the customer do?
  • what was their business issue and problem?
  • why did they choose to do business with your company?
  • what success metrics have they had?
  • how are they extending or expanding usage based on this success?

You can click back to the index from any story slide to facilitate self-guided practice. Grouping the logos by vertical market and having an introductory slide by market is also a good idea. Use 3 bullets to tell the vertical story - what the vertical means to your company (largest, fast growing etc.), what's unique about tte vertical that makes it select your solution and a list of customers in that vertical.

This is designed to be a 30-second prelude that further enhances the credibility of your customer story. Establish expertise by showing that you know the specific things that their market generally values and demonstrating your company already has momentum in their vertical is a great intro to the customer story.


Practicing as a team

Getting a field sales forcetogether at least once a week for one hour to role play your differentiated selling stories (including customer stories) is recommended. Friday morning 8 – 9 might be a slot that works for a national salesforce. Have all the reps in the room or on a GoToMeeting, display the story on the screen and have the rep that sold the account spend 10 minutes fleshing out the details of the customer story. You might even update the story on the fly during this process as the reps watch.

Then that rep that sold (Intel) turns to the rep on their right and says, “Joe, how is your company helping (Intel)?” Joe tells the 60 second version of the story and turn to the person on his right and says, “Jill, what are you doing at (Intel)?” etc. The sales manager and team may throw in a bit of coaching after each story.

At the end of this session, every rep has heard the story 10 or so times and they all vote on who told the best version. The combination of hearing the rep that sold the account tell the story, hearing the story told 10 times, getting some personal coaching and the pressure of competing in front of your peers makes for an intense and effective weekly learning experience.

However, it is sometimes difficult to get your entire sales team together every week due to distributed sales teams, multiple time zones, scheduling conflicts etc. Also, many reps would prefer to practice the customer stories on their own before being subjected to the peer pressure-cooker.

What is the best approach here?


Practicing Individually

The clickable powerpoint format outlined above is a good baseline for individual rep practice. However, it doesn’t give the practicing rep the benefit of hearing or seeing the best practice customer story being told and it doesn’t allow the rep to watch themselves delivering the story.

I’ve found a video coaching system that nicely addresses both of these issues. It is created by Dasko Communications and is targeted at sales forces. The Dasko Response Coach is an easy-to-use, cloud-based video coaching system that lets reps watch videos of top reps in action, practice the sales stories with their webcams and get coaching and feedback from their managers and trainers – all when it is convenient for the rep. Here is a Prezi outlining the sales coaching challenge.


Conclusion

Telling selling stories well – including customer stories – is an important way for reps to establish credibility with prospects. Packaging the stories up for the sales reps and making it easy for them to practice and get feedback is the secret sauce to systematically getting your sales force to tell great customer stories. Good luck!

Ericsson GladwellOliveroscustomer stories]]> http://salesscale.com/best-practice-customer-stories/feed/ 1 “Thought Bubble” Inflation: The Sales / Service Handoff http://salesscale.com/thought-bubble-inflation-the-sales-service-handoff/ http://salesscale.com/thought-bubble-inflation-the-sales-service-handoff/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:17:00 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?guid=41aea8046f057f45906a8d8c1a695ab9 ]]> Setting good expectations in sales and tightly managing  scope in services sounds like a great way to fix misaligned customer expectations.  

Much easier written than done. And it's a good start, but does miss a key piece of the puzzle.

As a 3-time VP Sales selling technology solutions to business people, I've spent a lot of time hearing from from the service team how my reps need to set better expectations during the sales cycle.  Services often has a point.  And so I've spent a lot of time more precisely productizing service offerings,  tightening up statement of works, including members of the service team in the sales cycle, creating tools and infrastructure to address the issue and working with reps to be as clear as possible about the what's and the when's.

But none of that addresses the often surprising - and harder to manage -- culprit of customer internal communications. 

Getting the clear solution 'thought bubble' from the reps mind into all the buyers she deals with during a sales cycle is difficult but doable.  The tricky part is when the buying team turns to their implementation / operations / user team - many of whom have not been part of the sales cycle - and tells them what to expect.

The "thought bubbles" that form in these folks minds are of course filtered by what they all want.  They typically aren't spending a lot of time analyzing every last word of your semi-detailed and semi-well written statement of work.  And they have no incentive to expect less than exactly what they need  - regardless of what your solution actually does or what the original scope of the deal is.

Where you might have some "thought bubble" expectation inflation between the rep and the buying team, you often see "thought bubble" hyper-inflation between the customer's buying team and their internal execution team.

And when the client's internal team -- who incidentally are managing the day-to-day implementation -- starts to ask for all kinds of crazy stuff, the services team starts casting the 'stink eye' towards the sales floor.  They suspect that sales must be the source of these crazy expectations.

In fact, sales often isn't. 

Focusing on the sales / service handoff is a great place to focus and deliver sales tools to help tighten up the expectation gap.  And tools like customer welcome letters, sales / service handoff meeting agendas, new customer kickoff agendas, sales / service internal kickoff agendas and  customer relationship and results scoring tools can help (see "The Sales Service Handoff" in our sales resource library).

Training everyone on the sales and service team to be aware of the potential for hyper-inflated "thought bubbles"  and immediately addressing them when they surface is important.  Not immediately resetting these expectations when they are first articulated confirms the client's feelings that these are the right expectations.

This means that the service team trusts that the sales team hasn't set wrong expectations.  Which means that the sales team needs to set the right expectations.  It also means that the service team knows how to gently say "no" and knows when to escalate things within the clients and their own companies when necessary.

Also all things much easier written than done.

]]> http://salesscale.com/thought-bubble-inflation-the-sales-service-handoff/feed/ 2 Retooling for the Recession http://salesscale.com/retooling-for-the-recession/ http://salesscale.com/retooling-for-the-recession/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:38:15 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?guid=4bc59a97c8fe42be557b1addd806018b ]]> Tom Lavey, Sales Scale Partners

I'm happy to introduce Tom's first post.  I had the pleasure of working with Tom both at Oracle when he was building out its application sales organization and then again when he was on my board of advisers at Nimblefish.  Tom is a leading expert in target marketing strategy, sales models, value pricing strategies, negotiation and just plain old selling!   He is one of the very few software folks who has driven over $1BB of software sales and he has done it through all kinds of economies so his thoughts on selling in this recession are particularly interesting.


Seven Changes to Make on a Rainy Day


You bet. It's time to buckle up. Change the way you do things. Take advantage of what you have and start improving your bottom line today. Polish the car and get it serviced instead of buying a new one. Paint the house instead of moving. Focus on local festivals instead of traveling to new continents. In other words, take this time to re-examine what's real today. Fix it. Make it better. Benefit from it.

If you are in business today you have customers, real live people who depend on your product to get their work done. You have a market that works. It may be soft, but you know that it works. Under normal conditions the organizations in those markets need your solution. So why not take this time to capitalize on your existing customers and re-sell into your market? Polish your organization. Re-paint your product. Focus on your market. Stay home.

Capitalizing on the elusive "Network Effect"


Many promises were made (perhaps by YOU) about "viral marketing" or the "network-effect". It was supposed to give you more customers automatically, at low cost of sales because your customers would introduce your product to their customers (or suppliers) and they would introduce it to THEIR customers, etc. etc. until you magically had 80% market share and zero cost of sales. That didn't happen, did it? Why it didn't is the key to revitalizing your company.

It has failed because of challenges that you haven't addressed:

  • Real product adoption within your customers takes more work than you've given it.
  • "Supply chain collaboration" is harder than it sounds
  • Your sales organization is not set up to sell to your customer's customers or suppliers.
  • Your marketing and partnering efforts were not re-engineered to make it work

Take this time to change your organization and capitalize on what is real - your current customers and your market. Following are seven easy steps to help you get there.

1. Change how you measure Customer Support and Services.


Today, most customer support and professional service teams are measured on customer satisfaction. You should measure how many current users are using the product - including the new modules and features. Do your current customers need more users? Not until everyone who could use it does use it.

I had a team at a large telecommunications company, and they were measured not just on the "smile meter" of customer satisfaction, but on moving adoption from group to group.  In two years we went from a pilot of 300 users in one product organization to 8,000+ users spanning five teams. The lesson: satisfaction is nice, but adoption is the prerequisite of success.

2. Change market research to account research.


It's time to stop talking about vertical market strategies and focus on specific account strategies. Examples:

  • To make the network-effect work you need a map of the network. Map the supply chain of your customers account by account. Look for multiple points of influence. Find a supplier to four or five of your key customers and you'll find an interested prospect.
  • Research changes in the executive ranks of your customers and your targeted prospects. My experience is that almost all new initiatives that involve significant technological investment occur within 6 months of one or more new key executives joining the company. After all, they were recruited because change was needed. Use this as a key indicator.

3. Change the way you work with your customers.


To make the network effect work requires involving your customers. Get a letter of introduction from individuals at your customer that you can use as a door opener at their relationship accounts. Perhaps you'd like to involve them economically by giving them a "finder fee" for helping you get business. But be careful and clever about what you offer.

 

Remember it is real people who will help you so the incentive should help them personally (but not directly in their pocket)! It should be something of value that helps them get their job done better or use your product better. Offer incentives such as additional licenses, training credits, or trade show and conference passes, etc. If you simply offer the customer a direct "fee" it may not go to person's budget who helps you and therefore is of less personal value.

4. Change sales "territories".


Almost no sales model I've seen is set up to take advantage of the network effect. Say your large New York customer in Banking could give you great leads into several medium sized printers in Chicago. Well guess what? They're in the wrong vertical, in the wrong state, and they're the wrong size account.

 

How in the world do expect the New York large account Banking team to pass on the lead to the Midwest mid-market printing and publishing team? Change the rules to make this work or it won't work. Let sales teams follow the network by registering their "network" or provide incentives and credit for involving other teams. This requires creative territory compensation plans but to ignore it is to insure failure of the network effect potential.

5. Change the Compensation Plans.


Today almost every software company I talk to is experiencing lower initial size deal size and longer sales cycles. Companies want to be sure that the software will work and really be used before they invest. Even renewals with existing customers can require rejustification. Changes you can make right away:

  • Pay reps a higher rate for paid pilot programs. The dollar amount of the transaction may be low but it's the best proof that a customer is interested and will move forward with proven success.
  • Pay reps for renewals. Two years ago they were automatic. Today they have to be earned.
  • Pay "new account" bonuses. New customers are smaller in initial value today but you'll need them to grow your business. Make it worth the sales reps' time.

6. Change how product development prioritizes new features.

This is simple. Customers are your number one priority. If your customers are happy, you will be introduced to new prospects (network effect), you will make more money on maintenance renewals, and you will improve adoption for enterprise-wide deployment. So, how do you make your customers exceedingly happy? Include them in the development process. The old strategy may have been to include just enough customer feature requests to mollify them. Today this just isn't good enough. Instead of spending only 20% of your development efforts on your customer's needs, and 80% of your time on new technology or new markets, flip it around. After all, you are relying on them to get you through these soft times.

7. Change the success criteria for partners and partner programs.

A partnership is no longer successful just because it made your website. You can have a list of 100 partners, but if they aren't aligned with your new strategy, it just won't help the bottom line. Use the network effect with your partner's customers. Include them in your network effect territory planning. Hold them responsible for adoption. Include them in development meetings. Partners are a resource, but they must treated as an integral part of your organization or they are just taking up resources across the company - resources you no longer have.

This is not the first down market . The cardinal rule has always been you must survive before you thrive. Just cutting costs (and headcount) is not sufficient. You must be creative and inventive. Those who recognize this as an opportunity will make significant changes to their organization, continue to improve the bottom line and be better prepared when the rainy day is over and the sun starts to shine.


Tom Lavey at Sales Scale Partners is currently a Sales and Business Strategy consultant for young companies like Transcepta, Birst, Retail Solutions, and Nimblefish,. Tom has been recognized as a national leader in sales management and sales strategies for enterprise technology solution companies.

He has grown startup organizations to over $50mm and $50mm organizations to over $300mm in revenue.Tom has developed and implemented go-to-market strategies for companies such as Taleo in workforce logistics, MS2, in product lifecycle management, Extricity in B-to-B commerce, and I2 in supply chain management.

From 1994 through 1999, Tom was vice president of North America application sales at Oracle Corporation and previously was CEO of Minx Software. Earlier Tom was COO of Ask Computer Systems.

]]> http://salesscale.com/retooling-for-the-recession/feed/ 0 Client Success Scoring http://salesscale.com/client-success-scoring/ http://salesscale.com/client-success-scoring/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:37:00 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?guid=6bb7699603315eb6bca3897d1a941d45 This post is the 5th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities. 

This client success scorer was also developed for a high-ticket, consultative sale and spans both the sales cycle and the ongoing account management relationship.  It tracks the strength of the relationship with the client and the results delivered.  The purpose with this tool was not to qualify or disqualify accounts but to realistically measure how well we were doing at the account and how to make retention and expansion more likely.

The ‘relationship strength’ section is somewhat similar to the fit / winnability tools discussed above with its tracking of initiative priority, contact level, budget size and competitive environment. Additionally, it tracks how the client awards additional business, from an RFP process (weakest relationship) to a verbal ‘give me a bid so we can move forward (strongest relationship).’ 

Another good indicator of relationship strength tracked here is how often strategic reviews are scheduled.   These reviews were face-to-face discussions with the executive sponsor about current project status and future project ideas.  Annual or bi-annual reviews was our target but something we hadn’t earned or asked for at all our customer accounts.

The ‘client results’ section first tracks the annual value created for the client.  Obviously, if you can quantify and get agreement around strong results, retention and expansion are easier.  We also scored solution usage (multiple divisions?), solution depth (multiple solutions?), and renewal status (from “no” to “automatic”). 

We felt referenceability was linked to results because if a client was agreeing to be a reference for sales, or, even better, for national pr / marketing / advertising campaigns, they were getting strong value from the solution.  We also tracked the professional success of the individual buyer  -  did the results from our solution make them a company star (strong)?  Did it get them promoted (stronger)?  Did they parlay it into a best practice industry leadership role (strongest)?

There were 30 points possible from both the relationship and the results sections and we carried the scores on our account management plan.  You’ll also notice that the 2nd tab on the spreadsheet shows a relationship-results scorecard for 5 accounts.  We used it as a group at a sales / service kickoff to assess how strong our relationships and results were.  It was an eye-opening exercise and made us realize specifically where our relationships and our results could be stronger than they were.

This tool was borrowed from the management consulting industry and implementing it was trickier in the tech model where – unlike the partner-model in consulting - sales and service rolled up into separate VPs.

We were a little too new-business focused and immature for this tool to deliver its full impact but I think it’s a good one for a company with a consultative solution where much of the growth comes from existing client expansion.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

]]> This post is the 5th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities. 

This client success scorer was also developed for a high-ticket, consultative sale and spans both the sales cycle and the ongoing account management relationship.  It tracks the strength of the relationship with the client and the results delivered.  The purpose with this tool was not to qualify or disqualify accounts but to realistically measure how well we were doing at the account and how to make retention and expansion more likely.

The ‘relationship strength’ section is somewhat similar to the fit / winnability tools discussed above with its tracking of initiative priority, contact level, budget size and competitive environment. Additionally, it tracks how the client awards additional business, from an RFP process (weakest relationship) to a verbal ‘give me a bid so we can move forward (strongest relationship).’ 

Another good indicator of relationship strength tracked here is how often strategic reviews are scheduled.   These reviews were face-to-face discussions with the executive sponsor about current project status and future project ideas.  Annual or bi-annual reviews was our target but something we hadn’t earned or asked for at all our customer accounts.

The ‘client results’ section first tracks the annual value created for the client.  Obviously, if you can quantify and get agreement around strong results, retention and expansion are easier.  We also scored solution usage (multiple divisions?), solution depth (multiple solutions?), and renewal status (from “no” to “automatic”). 

We felt referenceability was linked to results because if a client was agreeing to be a reference for sales, or, even better, for national pr / marketing / advertising campaigns, they were getting strong value from the solution.  We also tracked the professional success of the individual buyer  -  did the results from our solution make them a company star (strong)?  Did it get them promoted (stronger)?  Did they parlay it into a best practice industry leadership role (strongest)?

There were 30 points possible from both the relationship and the results sections and we carried the scores on our account management plan.  You’ll also notice that the 2nd tab on the spreadsheet shows a relationship-results scorecard for 5 accounts.  We used it as a group at a sales / service kickoff to assess how strong our relationships and results were.  It was an eye-opening exercise and made us realize specifically where our relationships and our results could be stronger than they were.

This tool was borrowed from the management consulting industry and implementing it was trickier in the tech model where – unlike the partner-model in consulting - sales and service rolled up into separate VPs.

We were a little too new-business focused and immature for this tool to deliver its full impact but I think it’s a good one for a company with a consultative solution where much of the growth comes from existing client expansion.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

]]> http://salesscale.com/client-success-scoring/feed/ 0 Sales Resource Prioritizer http://salesscale.com/sales-resource-prioritizer/ http://salesscale.com/sales-resource-prioritizer/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:15:00 +0000 Paul McGhee http://salesscale.com/?guid=01ab20f0e0a639f6983624c7b6161d59 This post is the 4th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  This was for a solution with a higher average selling price.

 

This sales cycle was a high ticket (ASP > $1M) create demand sales cycle where we needed to be smart about continually assessing fit and winnability because it was a long and resource intensive sales cycle: creative, technical and client services people were needed in every sales cycle in addition to an executive sponsor and the sales people themselves.

We had enough reps but not enough of these other folks (who also had day jobs outside of the sales cycle) to work all the opportunities.  We needed a fair and generally understood way of disqualifying opportunities because the ad hoc refereeing of resources at the sales meeting was not working well.

We tracked 2 phases of fit in a simple spreadsheet with this sales resource prioritizer.

Phase I ranked early sales cycle information that could be figured out through research and a 1st call.  Here we ranked things like vertical market attractiveness, alignment with CEO initiatives (determined from annual reports or transcripts from investor calls), size of marketing budget, year over year sales growth (we had better success selling to greed than fear and so winners were more likely to buy our solution),  and our internal coach’s level in the prospect organization.

Phase II was the gate to delivering a full solution presentation to an account.  It ranked information that could be gleaned through a discovery phase.  It included where our solution fit priority-wise for our line-of-business VP, how strong the solution fit was, how many competitors and how committed the prospect was to a joint evaluation process.

This is a good approach to qualifying resource-intensive sales opportunities and efficiently focusing sales-support resources on the most winnable deals.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

]]> This post is the 4th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  This was for a solution with a higher average selling price.

 

This sales cycle was a high ticket (ASP > $1M) create demand sales cycle where we needed to be smart about continually assessing fit and winnability because it was a long and resource intensive sales cycle: creative, technical and client services people were needed in every sales cycle in addition to an executive sponsor and the sales people themselves.

We had enough reps but not enough of these other folks (who also had day jobs outside of the sales cycle) to work all the opportunities.  We needed a fair and generally understood way of disqualifying opportunities because the ad hoc refereeing of resources at the sales meeting was not working well.

We tracked 2 phases of fit in a simple spreadsheet with this sales resource prioritizer.

Phase I ranked early sales cycle information that could be figured out through research and a 1st call.  Here we ranked things like vertical market attractiveness, alignment with CEO initiatives (determined from annual reports or transcripts from investor calls), size of marketing budget, year over year sales growth (we had better success selling to greed than fear and so winners were more likely to buy our solution),  and our internal coach’s level in the prospect organization.

Phase II was the gate to delivering a full solution presentation to an account.  It ranked information that could be gleaned through a discovery phase.  It included where our solution fit priority-wise for our line-of-business VP, how strong the solution fit was, how many competitors and how committed the prospect was to a joint evaluation process.

This is a good approach to qualifying resource-intensive sales opportunities and efficiently focusing sales-support resources on the most winnable deals.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

]]> http://salesscale.com/sales-resource-prioritizer/feed/ 0