Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

• Название: Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
• Автор: Rick Page
• Жанр: Маркетинг, PR, реклама

A master of the complex sale and a bestselling author, Rick Page is also one of the most experienced sales consultants and trainers in the world. Make Winning A Habit defines the gap between what companies know to do and how they consistently perform.

Page clearly identifies five “Ts” of transformation: Talent, Technique, Teamwork, Technology and Trust. These five elements, when fully developed and integrated into the sales and marketing organization, begin to create the habit of winning over customers in every industry. Stories of successes-and failures-from members of prominent companies help you apply the five “Ts” to your company's culture, and point the way to more effective plans for motivating employees, building and coaching winning teams, and improving hiring processes.

Then, with the use of Page's assessment scorecard, you can compare your company with some of the strategies and practices of the best sales forces in the world. Designed to gauge your organization's effectiveness and further develop breakthrough sales growth, this scorecard highlights your strengths and weaknesses, helping you bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

You'll also learn about:

The “Deadly Dozen” (pains sales managers feel today) and how they can kill business

A ten-point process for identifying and hiring nothing less than “A” players

The 8 “ates” of managing strategic accounts and how they will maximize revenue and elevate relationships

How to identify and correct the six most common areas of poor individual sales performance

With Make Winning A Habit, you'll discover the obstacles between you and the consistent sales performance you can achieve-and find the tools to not only make success a habit, but one that will keep growing with your business.

---

After talking with Joe, the vice president agreed that Joe’s solution would achieve his strategic objectives and that it would be very risky for him to try to achieve those same objectives with the competitor’s solution.

Joe suggested that the vice president abstain from the vote and allow the other five people on the committee to make the choice. This way, he could tell his friend, Joe’s competitor, that he had been outvoted.

This proved to be a way for the vice president to save face with his friend and to reach his business objectives by going with the better solution.

Joe won the deal, and the vice president became one of the biggest supporters that drove the initiative throughout the company.

The key to this strategy was to recognize that personal preference was only good if he could also solve the problem. Had Joe not had a relationship with the vice president, he probably could not have had this type of discussion with him. And if he had not had a superior product, relationship would have not been enough to win the deal.

Defining Your Best Practices Sales Cycle

The Six P’s methodology includes the elements that need to be attended to in order to win a complex sale. We teach them sequentially, but in fact, salespeople use them simultaneously.

Once you qualify an account with a dispassionate process, you use a combination of a stakeholder analysis and a metaphor of the sales cycle which we have named the canyon and crucible (see appendix Figure A-1).

The stakeholder analysis identifies each buyer’s pain, power, part, and preference in order to determine a plan to win the heart of each of the key voters or live without it. This process is overlaid with the canyon and crucible, which is a chronologic assessment of the dynamics of changing issues and decision-making politics as they go through a competitive evaluation. Combined, we’ve put a time dimension on the sales cycle.

The best practice in the industry today is to take your sales cycle and define it in terms of the phases that are unique to your company and your industry. Salespeople tend to do the right things in the sales cycle, just not always at the right times. And timing is critical. How you coach depends on which phase of the sales cycle you are in. In general, we want salespeople doing things earlier than they have been doing them before. The other reason that phases are important is that they match your forecasting process.

The Sales Cycle Coaching Template—A Vision of Victory

The first thing we do with a client is take the company’s sales management team and a selected number of the company’s top salespeople and identify, by phase, what an ideal sales cycle looks like. What does a vision of victory look like at each step along the way?

Information drives strategy. We start by defining all of the coaching questions managers will ask during the sales cycle to see if they have included the right activities in the sales cycle that are necessary to answer those coaching questions.

Then, by phase, what are the desired outcomes, questions to ask, information needed, roles and responsibilities, qualification criteria, and action items (with due dates and owners) for each of those phases? The result ends up being a template of an ideal sales cycle from which managers can coach and compare. Because they built it, they own it, and it is tailored to their business. It is then provided to all salespeople so that they won’t feel ambushed when the tough questions are asked.

The R.A.D.A.R. six P’s methodology, combined with your sales process, creates a best practice sales template unique to your organization. The purpose of a sales cycle template and a coaching session is to (1)guide the sales team on how to execute these action items most effectively, (2)identify who to focus your efforts on, and (3)explain why the salesperson should do certain activities or what is the risk of not doing the activity.

All a salesperson has is time, and the decisions he makes on that time are critical to his success. You can’t really “make time,” and you can’t really “save time.” All you can do is change the quality of time spent.

The idea is to have one sales cycle for your company for each market segment or industry. By the way, it shouldn’t take that long to build this. We’ve seen companies spend over $1 million and months with consultants to have this built. Then it sits in a binder without training or execution.

The challenge comes — and where many of these projects fail — in the action items, questions, anticipated risks, politics, and potential objections. Most plans also don’t take into account a thorough transition to post-sales team members.

A best practice sales cycle should be built in three days for less than six figures. For Apple Computer, we built eight of these—one for each industry—because the solution sets and buying processes for each buyer in each industry are different.

The way you sell to government is different from the way you sell to higher education, which is different from how you sell to health care. You may have a different buying cycle for a different solution set or industry. But once it has been developed, it should become the template for sales execution and coaching for your salespeople and managers.

Forecasting Is Now Strategic

Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, sales forecasts are now a serious issue in U.S.-listed companies. Companies have to be compliant and more transparent to stockholders. As a result, boards of directors want to know what sort of analysis is behind the sales forecast.

If the CEO says that everything is going to be okay and then gets embarrassed at the end of the quarter because some deals slipped and didn’t close, investors get surprised and now file lawsuits. It happens about once a quarter, and the result is a stock price that can fall 10 to 40 percent. These are high stakes for a weak forecasting system.

Why Forecasting Doesn’t Work Well

One source of sales discipline is the forecast itself — especially for product-oriented companies, where the revenue is recognizable when the sale is made. But most forecasts aren’t forecasts in the first place. Instead, they’re “pastcasts,” looking in the rear-view mirror at what has happened to date.

If the purpose of the forecast is simply to predict revenue rather than to manage and coach the pipeline, then it fails to reach its potential. In reality, many deals are already out of control by the time they hit the forecast and become visible to management.

In our experience, most forecasts don’t separate the issues of if and when you’re going to get the business. The flaw lies in the nature of competitive evaluations. Most CRM systems simply have line-item lists of opportunities, close dates, dollar amounts, and some sort of A-B-C or 50–70–90 percent ranking.

This is actually a percentage of expected value built on the confidence level of the manager, which may come close to the total company forecast by the law of large numbers. In reality, though, you don’t get a percent of a deal. You either win it or you don’t.

And we have seen newspaper article after newspaper article in which companies have a bad quarter attributed to “several deals that didn’t come in,” and their stock has fallen as much as 10 to 40 percent in a given quarter. These aren’t forecasts; they are simply wishes or guesses. Using a CRM system to automate them is just adding up bad numbers faster.

The closer you get to winning, the closer you actually get to losing because of the crucible effect defined in Hope Is Not A Strategy. As committees get closer to making a decision, politics erupt, the decision-making process breaks down, the issues change, priorities change, and the competition makes counterattacks once it realizes it is looking at 100 percent of zero.

Most forecasting systems are not tied to a methodology. They don’t reflect your strategy or the buying process of the buyer. Most sales reps are too close to the action, and their judgment is clouded by wishful thinking. So they don’t ask the tough, critical questions that challenge their strategy for fear that they will spoil a good forecast.

This is the sales manager’s job. It’s too important to delegate.

The best practice is a forecast that includes a line item but through which a manager can click and drill down to the decision-making process, politics, stakeholder analysis, source of urgency, action items, and value proposition to see what your true chances are of winning.

Then, if necessary, the manager can generate a phone call to the sales rep, which will be shorter and of greater value. Forecasts not built on methodology are a pack of guesses on which you bet your company every quarter.

Only by a forecast built on a detailed analysis of the account, reviewed in multiple coaching sessions by a front-line manager, the sales team, and perhaps some certified deal coaches can a sales manager sleep soundly at night.

Forecasting—If and When plus How

The best practice is to imbed methodology and sales process into your forecasting system. Although this is a best practice, we seldom see it used. Recently, we finished this process with Harcourt Assessment. Scott Sciotto, a sales manager there exclaimed, “At last — a methodology combined with a forecast system.”

There are two obvious benefits to this. We see people all the time who understand the six P’s as their sales process, still using A-B-C and 50–70–90 percent as their forecasting technique. But using phases alone fails to recognize the competitive risk in each deal. In a forecast, we need to know not only when the deal will happen but also if we are going to win it. Lumping the two together results in unpleasant surprises (see Figure 5–3).

As a salesperson, I hated my manager’s quarterly question of, “Is this deal going to close?”

My answer was always the same: “Are you asking me if I am going to win this deal at all, or am I going to win the deal this quarter? That is really two different questions.”

Forecasting using the law of large numbers has flourished to the detriment of quality forecasts at the front-line management level.

In addition, salespeople hide deals off the forecast so that they can turn them in at the end of the quarter and be a hero. Often they are awarded a bonus for this, which encourages bad behavior.

The Next Generation of Drill-Down Forecasting

While many sales managers have embedded their sales methodology into their CRM system, new “on demand” Internet technologies have significantly enabled the integration of methodology into the forecasting system. This can now be done without requiring any programming and while maintaining necessary security by keeping the data inside your firewall.

The success of Salesforce.com in penetrating larger enterprises has validated this approach. The ease of integrating CRM, forecasting, and remote coaching now allows for technology-assisted deal coaching and a new level of teamwork between sales rep and manager.

Technique Scorecard Best Practices, Technique Importance Execution Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) Agree, but we never do this We sometimes do this We often do this We do this consistently Individual Salespeople effectively link our solutions to the buyer's pains. Our salespeople have the individual skills necessary to create preference for us. Our salespeople are able to develop value propositions that link into strategic value and emotional issues for powerful people. Opportunity Salespeople understand political power and allocate resources to winning the votes that matter. Salespeople effectively qualify out of deals they cannot win. Everyone on the sales team knows his or her role and responsibility and understands the account and opportunity plan. Managers know how to effectively analyze and coach competitive deals. Account Management We consistently meet customer expectations. We have a best practices account management cycle. Salespeople know how to get to executives and know what to say when they get there. Industry/Market We have a best practices sales cycle,defined by phase, for each market segment. We have industry-focused solutions, messages, and expertise.

SECTION IV: Teamwork