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.

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Another good research organization for finding pains and issues for demand-creation selling is a company called Stratascope, Inc. Stratascope gathers industry statistics and available data on companies based on their financial reports. The company then works with salespeople to help them identify areas where an organization has a gap between its statistics or financial ratios and the industry standard. Using information from Stratascope, if an organization has a solution to the problem, they can actually create a value proposition based on closing that gap.

For example, a prospect averages 83 days sales outstanding in accounts receivable. The industry standard is 67, and the best in industry is 59. Based on the prospect’s financials, if you (the salesperson) can close that gap to meet the industry standard, you can show the prospect the savings and return on investment (ROI) he or she would experience as a result of implementing your solution. Maybe the result is an increase in earnings, more freed-up cash, or even an increase in shareholder value by a penny a share. This is a powerful approach in demandcreation selling that the consultants have been using for years.

Obstacles to Effective Account Management

There are some major organizational and cultural barriers to effective account management that are above and beyond what technology can solve. One is split policy and revenue recognition. Another is turf guarding, and a third, obviously, is communication.

Some salespeople would rather have 100 percent of zero than give up a percentage to someone else. This is the “me” mentality, and this mind-set has to be defeated internally in your culture if you are going to have a successful account management program.

Two of the bigger barriers to technology at the account management level are personal compensation issues and regional boundaries. When SAP was very small, it dominated several accounts because one salesperson could handle a major global account. When SAP became entrenched in other countries, there were internal fights in these accounts over whose share was whose.

The challenge is to keep these struggles internal and away from the client. Never let your service levels be affected by internal arguments.

The people who are probably the best, but not perfect, at this are actually the big consulting houses. For one, they have good revenue recognition—split policies that recognize who sold it and who has to support it. They also evaluate each other in regard to promotions and advancement in making partner. They know that they are going to need another partner some day down the road on their own deal, so, for the most part, collaboration is part of their culture.

They are usually able to put the good of the client above their internal priorities in order to make the pie bigger. Not that there are not fights, but they seem to have a collaborative approach — more so than many of the product companies we work with.

Building preference must be done before a formal buying event takes place because then the lights come on, the guards go out, and the walls come down.

In addition to listing research and opportunities, one of the key places where technology can be of help is to create a balance sheet of political assets— a metric of relationships— within a company. This is a way of measuring preference for you and your firm with powerful executives between the sales.

If you have a good account plan and the technology to make it available to everyone with a need to know, you can set clear goals and leverage your team. Everyone who touches the account in the organization knows what the objective is and can use the normal give and take of daily business to trade for access to the people you need to meet. Without a written companywide plan, and a system to make it accessible, this is simply not going to happen. There is also no way to present your documented value and negotiate it for preferred-vendor status.

Keeping track of multiple divisions and multiple sales efforts — while making sure that your pricing isn’t all over the board and providing a convincing joint proposal for the client that will help him or her understand your advantages—takes a great deal of coordination. Solving the political problems inside may be the biggest challenge. Without a piece of technology to keep track of who is doing what, however, this becomes an even more difficult task.

Closing the Gap between Marketing and Sales

Another important area of automation — that of sales messaging — can greatly affect the interface between marketing and sales. This is an area where technology actually has exacerbated the problem.

Marketing serves many important functions. Among these is creating effective and timely sales messaging for salespeople. Often the sales department is unable to get the information it needs from marketing in a format its people can use.

With the advent of e-mail and the Web, marketing people now can barrage salespeople with tons and tons of information, which makes sorting through it all to find the right information even more difficult.

The key to this is to provide the information in a format that allows salespeople to find what they need quickly and easily. Another problem is that marketing typically doesn’t create different messages for prospects, customers, salespeople, and investors. And if a company has a large number of products, a large number of competitors, and is in a number of different industries, the result is a huge knowledge management problem — which drives a sales problem.

Hey, Marketing—Salespeople Are Your Customers, Too

Marketing collateral and brochures obviously should be written from the point of view of the customer. But which customer? For sales-effectiveness messages, the starting point should be from the salesperson’s point of view, which is by stakeholder. What do the salespeople need to be competitive, to keep customers satisfied, to add value, and to win more business?

Once you have this information, it has to be organized and indexed. First, it has to be chunked into pieces. Some companies approach this by chunking it by product, but salespeople need it by customer pain — from the customer’s point of view. If customers have this pain, how does our solution solve it? What are the outcomes? And — oh, by the way — it is contained in what product?

After the information has been segmented, it then has to be indexed so that salespeople can search for it by customer pain; by product, solution, or service; by industry, executive, and technical buyer; by phase of the sales cycle; and by competitor. Once indexed, it must be linked to other relevant data so that salespeople can trace it back to other related information that they might need.

You are a salesperson in a hotel room, late at night. Tomorrow morning, you have a sales call to a CFO in health care, against competitor XYZ, for a certain solution set. What do you say? What are the industry issues for each person on the buying committee? What will your competitor have said? What traps can you look for? What issues can you create?

Tomorrow afternoon, you have to talk to procurement in Bank X. What are their issues? What will they be concerned about? What solutions do you have? How can you differentiate yourself?

As you can see, this can be a knowledge management challenge. Most file document vendors organize and index documents, but salespeople need their information in a more granular fashion.

Sales Knowledge Management

Salespeople tell us that they often have to make as many as 20 calls internally to find the information they need for prospects and clients. A tool that makes this easier is an enormous value that frees salespeople up to sell.

An example of a vendor working to provide that additional level of value to salespeople is Pragmatech. The company’s offerings allow salespeople to quickly personalize communication in the context of “buyer-ready information.” In other words, the communication is personalized and tailored to the buying criteria of each prospect or customer. All Pragmatech applications are driven by a common knowledge base. Content in the knowledge base is parsed into customizable pieces and indexed with appropriate search engines so that salespeople can easily personalize presentations, proposals, statements of work, RFP responses, business letters, and other communications throughout the sales process.

Jennifer Webb of Pragmatech tells us that when the company surveys its clients, it finds that 90 percent of the sales messaging used by its salespeople comes from their own hard drives—not a central message center—and that much of the data is feature-driven rather than pain-driven. When Pragmatech talks to prospects, its people ask, “What if you could capture what your A players are saying and get that into the heads of your B and C players?”

Pragmatech’s success stories demonstrate the value of a centralized knowledge base made accessible to sales organizations. For one enterprise, a leading online global career network, the marketing team aligned closely with sales to capture and refine the best high-value buyerfocused messaging. With use of automated proposals and presentations and a searchable Website, the sales force throughout the enterprise had access to these wellarticulated and accurate messages and could apply them to communications that were personalized to the buyer’s objectives. The results included improvements in sales effectiveness, client interactions, competitive advantages, and productivity.

Salespeople still need the flexibility to tailor messages to individual buyers, but in this way they can at least start from a central repository. Then you can be sure that they are basing their messages on current information that is already arranged into pieces that they can organize and use.

The solution is not just a sales portal, a tool kit, a dashboard, or a marketing encyclopedia. There is no technology “silver bullet” when it comes to sales and CRM.

Messages Focused by Stakeholder

The best practice is to have relevant information, to keep it fresh, and to organize and index it based on what your sales force needs. This should be the point of departure, and it should be driven by the best practices sales cycle, working backwards through marketing to get the right information by industry, stakeholder, organizational chart, solution, product, competitor, customer, prospect, or investor.

The information needs to be segmented, indexed, and linked by a tool that can help salespeople find what they need, when they need it, to win more business. By the time a salesperson gleans all this from brochures or books of binders, well, you can get the idea.

Product Launch or Product Lurch?

And if you are involved in a new product launch, your window of competitive advantage is probably six months before your competitor can bring a new product online. If your salespeople spend half that time creating messages themselves, you’ve already lost half your opportunity.

A typical scenario for many companies is for marketing to give the salespeople information on a new product or solution in a format that is great for a marketing piece but not great for a competitive sales message to be used throughout the sales cycle.

Each salesperson then “translates” this marketing message into the message he or she needs to support the sales process.

Here is the problem: The “A” players may figure this out quickly and lose value for only one or two weeks. But it takes the “B” players a little longer, and they may lose one or two deals before they figure it out. And how long does it take the “C” players? Somewhere between a long time and never. There is a better way to do this.

The best practice that we have found is that when it comes to competitive information, buyers needs, value propositions, and your benefits and differentiators, these

need to be organized in a context-sensitive search engine rather than in a marketing encyclopedia full of brochures. The search engine is the key.

A few years ago, Jon Hauck and I met with the company with which we had just been merged.

The manager asked us, “So, what did you guys do about six months ago? All of a sudden, you started turning on a dime. We used to be able to try a new tactic on you half a dozen times before you would finally have a sales meeting and get wise to it. Suddenly you started having an answer ready the very next day. Not only could you handle the objection, but you had set a trap for us and spun it the other way!”

What we had done was use the then-new technology of voice mail to create a clearinghouse of information so that whenever a salesperson discovered something new, he or she passed it through the product and brand managers immediately, and it was back in the field the next day.

The simple use of this technology made millions of dollars for us, but speed was the real issue. Now, with the Internet, this competitive speed should be even easier and faster.

Speed of Feedback Is Advantage

The best practice is to refresh information every 48 hours and to have somebody in charge of each competitor and each industry to keep that information current. You also need a feedback loop where a salesperson in one part of the world who uncovers a competitive trap can spread the word and have the rest of your salespeople ready for it before your competition can use it on you a dozen times.

Technology Scorecard Best Practices, Technology 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 We have a standard, widely adopted contact management system for our firm. Opportunity Level We have an effective, widely adopted opportunity management planning tool. Our metrics allow sales managers to track lead responsiveness. We regularly conduct win-loss reports through a third party. Our sales process and methodology are imbedded into our forecasting/pipeline system. Our forecast/pipeline system includes early suspects for management visibility. Account Management Our CRM system gives us visibility into opportunities for a given account worldwide. We have a C RM system that is widely adopted by the sales force. Industry/Market We have a tool for gathering and distributing feedback from our reps quickly. Marketing information is organized and indexed by industry, solution set, individual buyer, and competitor. Our sales force is equipped with tactics and messages, by industry, to respond to competitive traps and objections.

SECTION VI: Trust