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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Quality is defined by customer expectations. The salesperson’s job is to properly set those expectations high enough to get the business but not so high that you can’t deliver.

All awnings leak. Yours do, and so will the next guy’s.

One salesperson tells the client, “Our awnings never leak.”

Another salesperson instead offers the customer a piece of chalk and tells her, “When the first leak occurs, take this chalk and circle the leak. Call us, and we’ll fix it.”

Both salespeople may get the sale. But which salesperson will end up with an unhappy customer?

If your competition then says that their awnings don’t leak, they may win the initial business, but they won’t win the next time. And when that first leak occurs, they will have lost the customer’s trust forever.

They may win once, but they will fail to make winning a habit. And that unhappy client is now a vocal negative reference.

To build company-to-company trust, you have to make the first people who choose you look good for doing so. If you overpromise or underdeliver, you make repeat business — where true opportunity lies — an uphill battle. And you end up with a customer base of largely unhappy people.

The purpose of account management is to build company-to-company trust. The gateway is performance and quality on the first sale. If you don’t exceed expectations on the first sale, you may have inoculated the client against future business.

You have to do more than deliver and perform on the first business — you also have to document your value. The customer will not always do this. If you want to build from rapport to preference to trust, you have to go in and document and publicize what you’ve done for the client and why it was a good decision to choose you or keep you. Rarely will the client go to much effort to dispute these claims if they are reasonable, but it gives ammunition to your supporters.

If you have built trust with powerful individuals in an organization, you then can borrow that trust for access to other people you need to meet. This is called sponsorship, and it allows you to radiate successfully to the rest of the organization or industry. The last step of an implementation process is to proactively ask your sponsor who else you can be doing this for in the company, in the industry, and in the network. Then you need to ask those people to help you gain access to the people you need to meet.

Equal-Rank Meetings

There are many other things you can do to build company-to-company trust. If top executives can meet each other, this reduces risk because they know that if the salesperson leaves, they still have someone at the top they can call on who has skin in the game. Corporate visits and executive meetings are also important because they assure buyers that there is a company vision that supports the buyer’s agenda — that the seller is going to continue to commit resources to product, industry, or geography.

Before Enron became the poster child for corporate abuse (before Ken Lay), the company was one of the best-run organizations in the southwestern United States.

During a very competitive evaluation, Joe Terry had developed relationships with the divisional presidents but had not been able to penetrate to the corporate executives.

Our chairman, John Imlay, was an icon in the industry and known as a very charismatic speaker. He was going to be in Houston to meet a very prestigious client, and Joe took advantage of the trip to arrange a breakfast meeting with the divisional presidents so that he could use John’s name to get an audience with the corporate executives.

John made a huge impression on Enron’s president and CEO. The CEO asked John, “We are considering investing a substantial amount with your company. What are you going to do to ensure our success?”

John smiled and answered, “I’m going to let Joe make the good decisions he always makes, and everything will work out fine.” Baton passed. Deal won. Happy client.

These equal-rank meetings are especially important overseas, where there are greater class differences between managers and non-managers. The executive may say nothing different from what the salesperson has said all along; it’s simply that the executive has the stripes. It’s important in these executive-to-executive meetings to make sure that trust is left with the account executive after the call.

If the executive steals power during the sales call, he or she can’t give it back. That executive is now the actual account manager, and the salesperson is now the gun bearer. Every effort must be made to pass power to the account manager during the sales call. This also reduces vendor abuse if the people inside the account know that you have inside access to executive management.

Relationships

One of the reasons I may trust you and your company is because you solve my problems. The other pillar of trust is personal relationships — moving from alignment to rapport to trust. If I am going to trust you, I have to know that I can depend on you for at least a win-win in every transaction. (Dependability alone is not enough. There are some people I can depend on to stick it to me every time.)

My father-in-law was trusted for 39 years in the insurance business because his clients all knew that he would never do anything to his gain and their detriment. Most of these rural people never quite understood the implications of the insurance they were buying, but they knew he would never do anything that wasn’t in their best interest.

This is called trusted-advisor selling (the seventh generation of selling), and the height of it is when the buyer says, “I’m not sure what I need. Why don’t you study it and tell me what I need. Whatever you’re selling, I’m buying.” It takes years to build this kind of trust with buyers and only one abuse to break it, but it is the highest level of selling.

Sometimes we trust people only because we know that the risk of loss of future business will keep them honest. Danger comes from sellers who only want to sell to you one time. This is why a contract is still important. Without it, there is really nothing to ensure that trust.

In order to trust you, I need to know that you are dependable. I need to understand your principles and values and trust that you will never do anything that is not in my best interest. Principle-driven people are consistent, not situational. And principles are values acted on consistently.

If that trust grows into personal friendship, this is even better. This is when I not only trust you, but I also enjoy your company. I appreciate your counsel, and you are fun to be around. This is a great benefit to the buyer-seller relationship, but if it doesn’t have the underpinnings of strong product or performance, it can melt down quickly.

Even your best sponsors cannot go into implementation saying, “Buy from this guy. I like him. He’s my friend.” You have to build on both pillars of trust. I trust you because you are an industry expert, you know my business, and you can solve my problems. Or I will trust you because we work together, you are my friend, I know your family, and you will never let me down.

In the end, the only thing your company really has to sell is trust. It’s at the heart of brand management. Just look at all the images in advertising that focus on trust.

Trust Scorecard Best Practices, Trust 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 are trained in fundamental skills for discovery, linkage, and presentation. Opportunity We consistently conduct needs assessments with the client before showing our product and solutions. We consistently debrief each reference to get perspective of where we are in the sale. Account Management Our references are developed, rewarded, and their time treated respectfully. We consistently document our value to our existing clients. We have earned preferred vendor status in accounts. We get exclusive evaluations and noncompetitive business. We maintain continuity of the same reps on the same accounts from year to year. We conduct customer satisfaction and loyalty assessments regularly. Industry/Market Our sales force is organized and focused by industry so we can focus on industry-specific solutions for our clients.

SECTION VII: Transformation

CHAPTER 9: Transformation — Making It Stick

Until new behaviors are rooted in social norms and shared values, they are subject to degradation as soon as the pressure for change is removed

John Kotter, “What Leaders Really Do,” Harvard Business Review, 1999

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Peter Drucker

Over the past 30 years I’ve had a lot of managers come to me looking for improvement. Some of them are ready to make drastic changes and are willing to do whatever it takes to solve their business problems. Others aren’t comfortable with that much change. They want improvement but not transformation. Others just want a speech. Some want a miracle.

To achieve true competitive advantage, obviously there has to be a lasting top-management commitment to full integration of all sales processes from hiring to training to compensation to team roles and responsibilities, rewards, and performance. To really make it stick, managers have to get back into both deal coaching and performance coaching.

I would start by requiring every manager to read Larry

Bossidy and Ram Charan’s excellent book, Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done. It focuses on what it takes to build a culture of execution in all areas. One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “Coaching is the single most important part of expanding others capabilities. It’s the difference between giving orders and teaching people how to get things done. Good leaders regard every encounter as an opportunity to coach.”

The key is integrating these new processes, embedding them in every aspect of your culture from management language to forecasting, the sales cycle, and compensation.

How Salespeople Learn: C.A.S.H. Learning Model

Before you can transform your sales force, you have to understand how adults learn. In addition, salespeople learn differently from other adults. In our experience, there are four steps: curiosity, awareness, skill, and habit (see Figure 9–1).

Curiosity

Curiosity is the seed of learning — the individual has to bring this to the table. In our sessions, we always have a mixture of sponges, vacationers, and prisoners. The first two hours are spent getting the prisoners to unfold their arms. They are prisoners of their own experience.

We have to create a gap between where they are and where they need to be to survive and thrive as the demands of selling and the buyer evolve. They need to understand that they must either grow or go.