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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A useful exercise that we use in our management classes is to take each of the 10 P’s and rate your top three performers and your bottom three performers in a job category to see the relative importance of each attribute to that specific job.

Start Performance Management in the Interview

How long does it take to do a performance review? The answer is six months to a year because the first step in managing performance is to set the standards, values, tolerances, and expectations. You should give your candidates the performance review form and set their expectations as part of the interview process.

New hires are like wet cement. You can mold them and shape them early, but as time passes, habits form — both good and bad. After 90 days or so, their attitudes begin to calcify to the point where it may take a jackhammer to change their bad habits.

But how is the performance review actually handled in most cases? Performance reviews are seen as a necessary evil from HR, often written by HR, and often don’t include the behaviors, skills, and competencies needed to perform the adopted sales methodology. They are often seen as just checkboxes to get the HR people off your back.

If the performance review doesn’t include the sales methodology, then perhaps it should be ignored. However, if performance management is driven by the ideal sales cycle, it can be a very constructive performance coaching tool that actually should be reviewed on a quarterly basis rather than annually. This allows sales managers to coach not just deal competence, but the other factors of overall performance such as character, chemistry, competence, commitment, communication, and cognitive skills.

The time to start this process is in the interview itself, where expectations about how you want things done in your organization can be set early.

Talent Scorecard Best Practice, Talent 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 written, tested profiles for each sales position. We have questions, assessments, and an interview process that produce consistent performers. We generally have the sales talent in the right roles. We have sales performance reviews that include our sales methodology and are introduced during the interview process. New managers are trained how to hire effectively. We have a training curriculum, built on our best practices, that includes skills, opportunity strategies, and account management. Opportunity Management We have junior salespeople ready for territories when they open up. We have a pool of candidates in our industry on which we can draw when we have an opening. We have full-time internal recruiters. We have a high win ratio in head-to-head competitions. Account Management Our customer service people consider themselves part of the account sales team. We have sales reps and managers who have earned trusted advisor status with their clients. Industry/Market We have industry knowledgeable sales consultants available to our sales team. We are recognized thought leaders by the customers in our industry.

SECTION III: Technique

CHAPTER 5: Technique

Never mistake motion for action.

Ernest Hemingway

Jim Dickie is a partner in CSO Insights, a sales consulting practice that surveys hundreds of sales organizations every year and publishes an excellent benchmarking study. In their 2005 State of the Marketplace Review of 1,040 firms, he says that only 23.3 percent of companies spend more than $2,500 per year training their sales forces. And this includes all types of training.

On average, this represents the expected value generated by one rep in about two hours. And yet 84.5 percent of reporting companies in the study stated that their sales methodology either had a noticeable or significant impact on sales performance. It seems that additional investment in training would yield significant returns. But only a third of reporting firms said that adherence to their sales methodology is either structured or optimized.

Inspect what you expect. Defining a formal sales process and/or investing in sales training has little residual impact if it is not reinforced and enforced. Higher quotas and higher quota attainment do not appear to be the result of defining processes, but of using them.[3]

In Hope Is Not A Strategy, we detailed two sales processes that are best practices in the complex sale: The R.A.D.A.R.® (Reading Accounts and Deploying Appropriate Resources) methodology for winning competitive opportunities and the T.E.A.M. (Total Enterprise Account Management ®) process for managing strategic accounts.

So that this book is fully self-contained, this chapter not only will review but also will focus on advancements, refinements, new developments, and the impact of the up-and-down economy on how salespeople sell in each one of these processes. Rather than address the R.A.D.A.R. process in detail, we will provide a summary here and an in-depth appendix at the end of the book. Because readers have asked for more detail on the T.E.A.M. process, we explore it in more depth here.

We will then focus on best practices in coaching the process and increasing forecasting accuracy.

R.A.D.A.R.®: The Six P’s of Opportunity Management—Summary

The R.A.D.A.R. process is used for managing complex sales evaluations by committees. It brings together the best ideas in consultative selling, competitive selling, political selling, and team selling. It focuses on selling strategic benefits to strategic buyers and technical benefits to technical buyers. This methodology allows salespeople to control the competition, politics, and the decision-making process to increase their chance of winning.

Additionally, R.A.D.A.R. is a dynamic planning process to help you develop strategies and plans early in the sales process and revise them late in the process, when things turn emotional and political. In fact, how well and how quickly you review and revise your plan is more important than the perfection of the initial plan.

1. Link solutions to the prospect’s pain — for greater value.

2. Qualify the prospect — for best resource utilization.

3. Build competitive preference — by differentiating your solution.

4. Determine the decision-making process — for driving strategy.

5. Sell to power — by finding the key to buyer politics.

6. Communicate the strategic plan — for effective team selling.

An opportunity management process is for winning competitive evaluations either in existing accounts or in new-name prospects. Investing in account management is done to make opportunity management either easier or unnecessary by winning the evaluation before it begins.

T.E.A.M.: The Eight “Ates” of Managing Strategic Accounts

When managing large, strategic accounts, you want to maximize the revenue, relationships, and “referenceability” potential based on the account segmentation you have determined is best for your company strategy.

The methodology that follows includes the best practices that we have seen and produces an account management map to effectively sell between the sales. These elements are not sequential but rather form a planning loop—which should be reviewed at least quarterly—and are often executed simultaneously.

Penetrate

Penetrating an account may be achieved in several ways: through winning the first piece of business in a competitive evaluation, as a result of demand-creation selling rather than demand-reaction selling, through another business partner or division, or through corporate headquarters that results in a client-vendor relationship of some sort.

Once you have penetrated the account and won the business, you have to be ready to deliver. The first piece of business is usually based on price, proposal, and product.

Demonstrate

Clients often take credit for successes and blame vendors for failures. You must demonstrate your value by going back to the client and documenting the effects of having chosen your organization and solution. What outcomes, benefits, metrics, and gains have been achieved by having used your firm in the first place? Clients rarely write a paper that describes how wonderful a vendor is. You have to do that yourself. But make sure that you can back it up. And if you haven’t delivered value, then that becomes your strategy — account repair.

Evaluate

Segmenting accounts for future investment is a critical step in account management. It’s a waste of time to try to partner or earn preferred partner status with everyone. Some company cultures are that of a commodity buyer. They always have been and always will be, and it will only change at the top. In this case, you need to evaluate whether you should invest additional resources in this account in an effort to gain preferred vendor status or should you stay on a transactional level.

I once had an opportunity to sell to Pepsi, one of our competitor’s best customers. They called me and said that they wanted a national account agreement with us. I was young and excited and flew out to meet with them. I asked them, “What does it mean to be your partner?”

They said, “You have to offer us the same discount your competitor offers.”

In return for the discount, I asked them if they would put us on a short list for future purchases so we wouldn’t have to fight for every piece of business. I also asked them to promise us a yearly meeting with their IT department. They said “no” to both. They wanted a 50 percent discount just for the privilege to compete.