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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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.

I walked away.

We decided not to be their partner, but to go after other pieces of the business at the local level. As it turned out, our competitor didn’t spend much time on the account because the discount was so great. We stayed at the transactional level and did fine. If corporate couldn’t help us, they weren’t going to hurt us.

Radiate

If you decide to invest in growing an account, you need to radiate to power sponsors early in the game. Radiate from those who know you and like you to those who need to know you and like you — before the next formal buying process breaks out. Use one executive sponsor to take you to another. Ask each who else in his or her area/industry you can be doing this for.

Unfortunately, too many people either get too focused on delivery of the first project to radiate out or they havethe hall pass and get stuck in their comfort zone, calling on people who are already sold. In addition, sales “hunters” hurry down the road to the next prospect company because what is qualified for long-term account management is not qualified for a short-term quarterly-driven “hunter.” This is why “hunters” usually don’t make good account managers.

Collaborate

One way to elevate your value from commodity to strategic is to collaborate with the client on product or strategic initiatives. This requires working on issues other than just your product. It may mean logistics, marketing, codesign, new markets, integration, or innovation.

This is a very powerful model for raising value and has led to technology tools for product configuration, change orders, design, and collaboration through an entire supply chain.

I meet a lot of sales managers on airplanes. I remember flying into Minneapolis, sitting next to a sales manager for a paper company.

Of course, I asked him, “Isn’t it hard to sell a commodity like paper these days?”

He responded, “I have about 1,200 other salespeople in the commodity division. What I do is co-design specialty papers for clients with unique needs. I’m meeting with 3M tomorrow to collaborate on papers for products that we will both produce two years from now. The margins are much higher.

Likewise, later that year, I sat beside a carpet salesman, flying into Washington, D.C., who was meeting with Marriott Corporation to design special carpets for hotels they would build throughout the world over the next few years.

“It’s the only way we could get out of the commodity business,” he said.

Elevate

Elevate your executive relationships to trust and your solutions to the strategic.

ELEVATING TO STRATEGIC PAIN

A few years ago, one of our principals, Jon Hauck, was in a presentation with a sales rep who was presenting to the president of a major division of MCI and two of his lieutenants.

The lieutenants had prepared and coached them for the presentation, which was to last an hour. This was the big day! They thought they knew the president’s key issues, which could be addressed by their slick sales dashboard that would provide significant visibility into the forecast.

But just 20 minutes into the presentation, they could see that the president was tuning out. Though the rep was doing a very nice job, unfortunately, the only heads that were nodding were his and those of the lieutenants. Jon reached over, closed the laptop, and asked the president if visibility into the forecast was what really concerned him most.

“Yes,” he said. “But you’ve missed the issue. In the Telco space, forecasting revenue is not about when it’s sold, but when the switch is turned on. That’s what I need to forecast. I already know what my sales are going to be.”

With that, they immediately changed direction and probed a little deeper into his actual issue.

He cordially explained it, and they artfully created the linkage from the benefits of their solution to solving his true pain. This took about 13 minutes.

When they told him they could do what he needed, the deal was done. He told his sales operations manager to get with them, define the scope, and tell him how much to spend.

Two weeks later, they had a contract for over $500k.

STAY INVOLVED—DELIVER WHAT YOU SOLD

Early in the implementation of the State of Texas payroll system, Joe Terry, then the salesperson on the account, ran into a potential two-week delay to get the system installed because the client’s database manager was going to be on vacation and would miss the installation training class.

The next class was not to be held for another month, but the database manager refused to change his vacation schedule. At the project level, the project manager had chosen to simply let the delay stand.

Joe went to the deputy controller and explained the hidden cost of having the 30 people on the project team stand idle for a month while the project was on hold: $720,000.

That was a pretty expensive vacation.

The controller interjected himself in the process to prevent the delay, but just as important, Joe gained trusted advisor status with the controller. This access proved to be crucial as the project ran into the normal problems that can sometimes escalate out of control.

Many salespeople reach the executive level to get the sale and then leave the support team to work at the lower levels of the account. Sometimes the problem is actually the customer’s. By maintaining the access and relationships at the executive level, after the sale, Joe was able to save the customer from themselves without going over the project team’s head—he was already there.

He elevated the relationship to trust by staying involved in delivering what he sold and saved the executive from embarrassment.

HELP THEM DEFINE THEIR REAL PROBLEM

One client executive of Deloitte’s came to them and said, “We need to do something about increasing revenues.”

At the time, Deloitte had developed a process called a Value Map that allowed them to break processes into different areas. When they mapped the client’s problem to the Value Map, they saw that none of the projects the client wanted done addressed revenue at all.

The real initiative was that the client needed to cut costs. The client was asking Deloitte for the wrong thing.

When dealing with someone from a strategic standpoint, before you ask, “Are you doing the thing right?” you have to ask, “Are you doing the right thing?”

Dominate

Dominate doesn't mean manipulating the client. It means changing the client's decision-making process to give you the inside track as a preferred vendor. This will occur only because of lowered risk through superior performance and relationships. It means building company-to-company trust, in which the client doesn't have to put you out for competitive evaluations every time, or if they must, you get the inside track or high ground before it begins.

Inoculate

To inoculate means to provide solutions that are «sticky» — solutions that have a high switching cost so that moving away from your organization is not easy. This moves you out of the commodity relationship into a symbiotic relationship where you need each other.

What is qualified for long-term account management is not qualified for a short-term quarterly-driven "hunter."

It also means building allies and listening posts for competitive intrusions because competitors will try to penetrate your account the same way you did in the first place. If you do account management well enough, you may not have to do opportunity management at all, or if you do, you are well established on the issues and have powerful people who prefer you before a formal buying process begins.

Refinements and Advancements

Coaching: The Key to Organizational Sales Discipline

Additionally, the salespeople who grew up in the 1990s are now sales managers. In many cases, we've taken our best salespeople and made them managers with little preparation. You can't afford to take two years to send them away to earn an MBA, and that wouldn't work anyway. In MBA school, they teach you how to be a vice president and how to analyze problems—not execute solutions.

What sales managers are really asking for at this stage are tactical skills and training for new managers on how to hire effectively, coach performance, weed out weak people, and develop future leaders. Otherwise, you are taking sales-people—whose strengths as salespeople not only may not work for them as managers but might actually work against them — and promoting them.

As managers, they then clone more salespeople with bad habits. At the same time, there is a whole new generation of salespeople out there who not only need the fundamental skills of selling but also need to understand the complexities of committee sales and major accounts.

Sales managers have an even more difficult challenge than others because the skill sets they need to coach their people are much different from what is needed to coach a deal, yet they are intricately entwined. The trap is that many managers become “inspectors” instead of coaches, doing deal reviews without asking the tough questions or adding value by improving the strategy.

Many sales executives are figuring out that they can no longer grow with the sales techniques that have gotten them to where they are now. While coaching deals might have been an option in the up economy, it is essential in a down or flat economy. The new managers who were salespeople in the up economy may never have learned how to really analyze and coach a competitive deal.

Today’s Economy Affects the Way We Sell and the Talent Pool

One discovery we’ve made since the last book is the impact of an up economy and a down economy on the way sellers sell and the way buyers buy. The change in the economy has had a significant impact on the talent pool for salespeople and managers and the competencies they bring with them.

In the boom economy of the 1990s, a lot of bad habits were allowed to continue. As Jim Dickie, of CSO Insights, says, “In a hurricane, even turkeys can fly.”

There were some poor role models among salespeople and managers and a lot of mediocrity in selling that still resulted in high sales because it was a seller’s market.

These poor selling habits came back to roost when the market turned down. Many of the “one-year wonders” could not compete effectively in the new, tougher selling environment.

Several things began to happen. First, in the consulting world, salespeople had gotten used to proposal lobbing—answering 10 RFPs, throwing them over the castle wall, and winning two, which was enough to keep people off the bench.

In the down economy, there was no longer enough business to keep consulting firms busy. Our phone began ringing off the hook as those firms realized that they needed to get more competitive and better at selling in order to win their share or even grow.

Many consulting firms began to develop sales processes, hire outside business developers, and focus on sales training. While making significant improvements, one challenge still remains in the consulting industry—and that is the lack of an overall sales hierarchy and sales management and accountability infrastructure, as well as a hiring profile that leads to a competitive culture.

The Lost Art of Prospecting

In the rest of the sales world, we began to get a lot of calls from sales executives who said, “You told us how to win deals, but we don’t have enough deals to work on in this economy. Our pipelines aren’t full enough.”

Salespeople had forgotten how to prospect because they didn’t need to for the past 10 years. Instead, they had let marketing handle this responsibility. They had forgotten how to pick up the phone and call a stranger or felt that they were past that in their careers.

At the same time, executives today are barraged by more people than ever trying to get to them—through e-mail and voicemail—so the clutter is even greater. We work with a number of firms to help them refocus their prospecting efforts and demand-creation selling: how to get to executives, how to do research before you get there, and how to identify their top two or three issues so that the chances of a voice-mail or e-mail creating a 30-minute meeting actually may have some chance of working.

The goal is to identify an executive who will sponsor a project and find a budget in the absence of an evaluation.

Procurement Grows Stronger — Commoditization

Another impact of the down economy is that procurement has gained more power. Procurement has always been a stakeholder, with greater strength in government than in the commercial sector. In the down economy, though, its strength has grown as efforts have increased to drive cost out of companies so that they can compete globally.

As a result, sales cycles, after the vendor-selection decision, have developed a second crucible for the approval cycle, which can be as difficult and lengthy as the process for winning the business itself. This means that after earning the business, we need to better equip our sponsors with a business case for the economic buyer.

The best practice is to become more proactive in this phase of the process rather than leaving it up to the client.

As the economy declines, companies focus on cost cutting rather than on innovation or revenue-generating activities. This has been reinforced by the global impact on prices from low-cost producers in Asia. As a result, procurement has more power, even over strategic purchases.

By nature, procurement is inclined to ignore value and focus on price. In fact, procurement managers are measured and rewarded for it. The end users are the ones who understand value. This is why procurement people try to separate you from them at the end of the sale. Commoditization is not only a sport to these people, it is also a way of life. Even when they understand strategic value, they are trained to ignore it — at least in front of you.

They will say such things as, "I don't know. You all look the same to me, but you're more expensive. What can you do for us on the price?" Left unchecked, these people will drive you to the door and then catch you by the coattails.

Also remember that there is a mirror image of client relationship management (CRM) for procurement people called supplier relationship management (SRM). Also called strategic sourcing, procurement best practices call for segmenting suppliers into different categories based on the importance of their value and the availability of substitutes.