Note: This posting was written by Matt Dixon & Brent Adamson for the Harvard Business Review.

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Most sales organizations have invested more time and effort in the past 5 years in improving managers’ coaching of reps than they did in the previous fifty. This makes perfect sense: our research shows that no other productivity investment comes close to coaching in improving reps’ performance.

But not all reps who get coached, even by good coaches, do better. In fact, our research shows that sales coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong reps. And our work suggests that management targets the wrong reps all the time.

Left to their own devices, sales managers often skew their coaching efforts dramatically toward the “tails” — the very best and the very worst reps on their team.  They engage with poor reps because they feel they must in order to meet territory goals, and they work with their best reps because, well, it’s fun.  Few managers can resist the lure of reliving their glory days by passing along their wisdom to the one or two reps who remind them most of their younger selves.  To combat managers’ tendency to coach just laggards and leaders, companies implement elaborate systems to allocate coaching equally across the sales force. They imagine that “all boats will rise” as a result.

Unfortunately, our data show that both managers’ coaching tendencies, and companies’ response, are misguided.

Click here to read the rest of this post on HBR.

If I asked you why being in Sales is a tough job, I’m sure I’d hear many reasons ranging from selling increasingly complex solutions, to having less customer face time, to, here’s a good one, not knowing who to sell to.

Unfortunately, the reality is that a buyer is no longer just a C-suite decision-maker holding a checkbook. Now, the traditional buyer is more akin to the Frankenstein monster, consisting of multiple cross-functional stakeholders, purchasing consultants, and committees brought into the buying process. [See finding # 1 in our Ten Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know in 2011]

In fact, our hot-off-the presses customer data suggests that sales reps drastically underestimate the number of stakeholders involved in an average deal.  [See our latest findings from the 2011 customer data]. One member shared with us that the average number of stakeholders involved in each deal has increased by 3.5 people since 2006.

What does it mean for the supplier? Well, it simply means that group buying is on the rise and that access to these groups is rarely granted.

Organizations’ most typical response to overcoming this challenge has been to identify influential stakeholders and turn them into advocates, hoping that they will steer the group in the right direction.  I hate to break it to you, but advocates don’t work like that. In fact, out data shows quite the opposite… Read More »

(This post was written by Amy Gallo for our Finance and Strategy Practice.)

In CEB View’s last Talent Matters post we discussed how difficult it is to work for a bad boss. But what if, instead of working for one, you are one?

Of course it’s not easy being the boss. Research from CEB’s CLC Human Resources program shows that the three areas that most managers – even great ones – struggle with are evaluating employee performance, providing effective feedback, and turning around underperformance. These are hard things to do and because the way you do them directly affects your team, any missteps are likely to create friction.

Fortunately, the recession seems to have improved many employee-manager relationships but boss-bashing is still a favorite pastime (as proved by last week’s traffic on the first “bad boss” piece). So, how do you know if your employees are just letting off steam or if you are truly difficult to work with? Unfortunately, many bad bosses are the last to know how awful they are to work under. This may be because you aren’t getting the feedback you need, you’re disconnected from your employees or you just aren’t watching out for the signs.

Here are five indications that you may be a worse boss than you thought: Read More »

The storied Green Bay Packers will be playing in the Superbowl against the equally storied rough-and-tumble Pittsburgh Steelers.  The stage is set for a great Superbowl, which has become an increasingly global event. To shed a bit of light on the Green Bay Packers, one only needs to turn to their great coach, Vince Lombardi.

Lombardi coached the Packers from 1959 to 1967, and in those 9 years the team won 5 league championships. Many consider him the greatest football coach of all time, perhaps the greatest coach of any sport of all time. What’s indisputable is his name being synonymous with excellence.

Lombardi had a gift with words and a legendary ability to inspire his team. In these days of process, and systems, and all the science we bring to Sales, it’s easy to lose sight of the role that fundamentally great leadership can play in team motivation. For many of us, our year is now officially underway..the budgeting, the planning, the preparation is done. It’s time to execute in 2011. Let Lombardi’s words inspire your leadership: Read More »

Q1 is the time of year when I get an influx of requests to chat about account planning. Most members want to know how to tweak their account planning process to make it more effective.

I was meeting with an energy company a couple weeks back, when that same question came up.  We had some extra time so we started white boarding some ideas about their account planning process.  The exercise ended up being so valuable, I’ve used it a couple times since with great success, and wanted to share it with you today.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why would a customer want to account plan with you?
2. What are all the ways account planning can go wrong?

I’ll  handle each question in order:

1) Why would a customer want to account plan with you? Answering this one can be tricky – the key is to list out the benefits of account planning from the CUSTOMER’s perspective.

Putting this list together will help you build a value proposition that gets your customers excited about account planning with you.  And in case you missed that subtle point – the key word in that sentence was with.   Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Getting reps to use CRM is a perennial struggle for sales leaders. In an ideal world, reps would use your CRM system regularly to access data, improve their customer interactions, and provide timely customer data back to the center to enhance senior-level decision making.

In reality though, CRM is often viewed by reps as another centrally-mandated task on their already full plates. So, how can your company drive rep buy-in and encourage them to regularly access the CRM?

We recently held a panel discussion on the common challenges associated with CRM adoption and data quality. David Pseja, Sr. Manager of Sales Effectiveness at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, and Theresa Russel, VP of Sales Ops at ADP Dealer Services, offered insights and strategies for improving reps’ usage of CRM and maintaining CRM data quality.

Here are a few takeaways from the discussion:  Read More »

(This is a guest post by Lara Ponomareff of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Contact Centers.)

This is the time of year when many member companies are completing their annual performance reviews, and it’s gotten me thinking about talent.  More specifically, our high-potential talent and how to keep them around. 

And the news from our sister program for heads of HR, the Corporate Leadership Council (CLC), isn’t good.  In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, their study of over 20,000 ‘emerging star’ employees found some startling facts:

• 1 in 3 high-potential employees are disengaged from their job – and are far less productive as a result
• 1 in 4 intends to leave their current company within the next year
• 1 in 5 see a misalignment between what the company wants and their own personal aspirations

Sound scary?  Well, it definitely got my attention.  And it got me thinking about what we can do to swing these statistics back in our favor.

CLC outlines six key mistakes organizations make when developing high-potential employees – and ways organizations have overcome these barriers.  One mistake caught my eye in particular –  Mistake 2: Equating Current High Performance with Future Potential.

CLC data found almost 70% of high-performing staff don’t have what it takes to be successful in their next role.  We know who those people are – and we likely promote them all the time, like the star rep who, as a manager, doesn’t listen to or develop his team.

So how do you screen for someone who has high future potential?  Read More »

By Andrew Kent

It’s official: salespeople are spending less time selling to customers, and more time on internal activities, than they were five years ago.  That’s trend #8 from our “Ten Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know in 2011.”  But what if I told you that less customer-facing selling time is a good thing?

You’d probably think I was crazy.  I’ve never met an exec who told me, “My priority this year is to get my reps spending less time with customers.” For most of us, the priority is the exact opposite; indeed one exec told me he wants salespeople to “live” with their customers.

But before we ask our customers for the keys to their apartments, it’s important to understand what type of face time we’re losing and why we’re losing it.  SEC Solutions has been tracking rep time spend since 2003, and the evidence points not to the usual suspect of administrative time-sinks (although they’re a part), but to a fundamental change in what “selling time” means.

More specifically, star sales reps are spending less time presenting and persuading, and more time planning and orchestrating stakeholders.

The chart below shows how rep time-spend has changed over the last seven years, based on SEC Solutions’ analysis:

Read More »

Whenever I speak with companies that sell through the indirect channel, one of the questions I’m most often asked is about the channel manager role. Because it’s undoubtedly become one of the more complex roles in a sales organization, Council members are always curious to discuss the job description, key competencies, and main activities of the individual who manages your channel partner relationships.

And though there’s not one magic, all-encompassing channel manager job profile I’m able share, a member in the High Tech industry recently summed up the role with this quote, which I thought was right on point:

“Channel managers are the inflection point. You can have the best channel partner program in the world, but at the end of the day, your channel managers are where the rubber meets the road.”

In fact, channel managers’ ever-expanding responsibility set requires them to act like “mini-General Managers.” They have to navigate their own organization, the channel partner’s organization, and at times the end-customer’s organization. And within each of these groups, the channel manager must interact with multiple stakeholders from sales support, marketing, finance, procurement…the list goes on.

Given the importance (and complexity) of the role, here are some of the trends that have begun to emerge about the indirect channel manager:  Read More »

Since the inception of the motion picture in the late 1800′s, countless films have been created around the globe on almost every subject imaginable. Curious to get a feel for what life was like for 18th century Irish aristocracy? There’s a film for that. In the mood to be thrilled by a story of love, deception, and murder? Look no further. Interested in a film that can shape the way you think about sales and marketing? Well, those subjects are no strangers to the industry either, and the following is a list of a few films we consider “must-see” sales and marketing cinema. Read More »