The Council frequently refers to a new breed of high-performing reps–Challenger Reps–in our blog posts and research. But do you find yourself wondering—how do I actually build Challenger reps? Because the three key Challenger skills (teaching, tailoring, and asserting control) are tacit skills, typical approaches to upskilling often are insufficient.

Classroom training alone fails to deliver impact because tacit skills are difficult to describe in written materials such as job aids or a how-to manual, and manager coaching also can be inadequate because it’s hard to explain intangible concepts.

Instead, to truly internalize these skills, reps need practice. We’ve all heard a lot about experiential training, but does it actually work?

The answer is yes, tacit and intangible skills are best taught through experiential training. But it must be the right kind of experiential learning. You cannot risk reps practicing new skills with a customer and, as a result, we often see companies using role-plays.

But, how ‘real’ are our role-play programs? Read More »

As we’ve continued to meet with sales leaders across the globe about our research on the Challenger Rep, we always get a variety of reactions and responses as they think about how the research relates to their own experiences, teams and organization.  And quite often, a leader will make a statement about how Challenger correlates to their sales metrics – comments such as “You know, our metrics around activities don’t reinforce Challenger behaviors, they are more aligned to Hard Worker behaviors” or “my highest activity reps aren’t my highest performing reps.”

In fact, our 2011 Sales Metrics Benchmark Survey shows that 30% of respondents measure “customer appointments made per rep per month” as a rep performance metric.  But does this metric necessarily align to the Challenger behaviors?

It’s one of many interesting insights and questions our members ask when they see the research on the five sales rep profiles, including: Read More »

“Never make forecasts, especially about the future”
-Samuel Goldwyn

While the quote in the title is tongue-in-cheek, in Sales, forecasting is a fact of life.  And many members lament that the quality of their sales forecasting is lacking.  Information isn’t always entered by the sales force – and if it is, it might not be accurate – and even then our ability to analyze the information may not be up to par.

So to help us out, I went to the definitive source on financial tracking and analysis – the CFO suite.  I sat down with Myles Vander Weele, Executive Advisor with our Corporate Finance practice, to talk about sales forecasting from Finance’s perspective.

According to Myles, forecasting is a critical responsibility of Corporate Finance.  They work to figure out what the organization is capable of and then set targets to track actual performance against those expectations throughout the year.   “Since forecasts are assumptions,” says Myles, “Finance continuously checks to determine how the business is performing relative to those assumptions.”

And, getting sales forecasting as accurate as possible is critical to a well run business.  As Myles explains, “Sales forecasts help the company make better decisions on how to manage spending and what expectations they should be setting with investors.”

However, relatively speaking, forecasting Sales is difficult. Read More »

Buyers are outpacing supplier capabilities and becoming more efficient at pressuring on price—at least that’s the recurring theme the SEC is hearing in our recent conversations with members. But what’s enabling this behavior today’s buyers, and more importantly, what does it mean for your sales strategy?

The recent member conversations we’ve had suggest that customers have become more sophisticated at buying over the last several years due to:

• Economic pressures that have forced buyers to become increasingly risk averse and focused on cost—In response to the economic  uncertainty in the marketplace, customer organizations are relying more heavily on group buying, professionalized, process-driven procurement teams, and third-party consultants to help mitigate risk through well vetted purchases with higher levels of savings .
• Increased access to information— Internet access and vast technological advances over the past decade have created a much more transparent buying environment than what existed in the past. Customers can now easily find and access information about their industry, the competition, your product/solution, and your competitors’ products/solutions without spending a lot of time or money.

So what are the implications for sellers? Read More »

When it comes to talent management, it’s critical for organizations to bring the best talent into their sales forces.

We know from our research on high performing rep skills that companies’ best bet is to bring more Challenger Reps into the sales force – Challengers are four times more likely to be high-performers than Relationship Builders in complex selling environments.

But we’ve seen most sales organizations continue to use traditional relationship-based skills and competencies to screen and select new hires. After all, conventional wisdom tells us that the likable candidate who charms interviewers is bound to be a successful salesperson.

This hiring approach inevitably brings an unpleasant surprise, though. Why? Because if a rep relies on the same relationship-building behaviors they used to close a deal as they do to approach an interview, they’ll soon find that their long-term likelihood to succeed is bleak.

So how do companies actually find sales rep candidates with the Challenger skill set in the marketplace? Read More »

(This is a guest post by Patrick Spenner of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

Each year, the Marketing Leadership Council (MLC) surveys our members about their top challenges looking ahead.  As we read the tea leaves in this year’s survey results, here are our thoughts on what’s creeping into (or storming) the B2B marketing consciousness for 2012.

1) Voice-of-Customer 2.0. Marketers are grappling with what kinds of customer data are most important to collect and how to make hay out of the data. Early hypothesis from the MLC team: marketers are over-investing in collecting and analyzing data about the customer, and not enough in gathering information and insight about customer context, which is critical for generating commercial insight (see #5 below)

2) Skill Set Reset. There’s a creeping sense among B2B CMO’s that their marketing teams are in need of a capability overhaul.  With the rise of “no man’s land” in the mid-funnel and rapid changes in how buying centers are making purchase decisions, out-of-date marketing skill sets are being laid bare.

As one example of B2B marketing teams aggressively managing the skill set transition, consider the example of Cisco starting to “badge” and reward its marketers on their social media impact.

Ask yourself: how sweet/spooky would it be for 20% of your pay to rest on your social graph? Read More »

We hope you’ll read this and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. In 2011, the SEC had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and intimate roundtable discussions with leading CSOs, and examined hundreds of thousands data points.

Given this, we’d like to share the fundamental shifts we expect to play out in increasingly significant ways in 2012.

Granted, it’s not a MECE list – there is overlap and implications shared throughout these trends, but we hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, disagree if appropriate, and highlight trends you expect to see that we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input! Read More »

I often hear from sales leaders that it is more important than ever to drive account planning across the sales force to help allocate scarce resources, identify the right opportunities, and build deeper customer relationships. But what does good account planning actually look like? It starts with choosing the right preposition.

Fundamentally, account planning is setting and executing your strategy for engaging the customer. Here at the Council, we believe a successful account plan should do three things:

1) Create long-term customer and firm value– Map selling strategies to customer needs and manage the complexity of solutions-selling

2) Streamline internal processes– Focus account teams on defined objectives and coordinate cross-silo communication

3) Create stakeholder accountability– Create accountability for achieving goals and set metrics to evaluate rep and internal stakeholder performance

Account planning is most effective when it simultaneously works to achieve the strategic objectives of both the supplier organization and its customers. We want to make sure that we’re embarking on a commercial journey that is right for our firm and for the customer

And the first step you need to take?… Read More »

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

One of the main benefits of working at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) – SEC’s parent company – is that I get to learn what is going on in other corporate functions and keep pace with changing priorities and new challenges.

Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about globalization’s impact on the sales and service organization– especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it’s questions about how to serve local markets, work with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Selling to global customers and serving them in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn’t anything especially brand new to us in the sales and service organization.  We’ve seen our organization become more global as our customers become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues around CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while sales organizations may be trying to sell and serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up. Read More »

At last month’s annual Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, the SEC handed out our 2011 B2B Sales Awards. We were thrilled to celebrate the achievements of some of the most progressive organizations in the SEC membership. Awards were given in three categories: Adoption of Insight, Excellence in Sales Operations, and Commercial Achievement.

Without further ado, the recipients of this year’s sales awards were…

Adoption of Insight Award Winner: Treasury Wine Estates

The Adoption of Insight award is given to a company that is particularly good at taking action. This award recognizes an organization’s ability to take good ideas and turn them into actual tools, processes, and approaches that change behaviors. And we were very pleased to present this award to Darren Campbell, General Manager of Field Services at Treasury Wine Estates.

Treasury Wine Estates has a long track record of consistently turning ideas into action – the company is very far down the path of Commercial Teaching, and they’ve also done extensive work executing on our past Coaching research. The Treasury team took one of our most popular coaching best practices—Symetra Financial’s sales process-aligned coaching roadmap—and created their own version of it.

When accepting the award, Darren shared the six things that he believes help an organization accelerate insight to action: Read More »