Archive for the ‘sales process’ Category

How to fix your selling process in 192 pages (not)

Monday, January 28th, 2008

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal boils it down for us: “…[C]ompanies need to ‘reinvent’ the way they sell, to focus on their customers rather than product features.”

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.

It turns out that consultant Ram Charan (best known as the co-writer of “Execution” with Larry Bossidy) has sales in his sights. He has a new book, of course, entitled “What the Customer Wants You to Know,” and is interviewed in today’s “Theory and Practice” column. Here’s a taste of Charan’s wisdom:


The sales function has traditionally been about execution. Most sales people are very good at connecting with the purchasing customer. They get training to know the product. And they beat the competition on price.

Now the world has changed. Copying a product became very quick. You now have competition on the Internet to beat down prices.

It has become very hard to differentiate yourself in the eyes of the customer, for business-to-business sales. So salespeople should not sell the product any more. They should find out what the customer needs, which will be a combination of products and services and thought leadership.

Nothing in the above excerpt is incorrect. So why am I so annoyed?

Because these concepts are more than a decade old. There’s not a single statement in the interview that wasn’t well expressed in the ’90’s by people like Michael Bosworth, and Jim Holden, and Jeff Thull, and others. Hundreds of companies have implemented programs to instill these lessons into their organizations. But apparently we needed Charan to compile these ideas into a new book, and assert they are “reinventions,” before businesses would take them seriously.

Hopefully the book is well-sourced, and credit given to the folks who first developed these ideas. But Charan’s salesmanship gives reason for concern: the book’s website states, “This book defines a new approach to selling—which Charan calls value creation selling—that while radical is nonetheless practical.”

Funny, I first learned that new approach to selling in 1995.

All the above obscures one undeniable fact: despite these methods being well-understood and well-taught, most business selling hasn’t improved significantly. So there’s something much, much deeper impeding improvement in sales.

I just don’t think we’ll find it in “What the Customer Wants You to Know.”

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(If you’re interested in sales improvement, I’d recommend connecting with ES Research, a company with a much richer heritage in sales and sales leadership. ESR assesses many different sales improvement programs and provides information to companies looking to adopt new methods.)

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Posted in Wall Street Journal, sales, sales improvement, sales process | Comments

Complex solution sellers can learn from commodity salespeople

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

I’ve worked selling and marketing complex IT solutions for more than fifteen years now. I’ve done a fair amount of selling myself, and seen lots more people do it, with varying degrees of success. One thing I’ve observed, in myself and others, is that we can easily get entranced with the complexity, beauty and custom nature of our solution, and lose track of selling basics.

I was reminded of this a few years ago when our company was purchasing salesforce.com to manage our sales processes. Salesforce.com has, according to its website, more than 38,000 customers. They can customize a few things about the offering, but the price point (around $75 per user per month) and the sheer volume of customers they serve don’t allow for heavily customized solutions. Most of the tailoring you want, you do yourself. It’s like self-service at the grocery store.

However, the salesforce.com staff was the best I’d ever seen on managing the basics of a sales cycle. The pre-sales engineer, who responded to my web inquiry, carefully asked questions about the size of the organization, what we did for sales management software before, who else we were considering, and whether we had appropriate levels of approval for the purchase.

He didn’t hand off the account to sales until we were truly qualified–as I recall, when I had asked for a proposal. Then the salesperson picked right up on the trail of managing us toward closure. “What is your approval process?” “When is the meeting scheduled to review and approve the solution?” “Who will sign the contract?” “Who else should I be talking to to help you evaluate salesforce?” And, perhaps most powerfully, “When will you be taking your next action on this purchase?”–with a follow-up soon after that date had passed. (Click here and here for some simple but useful resources on sales process from the salesforce website.)

Virtually every salesperson knows these rules. But it’s easy to lose sight of them when you’re managing a complex sales engagement. Often times, we ask half the question or settle for half the answer. We don’t want to be too pushy, or we expect the logic of our solution to be self-evident.

But putting the basics to use as religiously as the salesforce.com staff will allow you to close more deals–and stop pursuing losing deals earlier with much less effort wasted.

(Postscript: the salesforce.com salesperson didn’t stop there. After we signed our agreement, she monitored our usage and called me when it appeared we weren’t fully using the service. “When are you going to send your administrator to training?” “When do you expect all your salespeople to be adding all their opportunities to the system?” She understood that if we didn’t commit to the system, we wouldn’t get value from it, and wouldn’t renew our contract a year hence. Another good lesson for all salespeople.)

(NOTE: I have no connection, financial or otherwise, to salesforce.com. I have not talked to them on any subject in more than two years.)

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Posted in sales, sales process | Comments

More on using the Cynefin framework

Friday, November 16th, 2007

If you found value in Dave Snowden’s and Mary Boone’s recent Harvard Business Review article (discussed in an earlier post), you should read Dave’s post on “safe-fail probes”–it’s sort of a second chapter to that article focusing on applying the Cynefin framework.

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Posted in Harvard Business Review, business development, complexity, decisionmaking, leadership, management, organizational behavior, product development, sales, sales process | Comments

HBR article demonstrates that leaders need to manage complexity

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

“We need to document our processes!”

I heard this again and again at various companies I worked at over the years. And that’s a fine goal, to document processes. But the thinking–that if processes are documented then we will be able to perform high-quality work and be successful–is flat-out wrong in many circumstances.

Why? Because many (and many of the most important) business problems can’t be reduced to a repeatable process. This view is described in an article in the November Harvard Business Review, “A Leader’s Framework for Decision-Making,” by Dave Snowden and Mary Boone (link – $$). (Prior references to Dave Snowden’s work can be found here: 1, 2, 3.)

In it, Snowden and Boone describe the Cynefin framework, a model that helps put business situations into a context that guides how they should be addressed. The framework has four primary segments:


Simple – repeatable processes that can be described by best practices (e.g., how to determine whether a mortgage applicant is qualified)

Complicated – “the domain of experts,” according to Snowden and Boone; where complete data is available, and issues can be solved with analysis (e.g., finding underground oil deposits)

Complex – where multiple variables interact unpredictably – “the realm of ‘unknown unknowns,’ …the domain to which much of contemporary business has shifted.”

Chaotic – where no manageable patterns exist, “the realm of unknowables” –e.g., September 11, 2001. In this case, the best response is to do something and assess what happens.

So, back to documenting processes. Simple processes and their best practice should be documented and followed. Complicated processes, too, can benefit from discipline, though there is value in dissent and dialogue. Documenting complex processes doesn’t do much of value–repeatability is impossible and in fact counterproductive to attempt.

Here are some business processes that would fall into the complex domain:

  • new product development (how people learn about and use products can have a significant effect on how the product evolves)
  • entering a new market or geography
  • making an organizational change
  • a B2B sales pursuit

So how to manage these if they can’t be boiled down to a cookbook? Boone and Snowden recommend involving more people in decisionmaking (sounds a bit democratic); setting some rules or guidelines to channel behavior (i.e., in a sales pursuit, we will never respond to a tender that we didn’t know was coming); encouraging dissent; creating an environment where good things can emerge, and nurturing those things.

In my experience, managers are still trying to shoehorn all their business problems into the simple or complicated domains. The more quickly they accept the complexity of many critical areas, and manage them appropriately, the sooner we’ll stop wasting human resources and start achieving better business results.

And that’ll be something worth documenting.

(graphic: the Cynefin framework from Cognitive Edge via Wikipedia)

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Posted in Harvard Business Review, business development, complexity, decisionmaking, leadership, management, organizational behavior, product development, sales, sales process | Comments

Prospecting yields are low–get used to it

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

I’ve recently talked to a couple of self-employed folks who came out of corporate staff jobs. Their unanimous opinion: marketing is a pain in the neck!

When I probed a bit, I found their frustration centered on the low conversion of prospects to sales. And on further probing, it became clear that their expectations for closing rates were much too high. “I meet someone, or get a referral, I give them a proposal. How come they don’t buy?”

Buyers need to be ready, willing and able to purchase your product or service. Many of the prospects you encounter are: unqualified, not interested, not ready, not able to make purchases, distracted, etc. Depending on your business, 80%/90%/95% of the leads you get won’t pan out, even if you do a good job selling.

The key is to find the nuggets of gold in your prospect list as quickly as possible, and don’t waste time on the others (though you want to keep their information handy for future marketing–so that when they are ready, willing, and able, you are top of mind for them).

And that implies you must focus on lead generation. Frustration at conversion yields often truly means you didn’t get enough prospects into the top of the funnel to have an adequate level of closed business out the other end.

So stop complaining, and start prospecting.

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Posted in lead generation, marketing, sales, sales process | Comments