Account planning as an ongoing process

When I joined an elite field enablement team at Oracle almost fifteen years ago, we formalized a facilitated account planning process, both for enterprise and key accounts. However, when sales leadership and corporate program management requested that account plans be submitted and tracked on a quarterly basis, we pushed back hard.

Some considered account planning as an opportunity to inventory opportunities. Others viewed it as a way of checking in on the account team, without getting too involved. A successful completion of the process would result in a planning document being filed in a drawer somewhere.

Few thought of it as a co-creation and alignment process, one that is a nearly continuous mix of discovery, conversation, hypothesis building/testing, and value creation.

With formally trained facilitators, good supporting material (corporate backgrounder, footprint and SOW analysis, comps, etc.), the buy-in from an increasing number of sales teams, and a value selling mindset, we won over the skeptics. We demonstrated that an effective, ongoing account planning process drives deeper customer engagement, more customer intimacy, higher revenues and profitability and higher lifetime customer value.

We had the people and process part sorted. But...we were struggling with the documentation, the capture of tribal knowledge and the management of action items for the teams. PowerPoint just didn't cut it, nor did Revegy.

When Ulrik Monberg encountered similar challenges in account planning processes, he founded ARPEDIO to provide an advanced account planning/account-based selling platform.

Recently Ulrik, CEO of ARPEDIO and I spent some time on the Thoughts on Selling podcast discussing account planning and account-based selling best practices. The ARPEDIO team then published an article based on our conversation. The first is an easy and interesting listen; the second is a useful written discussion of the key topics.

What are you doing to ensure the effectiveness of your account planning activities?

If you'd like help ensuring success this year please reach out for an initial conversation.

Thanks!

 

 

 

Lee

 

Abandoning the Hero Sale

When companies first get started, the founders may do most or all of the selling. They have the vision, the passion, the depth of knowledge of the service or product and connect well with early adopters.

At some point the Hero Sale risks becoming the Hero Fail. The challenge is that as the business expands, the founders (the heros) need to focus on running the business, managing the growth, courting investors, hiring managers, etc., and they have less time for selling.

So...they hire sales people. 

And they expect sales people to act and perform in their image, with the same depth of knowledge, passion, and ability to connect with mainstream customers.

I've seen and experienced it first-hand.

When I sold predictive analytics to some of the largest tech companies in the industry, the company president and founder expected the sales team to leverage his 100 page slide deck...to go deep into the technical details of the what and how of the platform. Much of our sales training focused on this technical deep dive, and only lightly touched on personas and messaging.

Conversely, my mainstream customers were only interested in the benefits of leveraging the platform - could they increase pipeline velocity, improve pipeline size and shape,  bolster their customer acquisition rates, meet their quota and revenue targets. The decision makers didn't care what was under the hood, only whether it would bolster their marketing results and how difficult it would be to integrate the predictive analytics platform and workflow into their existing marketing processes.

IBM wasn't even interested in the platform...they had their own...they were interested in our curated third party data. And we discovered this not through a detailed review of the CEO's slide deck, but in an extended white boarding session focusing on work flows. (White boards are my favorite selling tools.)

In talking with clients I hear many facing this same challenge...as the company grows, expected sales productivity fails to increase as experienced sales people are hired. And the founders question the new hires, the selection process, the target markets, everything but their own outsize influence in setting sales strategy.

Moving from a hero-driven revenue model to one that is sustainable and scalable requires a fundamental shift to a traditional selling model -- a formal selling methodology, selling processes, SFA and CRM platforms, formal onboarding activities. Dedicated sales managers will provide strong leverage for additional growth, particularly if a coaching methodology and mindset is part of the structure.

When I joined BAO, the outsourced inside sales organization, as its first sales leader, I implemented a formal selling methodology and spent a lot of time coaching my sales team on value selling techniques. Many had come from the delivery side of the organization and had been accustomed to a highly transactional sales approach...making up to 250 calls each day. The investment in time and effort paid off...we signed a number of key accounts that had been chased for fifteen years.

We also drove an increase in revenue of 75% over that first 18 month period.

Moving to this scalable selling model requires both support and patience from all of the key stakeholders. It won't happen all at once, and it does require a substantive shift in approach. The founders must step back and give the hired managers the space and time to do their job.

A formal approach to change management...and specifically...setting expectations with the key stakeholders will prove useful.

And maybe, just maybe, that hero can take their first vacation in four years.

Thanks!

Lee

Is Sales Enablement Really Just a Programming Challenge?

A common theme in sales enablement circles revolves around the challenge of displaying specific targeted content to sales people at discrete points in the sales cycle.

The belief is that if we just get the right content in front of the sales person at exactly the right time, it will help him or her to move an opportunity to the next stage.

Do we really think that enterprise selling has become nothing more than a Pavlovian parlor trick? That we can get a rep to literally ring  the bell when he or she consumes the “right” content?

At the risk of upsetting the SE vendors in the room, I’d ask this question — have we actually proven that reps will understand, retain and leverage all that content pushed at them? Do they really consume it, internalize it, make good use of it, retain any knowledge or show ability to reuse? Does it result in higher close rates, increased deal profitability, higher customer satisfaction and retention scores? Or are we simply measuring activity - number of reps “trained”, videos downloaded, micro-courses consumed, evaluations passed?

We know that customers don’t always follow a linear path in their buying process. And the development of their evaluation and selection criteria certainly isn’t linear. Things come up when they come up. While an experienced sales person can help guide some of this, in my experience, the best sales people pivot quickly and competently (and certainly don’t have time to go back to the office, update CRM and consume some more content.)

I want my reps to live in a culture of curiosity — what can they learn from a customer, what can they *find* in our sales enablement library (and elsewhere), what new ways of doing business can they co-create with their customers?

I’m deep into reading Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter Brown. In it, Brown makes the point that curiosity and intellectual inquiry are at the heart of successful learning. Sitting and passively reading content is not an effective learning strategy.

Look, if we are building sales bots, then perhaps the programming paradigm fits just fine. If we are doing this, though, why bother with the intermediate step of involving people…lets just program the bots and point them directly at customers.

The problem with the content strategy is that it aligns with a popular (but ineffective) market paradigm, that if we just tell customers enough, if we just keep talking at them, eventually they will see the error of their ways, understand that our widget is better than all the other vendors’ widgets, and will put pen to paper.

Customers don't buy this way, even enterprise customers dealing with complex product or service acquisitions or adoptions. They simply aren't competent at objectively evaluating the detailed feature sets of each vendor's offering. Instead, customers buy with their gut, when they believe that one vendor’s team, product and services hold less personal and institutional risk than the other offers, and they justify their decision with a selection of facts, product details and price quotes.

If we are intent on building a sustainable business, one that customers *want* to engage with, then we need to shift our paradigm to creating interesting, and interested selling individuals. We need to focus on helping sales people to develop their social cognition, so that they have greater situational and organizational awareness, as opposed to feeding them yet another script that starts off with “oh yea, our stuff can do that too…and we’re cheaper.”

Lee

If the Purpose of Sales Enablement is to Improve Seller Behavior...

If the goal of sales enablement is to improve the behavior of sales people (and drive increased sales productivity), how should we observe or measure rep skills and success? How do we improve behavior?

Some managers accompany their reps on calls to observe the rep in action. However, these "ride-alongs" fail for two reasons:

• Most managers cannot avoid "rescuing" their rep when they get into trouble
• More importantly, the presence of the manager causes the rep to behave differently and the observation yields inaccurate or misleading feedback

Image by Erik Aavatsmark via New York Magazine

To avoid manager interference, perhaps we should try the approach of putting the manager on a tall chair in the corner (watch the cult movie Kitchen Stories to judge for yourself how well this observation approach might work!)

More importantly, how...and when...should we focus on improving behavior?

Current approaches to both measuring and improving behavior are inadequate

Typical measurements provide a "look-back" at what happened, with no direct connection between measurement and improvement techniques. Even with good performance and success metrics that accurately measure sales effectiveness, efficiency, pipeline coverage and velocity, close rates, customer satisfaction and retention, we are largely collecting trailing indicators.

Today we act on those trailing indicators. We build hypotheses of why things happened the way they did, modify the environment in some way (different content, better coaching, etc.) and wait for new trailing metrics to reflect changes in performance.

Unfortunately, this process spans multiple sales quarters and opportunities. There's no immediate feedback loop between action, result, correction, new action, new result...and without that immediate feedback, the repeated behavior is reinforced rather than corrected.

The best time to make a course correction is before you're seriously off course

When sailing a boat or riding a bike, the best time to make a correction is before you run ashore or fall over. Sailors and cyclists make dozens of tiny, imperceptible corrections --  small movement of the tiller or angle of the front wheel -- all the time, without conscious thought.

For sales enablement to be effective, we need to be able to measure the success (or performance) of the rep as he or she is engaging with a prospect or client and act on that information in realtime, with corresponding small, timely course corrections.

What we need is "in situ" measurement and sales enablement -- delivered in place, at time of action. Perhaps a "sales Fitbit" that provides realtime feedback and guidance. Measurement, feedback and course correction as the rep is doing his or her job.

Image by DC Rainmaker (Link)

When I'm training for an upcoming race, I don't wait to see my elapsed time for the race before I choose to modify my training activities. I periodically check my running watch as I'm running in training, in realtime. How's my pace? Am I in heart-rate zone 2 or 3? During recovery between Yasso 800 sprints, does my heart-rate return to a reasonable level?  With these realtime metrics, I can choose to make an immediate modification to my next training sprint rather than wait to see how I eventually perform in the race and choose to run faster sprints before the next race.

Similarly, we need to be able to measure the effectiveness of a rep as he or she is engaging with a customer. The following are some of the "realtime" measurements we need to monitor:

• Is the rep following a thought-out path of engagement?
• Is the communication in line with the customer's business needs, language of value, results expected?
• Is the rep connecting at the right level in the organization?
• How responsive is the customer?
• How timely is the rep in following up?
• Is the engagement moving along an expected path, at an appropriate pace?

And given this in-process measurement, we need to provide a learning environment that doesn't require the rep to step out of their existing work flow (day-to-day selling processes). The rep needs constant, ongoing feedback and course correction that guides the improvement of their messaging, timeliness, targeting, listening, etc., while they are undertaking the activities of connecting with prospects and customers.

Some Good News

Companies that implement a "sales Fitbit" approach of monitoring & improving sales activity see immediate, substantial and persistent improvement in customer engagement, revenue and other results. Conversation conversions double or triple. Outbound contacts double. One company saw margins increase by 25% in four months.

This in situ approach doesn't work for all companies. It requires sales organizations to revisit their messaging and to trust their sellers to learn as they go. For companies that are interested, a proof of concept will give quick feedback on whether the approach has broad applicability.


Thanks!

Lee