Your Buyer Has Already Decided. They're Just Building Their Alibi.

The deal isn't stuck because of the business case.

It's stuck because someone on that buying committee is afraid — and the rep across the table is afraid too.

We've trained an entire generation of sellers to lead with logic. ROI calculators. Total cost of ownership. Payback period. We've handed buyers every rational reason to say yes, then watched deals die in committee anyway. We call it "no decision." We blame the economy. We blame the champion who didn't have enough pull.

We never blame the fear. On either side of the table.

The spreadsheet comes later. The spreadsheet is the alibi.

 

 

Emotion Drives the Decision. Logic Defends It.

Here's what the research tells us — and what the best sales leaders already know in their gut: emotion drives decisions. Logic defends them.

Your buyer isn't evaluating your solution with a spreadsheet. They're evaluating it with everything that has ever happened to them in a job like this one. The failed implementation three years ago. The vendor who overpromised and underdelivered. The career risk of being the person who signed the check on something that didn't work.

That spreadsheet with the 14-month payback period? It's not the decision. It's the alibi. It's what they show the CFO after they've already decided — or decided not to decide. The ROI model doesn't move the deal. It gives someone permission to defend the decision they've already made emotionally.

This isn't a controversial idea in behavioral economics. It's settled science. But most sales organizations are still building their entire go-to-market motion around the spreadsheet — and wondering why qualified deals keep going quiet.

But Here's the Part Nobody Talks About

Your rep is doing exactly the same thing.

They rush to the demo because silence feels like rejection. They pile on slides because they don't trust the relationship to hold without the content propping it up. The buyer goes quiet — and instead of slowing down and asking a harder question, the rep sends another deck. More features. More case studies. More reasons why this is the right decision.

None of which addresses what's actually happening.

The buyer is afraid of making the wrong call. The rep is afraid of losing the deal. Two people at the table, both afraid, neither one saying so. The conversation stays at the surface — features, timelines, pricing — because going deeper feels risky for everyone involved.

Two people at the table, both afraid. Neither one fessing up. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a system problem.

Most sales methodologies treat this as a buyer problem. Get better at objection handling. Build a stronger business case. Increase executive alignment. All useful, all insufficient — because they assume the buyer is the only one who needs to change.

The best sales leaders I know understand something different: when deals stall consistently, it's rarely a talent problem. It's a system problem. The system hasn't given reps the language, the tools, or the psychological safety to have the real conversation.

The Five Reasons Deals Actually Stall

Not all stalled deals are stuck for the same reason. That sounds obvious until you watch a sales organization apply the same fix — more pressure, more activity, an executive call — to every stalled deal in the pipeline regardless of why it stalled.

Sometimes that works. Usually it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the cost isn't just the deal. It's the quarter.

We've identified five distinct reasons deals stall — and each one demands a different response. We call it STUCK™. When you know which of the five it is, you know what your rep needs to do differently. When you don't, you're guessing. And guessing is expensive at enterprise deal sizes.

The diagnostic question isn't "what objection do I need to answer?" It's "where is this buyer stuck, and what does my rep actually need right now?" Those are different questions. They lead to different conversations. And they produce different outcomes.

What the System Looks Like When It's Working

The organizations closing the deals that matter aren't the ones with the most aggressive reps or the most sophisticated comp plans. They're the ones who've built a system that reduces fear on both sides of the table — and gives their leaders the diagnostic tools to know what's actually going on inside a stalled opportunity.

That means pipeline reviews that inspect risk, not just activity. Coaching conversations that address what's happening in the rep's head, not just what's happening in the deal. Discovery that earns the right to go deep before it goes wide. And a shared language between rep and manager that makes it safe to say "I don't know what's actually going on here" without that being a career-limiting admission.

It means leaders who know the difference between a deal that needs more time and a deal that needs a different approach. Who can tell whether a rep is stuck on the mechanics of the deal or stuck in their own head about it. Who inspect outcomes, not optics.

None of this requires firing your bottom third. None of it requires a new CRM or a new comp plan. It requires a different game.

That's not magic. It's methodology.

The Right Game

For most of the history of enterprise sales, we've been playing two games at the same table. The rep is playing the seller's game — activity metrics, stage progression, close plans. The buyer is playing their own game — managing internal risk, building consensus, protecting their career.

Those games don't naturally align. In fact, the more aggressively the rep plays their game, the more threatened the buyer feels playing theirs. Pressure accelerates retreat. More deck, more quiet. More urgency, more committee reviews.

The shift — the one that changes everything — is when the rep stops playing against the buyer and starts playing with them. When the question changes from "how do I move this deal forward?" to "what does this buyer need to make a good decision?" When the rep's success and the buyer's success stop being in tension and start being the same thing.

Together We Win™ isn't a slogan. It's a different operating principle. And building a sales organization around it — from how you hire to how you coach to how you inspect — is what separates the teams that scale from the ones that stall.

 If your pipeline is softer than it should be heading into the back half of the year, let's talk.

If your pipeline is softer than it should be heading into the back half of the year, let’s talk.

We work with Sales and enablement leaders at established and emerging tech and services companies who know something isn’t working but aren’t sure what to fix first. Start with the work we do at aceleragroup.com/services — then book 30 minutes at meet.aceleragroup.com and let’s take a look at what’s stuck.

Lee Levitt

Principal, The Acelera Group

Thoughts on Selling™

meet.aceleragroup.com

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

 

Is AI going to take over sales?

 

Is AI going to take over sales?

Yea, sure.

I’m no luddite …I installed early AI supercomputers at leading software companies many years ago and built expert systems on personal computers. I’ve sold predictive analytics to enterprise accounts and worked with many customers on analytics projects. I trained thousands of Google and Oracle sales people on data analytics.  I understand the power of leveraging large data sets.

I’ve also worked with thousands of customers and sales people and I’ve seen how customers lean in when an expert says “in my experience…”

If the sales person isn’t adding unique value, Generative Ai will take their seat.  And repetitive selling functions undertaken by corporate sales people – “how many more servers do you need” -- will be replaced by smart (AI enabled) outbound communications (written, voice, perhaps even generated video). Live chat is already being taken over by AI bots.

You need to add value.

Or you’re toast.

A key account director once told me that his job was to take orders (big orders.) He didn’t understand that his job was to create opportunities rather than to take orders. He’s no longer with the company.

The sales person approaching the customer with a hypothesis of how to accomplish their strategic goals differently, better, faster, more profitably will continue to be successful. And in some cases, that sales person is suggesting an approach or goals that might not have been on the customer’s radar. They will co-create a new way of doing business together.

Sales person who synthesize their business value hypotheses from a variety of inputs (customer, industry, sales engineer, analyst, prior experience) will continue to find a warm reception from their customers.  GenAI will have a role – it will suggest specific customers to approach, or synthesize the business case for use with those customers. At Oracle we outsourced that task to a team of people offshore. Today, companies can outsource the task to GenAI.

But…successful selling engagements ultimately focus on the “see-feel-do” model rather than the “hear-think-act” model. And people are really good at the “feel” part, if you let them. Michael Douglas, in The Komisky Method repeatedly asks “how did that feel”, not “what did you think?” I ask that exact question after every role play and phone call (during facilitated Power Hours.)

Now…this is a different question than whether GenAI will support or enable sales. AI based sales training is already a thing, and a powerful and scalable one at that. RNMKRS has already provided realtime feedback and coaching to tens of thousands of college sales students and Fortune 500 sales people. AI recommendation engines on “next best steps” are being built and deployed.

I’ll note that sales people do not want to be overburdened with too much data. They are masters of “just give me enough to get started and I’ll do the rest on my own.”  Let’s not burden them with too much information!

Here’s my message, and it’s exactly the same I delivered in a keynote address at a very large vendor's SKO in Las Vegas. “If you’re not moving up, you’re falling behind.” Your peers are not standing still (and neither is Generative AI). Either continue to improve your skills, to add more value, or be deprecated.

Even ChatGTP and Bard don’t think AI is going to take over sales anytime soon.

ChatGTP stated:

By automating certain tasks and streamlining workflows, AI can free up salespeople to focus on more high-value activities, such as relationship-building and strategic planning.

And Bard stated:

In the future, we will see a hybrid sales force where AI and human salespeople work together to close deals. AI will handle the tasks that it is good at, while human salespeople will focus on the tasks that require human skills and creativity. This will allow sales teams to be more efficient and effective than ever before…it is important to remember that AI cannot replace human salespeople entirely. The human touch will always be an essential part of successful sales.

What do you think? Are you concerned that GenAI will replace you or your team? Or are you looking forward to better tools that will allow you to engage more powerfully with your customers and prospects?

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

Lee

108 Selling Days Left in 2023!

With the end of the year fast approaching, now would be an excellent time to review the influence map with the team for each important deal and to take action now on your learnings.

• Have all the decision makers and stakeholders been identified?
• Have all the influencers been identified, including partners and service providers (the answer is always no!)
• For each of these individuals, how strong is the relationship? What direction is the relationship moving -- getting better, staying the same, getting worse?
• Who can say no...and why?
• When was the last time you significantly engaged with each of the important players on your influence map?
• What is your plan for improving relationships where necessary and getting commitments from each of those stakeholders and decision makers?
• If there is an incumbent to be displaced, what does their influence map look like and how much overlap is there with yours?
• What are your coaches telling you now?

The influence map is a key tool to help de-risk opportunities. If you leverage the influence map as part of your engagement and pursuit process, you are winning at a 20 to 40% higher rate and seldom, if ever, need to discount at the eleventh hour to close/win deals.

And if you aren't yet using influence maps, and would like assistance in implementing them, let me know!

While powerful, the influence map is just one part of a professional enterprise selling toolkit. I'll cover additional high value tools in coming days.

 

Thanks,

 

Lee

Hey, Lets Do Value Selling

Over the past few months, a number of senior sales leaders have reached out for help, stating "we want to implement value selling."

They see value selling as a tool to unlock more value (revenue) or to improve their pipeline or to gain a competitive selling edge.

They are on the right path...value selling can certainly have a net positive impact on revenue, pipeline and competitiveness.

However, their perception of value selling and how it's implemented is a bit short sighted. Value selling is not a thing. You don't "implement value selling." 

Value Selling Is Not a Tool

First and foremost, value selling is not a tool; rather, it's a mindset. Value selling is a way of thinking about how to engage with customers and requires a broad organizational commitment to putting the customer first.

Value selling focuses on the customer's strategic business goals (not technology habits). It focuses on the firmagraphics (the culture) of the buying entity (first mover/late adopter, risk taker/risk adverse, etc). It considers the needs/wants/desires of the individual stakeholders and contributors to the buying process. Value selling requires a specific focus on the use of language to align with those entities.

As a result, value selling is not something easily boiled down to Step One, Step Two, Step Three...

Instead, a value selling approach should be baked into onboarding, selling preparation, communications, actions and activities. And it requires an organization-wide change management process.

Start With Opportunity and Account Planning

Opportunity planning and development, and its cousin, account planning, are great places to start. 

Traditional opportunity planning starts with a profile of the target customer (focusing on installed base and potential budget) and the questions "what can we sell them and how much share can we steal from a competitor?" As this approach is highly transactional and competitive, it leads to sales with low profitability and mediocre customer satisfaction ratings. Sound familiar?

Value centered opportunity planning also starts with a profile of the target customer, but with a focus on strategic business goals, the gaps between goals and capabilities and the motivations of the organization and the key stakeholders. Reps or teams consider how they can help the organization to achieve these goals, independent of any product or service offering (Solution development comes much later.)

Value selling involves co-creation with the customer, and in many, perhaps most cases, doesn't have much impact on existing vendor relationships. It tends to focus on net-new value creation, generating far larger impact and results than a simple vendor substitution might.

There's no comparison of vendors' TCO in value selling. It's just not relevant. That's pocket fluff in comparison to the impact true co-creation offers. Why focus on shaving 10% in operating costs if the project could lead to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction or manufacturing quality. Most of the senior executives, the decision makers in a strategic project, will focus on the latter.

The team must consider "are we well positioned to help the customer achieve their goals?"  Once the organizational goals are identified, the reps or teams develop an influence map that details the key stakeholders, the strength of the relationships, and an action plan to further develop those relationships.

Finally, the team develops powerful messaging that emphasizes alignment and ability of the team to help the organization achieve their strategic goals, and the ability of the individual stakeholders to meet their personal goals.

As with any strategic sales improvement project, the assistance of a knowledgeable sales enablement sherpa to provide direction and to carry the load is critical. If you don't get value selling right the first time, you won't get a second chance. Senior management...and the sales team...will move on to other shiny new objects.  

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

Running and Selling

In many ways, running is similar to selling. Both involve preparation, patience, diligence, sweat and a lot of "failure."

Great coaches tell their athletes to prepare for next year’s race, or the year after. Building the foundation for success takes a long time. You shouldn’t expect to do it in one season or in one quarter. The work you’re doing now will pay off down the road, way down the road.

Yet we expect our sellers to come up to speed quickly….and the quicker the better. We measure “Time to First Revenue” as a key indicator of new hire performance and of onboarding program effectiveness. What we’re probably measuring, instead, is the persistence of a pre-existing deal in the territory, or perhaps a sales manager who’s closing deals for her new reps.

And we expect immediate results each time the organization pivots, whether it’s due to a new product introduction, or a strategic shift in sales priorities, or the sudden WFH status of much of the sales organization and customer base. It’s like telling a mile specialist that next week he’s competing in the marathon, or a marathoner that she’ll be competing in an Iron Man triathlon with its multiple disciplines.

Sometimes those pivots are unavoidable. Reps are now selling 100% by phone or video conference, with no expectation that they will be able to resume face to face selling any time soon.

But here’s the thing. Selling remotely is different than selling face to face. And buying is different today. Buyers are behaving differently. Sure, many still have projects to complete (or to start). They still have project plans and milestones and MBOs. But their reality is quite different today than it was in January of this year.

Their organizational challenges have shifted, perhaps dramatically. Some of their customers, partners and consumers are out of business or out of work. Their personal challenges have increased — remote working and management, loss of traditional support systems and day care, drop in household income, sick family members, the anxiety of the unknown.

So lets take a step back, take this opportunity to pose the question — “what serves our customers, our organization now?” How can we use this time to (re)build a strong foundation — relationships with our customers and prospects, deeper set of selling and relationship management skills.

With no races on the calendar, professional coaches point out that this year presents a unique opportunity for athletes, normally in a pre-race training cycle, to focus on building a strong fitness foundation, one that will serve the athlete for years to come, to improve their results several years out.

Similarly, the enforced WFH and dramatically different selling environment presents a unique opportunity for sales people to focus on relationship development, account research and preparation, and, importantly, their emotional intelligence.

How will you ensure that your sales teams both build a foundation for future success and keep the lights on this quarter?

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

Practice, Practice, Practice!

I’m in the middle of rereading Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (link) and I was surprised at the common themes that help runners, artists, surgeons and sales people all excel at their craft.

If you’re interested in excelling at sales, follow these guidelines:

#1 Context is everything

If your intent is to get through 10 calls so you can check that box and go to lunch, the calls won’t be useful to you or the prospects. On the other hand, if your intent is to solve problems, make sense of the world, talk to interesting people, improve your craft…your calls will be much productive and fun. Your prospects will enjoy talking with you; they’ll share more, they will help you to help them.

Remember, your context (or intent) is obvious to your prospect, like it’s written across your forehead or broadcast in your caller id. You will always broadcast some context, either consciously or not, so ensure that it is a powerful, positive one. (Hmm, perhaps a topic for another posting…)

#2 Practice makes perfect

Athletes and musicians practice to ensure success. And they don’t just practice, they focus on specific skills, one at a time. A pro golfer will spend a week working solely on his putting game (but not from the same spot each time). An ultra-marathoner will focus on building leg speed. A top sales person will focus on practicing the pivot or bridge from one topic to another.

We practice to build “muscle memory.” When a prospect asks us a question out of the blue, because we’ve practiced, because we’ve built that muscle memory, we can pivot to addressing the question in a useful and meaningful way. Or maybe that question doesn’t catch us off guard…because we saw something on the contact’s LinkedIn profile and gave some thought to how that might be relevant…

#3 Learn from doing

Top performers always evaluate their performance. What went well? What could he or she have done differently? What’s the learning? What new muscle memory must be created?

After you talk with a prospect or customer, think about the flow of the conversation. Were you properly prepared? Did the conversation follow the path you expected? (Hint, it never does!) Did you accomplish what you intended? Were you open to solving different problems, uncovering and exploring different issues? Did you position yourself as a resource? Did you make a deposit in the relationship bank account? Did you reach agreement on a specific follow up?

This introspection is the single most powerful thing you can do each day to identify areas for improvement, to build your selling skills. For a deep dive into learning theory, spend some time with Make It Stick by Peter Brown (link). Peter also cites some pretty interesting research on new techniques for skill development (a topic for another post.)

Leverage your resources. Use the industry and persona information provided by your organization or public resources, the treasure trove of prospect information on LinkedIn, the call and conversation planning tools needed for thoughtful preparation. Corporate Visions cites industry knowledge as being critical to successful conversations, more important than company knowledge, and far more important than product knowledge. Prepare for success!

Practice, practice, practice. It might take you 30 minutes to fill out your first call planning template. It will take you 5-10 minutes to complete your 10^th. Role play with your peers or your manager. Fine tune your conversational skills in a “safe” environment, make the mistakes in a coaching space where you will get immediate feedback. Practice your opening conversation in front of a mirror until it feels and sounds natural.

  

And pick up the phone often. You will have far greater success in holding an enrolling conversation with someone if you reach them by phone, versus trying to engage them by email. 

Thanks!

Lee

BAU as Primary Competitor

When selling complex solutions to the line of business, your primary competitor is almost always BAU or “Business As Usual”, sometimes referred to as “the status quo” or “we’ve always done it that way.”

Unless you happen to reach someone actively evaluating new approaches or technologies, you will have to contend with the entrenched BAU. Your contact might have been told when they joined the company that “this is the way we do things here.” For better or worse, that’s how things get done. Business as usual.

The way things get done might be highly efficient. Or it might require McGyvering the process with baling wire and duct tape, lots of manual processes.

I talk with these customers every day, across all lines of business. For instance – marketing directors extracting information from Marketo and Salesforce, importing it into Excel, normalizing the data and trying to make sense of it, trying to plan new marketing campaigns to drive customer acquisition or retention. In fact, googling the phrase “use marketo and salesforce data in excel” results in more than 261,000 results, including both Marketo and Salesforce forums, and an unlikely domain “datahero.” So…lots of people are McGyvering this very important information mashup. I wonder how that’s working for them…

One analytics manager recently told me that he spends a full day each week extracting data from source systems and loading it into their analytics app. That’s 20% of his working hours, doing something manually that could be automated at nominal cost and with a dramatically lower error rate. He hasn’t been able to take a vacation in three years…

Why do customers continue to do it this way?

Why don’t they welcome our calls, offering to help them do things better, faster, cheaper?

Here’s the problem

BAU works, more or less. There’s little perceived risk in continuing to do things the way things have been done. They know what will happen. Sure, the BAU approach might not be optimal, it might not even be particularly effective, but it’s predictable. They know how to do it that way and they know what results to expect. And they’re too busy doing what they’re doing to be actively searching for different ways of doing things…

Change represents risk

Any change to current processes holds perceived risk. There’s the effort of evaluating and making the change. Then processes have to be modified…and there’s no guarantee that the new way will work better than the old way (BAU). Or that it will work at all. So there’s a built-in bias to do nothing.

How do we get past BAU?

Be aware that your prospect doesn’t want to do anything differently. And you need to honor the approach that they’ve developed. Somebody might be proud of it. Somebody pitched it to management and got funding for it. It might actually work.

Typically cost isn’t sufficient. Prospects won’t move to something new for a small incremental decrease in cost. The risk is too high. There must either be a large, demonstrable cost savings, or a significant capability improvement (ability to drive new business outcomes) to drive consideration. Incremental performance improvements are almost never worth the perceived risk to the buyer. And if a change was recently, the thresh-hold for change will be even higher.

So we focus on helping customers to achieve new, better business outcomes – improving customer retention, reducing customer churn, raising operational profitability…we align to their strategic organizational metrics. And remember, business customers don’t really care how they achieve their business outcomes as long as they do achieve them. The technology-centric sales approach doesn’t intrigue them as it might for a conversation with IT executives. (Five guys in a garage, two squirrels in a cage, cloud-based data warehouse? I don’t know…will it help me improve my customer retention rate…and receive my quarterly bonus?)

As a sales person, your job is to reduce the perceived risk of doing something new

You start to do that in the first few seconds of a new conversation, as you align to the contact’s language of value, you demonstrate that you’ve done your homework, and you steer the conversation to discussing strategic business metrics and outcomes.

In talking with customers, I start with a foundation of credibility. We’ve worked with similar customers on similar projects many, many times. We can help “derisk” the process for the customer, help them to understand that working with us to adopt a new approach potentially represents less risk than continuing to do what they’ve been doing.

Ask questions about consequential pain

• What are the challenges in doing things the current (BAU) way?
• How will they handle a dramatic pivot or increase in business requirements?
• How will they support new/different strategic decision making?
• How would their business outcomes be different if they could streamline their approach, potentially improve the process?
• What would it mean to them personally if they could improve their results? If they could deliver even better business outcomes (customer retention, product quality, financial performance, employee safety, etc.)

Help them to build awareness that continuing to do things the way they’ve been doing things (BAU) holds substantial risk. Don’t tell them…ask the questions and help them to draw the conclusion… Once you get there, they will be open to a deeper discovery call, providing you with more time and access, building the business case for making a change.

Then suggest that they start with a “bite size” (low risk) project to solve problems not well addressed with current processes or technologies.

And for fun, take a look at the Snopes page on “Grandma’s Cooking Secret.” Yes, we do it that way because she always did it that way (BAU), but nobody knew why!

How do you get past BAU?

Thanks!

Leading Sales Indicators

Selling a complex solution is a lot like running a marathon. To be successful, you can’t just walk up to the starting line and start running. Success in the marathon takes months of preparation. For each mile of the marathon, a runner might run 20-30 miles in direct preparation. Similarly, a good enterprise sales person will dedicate 10-20 hours of preparation (research, discovery, planning) for each hour of face to face with the prospect or customer.

The successful marathoner will have a comprehensive race plan, mapping out the goal pace for each mile. Many apply these plans as temporary “race tats” on their arms, so that they can keep track of their plan while on the road. Similarly, good enterprise sales people develop detailed opportunity or pursuit plans that include both their actions and those of their teammates (other sales people on the account, sales engineers, etc.).

Marathoners carefully watch the leading indicators that help them to determine whether the individual race will be worthy of a Personal Record (PR) or perhaps just a long, slow run. For the runner, some of these leading indicators include their Heart Rate Variance (HRV) and sleep patterns in the days leading up to the race, the temperature and humidity on race day, how they feel at the start line and more.

If the racer sticks to their race plan (slower pace in the first half of the race, faster in the second), a good day is possible. Toss that race plan, run too fast in the first half of the race, and all the prep in the world won’t save you. Trust me…I know!

Similar dynamics exist in the complex enterprise sales environment. While sales management typically watches portfolio coverage as a primary indicator, it is not a leading indicator. Pipeline coverage will tell you that you are in trouble. It won’t tell you why you are in trouble…and it doesn’t give sufficient warning for early correction.

The Acelera Group Sales Productivity Framework incorporates ten rep-focused leading indicators, along with a single first line sales manager (FLSM) indicator. These indicators provide the early warning signs for a decline in sales performance, at the rep, group and region level, and point strongly to specific actions to be taken for course correction.

The ratio of prep time versus face time, as mentioned earlier, is one of these leading indicators. Depending on the specific business problem, level of prior customer intimacy and complexity of the environment, the sweet spot may be 5 or 10 to 1. When reps (or teams) diverge from the sweet spot, we can expect a looming drop in sales results.

A second leading indicator – whether a business value analysis (BVA) has been conducted – holds a similar power of predictability. Curiously, despite its significant positive impact on customer intimacy and satisfaction, deal profitability and overall sales results, the BVA is not widely used.

Complex enterprise selling should not be an ad hoc series of unrelated activities. Good preparation and effective plan execution will help the runner to complete the race and the sales rep to drive great sales results.

What are your leading indicators telling you?

Thanks!

Got a Plan?

How Are You Treating Your Largest Accounts?

Strategic accounts warrant investment and relationship rigor. They spend more, have been customers longer, and have made specific long-lasting platform, technology and relationship commitments. A company’s top five customers alone may account for 22% of all revenues and 21% of  annual profits! (Source: Sales Executive Council).

Most large companies have a strategic account strategy, providing additional technical, business, product resources, and occasionally targeted investments in those accounts. Some provide “concierge” access to technical or development resources. Executive sponsors are assigned to these accounts.

Yet day to day management of the relationship is largely left to chance. Few companies hire true strategic account managers (SAMs), choosing instead to promote their “best” individual reps into a role that requires significant team and process management skills.

While SAMs may be compensated on multi-year revenue attainment, share of wallet gains and occasionally customer satisfaction scores, the other sales people on the account, called specialist, pillar, or portfolio sales people, typically retain their quarterly and annual quota targets, and frequently are re-assigned year to year.  These portfolio sales people don’t typically report to the SAM, usually have competing business imperatives for their own product sets and may even compete with one another, as multiple products from the vendor may solve individual business or technical problems.

In short, a primary driver of disappointment in strategic account programs is that the planning process typically focuses on sales planning rather than relationship planning. 

Developing a Plan Isn’t Sufficient

SAMs are typically expected to develop an annual account plan, and some collaborate with their portfolio sales people to do so. Others just wing it. In most cases, the output is indeed a plan…a written document that is revisited annually…an artifact that provides no guidance for the day-to-day governance of the account. It is a sales plan with detailed lists of potential opportunities, alignment of products to perceived business or technical problems. The plan typically lacks a thorough analysis of the influence map within the account or any plans to bolster relationships with important internal and external (partner) stakeholders.

A recent survey conducted by the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) found that, even within their membership, a mere 11% of account plans are “effectively executed.” That’s a pretty dismal adherence rate, given that these plans should be the primary pathway to better customer relationships and higher revenue generation! 

What to Do?

If your organization is serious about strategic accounts, the first step is to ensure corporate support for a multiyear investment in the process of account planning, management and governance. While results will appear almost immediately, the full impact of an effective strategic account program will not be seen until the second or third year of the program. If the program is maintained, those results should be long-lasting!

The next step is to set up a framework for success, including:

• Hiring SAMs with strong team management skills
• Developing programmatic analysis of customer financials, industry growth trends, key stakeholder profiles, installed base, competitive SOW and more…
• Enrolling management of each portfolio sales organization in the process and creating a consistent set of rules of engagement
• Developing a process for thoughtfully identifying the strategic opportunities and challenges within the customer organization
• Installing a team governance process to ensure success on an ongoing basis

Team Governance?

In my experience…and I’ve driven strategic planning for more than $2B in revenues…the last item in the framework is the real challenge. Teams gather to conduct the planning process…and then scatter to the wind. Individual reps receive conflicting directives from their management, sometimes in conflict with the team. Occasionally they go “rogue” in an effort to land revenue this quarter or fiscal year, upsetting a much larger, more strategic deal.

To address this issue with one very large software company, we established the concept of sales team “program management” for their Account Team Unit (ATU). Initially, the function of program management was handled by an existing team member, with the goal of providing dedicated headcount to take on that function as necessary. As we developed the strategic account program at another company, one core team member owned team facilitation and took on governance as necessary to support the strengths (and challenges) of the strategic account manager. 

Thing One – Visibility

The SAM must have visibility on the activities of each portfolio rep (and their sales consultants), ensuring consistent team/account messaging across all initiatives and engagement; and whether individual reps are engaged. That visibility would also help the SAM to know where a rep needs help with access or organizational support. Reps gravitate to where they see opportunity, leaving broken promises of supporting the SAM and the strategic account. “If it’s not closing this quarter, I’m not wasting my time pursuing it.” 

Thing Two – Customer Participation

However, even if your organization successfully designs and implements a strong planning and governance framework, this only provides the “inside-out” view. It’s a series of hypotheses around “what we think the customer might be interested in…” And here’s where most companies fail in their strategic account planning process. They neglect to include the single most important stakeholder in the process — the customer.

Sure…it can be challenging to include the customer in the process, and sometimes the customer’s strategic focus doesn’t align with what we want to sell. Go figure! Yet, deep engagement with the customer in the planning process leads to more involvement by the customer, better “time and access” for discovery and relationship building, faster decision cycles, larger, more profitable deals, and higher customer satisfaction. That planning process, by the way, is a cycle rather than an event…a series of regular engagements with relevant resources, and commitment to action and investment on an ongoing basis.

Many companies leave the participation of the customer to be handled by the SAM. A few formally drive a “co-creation” process with the customer, ensuring that the customer has a seat at the table in the planning process. I’ve facilitated strategic account planning in F100 customers’ boardrooms, with active participation of key customer stakeholders throughout the process. Their participation provided valuable direction for our sales investments and led to the identification of significant new opportunities. Once a good context is established for the joint team, everyone looks forward to the regular discussions. We’re helping our strategic stakeholders to address significant business challenges and they have a sense that we’re “in the boat” with them, that we are truly committed to their success. 

Strategic Account Planning and Governance as Competitive Advantage — Actions to Take

If you believe that your strategic account program could drive more value for your organization (and for your customer), a key area of focus is individual sales rep activity, messaging and governance. We are exploring a new approach to better manage this area and am interested in partnering with a couple of organizations to pilot that approach.

And the second key area is customer involvement. If you’re not actively, routinely involving your customer in the strategic planning process, you’re leaving significant money on the table and wasting valuable time and resources on unqualified opportunities.

Thanks!

Winning in 2010

While 2009 was a difficult year, 2010 represents tremendous opportunity. Early indicators suggest that the economy is on the mend. While I don't expect budgets and activities to return to 2007 levels, executives have stopped behaving like ostriches and are increasingly considering how to build and improve business operations.We're seeing this in both our own client base and in our daily conversations with hundreds of IT decision makers.

I've called the fourth quarter of 2009 the most important quarter of the decade. Hopefully, you ended the quarter strongly and are well positioned for success in 2010 and beyond. This new quarter will also be critical -- market share is still up for grabs and as you solidify your position within accounts and markets, you will be ensuring future profitability for many years to come.

Weaker competitors are still sitting on the sidelines, wondering what has happened and whether their fortunes will ever change. Agile competitors have already launched new tactics to gain market share in well defined target segments.

To help you move forward strongly, I'll provide some context and the sales productivity framework Tom Barrieau and I developed at IDC. The framework includes the following five major levers of sales productivity:

• Talent Management
• Sales Management
• Sales Methodology
• Sales Enablement
• Customer Intelligence

Each of these five levers incorporates a number of elements. In the interest of time, we won't go into those today. Additionally, we're going to leave off the discussion of the heart of the framework itself -- the issue of sales productivity.

Sales productivity is a meaty issue. Most B2B organizations have some definition of sales productivity and in our experience most of those definitions lead to one rathole or another. (Hint -- it's not the number of calls a rep makes or the amount of revenue delivered in a given time period).

For an initial discussion of sales productivity measures, please see the IDC best practices report we published in 2008 on sales metrics and KPIs. This report will help you to start thinking about how you can collect the sales metrics and KPIs that allow you to measure true sales productivity and leverage that knowledge into action that improves your productivity.

That's an important big picture discussion, but not one that will help you to improve your performance next month. You need to balance the important and urgent tasks (See the Covey matrix to the right). If you ignore the important tasks, they will eventually become urgent...and how most sales organizations manage sales productivity is becoming urgent.

Today, however, the urgent tasks are becoming even more urgent. The steps to ensure improved revenue performance over the next two quarters boil down to the following:

• Sales people must have the right conversations with the right prospects at the right time!

It seems so simple. Yet most larger B2B sales organizations are still working on organizational realignment, tactics to extract more revenue with their existing customers or what to do about a competitive threat. While these are useful discussions, they must not form the basis of your market development strategy.

If you can get past those discussions, here are the steps to take. They map to the three levers listed above in italics:

#1. Target the Right Prospects and Customers at the Right Time (Customer Intelligence)

This is simple. You have useful data in your customer and prospect databases. Ask a couple of your best and brightest business analysts to answer the questions:

• Which of our prospects said "no" to us six to nine months ago?
• Which of our prospects has contracts coming up for renewal in the next three months?
• Which of our competitors is having a tough time in the market?
• What is the buying profile of our customers? After they've bought something from us, what is the next most likely purchase, and when does that purchase typically happen?
• What triggers signal buying intent?
  
• Which of our prospects is growing fastest?
• Which of our clients is growing fastest?

Once you've completed this analysis (and you should be conducting it at least quarterly), you'll have a series of lists of sales targets and a good set of "stories" as to when and why a particular target will buy. Work with field marketing to deliver targeted messages. Work with sales operations to parse out the targets on a controlled, measured basis. Monitor the results carefully -- some of these segments will respond better than others, and you will want to shift your marketing and sales resources to the most productive segments.

#2. Deliver the Right Conversations (Sales Enablement)

As part of this initiative, you will need to rearchitect the sales conversations. What are the key "care-abouts" of a given client or prospect? Why should a given prospect buy now? Why should a client upgrade now? (Hint, it's not because you need the revenue!). Deliver these new sales conversations as scripts for territory reps and channel partners. Deliver them as podcasts for enterprise reps and channel partners. Validate those conversations by asking for feedback. Congratulations, you've now just improved your sales enablement capabilities.

#3. Ensure the Right Behaviors (Sales Management)

You've got a secret weapon in your sales organization. This secret weapon can be used to significantly improve sales performance and results, yet in most organizations this resource is spending most of its time filling out reports to deliver to management. Oops.

This secret weapon is your first line sales manager. When the manager spends most of his or her time coaching reps, rep performance soars. In the short term, lighten up on the managers' reporting responsibilities. In the longer term, rearchitect this role so that it is a coaching role rather than a data management role. For a deep discussion of the first line sales manager role and related best practices, take a look at this recent IDC report.

Effective sales management also ensures the application of the appropriate resources to specific pipeline development activities. While few organizations expect their highly paid enterprise reps to be conducting marketing activities, these same reps may be expected to both cold call new opportunities and to manage existing relationships. Savvy organizations disaggregate the sales function, applying specialized resources to specific tasks. (I'll cover this issue in detail in an upcoming newsletter).

Good luck out there. And please, take these issues on with the sense of urgency that they require.


Thanks,

Lee

Open for Business or Hoping for Business?

The leading indicators are encouraging – FedEx Corp recently reported higher shipping volumes and raised its earnings forecast. Oracle announced both higher top and bottom line results for its most recent quarter. Corporate IT buyers are once again starting to talk about strategic initiatives rather than cost cutting. Marketing organizations are spending left-over year-end dollars and sales organizations are once again hiring new sales people.

2010 is promising to be a challenging year even as the economy slowly improves. Few analysts are expecting a return to robust growth anytime soon; those organizations that wait for calm waters and steady winds in this market will find themselves left on the beach.

The winners in 2010 will continue to hone their market definition, development and selling processes. Market leaders are:

• Defining markets more narrowly
• Prioritizing opportunities more systematically
• Building deeper intelligence about individual organizations
• Targeting marketing and sales assets more precisely
• Analyzing the interim and final results more carefully

Measure What You Manage
The net effect of this work is two-fold. First, these organizations are finding higher ROI on their marketing and sales investments. While not all investments provide equal and high returns, the increased inspection of the process and results provides better and faster opportunities to modify and improve. Secondly, the organizations conducting this level of analysis and management are outdistancing their peers. Simply put, the right sales resource delivering the right sales conversation to the right prospect at the right time is vastly more compelling than a rep reading from a script or dragging a prospect through the corporate presentation.

As a buyer, which would you prefer – a sales person who talks about your purchase in the context of your use case or one who assumes that his or her product is right for you just because of your physical proximity?

We’ve all been there – we’ve been in both buying and selling situations in which everybody clicks and the process goes smoothly and quickly to the benefit of both parties. We’ve also suffered through situations in which it’s clear to almost everybody that the conversation is going nowhere.

Some marketing and sales executives have told me that they have chosen not to undertake this work because the underlying data is not available or that the process development and management appears difficult. They’re partially correct – the data is not easily available and the work is hard. This is what separates the leaders from everyone else. The leaders have chosen to take on this work and they are already enjoying the results.

Approximately a dozen technology companies have deeply invested in this work. Another couple of dozen are in some stage of investigation and implementation. These companies will be rewarded with higher top line revenue growth, profitability and customer satisfaction.

What Will be Different?
I’ll leave you with a challenge – what will you do to improve the efficacy of your marketing and sales activities in 2010? Do you still believe that what you did in 2008 and 2009 will work in 2010? What are you willing to do differently in 2010 to improve your results?

Thanks,

Lee