It's Not Just the First Meeting. The Process Is Broken.

Here's Why Last time I wrote about the fifth rep — the one seller out of five who earns a second conversation by guiding instead of pitching. But here's what keeps nagging at me: fixing first meetings won't fix your number. The first meeting failure is a symptom. The real issue is the system behind it. The Whole Chain Is Pointed the Wrong Way Think about the last pipeline review you sat through. What questions got asked? What stage is this? When does it close? Did they see the demo? Next steps? These are the questions that build your forecast — the number you commit upward, the number you never want to explain. So the pipeline review focuses on what makes the forecast feel solid: stage, next steps, close date, verbal commits, whether the rep is texting with the CFO. But here's what nobody asked: How will this customer benefit from what we're proposing? Who influences this decision and what do they care about? What happens to their business if they don't act? Is our rep connecting with these people — or running a process at them? When was the last time a manager asked a rep, "What is this buyer afraid of?" Not what objections they raised. What they're actually afraid of — the career risk, the political exposure, the possibility they'll champion this deal and it blows up in their face. This isn't soft thinking. Both sellers and buyers believe B2B purchasing is a rational process — collect data, analyze options, select the best one. Research from Google and CEB tells a different story: B2B buyers are actually more emotionally driven than B2C consumers. But they don't know it — and neither do your reps. So your reps address the rational concerns, because that's what buyers say matters. Meanwhile the deal is actually being won or lost on fear, trust, and confidence. None of which show up in the scorecard. That question doesn't come up. Not because managers don't care. Because nothing in the system prepares them to ask. And it's not just inspection. Enablement builds product experts — certifications, demo bootcamps, battlecards. Coaching centers on demos, objection handling, and positioning. Pipeline reviews track activity and deal mechanics. Enablement, coaching, and inspection all reinforce the same product-centric muscle. And then we wonder why reps show up and pitch. There's a deeper issue: the entire sales process is managed inside-out. Every question, every inspection, every coaching conversation is about what we're doing to the buyer. Did we demo? Did we send the proposal? Did we get the next meeting? None of it asks what's going on with the buyer — how their decision process is going, what they need from us, whether they're any closer to the confidence they need to say yes. I saw this on a deal I coached two years ago. Enterprise software, big logo, enthusiastic champion at headquarters. Every pipeline review looked great — demos completed, proposal sent, next steps confirmed. It was in the forecast as a commit. What nobody asked was whether the division leaders who'd actually use the platform were on board. They weren't — and nobody on our side had done the work to understand their world. The deal died. Not because we lost to a competitor. Because we were managing our process instead of understanding their decision. The dashboard said green. The reality was red. And someone had to explain why a committed deal just evaporated. It was a painful loss my coaching client still agonizes over. And frankly, I do too! We were both blindsided by the lack of support in the secondary divisions. We thoughtthat our champion at HQ had the ability to mandate. He didn't. Trust but verify. Or as Don Jose Ruiz says "Be skeptical. But be open." Traditional sales methodology drives the focus on inside-out selling, sales management and leadership. It dictates how you enable, how you coach, how you inspect — and what it dictates is inside-out. What's missing are the value selling components — the foundation of the Acelera Group Value Selling Framework — that flip the lens: the components that cause buyers to engage, to trust, to share what happens if they fail or succeed. Without them, the methodology produces reps who can present but can't connect, who can demo but can't discover, who can pitch but can't listen.

Where is Your System Breaking Down? The problem shows up differently in every organization. Five questions to find where it's breaking down in yours: What are we actually enabling? Product training — or the ability to understand a buyer's situation well enough to be useful in the first five minutes? Buyers already have the product information. What they need is someone who can help them think. What are our coaching conversations really about? Demo execution and next steps — or whether our rep knows how this customer will benefit and what they're risking to get there? What are we really inspecting? Stage and close date — or whether a rep has mapped the influence network, built a real champion, and can articulate the buyer's problem back to them? We're inspecting the dashboard. The deal is happening somewhere else. What does our culture reward? The big close — or the rep who did the hard research, had the real conversation, and walked away from a bad-fit deal? Culture governs what reps do when nobody's watching. Are leadership and enablement pulling in the same direction? Enablement teams often know what reps need but lack the air cover to deliver it. When leadership defines "ready" as "knows the product" and enablement knows it should mean "understands the buyer," that gap becomes the gap reps carry into every meeting. Oh, and a bonus question -- what muscle memory are we building/reinforcing in role play? Sorry...that's not fair...most tech sales organizations don't bother to conduct role plays...or deliberate practice as I prefer to call it.  Most organizations can't answer "the right thing" on all five. That's not a failure — it's a diagnosis. Once you see where the system is misaligned, you can start fixing it. When all five point toward the buyer, "together we win" stops being a slogan and starts being how deals actually get done. See What This Looks Like in a Real Deal I'm building this out in a book called Together We Win and sharing draft chapters as I go. The full book will be available later this year. The first chapter — The Fifth Rep — puts you in the room where the system breaks down. Fair warning: your next pipeline review might feel different after you read it. Read Chapter 1: The Second Meeting Tell me where I'm wrong. I mean it! — Lee

Your Existing Customers Are Your Growth Engine. So Why Are You Ignoring Them?

 

Here's a number that should keep every CEO up at night: 73% of revenue comes from existing customers. Not new logos. Not the deals your sales team is chasing right now. The customers who already trust you enough to write you a check.

And it gets worse. According to Ebsta's 2024 analysis, 52% of net new revenue also comes from existing customers. When you do the profit math, nearly 100% of profit — sometimes more than 100% — is generated post-sale. Companies routinely need to generate 130% of their profit from existing customers just to cover the cost of acquiring new ones.

So where does the investment go? Into new business sales. Every time.

I had a conversation with Alex Raymond on the Thoughts on Selling podcast recently that crystallized something I've been feeling for years. Alex is the founder of AMplify, host of the Account Manager Secrets podcast, and he just published a book called The Growth Department. He's spent the last decade studying how companies grow through their existing customers — and his conclusion is blunt: most companies are blowing it.

The Varsity Team and the JV Squad

Alex uses an analogy I can't stop thinking about. We treat the sales team like the varsity team. They get the best coaches, the best playbooks, fancier uniforms, a nicer bus, nicer changing rooms. The account management and customer success teams? They're the JV squad. An inexperienced coach. Ratty hand-me-down uniforms. A smelly locker room. And then leadership says, "How come they're not performing at the same level?"

It's a structural problem, not a talent problem. The people in post-sales roles are often the hardest workers and most customer-centric people in the entire company. They drive more revenue than the salespeople in many cases — they just don't talk about it. But without the playbooks, training, tools, and leadership investment that sales gets, they're left twisting themselves into pretzels to get renewals across the line and keep customers happy.

And here's the cruel irony: when they succeed through sheer heroics, leadership doesn't see valor. They see a bunch of people running around putting out fires. The respect for the team goes down, not up.

The Recurring Revenue Myth

One of the most dangerous ideas in business today is that recurring revenue is automatic. Alex calls it a myth, and he's right. Just because revenue is structured as a subscription doesn't mean it shows up without effort. But executives hear "recurring" and assume it's on autopilot — which gives them permission to hire less experienced people, invest less in their development, and treat the entire function as an afterthought.

In the early days of SaaS, we knew better. Even on a 24-month contract, we'd say we have to earn the customer's usage every month. That mindset has been replaced by complacency, and the results are showing up in churn rates everywhere.

Keep, Grow, No Surprises

Alex offers a framework that's simple enough to fit on a napkin and powerful enough to reorient an entire post-sales organization. The job of account management is to help your company win. You do that three ways: keep the customers that sales brought in the door, grow the ones with the most potential, and make sure there are no surprises.

That's it. Not NPS scores. Not CSAT dashboards. Not being a liaison with the product team. Those are trailing indicators. The real job is keeping, growing, and eliminating surprises — and delivering profit back to the business.

The $1 That Changes Everything

One of the most surprising data points Alex shared comes from Greg Daines, who has analyzed massive datasets on why customers stay or leave. The minimum threshold to get a customer excited about renewing isn't some blockbuster ROI number. It's basically $1 of measurable improvement.

Why? Because once a customer sees a dollar of progress, they can imagine the path to ten, a thousand, a million. They feel justified in their decision. They want to keep going. And here's the kicker: even customers who see negative results stay twice as long as customers where you don't report value at all. Showing up with the truth — even when it's ugly — beats silence every time.

The Path Forward

This conversation reminded me of Jane Scott, one of the best CSMs I've ever worked with. Jane was the glue that held the Xerox account together at Oracle. She knew the metrics, she knew the people, she knew what mattered. She's what happens when you invest in post-sales talent and let them do their job.

Every company deserves a Jane Scott. But you don't get one by treating post-sales like the JV team.

Alex's book The Growth Department lays out the blueprint for changing that — for building the scaffolding that account management and customer success teams have never had. If you're a CRO, a VP of sales, a founder trying to scale, or a CSM wondering why nobody seems to care about the work you're doing, go read it.

The path to long-term, durable, profitable growth doesn't run through your next cold outreach campaign. It runs through the customers who are already here.

Listen to the full conversation on the Thoughts on Selling podcast.

244 Selling days left in 2024

Savvy sales leaders understand the rhythm of selling in a calendar year...in the first quarter (after territories and quotas are communicated to the field), sales people should be researching and prioritizing their accounts and planning their engagements.

In the second quarter opportunities should be developed, discovery conducted and value established. For larger accounts, account planning should be planned and held (with the customer's active participation. Your customers do attend your account planning sessions, right?)

In the third opportunities should be de-risked and customer commitments nailed down. Account planning should be continued. Executive briefings should be planned and hosted.

And...in the fourth quarter, deals should be closed.

There's only three challenges with this approach.

First, that's a lot of "shoulds."

With a formal structure in place, at the field level, and effective process facilitation, these important activities will happen, with effectiveness and impact.

Second, customers don't subscribe to the sales calendar...they have their own rhythm of business, whether their fiscal year ends in June, they have a fourth quarter freeze, or they simply have needs that aren't calendar bound.

Third, sales teams have a constant inflow and outflow of talent that requires retraining, new enablement and learning facilitation.

How much of this are you leaving to chance? Are you counting on a manager named Should to ensure the success of your team through the course of the year?

How did that work out for you last year?

What are you doing to ensure that these actions actually happen, with expediency and effectiveness?

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

 

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

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!

Are Your Numbers Down?

Our numbers are down, can you help?

Many conversations with new clients typically start with this statement. Those numbers may include close rates, pipeline coverage, quota attainment, deal size, deal profitability, share of wallet, renewal rates, customer satisfaction, even sales rep retention rates.

In my experience, the problem is rarely sales skills or fundamental product issues. Almost always, the decline in sales results is driven by one of two critical issues:

• Sales people do not align with critical business issues when they first engage with their prospects. Instead, they are unconsciously positioning for a features & benefits slugfest with their competition. These top of funnel activities drive mediocre conversion rates (second meeting, third meeting, etc.), limit access to other key stakeholders and ultimately leads to the downward spiral of “who’s willing to sell more cheaply.”
• Sales people do not have the resources to be successful, including alignment with the buyer’s journey created/curated by marketing, business value analysis resources, detailed customer implementation stories, or the training & background to effectively engage in business value discussions. Sometimes they simply need more time to prepare (less administrative load) or more/better/targeted sales coaching from their manager.

In conducting root cause analysis to identify the source(s) of the problem, we work closely with the sales operations team. Sales operations has access to all of the data necessary — extensive sales metrics, personnel information, customer demographics/firmagraphics — that tell the story of success versus failure. This analysis helps to build a map of effective pursuit strategies and detailed profiles of “good” versus “bad” prospects & customers.

With the results of the data analysis, we then take a look at sales enablement practices. Typically we find gaps where the data shows weak or declining conversion rates. Occasionally this is driven by external market forces — new competitors coming into the market, customers shifting internal strategies or structural (economic) factors.

More often, we simply find a disconnect between need and investment, as many (perhaps most) sales enablement investments are focused on addressing symptoms rather than root cause.

Fixing the Symptoms

I recently spoke with executives at a fast-growing midmarket cloud security company. In a quest for continued growth, they initiated a focus on enterprise accounts…and ran into a more mature, educated, complex set of buyers. As a result, their enterprise deal close rates are lower and less profitable than midmarket. Their initial response was to seek help with negotiating skills. But lack of good negotiating skills isn’t their primary problem…they weren’t establishing business value with the right set of stake holders in the early stages of conversation.

And their sales metrics reflect the difference:

• Higher conversion rates and velocity at top of funnel for midmarket versus enterprise
• Lower connection with C-level enterprise executives
• Lower access to VPs, directors, perhaps even managers for mid-pursuit discovery in enterprise accounts

Improved negotiating skills won’t fix their weak value foundation. They must address the fundamental problem — modifying their engagement approach for enterprise customers. And when they do so, they will also see an uptick in results for an increasing portion of their midmarket customers as the market matures.

Fixing the Problem

We’re in the early stages of a sales productivity project for a large technology vendor. Analysis of their quarterly earnings reports provides early indicators of the problem:

• Declining product revenue
• Declining service renewal rates
• Fundamental changes in their market (which they’ve helped to drive)

When we dig into their SFA data, I expect to find declining engagement and conversion rates at the top of the funnel. I also expect to find higher levels of success with certain types of customers — those who purchase “as a service” more frequently. This analysis will help to identify the specific changes needed in their existing sales enablement processes.

Win/Loss Analysis…Why Bother?

Interestingly, few companies leverage win/loss analysis to help identify the problem(s). It seems there’s little appetite for understanding why a specific company said “no.” Yet an understanding of what went wrong during the engagement can provide tremendous insight into how to fix the problem!

And if done properly, the information has the weight of statistics to help ensure appropriate investment to solve the problem.

The issue of sales productivity has many levers…and knowing which levers to push is not easy. It takes both a strategic approach and good pattern matching abilities.


Thanks!

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

Welcome to Q1!

It’s All About Pipeline

For many companies, it is early in Q1. At the end of last year, deals were closed, opportunities were pulled forward, the pipeline was emptied. Everyone took a breather.

So now we’re in Q1. Kick-off is over, sales people have been reinvigorated, tans are fading, and it’s time to get back to work.

Territories have been assigned, accounts have been allocated, SCs are chomping at the bit.

So…in most sales organizations, reps are conducting the traditional process of separating their accounts into three groups – “A”s, “B”s and “C”s. A accounts hold the most opportunity or promise, B accounts have some promise, and typically, C accounts aren’t well known or understood.

In my experience, most of the segmentation is based on simple (yet flawed) criteria:

• Prior engagement
• Good set of contacts
• Existing install base
• Strong revenue growth
• Easy commute from rep’s house or office

Occasionally a long targeted account will be classified as an “A” because “this year we just have to capture that logo!”

Despite the availability of extensive firmagraphic and intent data, few accounts are appropriately targeted based on their business requirements. Targeting is still an inside-out activity, started from scratch annually or when reps turn over.

So…it’s too late to fix that problem this quarter. Lets assume that we have a defined set of accounts and sales people with time, interest and energy. Now is the time to make the investments that ensure strong customer engagement and a healthy, active pipeline later in the year.

Building A Strong Pipeline

 If you don’t know where you’re going, any old path will do…
A good house requires a strong foundation…
A quality paint job is 90% preparation…

And in the same theme, a strong pipeline consists of individual pursuits based on the identification of real business requirements and engagement with stakeholders. It simply isn’t built on hope!

Many sales organizations count on marketing to deliver sufficient numbers of SQLs for follow up…even though somewhere between one and two thirds of there leads are self-generated.

Building that robust pipeline requires an iterative process for reps and managers – researching accounts, building hypotheses about business value and stakeholders, testing those hypotheses, creating access points, delivering value to the participants so that they stay engaged and supportive. While this process is effective, we have seen it implemented in few organizations.

Selling does not have to be adversarial. With good knowledge of the customer’s business goals, needs and challenges, a sales team can build value-based relationships and help their customer to achieve those goals more quickly and efficiently. In turn, the sales team will shorten sales cycles and improve deal profitability.

Building robust pipe requires executive commitment, experienced guidance, engaged sales management and a bit of patience. So, if the path is understood and the challenges are known, why aren’t more organizations making these investments?

Thanks,

Lee