More companies are investing in sales talent analytics initiatives to better attract, develop and retain top talent. But buyer beware! The term ‘analytics’ can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing
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Your Leading Indicators are Lagging
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Trends of Women in Sales
As a woman in sales, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed 25 rewarding years selling and leading in Silicon Valley. With incredible mentors, I quickly climbed (and sometimes cracked) the “corporate ladder” from telemarketer to CEO, each step witnessing a wide diversity gap for women in sales in all roles, especially leadership. Yes, past and present – women represent the minority in the room – like many others. Next, I’ll share how I got started in sales, how the sales role has collaboratively evolved, my recipe for sales career success, and simple solutions to help narrow the gender diversity gap together.
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B2B Nurture and Follow-up Strategies
B2B Nurture and Follow-up Strategies: an interview with Steve Wagner (Lead-gen specialist, SPI) and Lead Lizard, a demand generation agency… Steve Wagner is a demand generation leader with a proven success record for driving revenue. As the Demand Generation Manager at Sales Performance International, he’s demonstrated his ability to cultivate and manage new departments by driving team collaboration, adaptability, and responsiveness. Demand generation captured his interest with its ability to uncover buyer insights and the levers that make them act. Keep reading to learn Steve’s best practices for nurture programs and follow-up strategies.
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Conquering the Fear of the Unknown Sales Candidate
Sales managers are holding onto under-performing reps because they’d rather deal with the certainty of what they have, rather than the uncertainty of trying to hire a replacement rep. Although SVP’s know this doesn’t make good business sense, we understand that hiring talented sales professionals is indeed a daunting task for managers. First, there’s a global shortage of sales talent…
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Thriving in a Sea of Change; Selling in the Post ACA World
Sales success in today’s life sciences market comes to those individuals who are nimble and able to adapt their selling approach to a changing market. The healthcare market is a fluid environment, stretched to capacity by emerging competitive threats, expanding industry dynamics, and constricting regulatory changes.
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Analytics, analytics, analytics!
In mid-September, SPI attended the Sales Management Association’s fourth annual Sales Force Productivity Conference in Atlanta, Ga. Held each fall, the conference serves as the centerpiece of the Sales Management Association’s event calendar, with topics ranging from sales strategy, alignment and operations effectiveness to motivation, incentives and organic growth priorities. SPI executives, Dave Christofaro, Director of Sales Talent Optimization, and Dr. Shane Douthitt, Director of Sales Talent Analytics, gave the keynote presentation at the conference.
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Clinical Conversations Matter!
If you’re a patient suffering from Type II Diabetes, which statement would you trust more to increase your quality of life? “My drug is the best because it stimulates the body to produce insulin,” or “In a clinical study titled, ‘Effects of a dietary supplement A on abnormal glucose levels in Type II Diabetes patients…,” published in New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Houser found that dietary supplement A effectively regulates blood sugar levels with fewer side effects than therapies X, Y, and Z in patients suffering from Type II Diabetes.” For most patients, health care providers (HCPs) and clinical sales professionals, the latter elicits objectivity, adds genuine value, and instills confidence, which lead to fostering credibility. And yet, only a fraction of the life sciences sales professionals have evolved from the ostentatious “American pharmaceutical [and medical device] salesperson” to the trusted clinical advisor.
In a world where health care is becoming increasingly personalized, the need for objectivity in treatment outcomes is critical. Clinical conversations founded on the principles of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) minimize the risk of prescribing treatments based on biased research and/or clever sales tactics, and truly focus on the best possible care solutions for the patient. The 2014-2015 Sermo Survey results indicate that HPCs want to engage in clinical conversations with sales professionals who provide meaningful and unbiased information “using a high science sales approach that seamlessly incorporates clinical study results into a dialog to address specific issues concerning each physician’s practice.” A clinical sales professional who is committed to objectively presenting relevant clinical data in support of a care solution will be recognized among his peers and valued by HCPs.
The question that life sciences sales professionals should address, is how can they provide value in a technology-driven environment where approximately 94% of HCPs use smartphones and 77% use iPads for personal and/or professional needs? The majority of those same physicians (55%) desire for their sales reps to engage with them virtually. HCPs are zealous for clinical conversations grounded in EBM and focused on clinical research. Evidence shows that clinical sales representatives who leverage technology to engage is such clinical conversations will add value and excel in what some critics have touted “a dying profession.”
Synonyms of “credibility” include words like trustworthiness, reliability, dependability, reputation, and integrity. To embody these characteristics, clinical sales professionals must be objective in presenting clinical evidence and consistently add value when engaging in clinical conversations. According to Hoovers, to achieve the status of a trusted advisor, sellers in general must understand their audience, be relevant to the buyer, and approach the sale organically. For clinical sales professionals, this means researching your target HCPs and their patient demographic, sharing clinical data that is germane to their practice, and understanding how your product fits within their current treatment paradigm.
Recent market trends suggest that clinical sales representatives can still add value, but the days of the sales rep who walks into a clinical setting, drops off a business card and a few drug samples, and receives a call back from an enthusiastic physician are long gone. In today’s changing health care environment, the “hybrid” clinical sales representative who leverages technology to connect and share unbiased, relevant information will add value and ultimately become the sought-after trusted advisor.
To learn more, visit http://global.spisales.com/Evolve.
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Healthcare's Changing Business and Practice Models...Implications?
In today’s healthcare environment both the business model and practice model for healthcare providers have changed. In keeping with the law of cause and effect, these changes have forced practitioners to re-calibrate their expectations of sales professionals in the healthcare market. Successful sales teams align themselves with these new expectations to deliver credible solutions to critical practice or patient issues that are based on the best available clinical evidence.
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Happy Holidays from SPI!
At this special time of year as we celebrate the Holidays, SPI wants to say thank you to all of our past and current clients, to our partners, and to the individuals and teams we collaborate with daily in the pursuit of success. Thank you for a great 2014.
We have had the great pleasure to work with the world’s best and most dedicated professionals, from all parts of the globe, for over 25 years. It is our collaborative spirit, and mutual partnerships that make our jobs a joy and keep our passion for sales success and transformation alive.
From the SPI family to yours we wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
Warmest Regards,
Keith Eades and the entire global
Sales Performance International team
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Changing Your Daily Selling Habits & Micro-Marketer
Get started with Social Selling in 2015 by identifying goals against which you can measure your success and building a routine of activities that you can repeat often and track results against.
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Why Leave Revenue Growth to Chance in 2015?
Between their beautifully conceived offerings and the buyer exists that interesting collection of people known as “the sales force.” And in the majority of companies, the human capital costs of the sales organization comprises a significant share of corporate operating expenses. Investing in sales performance improvement solutions isn’t inherently a bad idea – some offerings might actually work well for your organization. For example, if your organization has no coherent “framework” for selling – by all means move from ad hoc behavior to some semblance of order and management science (we encounter and address this often). But conversely, many ideas might also not work well at all – even if they’ve benefitted other organizations that seem similar to yours.
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From Samples to Studies – The Changing Landscape of Life Sciences Sales
Physicians today want to see more clinical sales representatives. You must possess skills in various domains including clinical selling, customer service, and technology to meet healthcare providers’ (HCPs) needs and desires. A few statistics that provide greater insight into this point follow. 91% of HCPs want representatives to leverage clinical studies and EBM. Sales representatives who aren’t fluent in the language of evidence-based medicine will not survive. According to the Institute of Medicine, “The Life Science sales professional of the future will require high levels of fluency in EBM to effectively communicate and position value to potential medical buyers.” This trend is also well-aligned with key findings by TGaS Advisors about the importance of EBM. “For the first time, evidence-based medicine was found to be the strongest customer buying influence…” You must walk the walk and talk the talk.
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The Myth of the Ideal Seller Profile
broad based and vertical industry research and benchmarks have helped to dispel many common misconceptions about “ideal” traits and competencies of sales people (e.g., extroversion is a strong predictor of sales success). In addition, talent assessment, analytics, and benchmarking have led the movement to a more rational thought process about what it may take to succeed in various types of sales roles.
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Webcast: Why Leave Revenue Growth to Chance?
This webinar will present a cutting-edge, data-driven approach that allows today’s Sales Leader to get focused on the highest payback areas for performance improvement. By aligning talent analytics, adaptive learning, and sales enablement, sales organizations can make intelligent, focused investments in human capital - that have highest probability of impacting specific sales and business goals.
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Aligning Sales Talent to Drive YOUR Business Goals
A confluence of new capabilities is creating an innovative, more precise approach to performance improvement. New approaches include advanced analytics, refined sales competency and behavioral models, adaptive learning, and multiple forms of technology enablement. However, with only 17% of sales organizations leveraging sales talent analytics (TDWI Research), it seems that most CSO’s and their HR business partners are gambling — using intuition as the basis for making substantial investments in sales development initiatives. If the gamble doesn’t pay off, then the investment is wasted. Is your sales talent aligned to your company’s strategy of increasing revenue?
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Is Sales Training Really Impacting (Business Outcomes) Behavior Change?
Sales Leaders want the business results - so they will monitor and measure the pipeline of deals to ensure sales activities are contributing to the intended results. Good learning initiatives provide sales professionals with the required knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is tested and reinforced. That knowledge is also put to application during the learning process through case work, exercises, role plays, etc. And more importantly, application happens back in the real world where key learning and supporting tools help the seller perform in their every day job.
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Bridging the Sales Training to Execution Gap
In most classroom environments, there is little intention to show students how they would apply their learning in real world situations – nor do the training materials (text books) show how it is applied to day to day life. Not surprisingly, your sellers often feel the same way, after exiting training. If sellers find it difficult to apply learning to real-world scenarios, the value of the learning retention is diminished. We call this the gap between learning (training) and execution (real-life application).
Instead, sellers need the following to bridge this gap between learning and execution - automated, seller journeys and contextual learning.
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WEBINAR - Talent Analytics: The Sales Leader's New Competitive Edge
Sales leaders are confronted by a continuing challenge — low sales productivity. In the past year, quota attainment has dropped from 63% to 58%, and it takes too long for new reps to become a productive - 69% of reps take 7+ months to ramp-up (CSO Insights).
According to TDWI Research, only 17% of sales leaders are leveraging a new competitive edge for impacting sales outcomes — talent analytics. Talent analytics are the new way of making talent decisions and professional development decisions; they provide the path from guesswork or subjective-based decisions to decisions based on factual data. Talent analytics create a new edge for sales leaders by:
- Statistically proving what differentiates top-performers
- Pinpointing where to target professional development for the greatest ROI
- Identifying who to hire to reduce ramp-up time
For the sales leader leveraging talent analytics, sales productivity is up 20% - 30%. In this timely webinar hosted through the Sales Management Association, we will explore an advanced, but practical approach for significantly increasing sales productivity. You will learn how to leverage talent analytics to improve the performance of both your existing team, as well as new hires. Join talent analytics experts Dave Christofaro (Director, Sales Talent Optimization) and Trevor Byrd, Ph.D. (Senior Data Scientist) to attain a new edge for your sales organization.
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Current Sales Talent vs. Future Growth
Can your existing sales talent execute your future growth strategy?
By Dave Christofaro, Talent Analytics Practice Leader, SPI
To say that markets are changing rapidly in response to many forces is an understatement. For example, we described in our recent book, The Collaborative Sale, how buyer behavior is changing dramatically as a result of easy access to information, increased globalization, the rise of Millennials in business, the shortening time of competitive advantage, and other factors.
New disruptive competitors, backed by deep-pocketed venture capitalists, can pop up overnight. Take the example of HR software start-up Zenefits, which recently announced that it had just raised a whopping $500 million in VC funding – giving them a total valuation of $4.5 billion. Zenefits is bent on disrupting this sleepy and regulated industry, just as Uber disrupted the taxicab trade.
As a sales leader, you know that you need to constantly evolve in the face of these kinds of dramatic changes, or you will be left in the dust. As you adapt your sales strategy to align with your changing corporate strategy, have you also adapted your sales talent strategy to follow suit? In other words, is the team that got you to your current state also able to fulfill your new growth strategy?
Defining Sales Talent
We have observed that most sales organizations struggle to define what “good” and “great” salespeople should look like. They typically default to the characteristics of people who have succeeded in the past. This is not altogether a bad idea. However, as your business requirements change, your sales roles, and the definition of excellence in these roles, will also likely change – and in the face of dramatic business changes, your previous definitions, based on what worked before, may quickly become dead wrong.
For example, we have a client in the software industry that grew primarily through acquisition. Acquired entities operated autonomously and were usually left alone, as long as they made their respective growth and profitability numbers. Although the profile of top performers varied somewhat across divisions, many of their sellers were strong product specialists who excelled by really knowing their product and positioning features and benefits to technical buyers.
As valuations for software companies skyrocketed, fueled in part by bubble-like conditions in the VC market, good acquisitions became much more costly. Our client’s leadership team hired a well-known strategy consulting firm to evaluate their direction, and then decided to transition from growth through acquisition to organic growth. Slowly but surely, they started to integrate divisions under a common go-to-market strategy that focused on selling a comprehensive enterprise solution to C-level buyers.
Some previous top-performers continued to deliver good sales results, while others struggled badly with the transition. We used our sales talent assessment expertise to help them understand why. We started by developing a competency model for their future-state C-level solution seller and supporting roles. While each model will be unique for every organization, we leveraged our competency library and pre-existing profiles as a starting point, and then refined it iteratively to develop a valid competency map.
We then identified the target proficiency levels for each competency in each role. We used a proficiency level scale from 1 to 4, with 4 being the top. Not everybody needs to be level 4. One may only need to be level 3 in a competency in order to perform a role sufficiently. Then we assessed each incumbent to determine their proficiencies and identified gaps to close.
Once we gathered the data, our industrial and organizational psychologists crunched through the statistics to build performance models. This enabled them to determine which competencies make the most impact on sales results and isolate the behaviors of top performers – the critical sales competencies. Out of more than fifty sales competencies, we identified the four most critical ones, enabling our client to focus on what mattered the most.
By identifying the critical sales competencies and proficiency levels for the roles necessary to support the new strategy, our client was able to take the guesswork out of their hiring decisions. It also enabled them to provide individually tailored coaching and development to current salespeople, based on their true needs. They now have a much more systematic way of ensuring that their sales talent is able to deliver on their new business strategy.
Ensuring Strategy and Sales Talent Alignment
When you make significant changes to your sales strategy, it is important to define your new sales roles clearly and to develop accurate competency models for these roles. The bigger the strategic shift, the more likely the model of a top performer will be different from what it was before. Assessing your team against a competency model that is aligned with your new strategy will help you determine where people need help to make the transition successfully, and give you a benchmark for hiring new talent into these roles.
Has your sales strategy changed recently? Use the link above to get a free white paper about ensuring you have the sales talent to fulfill your new sales objectives and goals, or to register for a free webinar on how sales talent analytics enables you to align your sales team with your company strategy.
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Aligning CRM with Sales Improvement
Is Your CRM System Helping or Hindering Your Sales Improvement Initiative?
By Ken Cross, Director, Sales Enablement Practice, SPI
Launching any new sales improvement initiative is no small undertaking. Tinkering with the revenue engine of your company always entails some degree of risk. Introducing anything new to your sales team requires forethought and planning to ensure that all goes smoothly.
We have observed that many of our clients misunderstand and underestimate how changes in sales processes, methods, rewards, training or enablement tools can affect the successful use of customer relationship management (CRM) applications. They sometimes forget to plan for adjusting CRM to align with these changes. When there is misalignment, sales people often stop using CRM because it becomes an obstacle, rather than a help, to their success. Additionally, they are unlikely to fully adopt the changes in behavior that you are seeking, because CRM supports old habits.
According to a study by the Gartner Group, companies are spending nearly $20 billion on CRM annually, yet the adoption rate, as measured by regular use of the system, is less than 50 percent. Other studies have been even more pessimistic, showing CRM adoption rates as low as 26 percent. By Gartner’s calculations, this means that about $9 billion is essentially being wasted on CRM solutions to underutilization and related costs. You can’t afford to let this happen in your organization.
So what does it mean to align CRM with sales improvement initiatives and how do you do it to drive higher adoption rates? We’ve put together a CRM Alignment Checklist to help you.
Then, consider these four lessons that we’ve learned from working with our clients:
1. Align sales process language and behaviors with CRM workflow
Plain and simple, your CRM system must support reality. You must use the language in your sales processes to describe your stages, activities and verifiable outcomes consistently in your CRM system workflow.
You need to involve your CRM team as early as possible in any sales process enhancement initiative, so they can develop a clear understanding of expectations and timing for implementation. Making these changes often seems straightforward, but there are often unexpected domino effects that impact reporting and integration with other systems. Your CRM team needs sufficient time to re-align, reconfigure and test your systems.
2. Illustrate your sales process visibly in CRM
Most companies represent their sales processes as a series of steps that indicate the high-level stages, flowing linearly from identification to close, and then sequentially list the activities that support each stage. Unfortunately, too many companies show their sales processes only as textual menus, tabs and links in their CRM system, which can be overwhelming and confusing to users. About 65 percent of us are visual learners, so we recommend representing your sales processes visually in your CRM system, to make them easier to learn, understand and use.
If you represent your sales process as a visual flow diagram, your sellers will have an easier time navigating the process as they work in opportunities, and thus execute good sales behavior more consistently. If your CRM system can’t support visual representations of your sales processes, there are relatively inexpensive plug-in applications that can help. This small investment will pay off almost immediately by encouraging higher adoption.
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An example of a visual sales process in CRM
3. Embed sales process coaching and tools into your CRM workflow
Sales professionals will gladly leverage new techniques and tools, if they help them to sell more with less risk and effort. Your CRM system should become the central hub for sales rep activity and provide access to tools and resources that improve their day-to-day productivity. Make this easy by embedding links to supporting resources and tools in CRM, eliminating the need for a salesperson to search for these elsewhere, when they really need them.
This is especially powerful when you bring your sales process to life visually in your CRM system. For example, if your sales process requires the use of tools such as a call planner or opportunity evaluation checklist, then provide those tools at the point of the process when they are needed. If there are coaching tips or examples that make a particular activity in the sales process easier to execute, then link to those from the recommended activity in CRM that the coaching impacts. These links can be connected to help in many forms besides text, such as PDF documents, podcasts, recorded webinars, and YouTube-style videos.
4. Build more flexibility and responsiveness into your CRM system
As we describe in our latest book, The Collaborative Sale, buyer behavior has been changing rapidly, and you should continuously improve your sales processes to reflect these changes. Maintaining alignment of your sales processes with buyer behaviors is key to CRM usage. Fortunately, there have been many innovations in sales technology that help to support rapid system changes and easy embedding of new coaching and tools.
Download our CRM Alignment Checklist, and let us know if you would like to learn more about how we can help you ensure that your CRM system aligns with your sales performance improvement objectives.
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