Solution Selling Blog

Qualifying Sales Opportunities: Why You Should Retire BANT as Your Qualification Criteria

By Tim Sullivan, Director, Business Development

When we first engage with them, many of our clients are using BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe) as their standard criteria for evaluating the quality of sales opportunities. While the elements of BANT are important information to know, they don’t really reveal the true quality of an opportunity. More importantly, BANT doesn’t provide sellers with insight about what they can do to win.

When a seller first discovers an opportunity, if the buyer can articulate the elements of BANT explicitly, that seller is arriving relatively late to that buying process. This is true more often today, as buyers typically develop their own vision of a solution before contacting potential providers. A buyer’s ability to describe their budget, who will be involved in their decision process, their particular needs and requirements, and the specific timeframe they intend to make a decision are all clear indicators that the buyer already has a firm picture in their minds about what they want to purchase. And it’s likely that vision has already been influenced by other suppliers. In other words, a buyer’s ability to describe BANT means that you are most likely way behind – and that you are probably losing, before you even start.

While BANT represents some useful things to know, it doesn’t necessarily provide insight about what a seller should do to win. That insight comes not just from knowing BANT, but from the elements of the Successful Sales Formula:

Pain x Power x Vision x Value x Collaboration x Compelling Reason to Act = Sale

P – Pain or Problem

Does the customer acknowledge or understand that they have a critical business issue or a potential missed opportunity? Have they admitted to it? If not, this could very well be a new opportunity, waiting to be developed. Perhaps awareness of a potential problem has yet to be well-established in the customer’s mind. If so, then our job is to help them understand that critical business issue or missed opportunity, and then motivate them to take action.

P - Power

Do we know who the key people are in that organization, and if they have sufficient influence or authority to make a decision? Are we in contact and in alignment with them? Even if our initial sponsor contacts are not power, can we influence those in authority, and do we have a plan for doing so?

V - Vision

Does the customer understand how our solution could solve their problem? Can they articulate their vision to us, especially in a way that aligns with our competitive differentiators?

V - Value

Does the customer understand specifically what the quantitative benefits are for them to implement the solution? If not, we need to help them to calculate that, so that they recognize the cost of inaction.

C - Collaboration

Are you and the customer working together towards a purchase decision? The best way to tell is by offering a plan for how to evaluate the solution, and work with the buyer to refine that plan, in order to mitigate their risks to purchase and make it easier to buy. If they use this plan, then it’s a clear indication that you are working together in a collaborative effort.

C - Compelling Reason to Act

A compelling reason to act (CRTA) is an occurrence where, if the customer doesn’t make a decision, significant consequences will follow. If we can identify a compelling reason to act, we can also present the implications of not making a decision by that date. The CRTA is a potentially very powerful motivator for buyers to move forward with a purchase decision, and the seller who best understands and articulates the CRTA is usually the one who wins.

SPI’s Strength of Sale Tool

When we work with clients, we provide a tool to help them assess PPVVCC, based on buyer behaviors for each of these different dimensions. It can help you establish threshold qualification levels for including opportunities in your sales forecast, and it enables you track progress accurately. The closer you get to a well-developed score for each dimension, the more likely you are to win that business. This differs from BANT, which only reveals whether you are early or late to that buying process.

Rather than using only BANT to qualify opportunities, we recommend first asking yourself what you know in terms of the Successful Sales Formula. This will give you earlier and more useful indicators of your chances of winning business.

Download the free Strength of Sale analysis tool, and accurately determine the quality of your sales opportunities, using the Successful Sales Formula.

How to Recover from a Weak First Half

By Keith M. Eades, Founder and CEO, Sales Performance International, Inc.

The first half of the year is now behind us. For those of you who are on track to achieve your annual goal, congratulations. For those of you who need to play catch-up in the second half of the year, do not despair – you can still make this a successful year.

First, realize that despite some geopolitical instability, most of the world’s economies are growing. Spending is up slightly, with the S&P 500 sales growth rate hovering around 4 percent annually. These are not the worst of times, though it may feel that way. Buyers are highly risk-averse and cautious about their purchase decisions, but you can still exceed your sales goals if you take the right actions now.

Short-Term

Do the math. Make sure your sales managers and reps take off the rose-colored glasses and assess their situation honestly. What are your current close rate, average deal size, and sales cycle time? Based on this information, how many opportunities do you need to close in the second half of the year, and do you have enough opportunities in your pipeline to recover any gap within the required timeframe?

If you don’t have enough opportunities, there are several things you can do.

Get more opportunities in your pipeline.

This will probably require you to increase your marketing spend, and since these will be brand new opportunities, plan for them to take longer to close. If increasing the marketing budget is not a possibility, then you need to enable your salespeople to be better micro-marketers and enable them to create their own opportunities. They need to be able to stimulate buyer interest, without waiting for leads to be generated for them.
Expand the size and scope of the current opportunities in the pipeline.

I suggest more aggressive cross-selling and upselling activity. We often help our clients assess the potential of each account and identify low-hanging fruit using White Space Analysis. This looks at critical business drivers and initiatives in an account, and helps you identify potential options to create more value. You can then create an action plan and provide coaching to win this new business.
Close a higher percentage of opportunities.

To do this, you first need to get an accurate assessment of your opportunities and their readiness to close, and then create an action plan to win each of them. We help clients do this through our Successful Sales Formula, which analyzes opportunities in six dimensions – Pain, Power, Vision, Value, Collaboration, and Compelling Reason to Act. When the right combination of these factors exists, you have a very high probability of winning that business. (See our last blog post for more information on the Successful Sales Formula, and for a free tool which you can download to analyze your team’s opportunities.)

Mid- to Long-Term

It is difficult to think long-term when you are behind. However, if you don’t take some measures to treat the root causes of your sales challenges, you will always be playing catch-up. This is a brutal way to live, and it is usually only a matter of time before you won’t be able to take it anymore. Here are some ideas to consider:

Develop a suitable demand generation strategy to get enough opportunities to make your number.
Verify that your sales processes are aligned with how your buyers buy, and then manage with discipline and consistency in sales process execution. This will help improve forecast accuracy and enable your sales managers to analyze pipelines and identify selling skill deficiencies, and also develop individually-tailored salesperson development and coaching plans.
Create sales enablement playbooks to replicate success more effectively, and embed these tools into your CRM workflow, so they will be used more consistently.
Get your talent right. Get rid of the dead weight. Then determine the skills and behaviors that make your best people successful. Leverage this knowledge to hire and develop high performing people across your entire team.

Managing Your CEO and Peers

Managing your CEO/President and your peers on the executive team while you are in recovery mode is a very important, but often overlooked challenge. You are in a tough spot and might be tempted to rationalize why you are where you are. I encourage you to be completely transparent and have a clear plan to address what’s happening. If you’ve got bad news, but also know what you’re going to do about it in both the short and mid- to long term, then you can clearly articulate your plan and stand behind it. If you determine that the problem is a result of systemic or organizational causes, then lead or create a cross-functional team to find a holistic answer. Missing sales goals is not always just a sales problem.

You can make 2015 a great year. Now, go make it so!

Download the free White Space Analysis tool, and identify potential cross-selling and up-selling opportunities in your accounts.

And read our previous blog to download the free Strength of Sale analysis tool, to accurately determine the quality of your sales opportunities using the Successful Sales Formula.

Learn how to prepare your sales force to succeed in the era of the Affordable Care Act.

How Value Drivers help buyers overcome fear

By Tim Sullivan, Director, Business Development, SPI

In our latest book, The Collaborative Sale, Keith Eades and I explored what sellers need to do to sell successfully to today’s well-informed and empowered customer, whom we call “Buyer 2.0”. In our research, we discovered that even if buyers agree on the estimated value of a proposed solution, they may still delay making a purchase decision. Their hesitancy arises from concerns about fully realizing the value of a potential solution, or even worse, about the potential for failure. The sellers who recognize this hesitancy as natural, and who make it easy for buyers to overcome their fears, are those who now close business the most consistently. We call such sellers “Value Drivers” – they rarely lose deals to the most significant competitor facing sales professionals today: buyers who choose to do nothing at all.

How Buyer 2.0 Buys

Buyer 2.0 would not need sellers at all, if they could prove to themselves with certainty that a solution solves a problem or capitalizes on an opportunity. In fact, for products they view as a commodity, buyers often complete transactions without sellers. For example, they routinely make online purchases for airline tickets, hotel reservations, automobiles, clothes, books and other commodities, without the help of a seller.

For purchases of more strategic solutions, Buyer 2.0 typically conducts their own research to understand the “what” – the capabilities they think they need – but they need more help on the details of the “how” – the way a solution delivers value. For this, they seek expertise to verify the specific impact of potential new capabilities, and on the likely timeframe for achieving their desired results. They want to work with sellers who can provide this expertise, and who can address their concerns about any potential risks.

Value Drivers can demonstrate their expertise, and also help Buyer 2.0 to allay their concerns, by providing a clear and methodical path for evaluating a potential solution – a Collaboration Plan.

A Collaboration Plan serves to align buyers and sellers by identifying the procedural steps in an evaluation process. For more transactional sales of smaller or limited solutions, a Collaboration Plan may simply be a short list of recommended actions by the buyer and seller, with responsibilities and suggested dates for each action. For more strategic or enterprise-level solutions, the Collaboration Plan may require a more comprehensive list of buyer and seller actions, resources and anticipated dates for completion.

Example of a strategic Collaboration Plan

Components of a Good Collaboration Plan

Regardless of the length or brevity of any Collaboration Plan, it should include recommended actions for addressing:

Operational Risk Issues – actions that prove the viability and applicability of a proposed solution to address an identified problem or to fulfill an opportunity
Transitional Risk Issues – required actions for a successful solution installation, implementation or conversion
Financial Risk Issues – actions for arriving at a mutually agreed upon statement of value and return on investment, and for identifying and tracking the desired business results for the buyer
Buying Process Issues – organizational procedural requirements including legal, administrative, technical and purchasing department reviews, and approvals by managerial or executive decision-makers

A Collaboration Plan addresses both buyer and seller risks, equally. It is not just a plan to sell, ending with a signature on an agreement. Rather, it is a jointly agreed upon series of events for charting a course through the evaluation and all the way to successful business results for the buyer. A well-constructed Collaboration Plan serves the mutual interests of both the buyer and the seller by making the entire evaluation and decision process open and transparent.

The Myth of Control

A collaborative selling approach recognizes that the path to success is not based on trying to control buyers. Control-oriented thinking is a throwback to selling practices based on outdated buyer behavior assumptions. Today, Buyer 2.0 is an empowered buyer, reluctant to give up control of their buying process. A Collaboration Plan demonstrates the seller’s alignment with Buyer 2.0 behavior. Complete collaboration between buyers and sellers is now the only reasonable approach.

When a seller offers a Collaboration Plan, the preferred outcome is to have the buyer make changes and additions to it. If a buyer changes the plan, then the buyer takes an ownership stake in the plan. A buyer who ignores a Collaboration Plan proffered by a seller, or who responds only with a perfunctory acquiescence, is not really committing to joint exploration of a potential solution. A buyer who amends and improves a draft Collaboration Plan in conjunction with a seller is showing that they are willing to work actively together.

For this reason, mutual agreement on a Collaboration Plan is an important indicator of alignment with Buyer 2.0, and is a verifiable outcome that indicates positive progress. It is proof to the buyer that their concerns about operational, transitional and financial risk will be addressed – and that a purchase decision can be made with confidence.

Download a useful template for developing your own Collaboration Plans with your buyers, and dramatically reducing losses to “no decision” and buyer inaction.

Improving Life Sciences Sales

How to Align with How Healthcare Organizations Buy Today

By Brad Ansley, Director, SPI Life Sciences Industry Practice

All over the world, there is a growing middle class that expects better health care, and an aging population that requires increasing medical attention. Governments are taking action to control healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP. These are significant demographic and policy shifts that will dramatically affect suppliers of pharmaceutical products, medical devices and capital equipment. To survive, they must understand these changes and adapt accordingly.

In the United States, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is forcing healthcare providers to change their business and practice models. In order to reinforce the mandate to decrease the cost of care and improve outcomes, the Department of Health and Human Services, for the first time ever, has set targets for the percentage of Medicare reimbursement that is tied to either value or outcome. For example, in 2016, they expect 85% of all Medicare fees for service reimbursement to be tied to value or outcome, with the target increasing to 90% by 2017. This is driving healthcare providers to adopt more efficient and collaborative business practices.

As if that isn’t enough, accountable care organizations and other integrated delivery models are decreasing the decision making power of individual physicians. Surgeons used to be able to say, “I want a particular device in my OR every time I’m in there or I’m leaving.” Now, “value committees” consisting of clinicians, nurses, administrators, operations, and finance people are evaluating those decisions. Sales representatives have to deal with both clinical and administrative decision-makers.

To be successful, life sciences marketers and salespeople must get aligned with how healthcare systems are buying today, and they must understand the factors currently influencing buyers’ decisions. If they push marketing messages that don’t emphasize driving outcomes and value, then they will be left out in the cold. Even if the product costs more, if they can prove that it prevents patients from being readmitted to the hospital or shortens the hospital stay, then they can still win business.

How to Align

To align with today’s buyers, life sciences sales people must be able to solve problems and position the value of solutions in terms of cost management and outcome improvement. How sales reps gain access, how they prepare for a call, how they manage the complexity of the buying process, and how they continue to demonstrate value and look for growth opportunities inside the account are all changing. The life sciences sales role will start to look more like what we see today in the technology industry – a more complex sales environment.

Conversations with buyers are changing. Traditionally, a pharmaceutical sales rep might come in and say:

“Dr. Davis, I’m here to talk to you today about our antihypertensive medication. Here’s a study that we published in New England Journal and what it says is that we lower blood pressure ten millimeters of mercury better than our competitor.”

This is a canned pitch that doesn’t require the rep to consider if the physician has a high population of patients with high blood pressure, and if so, if that problem was relevant to the physician.

A consultative, solution-based sales conversation plays out differently:

“When I have spoken with other clinicians that appear to have practices similar to yours, they have a large hypertensive patient population that has a significant impact on the quality measures for the practice. I’d be interested to know how this patient population impacts your practice…

I’ve also found that their top clinical concerns are decreasing adverse experiences due to the use of multiple antihypertensives while targeting at least a decrease of 10 mm of mercury or more to reach their blood pressure goals. Can you help me understand what your targets and goals are for your hypertensive patients and the tools you use to get there?”

After gaining an understanding of the critical practice issues, the representative can then begin to position their solution in context. For instance, they could reach into their arsenal of clinical studies and say, “That being the case, I’ve critically appraised a clinical study that was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and thought it might be of interest to you. I’d like to hear your thoughts on how these results from the trial could impact your practice.”

A consultative, evidence-based and solution-focused approach helps the sales rep uncover issues and priorities that will enable her to either help propose a value-enhancing solution, or to shift to another product in the portfolio if there isn’t a current, compelling need for her initial solution. This is the kind of sales behavior that is now required to succeed in the new healthcare environment.

Download a free white paper on how buying is changing in healthcare systems, and how your sales organization should adapt to this new reality.

By Andy Smith, Senior Consultant, SPI

I recently attended a conference where 35 executives introduced their company in thirty seconds or less. Interestingly, two-thirds of them introduced their company as a provider of a product or service, with no reference to their customer. Only 12 introduced their company in terms of the problems they solve for customers.

This makes me wonder: how many salespeople introduce themselves as representatives of a product, service, or technology, instead of solvers of customers’ problems and challenges?

After more than 25 years of working with some of the world’s largest sales organizations, I’ve come to realize that solution-centric sellers aren’t just something they do, it is really more about who they are.

Doing Sales or Being a Solution Seller

So how do you know if you’re just doing sales or if you’re also being a solution seller? Reflect on the last time the heat was on to make the number at the end of the quarter. Did your selling become more about “doing the deal” as opposed to solving the customer problem?

Sellers who are focused on just doing sales – those who lead with their product, technology, or service – can develop into salespeople who are being solution sellers – those who lead with understanding their customer’s current or future problems. But this doesn’t happen just by training people on how to do Solution Selling.

In their book The Solution-Centric Organization, co-authors Keith Eades, SPI’s CEO, and Robert Kear, SPI’s CMO, list the four fundamental transformations that need to occur if Solution Selling is to become a way of being in an organization.

Change the way your salespeople THINK of themselves.

Ensure executives lead by example as they teach, encourage and expect salespeople to describe and introduce themselves as solvers of customers’ current and future problems, and not by the products, technology, or service your company provides. Make sure your sellers are crystal clear on the customer problems they can solve better than the competition.
Change how your salespeople (and marketing) COMMUNICATE with customers.

In customer-facing content (i.e., your company website, brochures, conference presentations, white papers, etc.), be sure to lead with how you address customer problems, trends, and emerging needs, and not the features or functions or your products, technology, or services.
Change how your salespeople ENGAGE in customer conversations.

Make sure you have salespeople with the right attributes, knowledge, skills, resources and tools so they can focus on customers’ current or potential problems and recommend solutions that provide measurable value – and not just talk about your company’s product, service, or technological superiority.
Change how you train and recognize your salespeople, to REINFORCE solution-centricity.

Invest in training that improves your salespeople’s knowledge about customers’ industries, issues, trends and challenges, in addition to your company’s product/technical knowledge. Make sure your salespeople are fluent in how your company’s capabilities solve or prevent your customers’ critical business issues. Provide incentives and recognition to salespeople for selling a solution that actually solves customer problems and creates measurable improvements, as opposed to sales incentives based purely on commissions or attaining revenue/profit goals.

Like any transformation, becoming solution-centric requires strong leadership by example, ensuring you have the right people with the right capabilities and tools, and the resolve to stay committed in spite of inevitable short-term obstacles. But the payoff is worth the effort, producing higher revenue growth, increased customer loyalty and improved employee engagement.

Does your sales team truly know how to be solution sellers? Download a free checklist and see if your team defines itself as being a solution-centric organization.

Andy Smith is a senior consultant and account executive with Sales Performance International. He helps product-focused organizations grow revenue by transforming into a solution-centric sales and marketing team.

How to Align Expectations and Engagement with Channel Partners

By Timothy Sullivan, Director, SPI

Many of our clients rely on channel sales partners to generate business, either exclusively or in conjunction with direct sales resources. They often ask us how they can improve the productivity of their channel sales partners.

We typically find that low channel partner productivity stems from two possible causes:

Lack of mutual understanding of the expectations for the business relationship, by the channel partner, the solution provider, or both.
Lack of a clear agreement on how the channel partner and solution provider will work together to create value for customers.

Our Channel Partner Alignment Worksheet can help you establish a clear understanding of the expectations for your relationship with a partner, and for setting effective plans to work as a team – and generate more sales.

This worksheet is derived from work which we published in our book, The Solution-Centric Organization, and is based on a model that examines all the components required to communicate the value of a solution to a customer. Using this model, a Channel Partner Manager (CPM) can dialogue with a partner to determine who will manage each aspect of the business relationship, and how they will do it.

Change the Conversation

Too often, the focus of dialogue between CPMs and their partners is on how much product should be sold – it is typically a quantitative negotiation. This is an important aspect to agree upon, but without setting clear expectations about who will do what between a solution provider and a channel partner, the sales projections are just guesswork. You need to settle on clear guidelines for partner expectations and engagement.

Download this valuable channel partner sales planning tool, so you can set clearer expectations for value creation, and help your channel partner achieve greater productivity – and more sales for both of you.

Tim Sullivan is Director of Business Development with Sales Performance International. He is co-author of The Solution Selling Fieldbook, and more recently, The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer-Driven World.

The Three Essential Features of Top-Notch Sales Hiring Assessments

By Dave Christofaro, Talent Analytics Practice Leader, Sales Performance International

At this moment, an online search for “sales hiring assessment” delivers over 46 million hits. But here’s a dirty little secret: most of these assessments don’t significantly improve the accuracy and quality of new hires. Statistical analysis of generic assessments indicates that they can only improve the likelihood of hiring the right sales candidate to a maximum of around 50 percent - which means that you will likely be wrong more than half the time, at best. In other words, most sales hiring assessments provide about as much certainty as rolling dice.

You can ensure that you select the right sales hiring assessment by following a few simple guidelines:

Use assessments that measure KSAs

The most common type of assessment is a personality assessment. However, every serious research study on assessments show that personality scores have almost nothing to do with job knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs). The performance of sales candidates who bring success in the shortest amount of time is based far more on KSA’s than their personality. Personality can be useful for evaluating a candidate’s culture fit within an organization, but be sure to also include knowledge tests, as well as behavioral interview guides and/or role-plays/simulations for demonstration of skills and abilities.
Don’t use “off-the-shelf” assessments – tailor them to improve PV

In the world of assessments, validity refers to how well a test or assessment actually measures what it intends to measure. Predictive validity (PV) is how accurately an assessment predicts future success, and PV varies by assessment type. “Off-the-shelf” assessments that have not been tailored to the specifics of a job role have the lowest PV. (Schmidt and Hunter, The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.)
Place heavy emphasis on behavioral-based assessments

Behavioral-based assessments are probably the best type for helping hiring managers drill deep into a sales candidate’s skills and abilities. In sales hiring, structured behavioral interview guides and role-plays/simulations are commonly-used examples of behavioral-based assessments. Remember, the candidate sitting across the table is a salesperson, so they can probably sell themselves well. Role-plays and simulations help separate the wheat from the chaff by having the candidate demonstrate their skills and abilities, rather than just talk about them.

Conclusion

The increasing use of pre-hire assessments for sales candidates is undeniable. However, don’t trust every assessment tool on the market. Be wise when deciding on what assessments to use. With an improved and more well-informed approach, you can reduce chance of hiring the wrong person to less than 15 percent – and your sales team’s performance will be dramatically better in a much shorter time.

Download a free white paper that describes the value of sales hiring assessment, and how you can use this to develop tailored performance development programs, for your own organization

How to Sell to Today’s Empowered Buyers

By Timothy Sullivan, Director, Sales Performance International

In our recent book, The Collaborative Sale, we describe the significant changes in buyer behavior over the last few years. With easy access to vast amounts of information at their fingertips, they are now much more empowered and educated. Generally, buyers now drive their own purchase decision processes. They’re also more risk averse, and therefore, more likely to make decisions for strategic purchases by formal committee.

As buyer behavior changes, sellers must also change. But how, exactly? What new activities and behaviors will enable sales professionals to sell more successfully? According to our research, sellers need to be agile in how they interact with buyers – they must become proficient in three personae to work effectively with buyers at different parts of the buying process.

These personae are:

The Micro-Marketer

Sellers can engage with buyers very early in their buying process by being effective micro-marketers. A micro-marketer demonstrates their expertise by providing ideas and useful advice to help buyers envision better ways of doing things. Micro-marketers recognize that buyers are having conversations all the time, and they go to where buyers are having those conversations – today, that often means being active on social media and online resources.

Micro-marketing helps sellers influence the thinking of potential buyers. If sellers can help buyers to create or enhance a vision of a possible solution, they increase their chances of winning by four times more than someone who engages later. It’s definitely worth the effort, even if the sales cycle might be longer.

The Visualizer

The visualizer is adept at sales conversations with buyers, whether they’re virtual or face-to-face. Visualizer conversations help the buyer to create, enhance or re-engineer their vision of a solution to their problems. Sellers must first understand where the buyer is in their buying process to determine the best type of sales conversation to apply. Visualizer sales conversations are collaborative, and help the buyer to paint a picture of a better way of doing things, so they can accomplish their goals and realize new value.

The Value-Driver

This persona consists of two parts. First, value-drivers identify and express quantitative value throughout their entire engagement with a buyer, beginning to end. Sellers who can collaborate with buyers to quantify the specific value of a solution help those buyers overcome their perception of financial risk. This builds buyers’ confidence and belief in solutions, and makes it much easier for them to buy.

The second part is recognizing that there are other risks besides financial ones, which cause concerns for buyers. Buyers are always concerned about operational risk – uncertainty that a solution will work as expected. They are also concerned about transitional risk – how to adopt or implement a solution successfully. The value-driver anticipates these risks, and helps buyers to mitigate them, so that they can make a buying decision with confidence.

Click here for a downloadable infographic illustrating three personae of a collaborative sale.

Many sellers may have natural affinities for one or more of these personae – but proficiency in all three are needed to align with how buyers buy today. Fortunately, all three can be learned and mastered by sellers. They only need to know how and when to adopt the right persona at the right time – then they can be true collaborative sellers, working as equals with buyers to find optimum solutions.

Tim Sullivan is Director of Business Development with Sales Performance International. He is co-author of The Solution Selling Fieldbook, and more recently, The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer-Driven World.

Introducing SPI’s Total Enterprise Account Management (TEAM) Program

By James Touchstone, Director, Sales Performance International

Your company’s most valuable assets are your enterprise accounts. The impact of acquiring, growing and retaining large enterprise accounts cannot be understated. For many of our clients, a relatively small number of enterprise accounts generate as much as 80 percent or more of total revenues.

In recognition of the ever-growing importance of enterprise accounts, we are very pleased to introduce our new Total Enterprise Account Management (TEAM) program.

What is TEAM?

TEAM is the culmination of two points of view on managing large accounts: planning for both account sales maximization and for higher relationship development. When SPI acquired The Complex Sale (TCS) last year, we were able to bring together two different perspectives on successfully developing business in large enterprise accounts, and integrate them together to form a uniquely holistic program – one that enables account managers to maximize sales while also elevating their relationships, and thus protect those accounts from competitive encroachment.

To manage enterprise accounts successfully, account managers must be adept at quantitative aspects of account planning to maximize revenue growth. They must also develop higher levels of trust and credibility with individuals in the account. The SPI and TCS teams recognized each of those essential abilities as two halves of the same coin that needed to be brought together into one, unified methodological approach. The new TEAM program is the unique synthesis of effective methods for maximizing sales and building relationships in an enterprise account.

Account Sales Planning

First, TEAM helps account managers develop a solid, quantitative understanding of an account’s potential. The methodology includes tools for compiling an inventory of the recurring revenue and current opportunities, and then identifies additional opportunities for creating new value in a white space exercise.

The white space exercise is very simple. It examines the key initiatives and account-level business issues and potential missed opportunities. Using a specialized matrix, the exercise enables account managers to see all potential opportunities within that account that can help them achieve or surpass their revenue objectives. This simple exercise typically increases the number of identified new business opportunities in an account by 2-7 times.

Some tend to not know what to do with so many new opportunities, so TEAM provides a simple mechanism for prioritizing them and allocating resources for execution. This helps account managers to identify and pursue those opportunities with the highest mutual value for both the buying and the selling organizations.

Account Relationship Planning

Next, TEAM helps account managers plan effective strategies for improving their level of relationship with enterprise accounts. TEAM provides an assessment tool to accurately determine the current level of relationship. Account managers tend to overstate this, because they generally think of relationship in terms of interactions with individuals that they know in an account only. TEAM enables account managers to see if they are trusted advisors to an enterprise account, or merely vendors or credible sources. They can then apply the optimum strategies and tactics to navigate organizational politics and elevate their true status over time.

Implementation: Practical and Seamlessly Embedded within CRM

The TEAM methodology generates a practical plan captured and shared electronically, either stand-alone or integrated within a CRM system, such as salesforce.com. The TEAM learning experience is entirely “hands on” by using planning tools and technology in a workshop. When your account managers leave the TEAM program, they do so with a live plan they can use immediately.

The TEAM methodology is an integrated system of technology, planning methods and skills development that enables your account managers to secure major accounts, identify new opportunities, build better relationships with buyers, and ultimately, generate more business.

Please click here to download an overview of TEAM, the modern account planning program.

James N. Touchstone is SPI’s Director of Learning and Development, responsible for the creation and enhancement of advanced sales methodology and skill enhancement programs. He is also co-author of The Solution Selling Fieldbook.

Why Personality Assessments Alone are Inadequate for Sales Hiring

By Dave Christofaro, Talent Analytics Practice Leader, Sales Performance International

Personality assessments, such as DISC or Meyers-Briggs, have an understandable appeal. They are well-known and generally inexpensive. However, according to research by I/O Psychology expert Dr. Frank Schmidt, the predictive quality, or validity, of personality assessments for selecting productive sales hires is far inferior to other assessment methods.

As the graph below shows, personality tests ranked near the bottom of predicting success in a job, and other assessments methods scored much higher. This is consistent with our research and experience working with our own clients.

Even in sales, personality alone rarely correlates to success in a job. Using an inexpensive but also ineffective tool comes at a high cost—the increased chance of making a bad hire. Research data proves that using personality assessments as the primary assessment during hiring results in bad hire rates as high as 50 percent. Let that soak in… 1 out of every 2 new sales reps could be the wrong fit for your company.

The subjective nature of personality assessments in hiring also places hiring organizations that use them at risk of violating Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines. Cornell University HR Review recommends using extreme caution when using personality assessments for hiring. Needless to say, to depend so heavily on a questionable tool could lead to costly mistakes and potential legal action.

It’s all in the KSAs

Personality tests simply don’t provide hiring managers enough relevant information about the candidate’s ability to succeed in the job. It only gives one dimension, when you need to be looking at the whole person. Knowledge and behavior are also extremely vital components for identifying productive sales hires.

According to research by Schmidt and Hunter, the factors that ultimately drive performance and effectiveness are knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA). The success rate of hiring the right person with assessments that measure KSA, combined with a structured interview process, is about 70 percent. This is more than three times better than when using personality assessments alone. Again, this is consistent with our own research and client experience.

Rather than using personality tests alone, you should use an assessment that measures the traits that correlate to success in a sales role. This means…

Creating competency models for each role to identify the competencies that drive success and the corresponding proficiency levels.
Evaluating candidates relative to these standards with a multi-measure assessment that measures these competencies.
Adopting a uniform hiring process to consistently evaluate candidates, and training your hiring managers in behavioral event interviewing skills to uncover the right information to make the best decisions.

This approach not only helps you make better hires. It enables consistent evaluation of candidates against established standards, which reduces bias in your hiring process.

So, stop wasting resources on personality assessments and risking a bad hire. Save yourself the headache in the long run and look towards things that are more reliable and accurate. Wave goodbye to the personality approach and say hello to KSAs.

Download our Checklist of Effective Sales Hiring Tests to help you make the best choice.

Dave Christofaro is SPI’s Talent Analytics Practice Leader, focused on providing sales talent optimization services for effective assessment of sales teams, and enabling improved hiring of sales professionals.

Five Best Practices for Sales Success in the Age of Evidence-based Medicine

By Brad Ansley, Healthcare Practice Leader, SPI

Changes in government healthcare policies are having a profound impact on how healthcare products, services, and solutions are being bought. Reimbursements to healthcare providers are increasingly based on the value or outcome of their care and not the volume of care. This leads them to favor treatments that either decrease costs, improve patient outcomes, or both. Increasingly, therapeutic decisions to meet these criteria are based on evidence from well-designed and conducted research.

As these changes cascade, life sciences companies must also change how they engage with healthcare buyers in order to drive business results. Below are five best practices to help life sciences salespeople achieve greater success in this new era of evidence-based medicine.

Adopt a solution-centric sales approach

Your sales reps must learn to have solution-centric instead of product-centric discussions. They must understand the clinician’s practice and patient population, and how a solution creates value by lowering costs or improving outcomes. Solution-centric discussions require new skills, such as discovery, collaboration, and solution development.
Develop strategic account management discipline

As the sun sets on the era of independent physicians with great autonomy, and gives way to the dawning of widespread physician employment and multi-stakeholder decision making, representatives must develop a new skill set. They must focus on solving those critical practice issues that may impact not just an individual physician but their whole organization. Selling strategically requires sales reps to identify stakeholders and their critical business/practice issues, gain access to the right stakeholders and create a vision of a solution by establishing links between brand value and stakeholders’ critical business/practice issues.
Develop your evidence-based medicine (EBM) skills and vocabulary

Understand and leverage the principles of evidence-based medicine and know how to speak the language. Many of today’s regulatory changes are focused on the use of EBM to ensure treatments are based on the best available evidence. Additionally, regulators now require medical schools to teach five levels of competency in EBM. This approach is influencing physicians’ perception of your sales reps. Research shows that EBM holds the strongest customer buying influence, and over 90 percent of physicians want reps to make more use of clinical studies and EBM in their conversations. Thus, representatives must know how to critically appraise clinical data like physicians are taught and use that information to establish the validity, statistical significance, and clinical relevance of the data.
Speak both clinical and business language fluently

Representatives must not only have the ability to speak the language of evidence-based medicine that physicians are expecting, they must also have the skill to address the objectives and concerns of key stakeholders. In the morning, a rep might be speaking about clinical data with the physician representative on the Value Analysis committee of an accountable care organization (ACO). In the afternoon, he or she may be speaking with a finance executive that’s interested in patient outcomes and the impact it will have on the bottom line.
Advocate for your customer

Your reps may not have all the answers at their fingertips that they need, and will need to access subject matter experts in your organization. They should think of themselves as the quarterback while looking for those solutions for the individual physician or healthcare organization. They must learn to pull from all resources in your company, and at times, across the industry. Healthcare organizations and individuals expect you to provide information that will help them solve critical issues or practice issues. Rally the right expertise and resources.

The one constant in life is change, and massive change is rocking the healthcare industry worldwide. Respond to change and you will reap the rewards. Ignore change, and you’ll certainly face some less than desirable consequences.

For more insight regarding your sales team, and on their readiness to sell in the age of EBM, we invite you to download our Evidence-based Solution Selling skills gap identifier.

With over two decades of experience in the life sciences industry as a microbiologist, pharmaceutical sales and marketing leader, and sales training consultant, Brad Ansley leads SPI’s healthcare industry practice. He is a principal developer of SPI’s Evidence-Based Solution Selling methodology, and has helped dozens of companies to improve their ability to sell life sciences industry solutions to their customers.

By David Stargel, VP and Senior Consultant, Sales Performance International

Are your salespeople putting enough time, effort and thought into developing and retaining business with your current customers, especially in large key accounts? And even if they are, how do you know if they are doing this effectively?

Our clients tell us that the cost of sale for acquiring a new customer can be up to ten times more than for developing business in an existing account. Increased profitability of business over the life of a retained customer is why most organizations are allocating more resources to sharpen their customer retention and growth strategies. But not all are doing this in a disciplined and systematic way.

Too many salespeople focus on chasing the next big deal. Many sellers depend too much on inbound demand generation driven by marketing. This has conditioned many salespeople to be reactive – whenever a “hot” lead surfaces, they drop everything to chase it down.

Selling more to existing accounts means getting ahead of this reactionary curve. Your salespeople must dedicate enough time and thought to strategically analyze their customer, identify where the real growth opportunities exist, and determine how to add value. To maximize sales in current accounts, this discipline must be executed consistently by every seller with account management responsibilities.

White Space Analysis is an approach to help account managers to systematically understand:

What’s happening in a customer organization
The drivers and issues that are impacting the customer
The initiatives that they are considering to execute their strategy
How they can create value in the account by enabling the customer to succeed

These insights enable sellers to identify a customer’s performance gaps or problems, and where your solutions and capabilities align with those issues. Think of this as a two-axis matrix, with the vertical axis listing the problems that a customer is struggling to overcome, and the horizontal axis listing your solution set.

Our clients report that the White Space Analysis exercise, while simple to execute, consistently increases the number of identified opportunities to create value and generate new business by two to seven times.

Once an account manager identifies the highest-value solutions that match up to a customer’s most critical business issues, they can then prioritize the opportunities, assess their strength of relationship and access to decision makers, and develop a practical plan to gain access, build support, and secure the business.

White Space Analysis is one element of SPI’s Total Enterprise Account Management (TEAM) program for improved account sales planning and relationship development. The discipline of White Space Analysis enables your sales team to identify where they can create new value, for both customers and for your own organization, and thus, maximize results in accounts. It changes the reactive behavior of most sellers, and helps them to develop a higher level of relationship. This is especially important in large, key accounts, which represent the most profitable customers.

If you sense that you should be getting more from your existing accounts, then start by downloading our White Space Analysis template.

Dave Stargel is a Vice President and Senior Consultant with SPI. He is involved in SPI’s product development of key programs for strategic planning solutions, and works with key client accounts to drive sustainable revenue growth by aligning their sales talent with their strategic business goals.

15 Questions to Identify the Best for Your Team

Sales training programs can easily provide a return on investment of 50x or more. However, not all sales training is the same. If not properly scoped or implemented, selecting a training option can result in a lot of time and money wasted. Your choice of a sales training provider is critically important to the success or failure of your initiative.

In our experience, clients who achieve the most success are those who establish clear criteria before evaluating possible solution providers. For this reason, we have created a new Sales Training Buyer’s Guide.

The guide describes fifteen critical questions in four categories, enabling you to clearly identify and prioritize your needs. The guide also includes an evaluation grid, so that you can score potential providers consistently and make an optimum choice.

This guide includes questions that help you to evaluate sales training options in four critical criteria:

Business Strategy Alignment -
these questions enable you to determine the degree that different training options align with your company’s business strategies, and how your customers buy. They also provide criteria for weighing the ability of providers to align with your organization’s industry, and with your marketing and sales support teams.
Process/Methodology Alignment -
these questions enable you to assess how well different training options support key sales processes and methodologies, and integrate with existing methods and best practices. They also evaluate how well a provider’s can assess your sales team’s developmental needs and track improvement.
Management/Systems Integration -
these questions enable you to evaluate how well training providers can help your sales managers to coach and reinforce the expected new sales behaviors. They also help you determine how well different training providers can design and implement effective sales processes and methods for your organization, and their ability to integrate with your CRM and sales enablement systems.
Global Access/Localization Support -
these questions help you to weigh the ability of training providers’ options for content access, by using different modalities for delivery, and their ability to deliver content in local languages, with appropriate cultural nuances.

Buying sales training can be a big investment, and the decision can be tricky. Selecting the right sales training partner has a profound impact on the success of your initiative. Our Sales Training Buyer’s Guide will help you make a more informed decision. Please download the guide, or contact us with any questions.

By David Stargel, VP and Senior Consultant, Sales Performance International

How much of your annual goal depends on growing revenue in strategic accounts? Almost all of our clients tell us that a relatively small number of large accounts generate a disproportionate amount of their revenue. Protecting and growing revenue in strategic accounts are critical success factors for nearly every sales leader.

So, how awful would it be if a strategic account “went silent” and you found out later that a competitor displaced you?

Strategic accounts are among your organization’s most valuable assets. Protecting them against competitors, and growing business by creating and winning new opportunities, depend heavily on the breadth and quality of relationships in those accounts. Strategic accounts will always be at risk if your sales team is not aligned with the right people—the ones with the influence or authority to launch or sustain business initiatives.

Effective account managers develop and elevate their relationship levels in accounts by:

Assessing Organizational Power and Politics

It is common for account managers to get comfortable with a solitary relationship in an account, and often with a contact at an operational level. This is risky because buyers in accounts can leave and get replaced by others with different loyalties. To guard against this eventuality, your account managers must:
- Identify all of the key stakeholders in the account
- Assess each stakeholder’s power and influence
- Determine political standing with each
Your account managers must look beyond formal titles and reporting relationships and also examine each contact’s informal authority and power to get things done. Good account managers generally have an intuitive understanding of an organization’s political landscape, but it’s best to not leave this to intuition alone. By establishing objective criteria to evaluate stakeholders, account managers will have a more accurate understanding of the people with whom they must align.
Gaining Access to New Stakeholders

Once an account manager identifies a stakeholder with whom they want to build a relationship, the easiest way to gain access is to suggest ways to solve a problem with significant organizational impact. Current contacts in an account are much more likely to introduce sellers to other stakeholders, if they believe that seller will bring value. By identifying the specific business issues or potential missed opportunities of different stakeholders, account managers can suggest potential solutions, leverage existing relationships, and gain access to new stakeholders more easily.
Nurturing Existing Relationships

While approaching new stakeholders in an account, either directly or through an existing relationship, account managers must be sensitive to how that will be perceived – they must be careful to not risk alienating current contacts. Savvy account managers work to nurture existing contact relationships by collaborating actively with them, keeping them informed, and showing how they can bring value to other parts of the organization – and thereby reflect well on existing contacts’ reputations.
Getting Credit for Value

Nothing elevates an account relationship more than getting credit for value delivered. This means not only regularly measuring and reporting the business impact of solutions, but also in bringing new insight and business savvy to every conversation in the account. Account manager conversations must show understanding of stakeholder challenges – they need to demonstrate situational fluency. Good account managers also do their research and calculate the cost of the status quo and the value of potential benefits. Each conversation in an account needs to be value-based.

In modern account management, the best defense is a good offense. By using these proactive methods to develop and elevate the level of relationships, account managers will be much better able to protect strategic accounts against competitive encroachment.

Download our Levels of Account Relationship guide. It will help you and your team to accurately assess the quality of relationships in accounts.

By Timothy Sullivan, Director, SPI

For organizations that use indirect channels sales partners for all or part of their revenues, Channel Partner Managers (CPMs) play an essential part of those companies’ success. Unfortunately, in working with our clients, we find that the role of the CPM is often defined too vaguely. Without clear guidance, a CPM will spend too much of their time simply reacting to partner requests, instead of working proactively to develop and maximize channel partner sales results.

A CPM’s role should reflect the kinds of channel partner types with whom that manager is working. There are four different types of channel partners:

“Sell to” partners – these typically embed your product inside theirs and resell it. In essence, these partners are your customers, and you generally have very little to no visibility to their end customers.
“Sell through” partners – these are typically dealers or distributors. CPMs may have some visibility on these partners’ end customers, but don’t actively engage with them. Instead, CPMs working with “sell through” partners generally focus on enabling their sales force to sell.
“Sell with” partners – CPMs generally play an integrated support role to these partners’ sales teams, and they have a high degree of visibility on these partners’ end customers and prospects. CPMs are often called in on “sell with” partners’ sales calls as a subject matter expert. In many cases, the CPM also acts as a virtual sales coach to partner sellers.
A hybrid – many channel partners use more than one of the above models, depending on the sales situation, and so, the CPM may have to play multiple roles in support of those partners.

Finding the Right Partner Success Criteria

A CPM’s success criteria will differ, based on the type(s) of partners with whom they work.

If you’re working with a selling to partner, then you want to provide expertise and help that partner to build the best possible solution that would be most appealing to their end customers, while being equipped to go out and sell it. Know how your partner differentiates their solutions. The attributes of your product that support their differentiation will matter the most to them, whether that is low-cost, high reliability, or some other value metric.
If you’re working with a selling through partner, then they probably also sell other companies’ products, so you are competing for their attention. You need to capture their hearts and minds so that they feel more comfortable and better equipped to sell your offerings. They need to understand how selling your capabilities enables them to make money. It also helps if they see you as easier to do business with. Recognize that you are in a competitive situation and emphasize your relative advantages to other solution providers.
If you’re working with a selling with partner, then you need to work with them to help identify the optimum situations for you to collaborate and define the rules of engagement. Understanding your channel partner’s selling process – or if they don’t have one, suggesting a buyer-aligned sales process to them – will help you to know when to engage most effectively in support of winning their opportunities.
If your partner uses a hybrid model, then you need to define the different types of sales situations that your partner encounters, and come to an agreement about how and when you can best be of help. Our Channel Partner Alignment Worksheet (described in a previous blog post) can help set clear expectations and establish alignment between a CPM and a channel partner.

CPMs can work with one or more types of partners, depending on the channel strategy and partner programs. Understanding what kinds of partners your organization works with is fundamental to knowing how best to support them, and is critical to the success of CPMs.

We’ve prepared a convenient infographic that illustrates the different types of channel partner sales models, to help you determine the best way to work with each of your partners.

By James N. Touchstone, Director, Sales Performance International

This is an especially challenging time of the year for sales leaders – even more so for those in companies with a December 31^st fiscal year-end. For them, in addition to working to surpass goals for this year, it’s also time to begin planning for success in 2016, as well.

When it comes to sales planning, most organizations begin with a top-down budgeting exercise - a new sales target is given to the sales leader, who then has to figure out how to reach it. Often, top-down goals present a difficult challenge, especially if they include high expectations for new business.

Bottom-up Pipeline Analysis

To help rationalize a top-down assigned goal, we recommend that sales leaders also conduct a thorough bottom-up analysis. Start by calculating the value of current opportunities and quantifying the expected recurring business that will carry over into next year. We’ve prepared a simplified Pipeline Analysis Worksheet tool to help you get started.

This analysis provides a clear picture of the value of opportunities still in play in the new year, and also what additional business the team needs to create in order to achieve the new growth targets. The question then becomes: how to fill the identified sales gap?

Practically, there are four things that sales leaders can do to achieve sales growth targets:

Retain and grow existing accounts.
Existing accounts are usually the most profitable source of revenue. Look at the biggest and most strategic accounts and perform a white space analysis on each. Determine the degree to which the sales team has penetrated each account, and consider the value of any additional capabilities that solve customer problems and thereby generate new opportunities.
Find more new account opportunities.
It’s well known that landing new accounts is typically harder, slower, and more expensive than growing existing accounts. Nevertheless, few sales teams can achieve their growth targets by relying on current customers only – they must also find new clients. A pipeline analysis will calculate the number of new opportunities needed, based on their average size. Plan to equip the sales team to be effective micro-marketers to stimulate the curiosity of targeted prospects. Collaborate with the marketing team to invest in demand generation activities that will support sales objectives.
Increase average opportunity size.
Simply selling more of the solution portfolio, in both existing and new accounts, always helps achievement of sales growth targets. Enable the sales team to cross-sell and upsell effectively by increasing their situational fluency. If a new product launch is anticipated, the sales team must be prepared to position and sell that new capability. Increasing prices can also help, but this may be viable only if market conditions permit. Regardless, equipping the sales team to better capture and communicate the value of solutions to customers will reduce concessions and discounts, and expand the size of each sale.
Win more opportunities in the pipeline.
Simply put, be more competitive. Analyze the current win rate – the number of opportunities won compared to total opportunities in the pipeline – and seek ways to improve it. This is probably the most challenging of the four options, as it requires investment in improving sales team competencies, providing sales enablement tools for knowledge and insight, and sales process execution discipline. However, these kinds of investments in improving sales team quality generally provide the longest-lasting and most sustainable improvements in productivity.

Fact-Based Sales Planning

After determining the realistic value of the aggregated pipeline, the sales leader can then more easily determine the ideal mix of actions to fill identified gaps and achieve top-down sales targets. This mix will drive identification of the resources required to support execution of a practical sales plan.

In a future blog post, we will provide a more detailed sales planning guide that assists in identifying the right tactics and resources for optimizing sales growth. But sales leaders can start now by doing the math, analyzing current pipelines, and identifying the principal sales growth actions that make the most sense for their organization. As a first step, a bottom-up pipeline analysis provides a clear understanding of the real numbers needed to succeed after New Year’s Day.

Download the simplified Pipeline Analysis Worksheet to begin planning for a successful 2016.

By James Touchstone and Ken Cross, Directors, Sales Performance International

Companies that offer sales skill or methodology training programs will sometimes provide automated tools to help improve post-training adoption of selling best practices. These organizations keep sales training and the use of supporting enablement tools as completely separate educational experiences.

In the past, incorporating automated tools as a wholly integrated part of a sales training experience entailed risk from potential failures in hardware, software or network connectivity. It was simpler and safer to keep technology and sales training segregated.

Today, however, it makes no sense to separate skill development and the tools that support new behaviors. In fact, we have been delivering sales training experiences with seamlessly integrated automated support tools to clients for the last several years, with excellent results. The benefits of such an integrated approach have been overwhelmingly positive.

What are the benefits of integrating sales training and enablement tools?

Builds enthusiasm and support for change at the grassroots level

Bringing sales enablement tools into the classroom is a novel and engaging experience for most learners. Today, these tools are powerful, but also simple and intuitive to use. Salespeople and sales managers see their utility immediately and quickly realize that this isn’t going to be an old-fashioned, “flavor-of-the-month” training program.
Makes the learning experience more realistic

Bringing sales enablement tools into the classroom creates a more realistic learning experience. It removes any questions about what the salesperson will do and how they will work once training is complete. It create a smooth transition between the classroom experience and the everyday usage and application of the trained skill or methodology.
Makes learning more digestible

Bringing sales enablement tools into the classroom makes the methodology being learned really come to life in a way that’s more easily understood for sellers. Learning feels more real and less theoretical or conceptual, especially when the training requires salespeople to work on live deals or accounts.
Enables better coaching and reinforcement

Bringing sales enablement tools into the classroom creates better alignment between a salesperson and their sales manager. It more realistically establishes what “good” looks like, shows salespeople and sales managers what to do, how to do it, and how work will be inspected. Everyone leaves on the same page, knowing what they will do the moment they get back to office, in the field, or on the phones.
Enables better and faster adoption

When bringing sales enablement tools into the classroom, we go through extensive preparation with our clients. We start by deploying tools in advance and requiring participants to use tools to complete their pre-work. This enables participants to become familiar with basic functionality that they master as they go through the program. No momentum is lost since there is no lag time between training and the deployment of tools.
Gives sales leaders insight into change

Our sales enablement tools have robust reporting functionality that enables sales leaders to see the rate of new process adoption and the positive impact it has on performance. Since tools are deployed prior to training and used immediately, sales leaders have a window into adoption and performance improvement.

We strongly recommend incorporating the use of supporting enablement tools within the sales training experience. Do not implement a new process or methodology without first thinking through implementation and sustainment. If tools are not integrated into the training that you are considering, then you risk losing momentum and adding additional disruption and complexity to your sales performance improvement initiative.

For more insight into using technology to bridge learning and sales execution, download this free white paper, “Sales Enablement in the Era of Buyer 2.0”.

Ken Cross is SPI’s Director of Sales Enablement, focusing on advancing sales technology and process automation. Ken is a frequent contributor to this blog and to industry publications and forums.

James N. Touchstone is SPI’s Director of Learning and Development, responsible for the creation and enhancement of advanced sales methodology and skill enhancement programs. He is also co-author of The Solution Selling Fieldbook.

Ken and Jimmy will be speaking further on integrating learning and sales enablement technology at the upcoming Sales Force Productivity Conference, sponsored by the Sales Management Association, October 12-14 in Atlanta. They will also present a free webinar on “Learn-ablement, a New Approach to Sales Training”, on October 22, 2015 at 2pm Eastern Time.

By Timothy Sullivan, Director, Sales Performance International

For nearly all of our clients, the end of every quarter is an important milestone – each with sales goals to meet. As we approach another quarter-end, ensuring that sales opportunities close as expected is critical for every sales leader. How do top-performing sales teams avoid delays in closing sales, and minimize slippage of opportunities into the next quarter?

As we documented in our recent book, The Collaborative Sale, more organizations are increasing the use of well-trained procurement professionals throughout the entire buying process. A common tactic of procurement managers is to draw negotiations out until the very end of the month, quarter or year, because buyers know that sellers become increasingly desperate to close business as the clock ticks forward. To avoid delays at the end of the sales cycle, the sales team must be fully equipped to manage a formalized negotiation, not just at the end of a purchase decision, but throughout the entire sales engagement with a buyer.

Avoiding closing delays starts by knowing if and when a deal is closeable, as indicated by five indicators:

Does the sales team have access to, and are aligned with, the individuals who have the power to buy? If not, the customer is more likely to use multiple rounds of negotiation with different levels within the organization, which could extend the final decision date.
Has the customer agreed to the potential payback of this particular purchase? If they have not yet acknowledged the value of what you are offering, that will almost certainly result in a delay.
Has the sales team and the customer received all the required approvals, not just from purchasing, but also from legal, technical, administrative, and any other customer groups that need to review the decision?
Has the customer and the sales team completed all the required steps for the customer to complete a good evaluation? A good Collaboration Plan will include all of those steps. If your team tries to close before completing the evaluation process, expect pushback from the customer.
How long has the customer known about the cost? The final negotiation meeting is not the time to reveal prices. Customers need a reasonable amount of time to socialize and come to consensus on anticipated costs within their organization.

In addition to the preceding criteria, it helps to identify a compelling reason to act (CRTA). A CTRA is a time-bound occurrence, beyond which, if a customer fails to make a decision to act, bad consequences will follow. For example, a customer might be launching a new product, and they need your capabilities to make the results of this event a success. If you can identify a CRTA, it can go a long way in helping to speed up final negotiations.

Even with a clear CRTA, quantifying the cost of delay is a powerful way to emphasize the value of an immediate purchase decision. Every day that goes by is another day that the customer is not receiving that value, increasing the lost opportunity cost. The more quantifiable the value of a solution, the more a customer can be motivated to come to a decision.

We have found that a little planning goes a long way in making final negotiation discussions much more effective. Even just a few minutes of planning will improve the likelihood of coming to a satisfactory conclusion on schedule.

We recommend using a simple tool known as the Get/Give List. It enables sellers to think sensibly about agreements they might get from the buyer in exchange for concessions. For example, a seller may ask the customer to extend the terms of business from one year to multiple years, or agree to be a referenceable case study. In exchange, they can offer equivalent value concessions which would be useful to the customer, and not just price discounts.

Now is the time to review opportunities expected to close at the end of this quarter:

Is it really ready to close? Verify the five closing criteria.
Has a CRTA been identified?
Has the cost of delay been calculated – and does the customer agree?
Have “gives and gets” of equivalent value been determined, for use in final negotiations?

With a little extra diligence and discipline, the sales team can bring in every opportunity they expect to win by the end of the quarter. Remember: hope is not a strategy for success!

Make your end-of-quarter negotiations more productive, by downloading a free Get/Give List planning tool.

By Timothy Sullivan, Director, Sales Performance International

As a sales leader, you depend on your team to contribute consistently and predictably towards achievement of sales goals. But what should you do if previously top-performing sellers on the team start to slide backwards? How do you get them back on track – and keep them there?

In working with our clients, we find that many first-line sales managers don’t really know what to do when top performers on their team stumble. Most of them feel comfortable when coaching rookies or average performers, but they aren’t as confident about how to coach an experienced seller with a strong record of success, especially when a high performer falters.

The reason for this is simple. Most sales managers, especially those new to the position, mistakenly believe that coaching is equivalent to providing good advice, based on their own past success and experience. As a result, when working with someone who already has a good sales track record and considerable experience, many sales managers are at a loss about how best to coach a veteran performer.

Providing useful advice is certainly a desirable outcome of coaching, but most sales managers need to rethink how they go about doing this. Effective coaching starts first with establishing standards of excellence, and coming to agreement with sellers about what those standards require.

Coaching sales behavior against agreed-upon standards enables managers to help each salesperson – regardless of their performance history — come to their own realization of what they can do to improve.

There are three steps to standard-based sales coaching:

Establish standards for customer engagement

If you don’t have agreed-upon expectations for how your salespeople should engage with customers and how your sales managers should engage with their salespeople, then establish those first. We help our clients do this through the development of dynamic, buyer-aligned sales processes, as we described in chapter 7 of our recent book, The Collaborative Sale.

Standards for effective sales engagement should include:
- Ideal pipeline characteristics – how large and how dynamic should they be?
- Ideal customer profile – what do your best customers look like?
- The customer buying process(es) – what are their buying preferences?
- Aligned seller process steps, with verifiable outcomes at each step
- Opportunity qualification criteria – when will you walk away from a deal?
- Cadence and criteria for sales management inspection
Train sales managers to assess and diagnose against your standards

With clear standards, your sales managers then have objective criteria against which to assess and diagnose performance issues, regardless of any salesperson’s tenure or experience. By examining each seller’s pipeline shape, managers can identify skill, time and activity management issues. Standards enable your sales managers to proactively identify issues and prescribe corrective action, before they grow into big problems.
Train sales managers to coach effectively against standards

Effective coaching entails observing what happened relative to a standard, knowing why it happened, and then reaching an agreement with the seller on how they can comply better with expectations. If the manager’s diagnosis is based on objective criteria and accurate observations, then a high-performing salesperson will be more open to listening and acting.

But good coaching is both a science and an art. While coaching to objective standards is important, there’s also a human side to coaching. It’s important to understand the preferred work style of each seller, so that the sales manager can coach them effectively. Using an assessment tool like DISC can help sales managers better understand their preferred style and how to best align with those in their charge.

Too many sales managers rely on informal, on-the-spot coaching alone. The best sales managers also establish a regular cadence for formal review of pipelines and opportunities, and take the time to prepare for each coaching conversation. We’ve provided a complimentary coaching preparation template, to help your managers coach more effectively to your standards of excellence – and keep your sales team’s performance on track.

Qualifying Sales Opportunities: Why You Should Retire BANT as Your Qualification Criteria

By Tim Sullivan, Director, Business Development

Pain x Power x Vision x Value x Collaboration x Compelling Reason to Act = Sale

P – Pain or Problem

P - Power

V - Vision

V - Value

C - Collaboration

C - Compelling Reason to Act

SPI’s Strength of Sale Tool

How to Recover from a Weak First Half

Short-Term

Get more opportunities in your pipeline.

Expand the size and scope of the current opportunities in the pipeline.

Close a higher percentage of opportunities.

Mid- to Long-Term

Managing Your CEO and Peers

How Value Drivers help buyers overcome fear

How Buyer 2.0 Buys

Example of a strategic Collaboration Plan

Components of a Good Collaboration Plan

The Myth of Control

Improving Life Sciences Sales

How to Align with How Healthcare Organizations Buy Today

How to Align

How to Align Expectations and Engagement with Channel Partners

Change the Conversation

The Three Essential Features of Top-Notch Sales Hiring Assessments

Conclusion

How to Sell to Today’s Empowered Buyers

Introducing SPI’s Total Enterprise Account Management (TEAM) Program

What is TEAM?

Account Sales Planning

Account Relationship Planning

Implementation: Practical and Seamlessly Embedded within CRM

Why Personality Assessments Alone are Inadequate for Sales Hiring

It’s all in the KSAs

Five Best Practices for Sales Success in the Age of Evidence-based Medicine

15 Questions to Identify the Best for Your Team

Bottom-up Pipeline Analysis

Fact-Based Sales Planning