, , , , ,

Book Review: The Challenger Sa

It took me a little longer than I thought, but I just finished Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson’s The Challenger Sale.
Another great book recommendation from a sales rep who was actually selling to me. This book builds on the SPIN Selling as the next big innovation in sales.
Needless to say, I learned a lot from the book, and enjoyed it immensely. In fact, after just reading the first few chapters, I started to hack my selling style immediately to be more Challenger-oriented.
What was interesting was that out of the different selling personas, the Relationship Builder typically had the lowest sales success. This was daunting for me as I typically harp on the importance of relationships, and though, I do take on several attributes of a Challenger (like teaching and tailoring, especially), I still may be very Relationship-oriented.
Here are my take-aways from the book:
  • In today’s noise-filled world, Challenger sales reps focus and drive value for prospects from the get-go. They are focused. They are tenacious.
  • The essence of the Challenger sale is about teaching prospects insights they do not know about their industries, tailoringthe solution for the prospects’ businesses, and taking control of the sales process.
  • Relationship builders focus on convenience for customers while Challengers focus on delivering value. Challengers are comfortable pushing prospects out of their comfort zones – challenging prospects to think differently.
  • Prospects are looking for ways to get the competitive advantage – new ways to cut costs, increase sales, expand markets. It’s about insight, and this is how Challengers approach sales. They provide insight into the industry and highlight a problem the prospect didn’t know he had, and they hammer home the urgency to solve it.
  • Marketing is the “insight generating machine” arming sales reps with quality material to teach and engage prospects. This is one of the reasons why infographics, white papers, and case studies are valuable collateral for reps.
  • The Challenger builds a team of advocates to ensure the buyer has backing – mitigate the risk of the buyer.
  • The Challenger teaches why the problem is urgent; else, the customer won’t see the importance of solving it (now).
  • Sales leadership is about sales innovation – how leaders can move stagnant deals forward. Sales innovation is the single biggest sales-related attribute of a world-class sales manager.
  • Sales success is about being able to tackle the things you don’t know, not about what you do know. It’s about being creative and innovative to solve problems.
  • “Be memorable, not agreeable.”

Great read especially as a relatively “young” sales professional not having formal experience before diving in when Body Boss was started. Next up for sales book reading – Predictable Revenue.

/by
, , , ,

Avoiding Sales Management Sins of Rapid Growth: 6 Take-Aways from TAG Panel

Yesterday, I attended my third Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) Sales Leadership event. This event was all about the pitfalls (“sins”) of managing a high growth sales team. (Highly relevant for me as we grow at SalesWise.)
The panel featured:
My main take-aways:
  1. The 3 Sins of sales management (from Mark): (1) Poorly designed selling philosophy (culture). (2) Too tolerant of mediocrity. (3) No system for selling or managing sales.
  2. No surprise the panel touched heavily on instilling and persisting a great sales culture. Common phrases throughout the panel included: “surround yourself with top talent”, “raise the bar”, “do not tolerate mediocrity”, “structure”, “understand a sales candidate’s ‘fire’ or motivator”, and “on-going training”.
  3. “Think like a big company” – this really hit home for me as I have been rather capricious in putting down learnings from selling (and marketing) SalesWise. I have a lot of knowledge of what works, what doesn’t work, and the like, but it’s all locked away in my head or in disparate sources (notebook, computer files, etc.). I should document everything in a single place – a living, breathing sales playbook accessible by all.
  4. Instilling structure in the sales organization ensures high productivity and a sustainable sales culture. It highlights the top performers and separates the laggards. Cull the laggards as quickly as possible (they can be like poison), and the average of your team immediately rises.
  5. Promoting high-performing sales reps to leadership positions does not always work. It can also have an exponential effect of decreasing sales (you took your best performer, after all) while poorly leading an established sales team. Recognize not all reps should be leaders, but it’s a leader’s job to disseminate the learnings of high performance to the rest. Recognize, too, rep coaching should be tailored to the individual.
  6. 10 x 10 = 100. The first “10” is you’re only aware of 10% of the whole problem. Dig deeper. “x10” represents the fear of addressing the problem is actually 10 times the reality. Consider your delivery to be productive. And “100”… because problems are typically solved 100 days late.
/by
, , , ,

Sales Culture Development: Take-Aways from TAG Panel

I attended another TAG Sales Leadership event last week — “Sales Culture Development”. I’m appreciating all these events as I continue to develop as a sales professional (should never really stop learning) and as we, at SalesWise, develop our own sales team. 
Given the panel discussion was about sales culture, there was heavy emphasis on how to engage sales professionals as well as reviewing the metrics that sales professionals are evaluated on. 
The panel included: 
Here were the main topics I took away:
  • Technology presents great opportunities and challenges. It’s important to recognize the dependency we become on technology and how personal effort and attention “disrupts” mass sales efforts. However, in a day of technology bombardment, personalization can be the key to sales.
  • 50-50 training on soft and hard skills. Much of sales comes down to effort, and yet, there are far more resources on teaching sales pros the hard skills to sell, rather than how to address the person and relationship. “Listen through the solution”, don’t “sell through the solution”.
  • Measure with balance. Tom Snyder, Founder of Vorsight BP and accomplished speaker, shared the importance of task clarity. It’s curious how much of sales metrics are based on outcomes (close X-many deals by the end of the quarter) which is akin to a football coach who tells his players to “score!” That’s obvious. What coaches really do is speak with players on the HOW and WHY. 
  • Focus on the funnel. Especially focus on, yes, the bottom of the funnel to ensure deals close, but then, focus on the top of the funnel. Everything in the middle tends to sort itself through effort.
/by
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Sales Team and Sales Reps Engagement to Drive Results: Take-Aways from TAG Panel

TAG Panel on “How Dynamic Sales Orgs Drive Results”. Pictured from left to right: Jon Birdsong, Mary Ford, Ryan Radding, Eric Mercado, and Kyle Tothill
I attended a Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) event for sales leadership a couple weeks ago about “How Dynamic Sales Orgs. Drive Results”. The panel included:

The majority of the discussion revolved around engaging sales teams either in mentoring and coaching or via direct incentives. Here are a few take-aways:

  • There’s a spectrum of engagement and performance that ranges from (low to high): Resistant, Reluctant, Existent, Compliant, Committed, and Compelled. Mitigate (or remove) reps in the first three groups while promoting and sharing practices of the high performance reps who exhibit innovation and leadership.
  • Drive engagement in these areas: Connection (connect individuals together to form the team), Support (mentoring and coaching), Reward (incentives), Progress (clear career progression model), and Structure (ensure alignment and understanding of roles and responsibilities).
  • Measuring success and engagement should go beyond metrics and activities. Include personal goals – set, met, exceeded? Understand that the “outside” lives of reps has a very real impact on work performance.
  • Beyond retention and promotion stats, evaluate the effectiveness and engagement of the team with referrals by reps and how quickly reps ramp up.
  • Gamification plays to the competitive nature of sales reps with a layer of transparency and accountability.
  • Pull ideas from reps on selling, don’t just push “best practices”. Sales reps can be innovative in how they sell and pushing “best practices” may not be conducive to the reps’ individual styles.
  • Coaching tends to have a “master-subordinate” structure set with boundaries while mentoring allows freer structure and less formality. Mentors tend to go beyond sales topics or even at the current job. Have/ establish both.

Good points raised by the team, and continues to illustrate that to drive sales, it’s all about driving engagement from the team. Companies are organizations of people. Engaging the people within, at the group and individual level, can produce a culture that drives sustainable practices for business growth and team motivation.

/by