So what is the standard response from sales leaders (VPs/Directors/managers) to this situation?  Unfortunately it is often to focus on the wrong things, let’s try an analogy using golf (click the picture to emlarge).  The sales person is on the tee, driver in hand and the sales leader is nowhere to be seen.  The sales person can drive it straight (unlikely in my experience), slice it into the rough or pull it out of bounds.  Whatever the outcome the sales leader probably has no idea what has taken place.

The good news is that we got lucky; we are in the light rough on the right and take a long iron for our second shot.  Again no sales leader is watching and we have similar potential outcomes except this time we hit it into the bunker at the side of the green.  As we reach our ball the sales leader wanders past and says that they need it down in three from there, and could we do it in the next five minutes (something about quarter end).

We splash out to 18 feet and the sales leader is now standing over the putt with us giving advice and coaching us with phrases like “Remember, whatever you do don’t screw up!”.  We putt to 3 feet, always a tricky one, and notice the sales leader is now joined by their boss – great we are getting plenty of advice now.

The good news is that we make the putt, the sales leader and their boss leave without a word, and you go to the next tee by yourself.  OK, so it’s an analogy, but it works for me on a number of levels.  Firstly, the sales leaders only got involved in the dying moments of the sale and had little understanding of what has gone on in previous meetings with the customer.  In fact, the first meeting you had may have been so bad that you went out of bounds and never got a second shot.  Secondly, we are focusing on outputs from previous work rather than shaping the business development efforts of the sales team by coming up with a clear set of practical strategies that can drive results.  There are other parts to the analogy – and can you get it in the hole for quarter end – which I am sure you understand from your own personal experience, so I won’t labour the point.

In the next four posts I am going to explore what steps I believe sales leaders can take that will impact medium and long term business, and create a solid platform for business development.  The four areas are:

• Creating meaningful value propositions
• Fishing where the fish are – segmentation
• Knowing your metrics – driving the pipeline
• Coaching for sales success

I hope you enjoy the ideas.

The concept of unintended consequences is one of the building blocks of economics. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the most famous metaphor in social science, is an example of a positive unintended consequence. Smith maintained that each individual, seeking only his own gain, “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” that end being the public interest. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

An excellent example of this law and how sales people can manipulate results occurred in the great golf cart boom of 2009. An American government subsidy designed to promote the purchase of electric vehicles (cars) for the sake of energy conservation was exploited by clever golf cart salesmen who recognized that their products fit under the government’s definition of an electric car. The salesmen began to give away “free” golf carts to consumers, with the entire bill being passed along to the government.

From my own experience the sales commission plan is an obvious candidate for this law. When I worked at a large IT company, the sales people quickly worked out that the new commission plan, focused on selling more application licences, would pay large amounts of money for simply resigning customers on their current software licences. It took management about two months to catch up – happy days!

Let me know if you have any examples from your sales experience of the law of unintended consequences.

These can be used by sales people to understand where there are gaps in their knowledge and ask questions to get a more complete picture of the customer situation.  They can also be used by sales managers to see if the sales person has control of the account.  Personally, I would often start a sales review by asking “Why us?” and “Why now?”  All the rest of the qualification flows from these two questions.  I would be looking for a crisp response to demonstrate understanding and control, and I would drill down as appropriate.  So here are a few I have thought of:

SCOTSMAN

Solution – Do we have a product or service that directly addresses their business need or do they want something that we don’t sell
Competition – Are there many competitors on this deal or are we in on our own
Only Me – Is there something that the prospect can only get from me that is critical to his decision or are we selling a “me too” solution?
Timescale – What is the prospects timescale? Will we get a rapid decision?
Size – Is the opportunity big enough to be interesting?
Money – Has the prospect got the money to afford the solution?
Authority – Are we talking to the decision maker?
Need – Why do they NEED to do this NOW, and why can’t they just wait.

MEDDIC

Metrics – What KPIs / drivers will we be contributing to – revenue, productivity, time to market?
Economic Buyer – Who will sign the contract and/or who owns the budget?
Decision Criteria – Technical and commercial criteria; their priority and our position versus competition?
Decision Process – What is The Sequence of Events?
Identified Goal – What is the Compelling Event. What is the individual or group objective? Are their serious consequences if not achieved?
Champion – Who is the Individual who has a personal win associated with the success of this project? She provides easy access to MEDDI.

TRAM BURP

Timing
Requirements
Action
Money
Budget
Uniqueness
Relationship
Priority

And two shorter ones:

BANT

Budget
Authority
Need
Timeline

£AWN

Money
Authority
Willingness
Need

Let me know any others that you use and I will add them to the resource.

Who is buying?
Who is in the Decision Making Unit (DMU), what are their roles – Decision Maker, Recommender or Influencer? Key point – who will sign off on the order, are we talking to the executive sponsor?

What are they buying?
What business issues are they trying to solve? How does our solution address these issues? What is the competition offering and how do we beat them?

Why are they buying?
What business issues or events are driving their decision? Is it a desire for more market share? Are they on the offence against new competition? Learning their reasons for buying enables your salesperson to understand the emotion behind the decision. This prevents them from being a product-focused only salesperson.

When are they buying?
When they were going to make the decision and when will they place the order? Too often, it’s much later than either the salesperson or the sales manager expected. Be sure to ask your salespeople what the prospects time frame or sense of urgency is about their decision. In many cases sales forecasts slip due to a lack of understanding of the buying process and who is involved.

Where is the budget?
Where is the money coming from for the purchase – are budgets in place, do they need to go for board approval; are they just flying a kite? In my experience sales people are very weak in qualifying where the money is coming from.

How will they buy?
How a prospect buys refers to the terms and conditions. How are they financing the purchase – lease, lease purchase or outright sale? What performance conditions are attached to the sale – do they need a trial first?

Using these ideas as the basis for a sales review will often expose the weaknesses of the qualification and allow you to decide whether to spend time (and resources) on the bid, re-qualify by getting the additional information or move on to opportunities that are more likely to result in an order.

You can then capture the best questions from the teams on a flip chart, throw in a prize for the best team questions and publish a best questions list for the whole team. Just getting sales people to ask two SMARTER questions per call will raise the quality of each discussion with your customers.

Today’s mantra, which seems to happen about 3 times a day, is “where’s your number?”, “where’s your number?”, “where’s your number?”  Does this ring true in your organization?  So what has changed, why have the sales manger moved from business enabler to someone who reports on the business booked?

I would welcome your views on this question as I believe it is a key issue for organization’s that want to develop and sustain their businesses.  For me, it seems that all of the systems we now have in place e.g. pipeline tools, CRM and various excel reports mean that many parts of the business can now chase sales managers constantly with regard to their own department’s agendas.  So, for instance, the Sales Director and Finance will chase on revenue and margin, product management will chase on product mix (we need you to sell laptops not desktops) and even HR now get involved in call time (for internals) and number of visits (for externals).

What this means is that the sales manager focuses totally on the end of the process – can you close the business today.  Whereas, the place they should be working is much earlier in the sale – do we understand the customer’s business needs, do they have a budget, have we contacted all the key decision makers, have does our solution beat the competition, etc.

There is a good analogy with playing a par 4 hole at golf.  The sales manager has no real interest in the drive or second shot, a passing interest in the approach shot and then fully interested in the putt.  The problem in the sales context is that many of the sales people have gone in the water off the tee and the sales manager has no knowledge of this until they 3-putt and take 8!

To overcome this problem, in a recent sales development program, we used the sales managers as an integral part of the sustaining of the sales work by getting them to coach the sales people on 5 targeted accounts.  To keep them honest they in turn had to report their progress to the Sales Director.  The actual results from the program were amazing, with massive revenue being generated from the chosen (dormant) accounts.  But interestingly both the sales people and sales managers said that they enjoyed their jobs far more and felt like they were working as a team rather than “us and them”.

Although I have made this sound easy, there is a lot of work to do to achieve this, both in training the sales managers as real coaches and changing the culture of the company.  The second part is the more difficult, and means that a wider span of management has to understand the new coaching culture and asking for product mix switches at the close just isn’t feasible (just think of the customer’s view).

Let me know what you think about this – what is the role of a sales manager.