Originally published by Scott Gruher, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

You have identified a selling time issue within the sales force. A great deal of their time is spent traveling, completing administrative duties, and dealing with internal bureaucracy. Although 75% of the Sales Rep scorecard is tied directly to revenue growth, only 42% of their time is really focused on activities that drive growth.

Now that you have gained this level of clarity regarding current state selling time, what do you do about it?

Here are four options:

1.Territory Optimization - get your sales team to spend less time on the road and more time face-to-face with customers by organizing territories to minimize travel time. Condensing territories typically leads to an increase revenue production and a reduction in cost even though the total number of prospects in the territory may decrease

2.Task Reduction/Delegation - minimize low impact tasks by delegating, offloading, and minimizing the amount of time spent on them. Many times these tasks are driven by leadership and can easily be reduced. Examples are useless reports, forecasting outside of the CRM, etc.

3.Virtual Selling - remove travel and windshield time by taking advantage of virtual technologies. Determine steps within the sales methodology that can be executed virtually with the same level of effectiveness

4.Role Clarity/Scorecard Alignment - reduce any role ambiguity so conflicting priorities do not leave the sales team confused

Example of Selling Time Survey Output...click here to read the rest of this article from Sales Benchmark Index. 

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Originally published by Geoffrey James, Inc. Magazine

Are you cut out to make the sale? Make sure you've got these characteristics--or else learn to develop them.

Selling and buying are not purely intellectual exercises. Buyers and sellers are emotional human beings, which is why great salespeople are always masters at managing their own emotions. Based upon my observation (and some pretty hefty research in emotional intelligence), highly successful salespeople cultivate the following five emotional traits:

1. Assertiveness

This allows you to move a sales situation forward without offending or frustrating the customer. Think of it as being located halfway between passivity and aggressiveness. For example, suppose a customer is delaying a decision. There are at least three basic responses:

Passive: "Could you give me a call when you've made a decision?"

Aggressive: "If you don't buy right now, the offer is off the table."

Assertive: "Can you give me a specific time and date when you'll make your final decision?"

The passive response puts the sale on hold indefinitely (or give your competitor the opening to outsell you). The aggressive response creates pressure and resentment: Even if it works, you'll be seen as a typical pushy salesman. The assertive approach sets up the specific conditions for the close, without forcing the customer's pace.

2. Self-Awareness

You need to be able to identify your own emotions, understand how they work, and then use them to help you build stronger customer relationships. This is a four-step process:

1. Identify the emotions that you're feeling,
2. Based on experience, predict how those emotions will affect your sales effort.
3. Compensate for negative emotions that might hinder the sale.
4. Expand your positive emotions that might help you make the sale.

For example, suppose you feel furious that an important customer stood you up. You might take a break before your next meeting in order to remind yourself of all the times you've succeeded in the face of challenges. Or you might, as an ice-breaker, tell your second customer that you're having a tough day and why.

3. Empathy

This entails adapting your behavior to the customer's moods and emotions. It begins with listening and observing, but simply knowing what the customer might be feeling is not enough. You must be able to feel what the customer is likely to be feeling.

Suppose, during a sales call, you discover that the customer's firm just announced major layoffs. You could ignore the news and proceed with the sales call as if nothing had changed, or you could focus on your own desire to make the sale and ask your contact who will have buying authority after the layoffs are over.

Both responses to the event make business sense-but if you want to build a better relationship, you'll be empathetic and imagine your contact's sense of fear and confusion. Then, depending on your emotional reading of the customer, decide whether the customer would prefer to commiserate, complain or (alternatively) be distracted from the situation.

4. Problem Solving

The desire to solve a problem helps you create new ways to satisfy the customer's needs, both financial (the ROI of your offering) and emotional-such as the customer's need to be convinced that your and your firm are reputable and reliable. Problem solving is a four step process:

1. See the customer situation as it really is. (Never try to solve a problem before you fully understand it.)
2. Help the customer visualize a more desirable situation.
3. Devise a way to move the customer from the ways things are today to the way the customer would like them to be.
4. Communicate that solution in a way that makes it easy for the customer to make a decision.

While those steps might seem obvious, they're the exact opposite of old-school salesmanship, where selling entails "giving a great sales pitch."

5. Optimism

Optimism helps you maintain a sense of balance when things go awry. It proceeds directly from the (often unspoken) rules that you use to interpret daily events. For example, if the first sales call of the day goes poorly, your performance for the rest of the day will be different if you have this rule...

A bad first call means that I'm off my game this will be a bad day.

... rather than this rule:

Every sales call is different, so the next will probably be better.

Note that both rules are arbitrary responses to the same event, and neither is more "realistic" than the other. Even so, if you automatically jump to the first rule, rather than the second, it will be difficult for you to remain happy.

This principle works on bigger events, too. I've run into about a dozen top salespeople who saw the weak economy as an opportunity to sell even more,and did so, while their colleagues were busy hand-wringing. 

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Originally published by Geoffrey James, Inc. Magazine

If you don't understand the answers to these critical questions, your sales operation may be in jeopardy.

When business people discuss selling, there are five questions that constantly pop up-and often spark arguments. I thought I'd do everyone a favor and answer those questions once and for all.

Q: Are great salespeople are born or made?

A: Born. Numerous studies reveal there is a very small percentage of people who are natural sales stars, with a near-savant ability to sell inside a certain environment.

Contrary to popular belief, though, there's not a single personality type that's good at every kind of selling-and, in fact, a sales star in one environment (say, field sales of software solutions) is likely to be a failure in a different environment (car sales, for instance).

Q: Is the 80/20 rule for real?

A: Yes. But the statistic (i.e., that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your sales team) is somewhat misleading.

The sales performance of any sales team maps exactly to a standard bell curve. As with any other kinds of human performance, there will be a few people who are really good at it, a large number who are OK or competent, and a corresponding small number who are lousy.

In other words, the 80/20 rule is simply a mathematical phenomenon tied to human behavior. It is not a specific call to action.

Q: Is sales an art or a science?

A: It's an art-but its measurement is very much a science. The best analogy is probably professional sports. Each player is very much an artist when it comes to the way he or she moves and thinks. However, coaches use a variety of scientific measurements to help improve individual performance, and managers use scientific staffing methods (think Moneyball) to deploy the right kind of teams for the right amount of expenditure.

Great sales managers do the same thing.

Q: Is cold-calling dead?

A: No. Cold calling-contacting people with whom you've never had a conversation in the past-is very much alive and very common.

What's different today is two things: First, you're far more likely to walk into a cold calling situation armed with a larger amount of information about the person you're calling and the company in which he or she works. Second, it's increasingly difficult to get people on the telephone, which tends to make cold-calling less cost-effective as a lead generation method.

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Originally published by David Satterwhite, VP of Sales and General Manager, Americas, for Good Technology (www.good.com). He is a successful sales executive with a proven track record for building and scaling worldwide sales, services, and business development teams for various high-tech companies.

There are three megatrends emerging today that stand to push our customer relationships and sales strategies to a whole new level: social media, mobility, and security. We all know that building and sustaining strong customer relationships is key to a successful sales strategy. But in today's environment, being "social" with your customers refers to not only wining and dining current and prospective clients (OK, that helps, too); it refers also to your sales team's ability to effectively share information, build customer communities, and engage regularly with clients and one another through new media channels.

As of today, there are more than 100 million users on Facebook, more than 130 million members on LinkedIn, and upwards of 140 million active users on Twitter generating 340 million tweets per day. More than 400 million Google+ members are expected by the end of 2012. Not only are these online communities growing, but they are also increasingly going mobile. According to a report by comScore, in August 2011, 72.2 million Americans accessed social sites and blogs from their mobile phones, a 37 percent increase from a year ago. And considering your sales force is always on the go, there is a true dependence on smartphones and tablets in order to embrace a social customer culture and communicate with customers, partners, and colleagues, anytime and from anywhere.

Mobile devices are also catalysts for improved productivity by way of any number of social-business applications that not only improve an organization's productivity, but also enable real-time collaboration with its sales team and customers. If your company has a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy in place, all the better; sales reps can use the devices that they're most comfortable with to do their jobs.

But while mobility and BYOD certainly enhance the sales professional's ability to do his or her job more effectively, they also bring important security issues to the table. In sales, we're privy to sensitive customer information. If the integrity of that data is compromised in any way - because our iPad is stolen or we download an infected app - the consequences for our clients could be dire. The impact of a security breach ranges from multithousand dollar fines to brand damage and customer attrition. The bottom line: mobile security in today's app-central business environment is no joke.

Establishing a mobile-security strategy that includes BYOD and social-media access becomes, then, another important enabler of a successful sales strategy. A "containerized" approach that effectively sections off a mobile device into work and personal components can solve this problem. Data is encrypted and password protected, and IT can quickly and easily wipe all company data from the device if it gets lost or stolen without having to wipe personal information.

The intersection of social applications, mobility, and security hold enormous potential for sales teams to sell more, with greater customer satisfaction, while reaching sales goals faster. Let's look at some of the key benefits that your organization can achieve by combining these three elements:

1.Unified sales force. Your sales reps can be scattered across the country or across the globe. Using a social-business application such as Jive, for example, can help you achieve a collaborative, secure environment that builds a stronger sales team. Jive transcends these geographic boundaries and helps sales associates share their knowledge, insight, and experience with other team members.

2.Increased executive visibility. Being mobile and global sometimes makes it tough for sales reps to connect with members of the leadership team. Building a social community in a secure environment gives executives added visibility into customer activities, issues, and solutions. This heightened insight enables the more experienced, senior-level, executive team members to impart their knowledge to the sales force while interfacing with customers in a social forum.

3.Reduced training cycles. Getting new team members up-to-speed is time consuming. What if you could shorten the process and make it less overwhelming by providing a secure forum for new recruits to ask questions, gather information, and see how their more-experienced colleagues are getting things done? Sometimes simply observing a community conversation is all it takes to prompt new sales reps to ask questions they would not have thought to ask otherwise.

4.Better alignment with marketing. Social collaboration tools give the marketing team an opportunity to see the conversations taking place and provide sales reps with the assets they need to do their jobs more efficiently. Recurring themes, questions, and issues can be identified and addressed quicker and more efficiently than before.

5.Improved customer service. A happy customer is not only a returning customer, but one that will become your brand ambassador. Building social communities lets customers and sales teams interact in real time. They also provide a secure forum for customers to interact with one another and share best practices to ensure a successful experience with your products and services. Establishing a dynamic and social customer community is an easy way to enhance their experience with your company and its products or services.

Achieving sales goals is the cornerstone of any company's success, and a savvy organization will create an integrated approach to selling in today's evolving business environment. By effectively deploying a secure, social mobility strategy, organizations can take advantage of tools that will enhance customer responsiveness, improve productivity, accelerate sales cycles, and of course, keep customers coming back for more!

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Originally published by George de los Reyes, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

Our sales consulting firm is often asked to help companies right size their sales force. The goal of these engagements is to match our client's selling capacity to the market opportunity that exists for their product or solution. In this blog post I want to give you our secret sauce and outline our methodology for aligning the sales force size to market potential.

The first step in a sizing analysis is to understand where the client's industry, company, product and sales organization are in their life cycles. For our purposes we consider three life-cycle stages: Growth, Maturity and Decline. We often find stage misalignment that inevitably causes disconnect between the overall sales strategy and the environment our client is operating in. The net result is unrealized revenue goals.

The second step in a sizing exercise is to assess current state. In this phase, we seek to understand where our client falls on the Sales Force Maturity Curve. Sale force maturity ranges from Level 1 (chaotic) to Level 5 (Predictable). A sales organization's place on the curve correlates directly with their ability to implement change, a necessary output of a sizing exercise.

In addition to assessing their maturity level, we also look for insight into how our client determined headcount in the past. There are several common mistakes companies make when trying to determine headcount. Ignoring market dynamics and focusing solely on cost & affordability, many of our clients…

• Maintain sales force size to keep costs at a constant percentage of sales
• Split a territory as soon as it hits a threshold
• Add heads only when results generated are enough to increase investment
• Do not add new headcount to pursue new opportunities
• Reduce headcount to 'pay' for investments in sales force productivity
• Keep headcount the same if the current size worked last year

The third step in accurately sizing your sales force is...click here to read the rest of this article from Sales Benchmark Index.

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Originally published by Greg Alexander, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

I know a lot of sales leaders. My sales consulting company is built to serve them.

From time to time, people will call me asking for a referral to an "A Player" sales leader. I enjoy playing match maker and try to help when I can. Helping someone land their dream job is fulfilling.

Referring someone to a CEO is a credibility building or credibility destroying task. Our sales consulting firm gets paid based on the quality of our advice. I will spend more than a few minutes screening someone before passing their name along. This has taught me a lot.

Sales 2.0 has swept the globe. There are sales leaders who have evolved. There are sales leaders who have not evolved. CEO's do not want to hire sales leaders running yesterday's play book. They want someone who can lead them into this new buyer driven world. But, how do you know if your skills are current or not? Here is a fun tool that might help:

The Dinosaur Test: 10 Questions to Understand if You Have Become Obsolete.

1- Territories are determined based on geography: True or False.

2- Leads are generated by sales reps: True or False.

3- A single standard sales process generates the best sales results: True or False.

4- More channel partners is better than fewer channel partners: True or False.

5- Single purpose sales roles outperform multipurpose sales roles: True or False.

6- Headcount is determined by how many reps a company can afford: True or False.

7- Sales managers should carry an individual sales quota, plus the team quota: True or False.

8- The sales compensation plan should pay top performers 3x the bottom performers: True or False.

9- Hiring decisions should be made based on test results derived from online assessments: True or False.

10- Strategic accounts should be labeled such based on the revenue they contribute: True or False.

How did you do? Click here to download the answers and decipher whether or not you're an obsolete sales leader.

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Atlanta, Georgia - May 1, 2012

CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS™), a proven methodology for predictably improving revenue growth and sales performance, this week announced that Metso, a Finnish engineering company, has achieved significant sales efficiency since implementing the CustomerCentric Selling® sales methodology into their paper line business.

Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Metso's paper line business, states, "We soon realized that the partner we needed to choose to support us in this transition must have a strong methodology, global delivery capability and experience in working with the manufacturing industry. After a few pilot trials, we chose Customer Centric Selling® Europe to become our partner, whom we have successfully been working with for over three years." He continues, "By committing all the frontline sales reps and sales managers to this sales process, we have reached an entirely new level of sales discipline."

The primary driving force for development was the high cost of sales. Moreover, the proposal delivery process was undefined and unclear, and the sales force spent too much time responding and creating sales material for opportunities that were not real or were presented too late to quote. These issues caused multiple challenges, including large scale projects with low win rates and the production of too many sales proposals that were not qualified or intended to buy. Since the CustomerCentric Selling® implementation in 2008, the amount of work allocated to respond to unqualified customer quotations has reduced by more than 50 percent, while the sales project win rate has more than doubled. This development has enabled the Metso sales force to allocate more face time to solve customers' daily business problems at customer locations. Increased sales force efficiency has been achieved through improved internal communication that was possible through the use of concrete sales tools supported by a disciplined sales process. This progress has also empowered team members of different locations to be able to discuss and develop concrete sales cases and share the same terminology in sales. The sales team's ability to speak the same language and follow the same discipline through a systematic sales process has resulted in more accurate forecasting and enhanced resource allocation since the quality of information in the sales system has improved dramatically.

Click here to read Metso's case study about their sales training success with CustomerCentric Selling®, the sales training company.

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Originally published by Vince Koehler, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

Most B2B firms have their sales force performing the function of prospecting to fill the top of the funnel in Lead Generation. A time study will provide insight into how much time your sales reps are spending prospecting through cold calling, emailing and onsite drive-by visits. Prospecting efforts should always continue to be performed opportunistically for the sales field, but there is a better way.

World Class firms are utilizing Lead Generation efforts to generate qualified leads with the following benefits:

• Increased funnel - It's common for B2B sales forces investing in Lead Generation to increase the size of opportunities in the funnel by 10%.
• Shorter, Accelerated Sales Cycles - On average, qualified leads passed to the sales force have significantly shorter sales cycles than the average sales cycle.
• Faster Ramping New Sales Reps - It's no coincidence that World class firms who invest in demand generation find significantly shorter ramping times.
• Expanded selling capacity - Transition rep prospecting time to selling time.

Getting Started
Starting up Lead Generation is a Greenfield effort where the experts in the field are those companies who have done it and consultants who have assisted their clients. The top experts in the field today are those implementing Demand Generation programs and launching Lead Development Representative (LDR) teams. The quickest way to get started is to work with a consulting firm with experience in standing up LDR teams.

The Equation for Success: Lead Generation = Demand Generation + Lead Management

Lead Generation consists of two components...

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Originally published by Scott Gruher, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) 

How do you know if your Go to Market Strategy is yielding the anticipated results? Many sales organizations track metrics. Few track metrics that are meaningful and act on the what the metrics are saying. World Class sales organizations set specific milestones for metric progression, long-term goals, and adjust their strategy based on the story the metrics are telling.

When selecting Go to Market metrics, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Do the metrics align with the corporate strategy?
• How difficult are the metrics to track?
• Are the implications of the metric changing clear?
• How long will it take to impact the metric?
• Can we diagnose the origin of metric movement?

Five Key Go to Market Strategy Metrics:

1.Revenue Per Dollar of Sales Expense - calculate by dividing revenue by sales expense. This metric will improve with either an efficiency or effectiveness strategy (as illustrated below in figure 1.0). If you improve revenue and maintain your cost structure, less will be spent per dollar of revenue. If you maintain revenue and decrease expenses it will also improve

2.Selling Time - determine the main activity buckets that your sales team performs on a weekly and monthly basis (15-25 total activities). Categorize each activity as either a selling activity or non-selling activity. Launch a survey, or better yet, have your team track their time for 4 weeks using a time tracking template. Best in class sales organizations are north of 70% selling time

3.Quota Attainment - take the total number of sales professionals that achieve quota and divide by the total number of quota carrying reps. Best in class sales organizations have greater than 60% of their quota carrying reps achieving and exceeding quota

4.Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - measured as ratio of the: (Total Cost of Sales + Total Cost of Marketing + Miscellaneous Costs*)/(Annual Contract Value)

5.Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - the net present value of the cash flows attributed to the relationship with a customer

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Originally published by Matt Sharrers, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

According to Matt Sharrers from SBI, a recent sales training study revealed some shocking numbers.

Here are 3 of them: 17%, 1.7 and $27,204

17% - The percentage of first year front line Sales Managers that made their number.

1.7 - The average number of A player sales reps that left for a different job when they got a new Sales Manager.

$27,204 - The average reduction in pay the new Sales Manager was on pace for in 2011.

Why is this happening? These 'A' player sales reps had become 'C' player sales managers. They were working hard. They were trying to do the things that sales managers were supposed to. Things like:

• Hiring top talent
• New hire training
• Sales process coaching
• Bi weekly 1 on 1 meetings
• Forecast calls
• Sales performance management

The answer: The definition of promotable was inconsistent. These newly appointed Sales Managers should never have been promoted.

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