Selling Styles: Art or Science (A Love Story)

I love my job. My primary responsibility is to create LEADS. In my career, I’ve created a few hundred thousand quality leads to be distributed across an array of sales teams. With numbers of this scale, the main issue that kills me is not necessarily the lead source, cost per lead, OR lead quality. It’s that “Susie” closes her leads at “18%” and “Jimmy” closes his at “8%”.  Mentally, I see “n” number of Jimmy’s missed opportunities floating away in the smoke of burning money — WTF!

I live in a world of facts, specific metrics, blended averages and trends. Given that the laws of large numbers suggest reasonable equity in quality and distribution across all the Sales Reps, it is extraordinarily painful to realize the amount of money burned with the conversion rate delta from Jimmy to Susie. It’s painful enough when you have only 2 reps, but what if you had 1 Susie’s and 3 Jimmy’s or 5 Susie’s and 30 Jimmy’s?

Which begs the question – should Sales Reps sell via ART or SCIENCE?

In some organizations, 80% of the revenue is created by only 20% of the sales team. If you want to achieve the next level of scalability, I feel you need to master the SCIENCE in order to raise all the boats. And when I mean YOU, I mean Reps AND Managers AND Executives.

• Executives must budget for and recognize that giving their Managers the right tools will allow them to monitor, correct, leverage and be held accountable for the results.
• Managers must study the space they are selling in and put together a best practices selling process to use in the tools that all the Reps will follow.
• The Reps must use the tools and follow the process - even if flawed – so Managers can monitor the measuring points, view those metrics objectively and make changes to the process as needed to drive improvements across the entire sales team.

Think of it this way. What if you could leverage some of “Susie’s Art” and mass produce it as a Science.  True, you can’t convert 100% of it, but…

• What “Jimmy Sales Rep” out there wouldn’t want to drop the way he does it in exchange for the success Susie has?
• What Manager wouldn’t want to close the gap between Susie’s and Jimmy’s closing percentage to make his numbers better?

What Executive wouldn’t fork over the short money (Often the daily price of a cup of coffee for that same Rep) for the tools that would easily pay itself off by closing that gap alone?

By the way, did you notice the word – Process.  Right away this screams science.  It’s a documented, repeatable way to generally get the same results within the laws of large numbers.

Don’t have one? Are you afraid of the term? Don’t like being “boxed in by the man”?  Do you think you’re too small an organization to have one?

You want to scale? You want to succeed? Then “sales process”, “opportunity workflow”, “lead management”, or any similar term has to be part of your vocabulary.  Don’t let the term make you cringe. Any good sales manager wants his team to have the right sales best practices. It often starts with process.

If you have a sales process, do you monitor the results? Do you leverage the peaks? Do you remedy the valleys? It’s not just about where your wins come from, it’s about where do you lose deals. Where is one rep winning where the other reps are losing? How can you correct that? Is your best Sales Rep still running strong? Are your weaker Sales Reps getting stronger? Are you reaping the benefits?

Documented or not, I guarantee you have a sales process.  At Landslide CRM (insert shameless plug to our Interactive Demo that explains more), we come across, uncover and shape real sales processes and opportunity workflow all the time.  Don’t be afraid of process, leverage it.  Find empowerment and freedom through the structure. A successful CRM that provides that structure and process doesn’t have to be complicated to be powerful. And make sure you are collecting as much data as you can by leveraging the use of custom fields to your specific selling needs so you will have a factual, metrics based, picture of what’s going on in your organization. You can always go back and report on what you’ve collected later … but you can never make decisions on information you’ve never collected.

In the end:

• Jimmy will be closing a lot more like Susie.
• Managers will be able to help more Jimmy’s along and make their numbers.
• Executives will not only see a return on the monies invested, but also the time to put that “Science” in place.
• Your Lead Generation Team won’t be watching their budget go up in smoke.

Which do you prefer … Selling as an Art or a Science?

Special thanks to Jeffrey Cody for his contribution to the Solution Selling Blog.

How's Your "Middle" Doing?

Many of the prospects I initially call on tell me going in that they have a sales process in place.  At first look, that often appears to be the case. Most have an installed CRM system and a long list of internal activities/ steps that sellers are suppose to follow, i.e., make 25 phone calls a week, make five in-person sales calls a week, enter all data into CRM, issue contracts, etc. It all looks good. The problem is none of it has anything to do with how their buyer’s buy—- buyer alignment. 

Almost anything entered into the CRM system is categorized as a qualified opportunity. It can sit there for a long time… four months, six months, eight months and even longer. Often the next step is: has the deal closed? What’s wrong here? The middle part —- the most important portion —- of the sales process is missing. 

So, many times I basically see a two step process for opportunities: create and close. Alignment with the buyer is not incorporated into the process. Key steps of qualification, development of the solution, proof and negotiation are not formalized. Additionally, implementation, a key step after close, is not accounted for in the sales process at all. 

The “middle” steps of sales process allow sellers to develop situational fluency by thoroughly diagnosing a customer’s pain, providing a vision of a solution and positioning value throughout the entire process. These key steps move sellers from product-centric selling to consultative or “Solution Selling®” (meaning both the trademark intellectual property AND the core methodology in practice). 

Now, tech companies often have a middle step and it’s called the “demo”. Get the tech guy, book a time and show the prospect a real time demonstration of the technology. Problem is, without the other “middle” steps of sales process, the demo may not be providing capabilities that the prospect needs. So, many demos are delivered for opportunities that will never go anywhere. It frustrates sales management and dramatically drives up the cost of sales.

Without a buyer-aligned middle part of the sales process, it is impossible to weed out the bad deals or, conversely, find the great deals that may require more resources and support. Forecasting for sales managers becomes a complicated, separate process that consumes way too much time and rarely results in better forecast accuracy.

How’s the “middle” part of your sales process working out?

How to Leverage Benchmarking and Baselining

Sales, by its very nature, is a binary, win-lose contest….the lagging indicators - stock price, revenues, market share reek of performance comparisons, and that is a good thing. These are clear, rear view mirror benchmarks – the results speak for themselves and are impossible to debate. In this case, benchmarks have a very clear standard and should be leveraged. They help organizations understand how they stack up / compare in terms of results.

When looking forward to the leading indicators that drive results, benchmarking can be a distraction. Benchmarking competitive sales practices can shed some light on things you could be doing better; However, it has much more potential for distracting your salesforce.

World-class sales organizations spend the vast majority of their time on setting, monitoring, executing and evaluating performance against very clear baselines. This allows for razor-like focus on what sales teams can and should control – their own performance.

John Wooden, widely considered the best coach in sports, downplayed the role of scouting in his team’s preparation year over year. Instead, he insisted on measuring and evaluating his players based on what they could do. He knew that, if his team did its job, the right outcome would be assured.

So the question is, “what internal standard have you set for your sales organization, sales teams and individual sellers?” Are they clear, achievable and most importantly, do they drive every person to do all that they can to fulfill their potential? Obviously, the seller’s quota is the ultimate baseline to work from. Identifying the key behavioral / leading baselines to execute against is merely the first step. For ideal results, it is active involvement, coaching and development of the salesperson [through the various stages of the sales cycle] that yields real learning and best outcomes.

It is only through an in-depth focus on best practice sales behaviors that organizations can follow-through on the individual promise of each sales person. Talking about what others are doing, and how they are doing it typically leads down the slippery slope of the seller being a victim of the company, industry and/or competition. So remove the distraction and the excuse – focus your team on what they and you can control and follow-through on.

Why Sales Process?

Is selling an art or a science?  Answer: both.  Eagle sellers, who are natural born sales people, put a lot of art into selling - they just sell and it happens.  But most of us do not have that luxury.  Most sellers, myself included, need the science of selling in order to be successful.  The science part of selling is understanding the customer’s buying process and aligning your sales activities accordingly. 

The sales process gives you a game plan to start a sale and follow it through to the close.  There are various components to it, but the most important thing to remember is to stay in alignment with the customer.  In today’s selling environment, we we want to be buying facilitators to make it easier for our customers buy from us.   

Selling Into a Headwind – It’s the Process, Stupid!

As economic uncertainty continues to rule the airwaves, most if not all companies are experiencing a challenging sales year. As if selling is not already difficult enough, the current “low demand” environment amplifies many of the typical selling challenges, including:

• Stimulating interest and differentiating
• Demonstrating compelling value
• Effectively mining existing customer relationships
• Moving the customer conversation from commodity products to high-value solutions
• Doing more with less across the board

The instinctive response in this scenario can be, like a panicked army, the tendency to attack anything that moves. Sometimes this activity-intensive behavior is defended under the guise of being “entrepreneurial”, but the ensuing chaos rarely produces consistent execution (or results).

Like other forms of crisis, the most difficult times are precisely when clear thinking and discipline are most critical. Taking a rational, well-defined approach to targeting prospects, account planning, and sales execution are more important than ever for sales organizations. In other words, truly understanding and implementing a sales process (and “how to” methodologies) is potentially the best economic insurance policy your company can invest in.

The Cold Hard Facts About Process
But how can you make this case with confidence? In short, the cold facts at two distinct levels support the compelling economics of successful process adoption. What does research tell us about this topic? First, let’s consider the findings at an aggregate level. For the past 13 years, CSO Insights has conducted an annual sales performance study of more than a thousand global companies. For the relatively small number of companies who have attained world-class levels of sales process adherence (by CSO Insight’s criteria), the outcomes are nothing short of compelling. These companies on average realize the following advantages over their peers:

• 11.6% higher quota attainment
• 3.5% improvement in win rates of forecasted deals
• 30% reduction in turnover
• 185% improvement in cross selling and up selling
• 143% improvement in selling value and avoiding excessive discounting

But what about results at the individual company level? Many case studies that are presented at this level are often anecdotal, or fail to demonstrate a “cause and effect” relationship that is valid. That is, they fail to tie specific changes in seller behavior to a defined set of sales outcomes. Several studies have been independently performed by SPI clients to determine how the application of specific methods in the Solution Selling process correlates to key sales metrics. These analyses considered key elements of sellers executing the process, including the degree to which:

• the customer problem (pain) was identified
• reasons for the customer problem were understood
• specific organizational impact of the problem was understood
• buying influence was established
• access to power was established
• proof of value was established

As one might expect, there was a consistent pattern of positive and statistically valid correlations to key sales metrics, including:

• More qualified opportunities generated
• Higher quality (larger) opportunities generated
• Shorter sales cycles
• Higher win rates
• More consistency (predictability) of win rates

In other words, just as consistent diet and exercise almost guarantee improved health, the salespeople who most consistently adhered to the Solution Selling process improved sales outcomes in almost all areas.

The Process Challenge
If the rewards are so compelling, why don’t more companies invest in the development and adherence to a sales process? According to research by CSO Insights, only 14% of the companies in their annual study have evolved to a world class (Level 4 in their model) of sales process maturity. There are a number of potential reasons:

1. Ignorance and misconceptions - The term “sales process” has a superficial connotation in many cases. Often companies believe that having a CRM system with sales milestones and probabilities is equivalent to having a sales process. There is typically little analysis of buyer behavior, methodology (how to’s) integration, messaging and sales tool integration, and management system and metrics implementation. In addition, many organizations fail to incorporate critical targeting and account planning methods into the overall selling process.
2. Product-focused sales training - Product training continues to dominate the sales training spend, without integrated skills training. It is often left to the salesperson to “connect the dots” between product training and skills training.
3. Skills training without process integration -When companies do invest in skills (methods) training, it is often event-based, and not aligned with a well-defined sales process. In this scenario, research shows that salespeople retain less that 15% of the training content.
4. Sales culture = “cowboy” culture - Lone wolf sales stars may tend to rebel with respect to process initiatives. Top performers may discount the necessity of process, and label it as a “big brother” intrusion or waste of their valuable time - giving process a bad name. However, research has indicated that mid-level performers (the bulk of the sales force), can benefit significantly from process adherence and effective (process-based) coaching.
5. Management Attention Deficit Disorder - Sales executives are under intense pressure to meet short-term targets. Process initiatives can appear complex, and can evoke responses such as “it’s hard to fix the plane while we’re flying.” Without strong executive sponsorship or visionary leadership, it is often hard to obtain the mindshare necessary to effect real change.

The Good News
In spite of these challenges, process-based selling is quite feasible for most sales organizations if they make a modest investment to understand their current state, and take a stepwise approach to steady performance improvement (just like diet and exercise). What is missing in the “noise of battle” for most organizationsis a practical model (blueprint) for understanding where you are today, and a logical implementation plan (roadmap) to make incremental improvements that are sustainable.