Foreword

In the good old days, when selling was so much simpler, it was widely put about that sales success rested on the “three Ss” of good selling:

Selection: recruiting really high-potential salespeople

Strategy: helping them make insightful sales plans for each account

Skill: teaching them how to make effective sales calls

If you could get those three things right, then you had all you needed for a world-beating sales force.

At a conference in Europe last year, someone asked me whether I thought the three Ss still applied to the much more sophisticated sales environment of today. I answered that, yes, selection, strategy, and skill remain valid predictors of sales success. Really good people are still scarcer than gold, and if you can select the best, you are an automatic winner. Strategy and skill are just as essential to success as ever they were—although both have become more sophisticated in recent years. The questioner frowned at my response, and I could see that I had disappointed her. I hope she reads this, because I’d like her to know that, after the conference, her frown prompted me to do some deeper thinking about her question. If I had to bet on the three most important factors for sales success today, would I still put my money on the three Ss? Or has the revolution in selling that we’ve seen over the last 10 years so changed our understanding of sales success that there are now newer and more important factors?

I certainly don’t want to underestimate the importance of selection, skill, or strategy. They remain essential ingredients to the success of any sales force. But it’s increasingly clear that they are no longer enough. In recent years I’ve worked with some sales forces that have had good offerings, good sales-people, decent account planning, and an above-average level of skill compared with their competition. According to the three Ss, these sales forces should have a superior performance. Yet, in many cases, they were losing market share to the competition. Why? What did competitors have that was making them more successful? In some cases it wasn’t a sales force issue. The competitor had superior pricing or marketing, a dynamic culture, or a distribution advantage. But, in more instances than I would have liked, a sales force strong on the three Ss of selection, strategy, and skill was being outsold.

I’ve pondered mightily on these cases, with the kind of thinking that you do late at night when there’s a niggling issue troubling you and you can’t sleep. After all, I made my name in the field of sales skill and sales strategy, so it wasn’t easy to challenge a foundation of my own reputation. But, after much agonizing, I came up with my finalists. If I had to pick just three components of success in the new sales world, I would choose the three Ms:

Management, especially first-line sales supervision

Metrics that go beyond the usual activity-based measurement

Methodology, or working with a systematic and disciplined approach

Let’s look more closely at each one to see why these three are the essential components of sales success for the immediate future. And, at this point, I should add that Cracking the Sales Management Code is all about the three Ms of management, metrics, and methodology.

MANAGEMENT

In my embarrassingly long career, I must have worked closely with more than 50 sales forces in an effort to significantly improve their performance. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve generally been successful in turning around poor-performing sales forces if the first-line managers I worked with had good potential, even if the salespeople themselves were mediocre. But I’ve never succeeded, even with half-decent salespeople, when it was the other way around. If first-line managers were of low caliber, no amount of effort, no reorganization, no training made any sustainable difference. For the last 10 years, whenever I’ve been asked to help turn around a sales force, my first questions are always about the capability and potential of sales supervisors and managers. So selection, one of the old “three Ss,” is still a vital component of success. But in the ever more complex business environment where companies must compete for the future, it’s even more important to select good sales managers than good salespeople.

However, the sales management problem doesn’t end with the recruitment or promotion of talented people. There are many thousands of bright high-potential sales managers who are highly motivated to succeed and who are nevertheless struggling to survive. They are ready and willing to do the right thing. What they lack is help and advice on what to do. They can’t rely on older, experienced managers within their companies who generally learned the sales business in the days when the definition of strategy was “simple tactics ruthlessly executed.” And, unfortunately, many of these outdated senior managers are forcefully urging their juniors to do too many of the wrong things. Where can new managers turn for advice? If they were salespeople, they could go to the 5,000 or more books that give advice on how to sell. But, as we know all too well from the sad history of outstanding salespeople who have been promoted into becoming abysmal sales managers, selling and sales management are entirely different things. So what can the new manager read that’s helpful? By my count, there are less than a hundred books on sales management, more than half of them out of print. Worse, many of the available books are general guides on how to manage people, just putting the word sales in front of the word manager. There’s an acute shortage of good books on the specifics of sales management. That’s why I encouraged Jason to write Cracking the Sales Management Code. It’s about the practical specifics of sales management in the new era—and it fills a void.

What are some of these specifics? Let me give a few examples. There’s advice on what CRM (customer relationship management) can do and, even more important, what it can’t do. There’s a clear explanation of the steps needed to link sales activities to business results; there are practical tools to help sales managers wade through the deepening flood of control issues that come with increasing sales complexity. These are important and useful topics, and sales managers will welcome the advice that this book offers.

METRICS

I’m often asked by clients, “What one thing do my sales managers need to understand better?” “Metrics,” I invariably reply. Perhaps the most misunderstood of all sales management activity is the design and use of metrics. The great scientist Lord Kelvin wrote, almost two centuries ago, “If you cannot measure it, if you cannot express it in quantitative terms, then your knowledge is of a meager and insubstantial kind.” That, in a nutshell, is the justification for sales metrics. What you cannot measure, you cannot improve. Sales metrics are important because they allow us to measure, understand, control, and improve the performance of sales forces. But what does metrics mean to the average sales manager? Chances are that the word conjures up visions of activity management, measures such as call reports or calls per day, tracking of targets and quotas in terms of volume, and profitability per salesperson. These are the tried and true metrics of the old selling. Cracking the Sales Management Code convincingly argues that these classic measures are not only inadequate but, for most sales forces today, can be downright unhelpful.

Jason, Michelle, and their colleagues, working with that excellent organization the Sales Education Foundation, identified 306 metrics that were being used by the sales forces in their survey. That, you might agree, adds up to a whole cartload of metrics. How do you see the wood from the trees in this smorgasbord of more than 300 choices? (Or, to avoid my ghastly mixed metaphor, perhaps I should ask, “Where’s the beef in this feast of choices?”) The main theme of this book is how to answer that question—what it takes to get the right metrics, how to select them, how to test them, and how to use them to run a high-performing sales force. I shan’t say more about the new metrics here because I wouldn’t want to intrude on the clear story that Jason lays out. But I would urge serious sales managers to invest time to thoroughly understand the important role played by metrics—and this book is a good place to start. The future will bring even more exciting developments in sales metrics. Companies like GE are already experimenting with Six Sigma metrics, and a fundamental understanding of measurement in these companies is a foundation skill for management success.

METHODOLOGY

The final M in my three new pillars of sales success is methodology. I choose the word because it’s a wide enough term to cover a range of methods, tools, and techniques that can be used to bring order and predictability to selling. The two most common forms of sales methodology are sales process—or its simpler versions, called pipelines or funnels—and CRM systems. The purpose of a sales process is to break down the sales cycle into sequential steps and to track the progress of each sales opportunity as it moves through the steps. Each step has a range of activities and measures associated with it that must be completed before moving to the next step. In this way, sales forecasts can become more accurate, and managers can diagnose and intervene when important opportunities need their help and guidance. That much is Sales 101. Almost everyone today has some form of sales methodology to organize and systematize their selling activity. Companies have spent many billions on sales process and CRM systems, generally with feeble and disappointing results. Partly this disappointment has come from overselling of what CRM can do by software vendors whose understanding of sales sometimes borders on the nonexistent. But the companies who bought systems that failed to deliver on promises must shoulder some of the blame. They naively expected that the system would magically solve most of their problems and, with very few exceptions, failed to understand the enormous difficulty and hard work involved in implementing a sales methodology.

I go through all of this to explain why sales methodologies are often seen cynically by practicing sales managers. And that’s a pity. In today’s world, the success of a sales force may depend more on having a good sales methodology than on any other factor. One of the reasons I think Cracking the Sales Management Code makes such a useful contribution is that it takes a sensible and balanced view of sales methodology. It avoids both the breathless enthusiasm of the CRM junkies and the unwarranted cynicism of the detractors who have been victims of bad process and are revenging themselves in print. Such a balance is hard to find.

So read this book. It will give you practical help with all three pillars of the new selling—management, metrics, and methodology. And I wish you every success in applying the ideas to your selling.

Neil Rackham