EPILOGUE

Helping Others Elevate the Sales Profession

Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.

—General Patton

As we introduced at the beginning of this book, 80 percent of sellers are at a Stage I and II level of proficiency. Not surprisingly, most company’s sales infrastructure is geared to those levels. They focus on the tangible sources of competitive advantage and not on the intangible sources of relative superiority—politics, Unexpected Value, and strategy. Although many of you have the internal motivation and drive to excel to Stage III or IV without your company’s support, you will move more easily and quickly with it.

With this gap between Stage III and IV selling and Stage I and II company infrastructure in mind, we encourage you to share this message with your sales manager to help yourself and other sellers in your company. Explain that an updated company infrastructure will produce a number of opportunities for new business. Namely:

• Consistently Higher Win Rates: Win rates in most industries are in the neighborhood of 30 percent as a result of heavy Stage II selling. Basically, and on average, 3 out of 10 deals are won. But those 3 deals must carry the cost of sales for all 10, which also impacts margins. Even a small increase in win rate for the right types of deals can produce a disproportionate increase in revenue.
• Unexpected Increase in Customer Satisfaction: Executive-level customer satisfaction scores tend to be lower for Stage II seller installations, which confuses your company image with customer executives and reduces future competitiveness in terms of repeat business. This is all about executive customer loyalty and the opportunity to improve it.
• Increased Wallet Share: The best way to take the lion’s share of business within major accounts is with a Stage IV Customer Advisor at the helm. These sellers not only pursue individual opportunities but build a plan to effectively leverage customer politics, value, and strategy to take the majority of the business. Scaling up the number of Customer Advisors takes market share from competitors, one major account at a time.

Aligning the company’s sales support infrastructure with all the stages of selling has the potential to create significant short- and long-term business impact. To affect this alignment, however, requires a bit of nontraditional thinking and an understanding of how sellers develop. When sellers learn new and innovative sales concepts, ideas, and techniques, they go through four phases of development:

Sometimes, organizations unintentionally try to achieve results through the awareness and understanding phases of learning, without a detailed bridge to the skill development and “belief” phases that are required to create powerful and sustainable results. This common Stage I and II training approach looks a lot like what you see in Figure E.1.

Figure E.1 Stage I and II Traditional Training Approach

Source: Sydney Harris, ScienceCartoonsPlus.com. Used with permission.

So what is missing? What is the miracle? We suggest you engage in a discussion with your sales manager that looks at selling as a management science, bringing to life the intangibles. All too often, the array of skill-based training programs that companies offer, although helpful, lack relevance in terms of providing customers with Unexpected Value while advancing sellers to relative superiority. This relevance is added in a Level 1 sales infrastructure that connects skills to managing politics, value, and strategy within accounts.

Level 1: Establishing Relevance

Rather than training sellers on isolated skills such as probing, handling objections, generating proposals, giving presentations, and so on, a Stage III and IV infrastructure integrates these skills with the intangibles. It threads all the appropriate skills together to produce nontraditional sources of relative superiority for sellers. The result is a cohesive, well-integrated curriculum where all the skills work in concert, geometrically increasing win rates and the value provided to customers.

Now that the training is centered on the customer and competition, the next step is to help sellers learn to implement what has been taught, which brings us to the Level 2 sales infrastructure.

Level 2: Driving Adoption

The best way to learn is to do! Adoption is accomplished through sales management coaching in the field, specifically by conducting deal reviews that encourage and support sellers as they adapt and apply sales-relevant skills. In addition, many sales managers will link the application of new skills to pipeline management and sales forecasting.

In this way, for example, the pipeline not only tells you how a sales situation is progressing, in terms of activities, but also indicates whether you are winning or losing. So, within a region or district, the skills become locally institutionalized. Having said that, the effectiveness of a Level 2 sales infrastructure will vary as sales managers vary. Having established proof of concept in two or three regions, the next step is to link the application of key sales skills to companywide sales practices. This brings you to Level 3 of the sales infrastructure.

Level 3: Creating Sustainable Impact

It is at this level that executives start infusing these integrated skills throughout the organization. Here are just a few of the best practices we’ve seen.

Sales Process

• Pipeline Management: Advancing from one phase of the pipeline to another requires that certain compete activities take place. For example, as a gating requirement, the Fox would need to be identified before you enter the proposal stage.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Opportunity and account plans are automated to make the skills easier to implement and manage. Because these tools produce insight for the seller, the traditional use of the CRM may increase as well.

Marketing

• Value Statements: The marketing team catalogs industry-specific expressions of value to assist sellers in moving up the Sales Value Chain.
• Competitive Intelligence: Here, example Competitive Differentiation Analysis matrixes are produced for primary competitors to assist sellers in formulating a Compete Strategy for specific deals.

Human Resources (HR)

• Compensation: The HR team links compensation to key selling behaviors in order to motivate and recognize Stage III and IV success.
• Hiring: Here, the required core competencies that drive the right behaviors are integrated with the recruiting and selection process to better identify, hire, and retain Stage III and IV sellers.

Finance

• Bid and Proposal Funding: The finance and sales management teams work together to establish opportunity qualification criteria to justify the cost of a sales pursuit in order to ensure the right amount of focus on the right deals.

Three-Level Sales Performance Infrastructure

The result is a company infrastructure that doesn’t end with isolated sales training, but rather a three-level sales performance system that advances sellers to relevance with strong adoption that becomes sustainable. This approach is summarized in Figure E.2.

Figure E.2 Three-Level Sales Performance System

This system first elevates sellers to become Customer Advisors. Then it scales up their number in a sustainable manner that produces an enterprise asset for the company. This is an asset that builds on the product, technology, service levels, and the company’s reputation to provide unprecedented customer value and high win rates. An asset that is tangible, but that stems from the intangibles!

Conclusion

As a Customer Advisor, or someone with the potential to become one, you have a voice and a responsibility. If you can see your future success, you can see the kind of support system required to assist you and others, as we have introduced with the three-level sales performance system. Use this book to quickly reach your potential, but then help others. Many sellers will not make it to Stage IV on their own. They have ability and commitment, but will need help. As a high performer, your voice will be heard.

Be the spark within your company to elevate the sales profession to that of a management science, providing Unexpected Value to your customers, beyond product, price, and brand, so that everybody wins—your customer, your company, you, and, over time, the selling profession.