In Sales Productivity, Velocity Matters

Learned this week of a sales manager who's raised the white flag for 2010 after one month's sales effort. Her team's January numbers were down 22% over last January and for 2010 their firm's looking for 18% growth over last year.

The good news? There's still 11 months to go. The bad news? The specific things that she and her team might do to course-correct for the rest of the year aren't clear. Worse than that, it may take a few months to detect the impacts on future sales of their course-correcting tactics. If they get it wrong, they'll have that much less time in which to try other things, then even less time remaining in which to detect whether or not their latest tactics have 'turned the tide'.

This manager's situation underscores how velocity matters. Victor Cheng notes that one of the keys to recession-proofing a business is to shrink decision cycles. In sales, this requires sharper, faster, feedback on the impacts of sales efforts. With it, sales leaders can detect, quickly, whether or not a tactic is working. If it isn't working, there's still plenty of time left in which to try other tactics and strive for more impact.

Faster decision cycles in sales create two advantages: lowered costs of mistakes and enhanced craftsmanship in sales practices. As Clayton Christensen notes, those who fail fast, gain much - fear of failure is surpassed with a curiosity to succeed and the learned skills with which to do so.

11 months to go? Bring it on.

The Value of Social Media in Triggering Sales Productivity

Sociable! is a new bible on how firms are profiting from their uses of Social Media. The authors - Shane Gibson and Steve Jagger - are both entrepreneurs + seasoned sales professionals. They're hard wired to only do things that deliver a positive return on effort. This makes their perspectives on social media useful pointers on the little things one can do using social media to improve sales productivity. Specifically:

ON CONNECTING
Social Media are all about connecting conversationally with folks who you might otherwise never have the opportunity to connect with. Such media can, when used properly, create connections and shrink distances and do both, quickly. Social Media are an opportunity to stop pitching + start connecting. In a conversation economy, there’s a huge need for conversation engendering ways of doing business. Used successfully, they create a dialogue. ‘Me’ focused conversations will fail. When you master the art of conversational connecting, you’ll thaw the cold call or cold event.

ON BEING A LEADER IN BEING SOCIABLE
Social Media are new + create new opportunities for thought leadership. Those who emerge as thought leaders will be able to harness the power of the crowd.

Real thought leaders are exceptionally helpful. They make it easy for influencers to digest and evaluate information. Thought leaders don’t make their colleagues do mundane work – they do it for them.

As you seek to be helpful to others, be authentic. Most people work on a relationship to get a deal, but the relationship is the deal.

Measure your success as a thought leader thoughtfully. With Twitter, it’s not about the number of followers. With LinkedIn, it’s not about your number of connections. In both cases, what matters is the number of relationships. Becoming a thought leader isn’t about getting referrals … it’s about becoming referable.

ON BEING ENORMOUSLY SUCCESSFUL
Social media bring not only the potential to connect, but also the potential to learn, quickly, how to most effectively connect. The reason: the feedback mechanisms such media provide. Use those feedback mechanisms to discover how successfully you are connecting and, then, be prepared to be wrong. Expect to make mistakes + learn when you do. When you’re pioneering uses of social media, there are no set rules for avoiding mistakes. Failure is part of the process of becoming successful. If you do make a mistake, don’t be afraid to apologize. It’s part of learning. It’s part of being authentic.

Shane and Steve offer rules for profiting from Social Media which are simple and sensible. Their rules are also authentic, backed by numerous stories of the successes enjoyed by those who’ve lived by them.

If you're wondering about how using Social Media might improve your sales productivity, read what Shane and Steve have discovered. Then sign-on to Social Media. The hit send. At that point, your journey will begin. With their book as a guide, the journey will be a rewarding one.


+++++++
These points are what I discovered from a first read of Sociable! The wisdom in these discoveries is the authors'. The mistakes, if any, are mine. FYI, the 1st chapter's available for free download from here

Triggering Sales Productivity by Understanding Return-on-Effort

There is much talk these days of a need for better, deeper, integration of marketing and sales. In my view, it’s desperately needed, but must be done in ways that address the underlying reason why executives are demanding it – they want a higher return on investment (ROI) from marketing and sales. At its core, this requires finding ways to improve the return-on-effort (ROE) in sales.

In recent years, marketing automation, sales enablement, and Sales 2.0 tools have helped marketing and sales teams be more informed and efficient. Despite these advances, declines in sales productivity continue (according to CSO Insights, quota attainment declined, again, in 2009). There’s a need for marketing and sales to combine expertise and resources in new ways that actually fix this underlying sales productivity problem. In my view, this requires that marketing and sales find ways to create:

• more helpful selling processes
• simpler, smarter, user experiences for sales reps
• better metrics on the impacts of sales efforts

From my perspective, new buyer-centric (self-service) sales models have negatively affected the buyer experience. Ask someone who's trying to buy something from another business today to identify the thing that's hardest for them to find these days and they'll tell you it's ... help. Now that help is a scarce resource, if it’s offered in abundance by sales people to prospects who’d most appreciate it, I believe prospects will notice. In noticing, my bet is that prospects will do something extraordinary - they'll engage in the process. They'll take the sales rep's calls. In doing so, they’ll reward sales effort with a buyer impact. It’s an important first step.

The second key to improving sales productivity is to deliver much simpler views of the massively useful information now available. Today, in many sales teams, there’s an all-you-can eat 24/7 information buffet in play. There’s so much work to be done, and so much information available with which to do it, that important callbacks aren’t occurring. Often it’s because sales people don’t have the time to call. In some cases, they’re flooded with so much information that they’re missing opportunities to re-engage with interested prospects.

In my experience, the more information sales reps have the less of it they'll ever consume. Barry Trailer's noted the same in CSO Insight's formula for sales productivity. What's needed therefore are interfaces that reduce the flow of information to sales people and add some smarts to the information that’s flowing. What’s needed are interfaces that make it much easier for sales people to understand everything that's going on and then choose, wisely, where best to invest their efforts. In my experience, when Sales Reps’ can make smart choices, easily, of what to do next, and with whom, their efforts have more impact. It’s an important second step.

The third key to improving sales productivity is measuring, in the aggregate, the impacts of selling efforts. In my view we've come to a point where our ability to measure content consumption and do clever things with it (like lead scoring) is really impressive. Being helpful, however, requires sales conversations, not just content consumption. In my view, this requires new metrics that reveal the impact of conversational sales efforts. Metrics which reveal, for instance:

• How many good sales conversations the sales team is having every day (based on what prospects go on to do after a sales conversation ends)
• Behavior-based conversions of prospects through the sales funnel. This means a shift away from measuring, for instance, how many quotes the sales team produced today to measuring, instead, how many prospects read quotes today.
• What marketing and sales activities are triggering the highest and fastest impacts from sales efforts.

When it's clear what impacts conversational sales efforts are having, marketing and sales will improve impacts, together. Silos between marketing and sales will disappear. They'll innovate in ways that improve sales productivity. It's an important third step.

I’ve been privileged to witness the impacts on sales productivity of doing these three things, and doing them all at once. They’re seeding improvements in the return-on-effort for both marketing and sales. It’s what keeps me coming into the office every day.

The Scientific Advantage of Improving Sales Productivity

Improving the productivity of an existing sales team holds enormous promise for new competitive advantages. A recent HBR article on the New Science of Sales Productivity hints at the scope of the achievable.

The authors provide a useful comparison of two approaches to achieving an 80% growth in sales over 5 years - a 'capacity' focus relying on additional sales hires to hit the sales target vs. a 'productivity' focus relying on teasing higher sales productivity from the existing team.

They conclude that an existing sales team that achieves an 8% annual improvement in their productivity will generate the same sales growth as a team that adds 27% more reps. This ignores, of course, the added costs of recruiting and training new reps.

In their view, such productivity improvements are now enabled when sales leaders implement systems around the art of selling that provide data, analyses, processes, and tools that shrink the performance gap between top performers and the rest of the sales team.

Perhaps there are, now, better ways to drive sales productivity than merely admonishing reps to work harder. They found that firms using sales productivity improving systems are typically seeing gains of 30% in sales revenues per rep within two - three years.

A summary of their comparative estimates of impact:

Are Your Prospect Experiences Productive Ones?

It amazes me how much one can learn about the tricks to B2B sales productivity by being prospected by someone else. I recently attended a trade show, had a pleasant chat with a vendor rep in one of the booths, then 'got scanned'.

A couple of weeks later, our sales desk received a call (in the middle of a sales meeting). One of our colleagues dipped out to take the call. When she lifted the receiver, there was no one at the other end of the line so she hung up. Thirty seconds later, my phone rang and (given the sales meeting had already been disrupted), I took the call. It was an Account Exec from the vendor and (apparently) not anyone I'd spoken to in the booth. While I wasn't rude (or at least worked at not being so), I did make it clear that this wasn't the most convenient time to chat. The call ended with no attempt by the Rep to be helpful by scheduling a callback or offering to help in any other way.

A few days later, I got another call. From the same vendor, but a different Account Executive who, also, I'd never met. This time, I explained I knew someone at the firm and would probably follow-up with them. At that point, I was effectively dropped (politely) like a hot potatoe.

In both cases, I walked away feeling like here were two well meaning sales professionals who connected with me (audibly) yet missed an opportunity to really connect with me substantively.

Add it all up, and you have a prospect experience that wasn't very helpful. Neil Rackham's take on how to sell in tough economic times is the antithesis of this kind of activity-completing experience. Rackham advocates being exceptionally helpful, often unexpectedly; it will trigger prospects to engage in 'the conversation'.

Are your prospect experiences activity-completing ones for your sales people, or helpful ones for your sales prospects? If you were the prospect, which type would you rather participate in?