Lessons From Start-Ups on Improving Sales Productivity Despite Uncertainties

These days, selling Business-to-Business can seem like risky business. CSO Insights' latest Sales Performance Report notes that in 2009 the percentage of reps making quota dropped to 51.8% from 58.8% a year earlier. The response? Most firms have increased quotas for 2010, seemingly hoping that an improved economy will be the tide that raises performance. In CSO Insights' view, it's a risky approach prone to fail unless other things occur.

The right interventions to improve sales productivity seem equally uncertain. New sales compensation models? Re-organizations of sales operations? New technologies? Sales training? One of the challenges to buyers is that these choices tend to be silo-ed silver bullets which, when shot, end up being advocated most by those who've shot them. There's no independent proof that the chosen tactic had more impact than any other tactic would have had.

So, what's one to do? In my view, there's value in thinking like a successful start-up. For start-ups, uncertainty is a given; the trick is drive down the risks arising from uncertainty. From Eric Ries's thoughtful post on balancing process and innovation, these best practices emerge:

• ACCELERATE LEARNING.
  The speed at which a startup can learn is its competitive advantage and the defining factor in its success. Any change that accelerates learning is a win, and everything else is waste
• MEASURE CUSTOMER-VALIDATING THINGS.
  Startups measure their firms' impacts based on customers' experiences. They do so in ways that create a common measurement language for all members of their team. This eliminates risks that different parts of a firm's team "learn" in their own private reality. It lets teams, when facing difficult choices, come together and make informed, fact-based, decisions.
• TRIGGER LEARNING VIA FEEDBACK.
  The faster feedback on customer experiences arrives, the better. The feedback loop between taking an action and seeing the results should be as short as possible. To provoke learning, simplicity matters. Reports that bury users in data won't affect behaviors. Simple ones will. It's not about how much data you can store. It's about how much learning you can provoke.

In short, there's great value to firms in gaining fast feedback on impacts of their actions, delivered simply with actionable metrics, based on customer behaviors, that trigger learning. Doing so makes more predictable the impacts of actions taken in the face of uncertainties. It eliminates the risk of making the same mistakes over and over again. It builds craftsmanship.

These lessons from start-ups have legs. Look at what successful firms did through past recessions to grow their market shares and you'll find these same themes.

When Conversations Are the Key to Success, Why Bother With a Keyboard?

Conversations have always been a key to my career success. Since 1981, I've used keyboards to support conversations, often with folks working a long distance from Vancouver. Email and other forms of on-line messaging became a way of conversing with key people who were normally very hard to reach.

It came as a bit of surprise to me this week when a really bright, highly valued, colleague suggested that writing wasn't very important in sales, and it was becoming less important.

My reliance on my keyboard as part of my conversations hasn't really changed in 30 years. Letting busy people choose if and when they'd like to re-engage in conversation with me. Proving that I've listened to them. Offering my perspectives. Making an honest effort to contribute value to those who I'm conversing with (much as Neil Rackham advocates). Waiting for proof that I've succeeded in my efforts via some feedback (like a reply email).

In 1993, I asked a senior executive of a Gas Utility if he could ever foresee their industry using the Internet as part of their business. Not a chance he said. Three years later, he asked for my help in a presentation to the CEO's of Canada's gas distribution firms on that very topic. Two years after that, we proudly helped their firm create an on-line conversation with regulators and the public that led to approvals for their firm's construction of a new natural gas pipeline. This happened despite many underlying route complexities, including environmental and first nations concerns. We used keyboards, for a first time, as part of their conversation.

Throughout all this, the importance of engaging the public and regulators in a dialogue on the merits of the project never changed. What did change was the means to that end. We found a way to improve the odds of success by giving valuable communications added amplitude and speed via clever uses of emerging technologies. Keyboards became a trigger for conversations, not a replacement for them.

The approach worked, in my view, because the fundamental work never changed. It felt familiar to those who were doing it, we'd just instrumented it a little differently. Users gained feedback on how well (or not) they were engaging target audiences in the dialogue we knew had to occur. They got that feedback fast. This required added agility in how we participated in the conversations we'd invited. We needed to respond in a fashion that proved we were actually listening. When we did, it seeded feedback reinforcing that we were on the right track. Success became more predictable.

At the end of the day, everyone involved looked at each other and couldn't believe what we'd collectively accomplished. We'd triggered more conversations, quickly, with the help of keyboards. We'd triggered more good conversations, quickly, with the help of feedback that let us make mistakes, then discover and fix them fast.

This was 17 years after I'd begun learning how to support conversations with a keyboard. It's now 12 years later,
and I'm still learning how to do so.

For me, the keyboard's role in triggering conversations
is still the same.

The screen's just a little different.

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.