Is this Social Selling? (A Rant)

To be honest I still struggle with a good definition for Social Selling; even though LinkedIn is telling me that my SSI is 82, not extremely high but in the top 1% percentile of my peer group and in the top 5% percentile of my network.

So today I cam across this e-mail where the use of LinkedIn as a tool is pretty obvious.
I am sure you must have seen similar e-mails as this example here below:

Objet : Saw you on LinkedIn, Christian

Hi Christian,

I hope you don’t mind me reaching out. I’m an executive at … and the former head of global recruiting for…..

I researched your profile on LinkedIn and was hoping to discuss with you an issue about which I’m sure you’re painfully aware: Hiring talent is at least as hard, if not harder than it’s ever been for recruiters today.

It’s no secret that most hiring processes are manual and use databases filled with stale, out-of-date data. In fact, it’s estimated that almost 80% of a recruiter’s time today is spent on low-value, repetitive, laborious tasks.

The result? In this market, the good hires are getting away, a fact a fast-growing business can ill-afford.

That’s why I’m reaching out. My company, …., provides an end-to-end hiring platform that finally allows busy recruiters to spend time on what matters most – building relationships with candidates and hiring the right people, faster.

We’re not another Applicant Tracking System (ATS), job board, or some hard-to-use software tool. Our solution really does the job – across 16 different hiring service functions. In fact, we provide the industry’s largest and most accurate database of both active and passive candidates anywhere.

Christian, if the pace of business requires that you find, nurture, evaluate and hire the right talent faster, let’s talk about how …..would work for you. Please let me know when you’re free to jump on the phone and I’ll get right back to you.

Best,

……
…..

If you would like me to remove c_a_maurer@ceoexpress.com from my outreach, please click here.

Is this social Selling?

The only thing social I can see here is that the sender found my contact details on LinkedIn instead of a phone book or another directory. Had the sender researched my profile, as pretended, it would be pretty clear that I am far from being an ideal target for what he has to offer.  

To me this is social selling like "lipstick on a pig" (Seth Godin).
It seems salespeople are not willing to learn. They just transpose their ineffective behavior to the next new fad.

I would be interest in your opinion on this.

Do You Need a Sales-Consultant, -Coach or -Trainer ?

Is this differentiation necessary when you are looking for help with your initiative to increase sales productivity?

The fact that all three terms are listed on many LinkedIn profiles (mine included) can mean two things. Either, it suggests that the terms are taken as interchangeable and listing them all gives a higher chance to be found depending of the preferred term used by those seeking help. Or, these are three different roles.

I believe these are different roles needed for different phases in your initiative. I have listed them on my profile to indicate that I can assume all three roles.

Consultants

have a deep knowledge of their field. They have tools to diagnose the root causes of sales productivity problems. Based on the diagnosis, they can then design a therapy plan how to eliminate the detected inhibitors for higher sales productivity. They have a methodology how to do this. The therapy plans are based on modules that can be mixed and matched, extended or contracted depending on the diagnosis. Only few sales consultants stop their service offering at this level. Most of them will then also help with the execution of the therapy plan. They will then take on the roles of trainers and coaches.

Consultants are best engaged early in the initiative or when derailed initiatives need to be brought back on course.

Consultants can even help you deciding whether an initiative is needed or not. In this case, both parties must understand that the diagnosis is a free standing separately billable item and that the engagement might end after the diagnosis phase.

It might also be advisable to consider the development of the therapy plan as a separately payable free standing engagement. The customer then has a higher guarantee that the consultant is not just trying to peddle his/her teaching and coaching services and will recommend third parties if this improves the execution of the plan.

The term consultant is also used for people giving you advise how to implement a prepackaged, methodology , process or piece of software to improve sales productivity. Their diagnostics are geared to confirm the fit between their solution and a problem. Getting help from this type of consultants in early phases of an initiative bears the risk, that they might see every problem as a “nail”, because the only tool they have is a “hammer” (their particular offering).

Trainers

have internalized a body of knowledge (best practices) how to improve sales efficiency and/or effectiveness. They transfer their knowledge to their trainees through lecturing, case studies, tests and practical exercises. They do this in classrooms, interactive web based sessions or a blended combination which might also include self paced learning modules. They have their own intellectual property (body of knowledge) or are certified to use the material proprietary to a third party.

Organizations not wanting to use consultants to carry out a diagnosis to help shape their initiative and engaging trainers only and maybe consultants advising on the use of a particular solution, rely on a self diagnosis of the problems. They must accept that the cause for potential failure of the initiative is not always the training. It is as likely that the failure is caused by a superfluously carried out diagnosis or by jumping prematurely to conclusions.

Coaches

have an intimate knowledge what best practice behavior, leading to higher efficiency and/or effectiveness looks like. They observe those to be coached in real life situations or role plays or they review outputs (e.g. plans) and identify gaps between what they observe and best practice. They then advise the person to be coached what behavior changes are needed to get closer to best practice. Coaching is usually an iterative process. The coach will observe how well the advise is internalized and has improved behavior and will recommend further changes if gaps are still significant. This loop will be repeated until gaps have disappeared or have at least reached a tolerable level.

For a coach to be effective, there must be an agreement between the customer and the coach, what best practices had previously been taught and need reinforcement.

Using trainers who taught best practices as coaches,assures knowledge about the best practices to be reinforced. Knowing how to train best practices does though not mean automatically also knowing how to coach best practices. There is a difference in approach. Trainers used as coaches might also earlier come to the conclusion that gaps are so huge that refresher training or re-training is needed before coaching can be effective.

Conclusion

Distinguishing the three roles and understanding which role is needed when in a sales productivity improvement initiative and what the prerequisites are, gives a higher certainty for a successful outcome.

Within each role, there are though also variants to be considered. Ignoring these variants, might also cause the initiative not delivering the expected results

When you seek help to improve sales productivity, do you make the distinction of roles?

How would you describe these roles?

Do you have experience on this topic you would like to share?

How the C-Level Makes or Breaks Sales Performance

Sales performance is at its lowest in years. When thinking about remedies, the first thought usually goes towards initiatives, mostly in the form of training,  focused on sales people helping them to increase their performance in this 'new normal' that seems to emerge.

The 'new normal'

Undoubtedly, sales people need to adapt their skills to this 'new normal'. One of the key characteristics of this new era is that people are much more concerned about spending their money wisely. With respect to traditional sales performance improvement initiatives, this poses though a major problem. Many of those initiatives, often in the form of outsourced training, have not delivered the desired results in the past. How can we increase the likelihood that new urgently needed sales performance initiatives, have a more sustainable effect; even though budgets are tighter than ever. My proposal is to first look at how the C-level ( e.g. Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Sales Officer) impacts sales effectiveness.

The C-level's impact

Many executives on the C-level are not consciously aware of how they impact sales performance. Others have a misconception about the role they play in the sales process. Studies show that, for example, a high percentage of C-level executives consider themselves knowledgeable about the customers of their company. The percentage of field sales people, confirming this perception, is though very much lower. The same pattern emerges when looking at the question how the C-level is involved in the sales process. Again executives rate their involvement much higher than it is perceived by the field.

As a matter of fact, it is probably more likely that fundamentally, C-level executives have a hands off attitude towards sales. Many are guided by the principle “I just care about the revenue, it is sales's job to figure out how to make it”. Yet in contrast to this general attitude, the same executives start to show behavior of micro management when it comes to large deals. This is why they think they are involved in the sales process. Their understandable concern whether the deal can be booked still in a given quarter is perceived by the field that only the numbers count. This behavior goes to the detriment of the sustainability of sales effectiveness initiatives. It is the expression that an outcome based sales force control system is prevailing. Sales effectiveness is however improved by changing behavior. To track and reinforce the behavior change, a behavior based sales force control system is needed. As the companies quarterly figures might though depend on this large deal to close, executives towards the end of the quarter, tend to see the situation as a crises and revert to a command and control management approach. Behavior based sales force control systems though are based on a coaching approach. Fear about not making the number lets executives ignore evidence that others, using behavioral based sales force control systems, are experiencing better and more sustainable outcomes.

What does it have to do with sales performance?

Not only does this focus on large deals shed some doubt on a company's ability to produce sustainable revenue streams if every quarter, their results depend on these big deals. This management approach certainly goes to the detriment of the sustainability of any sales effectiveness initiative. Paradoxically, when you talk to executives, they are often telling you that they are convinced about the need and the usefulness of sales people being coached by their managers. They sometimes even show disappointment about the little coaching managers provide to their sale people.

Managers often are not doing enough coaching because they have never been trained in coaching. Providing training on coaching for sales managers can though just increase the misalignment. There is therefore a high likelihood that the training will not show any sustainable effects. 
 

Where to start a sales performance improvement initiative?

Managers are faced with a constant struggle to balance the people focus (coaching, sustainability) with the business focus (urgency, short term). How can one expect a 'coaching initiative' to fall on fertile ground if the executive level continues to inspect just revenue. For such an initiative having a sustainable effect, a mind shift at the executive level is needed . Executives should recognize their duty to consciously supporting the managers in finding that balance between people orientation and business orientation. This should not be too hard in principal. Successful executives have learned to think in 'and' concept, rather than in 'either or'. How will such a mind shift become evident? When they start inspecting people related parameters besides revenue. It could well be that executives might need help achieving this mind shift and learning what to inspect. Money spent on this help has certainly the highest leverage effect compared to just pouring money into the next sales effectiveness initiative on the individual contributors level.

Should you be interested in knowing more about the impact of the C-level on sales performance and what to do about it, you can follow this link,

How Do You Know Your Sales Effectiveness Initiative Is Successful?

To determine the success of a sales effectiveness initiative, you need to define measurable objectives and a baseline where you currently stand relative to these objectives. The most common objective use to measure success is a revenue objective. It can easily be measured. So can the base line easily be established. Yet judging the success of the initiative by the attainment of the revenue objective, can lead to much debate. According to “The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance” by Andris A. Zoltners et al. the degree to which a sales force can influence revenue varies widely. This source also warns about using only one indicator (e.g. revenue per sales person) to measure performance.

Donal Daily in a recent post on the Sales 2.0 Network blog, has suggested to also include 'non revenue objectives' when judging the success of sales effectiveness initiatives. Examples given for such objectives were among others : Better qualification or common sales language across the organization.. The reasons given for this suggestions are very plausible. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Especially when your revenue creation requires long sales cycles, it is too late for corrective actions with short term effect when you notice a deviation from the revenue objective. Tracking the behavior of the sales people through 'non-revenue' objectives along the sales cycle has a bigger chance for corrective actions impacting the outcome on short term..

Yet, I doubt that result oriented sales leaders would buy into this concept. They believe in outcome based sales force control systems. You recognize this type of leader by their actions They try to push sales people to higher performance by aggressive quota setting, lucrative incentives and tough and frequent forecast reviews.

Even with sales leaders seeing the value of the alternative use of behavioral based sales force control systems, I would not recommend the objectives as stated. As the objectives are not measurable, the success of an initiative is solely determined how these leaders judge 'better qualification' and 'common language'. of the cited 'non-revenue' objectives.

What is needed is the transformation of these qualitative objectives into measurable leading indicators that sales leaders can accept as being unambiguous with respect to their impact on productivity. Presenting a logic how these productivity indicators can lead to higher revenue, might further help with their acceptance. To stay with the example of 'a common language'; establishing a common language shortens the time sales managers need for example for deal reviews. Reports adhering to a standard template can be interpreted faster than reports structured as every salespersons feels best. Salespeople also profit from this gain in time. They spend less time in review meetings explaining their deals they are working on to sales management.

How this time (productivity) gain influences revenue is though up to managers and sales people. If managers use the freed up time for coaching and salespeople use the extra time for meaningful interactions with clients, it is plausible that at term this will lead to higher revenue. There are also many studies demonstrating the higher impact on performance of behavioral based sales force control systems compared to outcome based systems. Sales leader adhering to this type of systems should now be able to accept this additional objectives.

For people primarily adhering to outcome based sales force control systems, an extra effort is needed. They will first have to accept results of such studies and include at least some behavioral elements into their control systems before they will be able to better track the success of their sales effectiveness initiatives.

I am curious what practitioners have to say on this topic.

How 2500 Sales Leaders Intend to Improve Sales Performance of Their Troops

CSO Insights just published their The Sales Performance Optimization 2010 Survey Results and Analysis Report which this year captures and consolidates the opinion of more that 2500 respondents to the survey.
As a customer focused sales effectiveness consultant, I always look first at the section of the report providing the list of initiatives CSOs plan to undertake to improve the performance of their troops. I find this a valuable orientation to check whether the offerings of my practice are in line with market trends. Although, I very much appreciate the insight comments provided in the report together with the data, I like to form also my own opinion by just looking on the data itself.
Looking at the list of initiatives ranked in importance in the 2010 report and comparing it to the same list in the 2009 report, there are three trends catching my particular attention.

Increased Process Orientation

What struck me first were the changes in ranking of initiatives in the upper middle of the table. The initiative «Analyze customer buy process» has moved up in rank and is now considered more important than «Revise Sales Process» I consider this a very positive trend which fits well with what I have believed for years. Improving performance requires an understanding of the processes leading to the results with which performance is measured. Furthermore, I am a long term advocate that sales processes must be aligned with how customers want to buy. So ranking the initiative of understanding these buy processes higher in importance than revising one’s sales process makes all the sense for me. Maybe it is also an indication, that the sales leader community finally acknowledges the fact, that Web 2.0 has a far reaching impact on how customers buy.

Access to knowledge repositioned

The second remarkable trend to me is the ‘relegation’ in importance of the initiative «Improve Reps access to information» to just below «Revising Sales process». Although I have invested quite some time and effort to expand the capabilities of my practice in the Sales Enablement domain a solution which can answer such initiatives, I am not unhappy about this trend. I take it that sales leaders have become more realistic and do no longer take Sales Enablement as the next silver bullet. I do not believe that this new ranking can be interpreted that the considerable drain on sales peoples’ time to search and adapt information to suit a particular sales situation has diminished. Thus the negative impact on performance is still the same. I take this new ranking rather as an expression, that for Sales Enablement to serve its purpose: Increasing the ‘situational fluency’ of sales people, it must be put in the context of the buying process and the corresponding sales process.

More focus on Sales & Marketing Collaboration

The third observation is about the increase of importance of the initiative «More closely align Sales & Marketing» which now ranks second directly behind what remains to be considered the most important initiative «Revise lead generation».
This must be good news to Chief Marketing Officers who are increasingly held accountable for business results. They should now find a more open ear with their CSO counterparts. This also confirms my believe, that CSOs seeking top performance can no longer ignore marketing. My continued investment in improving my capabilities is thus timely to support CSOs wanting to implement such initiatives.
Lead generation remaining the top initative is of some concern to me. The fact that this initative has the highest priority for the fifth consecutive year now, indicates first, that the ranking has probably little to do with the current economic situation. To me it is more an indication, that CSOs and CMOs for that matter, are handed down a target revenue number from the CEO, COO,  CFO level  mainly taking into account share holder value aspects. CSOs seem to continue to believe that for meeting those targets, most attention should be given on filling the funnel on the top. It is my hope that the increased focus on process aspects will lead sales leaders to the conclusion that there might be other means to increase revenue by getting more out of what you have (i.e. increase velocity and conversion rate of opportunities).
Another way to do more with the same could be by ’lead recycling’. This is probably the most promising area where CSOs and CMOs can start collaborating and learn how they can leverage each others capabilities in a very pragmatic low risk manner.
The Sales Performance Optimization 2010 Survey Results and Analysis Report by CSO Insights is thus as thought provoking as ever and is a must read for anybody concerned with sales performance.
To me personally, the report provided assurance, that my practice is well prepared to help Sales Leaders implementing the initiatives they consider most important for improving sales performance.
You can get the report on CSO Insights’ website at http://www.csoinsights.com/Publications/Shop/Sales-Performance-Optimization

Sales does not use our Marketing Assets

There is hardly any CMO not having complained about this. It is nothing new but in today's economic environment, this can be a serious threat to their career. Marketing programs in college often don't focus on inter-departmental relationships. Yet strong communication and efficiency across departments can have numerous positive outcomes. On the other side, poor or non-existent relations between a sales and marketing team can mean leaving quality assets untapped.Producing assets that are not used is a waste of money. My conservative estimate is that this waste could easily amount to 10% of the marketing investment in people and programs. This is probably not a wise thing to do when CMOs are increasingly held accountable by CEOs about their contribution they make to the business

In my Masterclass “Why do Salespeople Make Little Use of Marketing Assets” on August 20, 2009 at 11 a.m. US Eastern, 4 p.m. UK, 17:00 CET, I will discuss why this is, and what can be done to increase usage. The slides used for this Masterclass  can now be found here.

You might wonder why a consultant focusing on sales effectiveness cares about this and what recommendations he can make to solve this marketing issue.

I am interested in the question for the the same reason why also CSO's (Chief Sales Officers) should be concerned. Not using marketing assets negatively impacts sales effectiveness. It is not that sales would not need such materials. One reason for not using them is simply because they are not aware of what is available and how it could forward their sales campaign. So they might create something on the fly. If sales people are aware of the assets, they find that these often do not fit with the need of the salesperson for a particular sales call. Salespeople spend time to create or adapt those assets to their needs which is time not spend with the customers. We are speaking about several hours per week.

My personal experience about this misalignment between sales and marketing comes from coaching strategic key account teams. Very often, when I ask the question whether they have considered Marketing as a resource they can leverage for the formulation and execution of their key account plans, I get a a blank stare or I draw a laughter.

As a former head of a solution practice in a boutique consulting firm, it was in my remit to create marketing assets. Through this, I gained some practical experience how to create them so that sales people made use of them. That is also when I started to use the term Marketing Assets instead of Marketing Collateral. This might seems dwelling in semantics.
To me however it is the symptom of a mind set.

If you are interested in a methodologically sound but pragmatic approach to help bridging some of the marketing and sales divide, you can join me

In my Masterclass “Why do Salespeople Make Little Use of Marketing Assets” on August 20, 2009 at 11 a.m. US Eastern, 4 p.m. UK, 17:00 CET. Readers of this blog can register for free.

Guest author Ian Brodie on diminished returns to sales calls

In today's business climate, sales organizations think that they have to increase their activities to counteract the increased reluctance of customers to buy. These increased activities will however not necessarily be rewarded by higher revenue.One might end up trying to get more juice from an already squeezed out lemon. Read below the thoughts of Ian Brodie, triggered by my mentioning of diminishing returns to sales calls in a previous post:

“A few years ago I was involved in some consulting work for a large pharma company where we used Operational Research techniques to try to identify the optimum call frequency for doctors. Normally you can’t do this in Europe because you don’t know the exact number of drugs prescribed by each physician (only the number of prescriptions picked up in pharmacies in postcode “bricks”). But in our case we could – it was vaccines delivered and used at each clinic so we knew exactly what the demand was and could correlate it to the sales calls.

Traditionally, the company had concentrated on calls to high prescribing physicians. Any extra resources it had it put into more calls to these physicians.

But our statistical analysis identified that after about 10-12 calls per year to this group, additional calls made no difference. They had heard the message and bough in to it – any extra calls were just “preaching to the converted”.

In contrast, there was a distinct segment of physicians who were typically younger and early on in their careers, and who prescribed less – but an extra visit to those physicians generated a significant increase in sales.

Then finally there was a group that no matter how many times you visited they weren’t going to prescribe your product.

The company ended up diverting resource from both the non-prescribers and some from the over-visited high prescribers to the middle “high response” segment – and sales went up by nearly 20% - a huge leap in the competitive pharmaceutical world.

I still see today many segmentation models being used which aim to put the most resources to the “biggest” customers – not necessarily matching resource with where the highest response may come from.”

Let me add another spin to Ian's conclusion: While not all sales organizations will be in the fortunate position to produce such hard evidence to segment their territories, all can develop a certain level of understanding where to focus activities on. The first step is though to be willing to break away from some “handed down management wisdom” like bigger is better or that increased activities lead to a higher chance of making the numbers.

If you want to read more from Ian Brodie, you can visit his blog Sales Excellence.

Life Line for Sales Executives

Most sales leaders are currently faced with a big dilemma. On one hand they have to painfully admit that their teams are probably not apt to be successful in the tough current market context. This is not surprising. It happens every time after a phase where demand was high and covered over deficits in selling capabilities of teams.

On the other hand, It is also normal that in tough times budgets to improve sales effectiveness, although needed more than ever, are tighter. Despite the recommendations of many experts that sales efforts should not be reduced to assure survival of the company, leaders often have no choice but to adjust selling cost to reflect current expectation of market evolution.

These experts are not short in quoting studies indicating the advantage of a counter cyclic behavior with respect to sales efforts They recommend that it is now the time to invest in sales effectiveness. Justifying such investments is however very difficult in belt tightening times. The impression is widespread that past massive investments in such initiatives have not shown the expected returns. It is thus understandable if sales executives and their superiors are very hesitant to follow such recommendations and ask themselves why the outcomes should be different with a new initiative. The danger however is real that not addressing sales capabilities issues might further endanger the sustainability and even the existence of an enterprise.

An alternative way to improve sales effectiveness

Looking for causes that lead to t he impression that past initiatives to improve sales effectiveness did not show the expected results helps us to find an alternative approach.

Here are some reasons leading to the impression of unsuccessful sales effectiveness initiatives:

• Potential improvements were not measured at all or with inadequate indicators.

• Initiatives were structured as training events suffering from the Hawthorne effect

• Managers were rarely enabled to integrate new methods and approaches, taught to their troops, into their daily management practice.

• Most sales managers even had never any specific training for their job. They copy what they saw their bosses doing at the time. The methods observed might have been already questionable at the time. The danger of them being inadequate to face today's context is even higher.

Sales Management as the primary target

Focusing on the sales management as the core of a transformation initiative for improved sales effectiveness seems therefore a plausible alternative approach.

Not only is the initiative primarily aimed at sales leadership more affordable than addressing sales people; as there are fewer managers than sales people. Focusing on the managers can also improve sustainability of the initiative. Analyzing failed sales effectiveness initiatives often revealed that sales leadership was the primary cause of failure since they had not adapted their practice to new methods and approaches taught by external organizations to their sales people. Training the sales management on how to adapt to new methods should be considered a minimum but is often omitted due to budgetary constraints. These constraints can however be overcome by enabling sales management to introduce these methods to their teams by themselves. This approach not only dramatically increases sustainability of sales effectiveness initiative, because they now have to give active and visible support to the initiative, enabling sales managers as multipliers also allows for much faster deployment of an initiative. Rapid implementation is particularly essential in though times where improvements are needed fast.

Accompanying the initiative with an adequate set of success metrics seems to go without saying to avoid problems of justifying future initiatives which seems to be inevitable to keep up capabilities in ever changing environments.