Transforming Sales Manager

Webinar: Making Sales Managers Your Most Valuable Enablement Resource

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Sales enablement initiatives have the potential to drive exceptional sales performance. However, the most critical link in the sales enablement value chain is often missed, resulting in mediocre impact, or even failed programs. Transforming sales managers to sales coaches has the potential to supercharge all other enablement initiatives and drive exceptional results.

During this session, Axiom partner Bob Sanders will show why sales managers are the most critical resource in sales enablement initiatives. He’ll also share Axiom’s GUIDE model, which helps sales enablement transform managers from super sellers and compliance officers to exceptional coaches.

Sales Interaction

3 Steps to Radically Improve Sales Engagement and Business Results

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Here’s an exercise you can do right now to check on the effectiveness of your existing sales engagements. Start by pulling a report of the Top 20 opportunities in your organization, and then go line by line and see if you can answer the following questions.

  1. What is the probability we will win this business? And is that answer based on the seller’s gut feel, what is automatically generated by your CRM based on the sales stage, or what you know about the prospective customer?
  2. Who in the prospect’s organization is involved in making this decision, what role will each person play and, and what influence will each evaluator have on the ultimate decision?
  3. Which alternatives are being considered and/or favored by these evaluators? Why are certain alternatives favored over others?
  4. What are the key business issues, and how are those issues affecting this decision?
  5. What criteria will they use to determine which alternative is best for their business?
  6. What steps are involved in their decision process, when will those steps take place and what is driving that timeline?

While there is little doubt this exercise would provide powerful insights about how your sellers are engaging with buyers, the unfortunate reality for most organizations is that this type of review will likely never happen. Why? Because this information, if it does exist, is being stored in either the mind or possibly on in the notes of individual salespeople. It isn’t in a form or location where it can be easily shared, let alone analyzed to see what’s missing. And therein lies one of the greatest obstacles to better sales engagements and dramatically higher win rates – not knowing what we know about our opportunities. Put another way:

It isn’t what we don’t know about an opportunity that kills us, it’s what we don’t know we don’t know.

You see, if we could conduct this review in an efficient manner, and if in doing so we realized we were missing key information, we could almost certainly (unless we are literally at the end of the buyer’s journey) go back and gather the information we are missing. In fact, most buyers don’t want to be sold, they want to be helped and we can’t help them if we don’t properly understand them. Therefore, most are quite willing to share more information, provided that information is being used to better help and serve them.

How Bad Does it Hurt?

  • Does it bother you that this kind of information — if it exists at all — only lives in your seller’s mind or personal notes?

  • Does it make you uncomfortable to think that if this person were to leave, so would all the information about that account and opportunity?

  • Does it pain you to think that the only way anyone can help this person win the sale and get better is to go through the tedious process of having them recall everything they know?

If the idea that such critical information might be getting missed in your sales engagements, or might walk out the door with a salesperson drives you nuts, we can absolutely relate. And if it makes you a bit uncomfortable, maybe even slightly nauseous to think about how time-consuming and ineffective opportunity reviews often are, believe me, we are right there with you!

Thankfully, there are ways to address the root cause of this problem and radically improve your sales engagement and business results.

Step 1 — Establish Common Information Objectives

The more we know about our prospective customers (what’s happening in their business, what they want to buy, how they determine who has it, etc.) the better our chances of winning the opportunities we can win. Maybe just as important, this information also gives us a chance to walk away from the business we can’t win without wasting our time or that of our prospects. Sadly, many organizations never get to the point where they can agree on what information they need in order to understand an opportunity. Naturally, this dramatically reduces their chance of developing individual and organizational effectiveness around eliciting important customer information.

To overcome this, establish a shared set of information objectives. To be clear, this shouldn’t simply be anything anyone believes they want to know, and it also shouldn’t be limited to a few important things your management team thinks you need to know. Instead, it should be everything you need to know to fully understand a sales opportunity — a static set of commonly understood terms and definitions that anyone can recite at any time.

You’ll want to get to the point where these terms and definitions become part of every conversation moving forward. Want a sample template for a comprehensive set of information objectives? Click here and we will send one to you free of charge, along with a note-taking tool to help people gather this information during their sales conversations.

Step 2 — Help People Gather, Analyze, and Leverage the Information

Next, provide your people with a tool, any tool, that can help them better gather, analyze, and leverage this information. Ideally, you will integrate this information into your CRM, however even a word form or printed note-taking tool is better than nothing at all. If you are planning to integrate into your CRM, the information entered must help your salespeople:

  • Work more effectively and efficiently.

  • Forecast quickly and accurately.

  • Win more business.

  • Create benefits for the seller and manager.

A couple important caveats here:

  1. Don’t expect your salespeople to type information into fields in your CRM … they won’t do it and there are better ways to leverage technology to capture what they do know, and perhaps more importantly do not know about their opportunities so that it can be used to help them.
  2. Avoid the temptation to punish people for what they don’t know. Instead create transparency and promote objectivity. If you beat people up for what they don’t know, they will likely make things up.

Step 3 — Provide Ongoing Learning and Coaching to Improve Skill and Knowledge

Once we have a common set of information objectives and we are leveraging them to help people better understand their opportunities, sales managers can begin helping the team become more proficient at engaging buyers and gathering this information. However, it is critical to understand the difference between the typical manager-seller conversations and truly productive coaching.

Most sales managers were promoted because they were great sellers. Therefore, their natural tendency is to do what they do best. This is why so many sales managers are really player-coaches who rely on team members to bird dog opportunities while the manager is deeply involved in working the deals. In other words, the manager is running the plays.

We want an environment where the managers have their sellers handling the sales engagement. Meanwhile, the manager is actively involved in developing the strategy. So rather than run the plays, they are calling the plays.

Better play calling improves performance. However, really maximizing results requires moving beyond calling plays to developing better players. Managers must be held accountable for diagnosing the root cause of performance gaps among their sellers and determining what corrective action or learning can be leveraged to shrink the gaps. Want more information on the model for effective sales coaching? Click here to download our Guide to Sales Coaching.

In an ideal world, the CRM or some other tool is available to help improve coaching conversations by:

  1. Making it easy and efficient for managers to identify potential performance gaps, even before they affect results.
  2. Giving the manager questions to ask or steps to follow to diagnose the root cause of any performance gaps.
  3. Presenting the appropriate learning activities based on the root cause and being able to assign these from the CRM.
  4. Tracking both coaching and learning to help you identify and help people who are struggling with these two critical behaviors.

When we settle on clearly defined information objectives and provide tools to help people better gather and analyze the information then use that information to coach and develop sellers, we can transform our sales conversations and dramatically improve sales results.

Want to learn more? Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

X-Ray of Broken Collarbone

Missed Sales Targets: How to Avoid the Crash

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I knew it was broken as soon as I hit the ground. My shoulder had shifted nearly two inches on impact, and now, sitting by the side of the road, I could feel my collarbone poking up from beneath my skin. Needless to say, the pain was unbearable. Just a few years earlier, I had begun riding as a knee problem was keeping me from my normal release of running. By now, I had become a full-on cycling enthusiast; or, according to my wife, an addict.

As a cyclist, you learn quickly that you fall into two groups — those who have crashed and those who will. I had just graduated from the latter to the former. And for the next eight weeks, I’d be in a sling. What’s crazy about the wreck, though, is how much clarity I had afterward about WHY I crashed. Looking back, I could see all the signs as if everything had happened in super slow motion. As I recalled the events in great detail, I reflected on the past two decades and the many conversations I have had with sales managers just after their team had crashed and missed their sales target.

Like me, they always seemed clear about what had happened after the fact, even though they could not avoid the wreck before it happened. So what is it that causes sales teams to miss their targets and suffer the painful consequences of the crash?

No Shortage of Data

When I had my accident (a pseudonym, really, since it was my negligence that caused the wreck rather than a chance occurrence), I had no lack of information that could have helped me avoid the crash. I knew the conditions, had good visibility and was even provided adequate signals from other riders in my pace line about road hazards.

Similarly, most sales organizations and their sales teams find that the root cause of their failure is NOT a shortage of data. While there are undoubtedly helpful analytics and supplemental reports that can extend the value of the information available through the company’s CRM/SFA tools, the lack of this data is rarely the underlying cause of the team’s failure.

Thus, while better information can facilitate improved management, it will not in and of itself prevent performance gaps.

Sales Teams — Don’t Fixate on the Wheel

If lack of data isn’t to blame, what is? Looking back on my crash, it’s easy to see that I was simply too focused on the wrong information. Every rider knows there are certain axioms governing safe riding in a pace line.

For example, don’t look behind you; keep focused on what’s happening in front of you.

This one is probably obvious to even the most novice rider.

Less obvious however, is the importance of avoiding the trap of fixating on the wheel of the bike in front of you — and this particular problem is also far more difficult to avoid. Even seasoned riders can become “entranced” by the rear wheel of the bike in front of them, especially when it is just inches away and you are cruising along at 20+ MPH.

That’s exactly what happened to me. Instead of looking ahead, I got caught looking down.

The result was a big OUCH!

Fixating on the wrong information can be equally as devastating for sales leaders. Managers often “fixate” on certain metrics, such as funnel activity, only to find the sales teams increasing the value of their pipeline while still missing sales targets.

In one case, we had a team that was required to keep seven times their quota in the pipeline at all times, so every person did precisely that. Unfortunately, at the end of the year, this team only achieved 60% of their sales target. Clearly, something was missing, and this excessive focus on a single metric wasn’t allowing the sales leader or people on the team to properly diagnose the problem.

The Predictive Metrics for Selling

So, what should be the focus of sales teams and their managers? Like cycling, sales leaders must force themselves to look forward and consider a COMBINATION of metrics that predict success or failure. While pipeline activity is certainly one of these things, it should not be the sole focus of a manager’s analysis if it will lead to excluding other key metrics. We recommend every salesperson on the team have a mathematically valid sales success plan that defines targets for:

  • New Opportunities

  • New Proposals

  • Average Sale Value

  • Proposal Ratio

  • Closing Ratio

You can download a simple Excel spreadsheet for creating the sales success plan here. By regularly reviewing each seller’s performance relative to the target for these predictive metrics, sales leaders can identify gaps BEFORE a crash in sales results. Further investigation into the behavioral issue producing the gap, and the underlying skill or knowledge gap that is the root cause, allows both the manager and seller to define corrective action that will minimize the pain of the miss and perhaps help them avoid the missed targets and sales crash altogether.

And take it from me, avoiding a crash is a far better outcome than explaining it after the fact!

Want to learn more? Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

Allen Iversion

Practice? What are we talking about, practice?

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It’s NBA playoff time again and for some reason this always reminds me of the now infamous 2002 interview with then-Philadelphia 76ers superstar Allen Iverson. As you know by now, a reporter questioned Iverson’s effort during practice, which caused Iverson to get so upset that his ensuing tirade became one of the more entertaining moments in the history of the NBA.

“But we’re talking about practice, man,” Iverson said. “What are we talking about? Practice? We’re talking about practice, man.”

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this link. In fact this moment is so iconic, Ted Lasso did a highly entertaining flipped version, which you can see here – great stuff!

An Important Lesson

Iverson was a rare talent for sure. However, seeing how his career ended, this clip may also provide one of the most enlightening lessons for professionals in all fields – including sales.

While it’s true that during the interview Iverson accepted responsibility for his actions and even expressed awareness of his need to be a leader of the team, his disdain for practice was evident.

For more than two decades now we’ve seen a similar view permeate the sales profession. Unfortunately for many, if this doesn’t change, many salespeople and sales leaders may find themselves in the same position as Allen Iverson: Looking for something new to do.

Pressure to Perform

Sales organizations will feel increasing pressure to execute better than their competition as businesses shift their focus from cost cutting measures to growing top line performance.

With this pressure comes the need for common processes, and the requirement that people practice their craft in order to develop the habits that will help them execute more effectively in the Held.

Successful individuals and teams must practice skills together in order to identify gaps in their performance, and Hnd opportunities to improve.

While wins and losses allow us to keep score in selling, the fact is customers generally make bad coaches. After all, when was the last time a customer gave you some pointers on how to make a more compelling presentation and scheduled a time to try it again?

Practice Counts

The reality of any performance profession, be it athletics, music, surgery or sales, is that practice makes an enormous difference and represents the greatest opportunity for improvement.

Unfortunately, many sales professionals don’t commit adequate time and attention to this – to their own detriment. Why? Similar to Iverson, they fail to understand that game time performance is ultimately a reflection of the habits created in practice. Many appear to believe that their innate talents will allow them to excel against their competition, and that practice is more trouble than it is worth.

The truth is that Practice is THE KEY to winning. So, if we want a long and prosperous career filled with more wins and fewer losses, we need to consider Allen Iverson’s counter-example and develop the habit of practicing on a consistent basis. And if we want an to build a sales organization that consistently improves its effectiveness through practice, we must start by having coaches that help drive that habit.

Want to learn more about how effective coaching can help create the habit of continuous improvement and support sales excellence? Click here to download our free Guide to Sales Coaching, including a coaching readiness assessment to help you prepare for your sales enablement initiatives.

Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com. 

View of stars

Webinar: Can Your Sales Methodology Help You Achieve Greater Heights?

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Companies are increasingly implementing common selling methodologies to drive better performance. But how do you know when the time is right, and how do you select the best methodology for your business? Join Ray Bonis, Global Revenue Operations leader with Thryv and Bob Sanders, managing partner at Axiom as they discuss keys to selecting and implementing a winning sales methodology. With more than two decades experience each, Ray and Bob have helped dozens of companies successfully navigate the sales methodology project and have useful insights to ensure your project succeeds.

During this session, Ray and Bob cover a variety of topics, including:

  • The difference between sales methodology and sales process

  • Why and when you should implement a sales methodology

  • Differences between more and less effective methodologies

  • Criteria for select the methodology that’s right for you

  • Keys to implementing your sales methodology

Cowboys Training Camp

Developing the Sales Athletes on Your Team

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With every change in sporting season, I am struck by the level of effort professional sports teams dedicate to winning. And as I obsess about my favorite team (full disclosure, I am a long-suffering Dallas Cowboys fan), I wonder if this is the year that they will finally put strategy, talent, and execution together to deliver a championship. While the Cowboys regularly disappoint, I do take solace that some of my other favorite teams like the Georgia Bulldogs, Atlanta Braves, and Dallas Stars have won championships more recently.

But as I consider the effort these teams expend, I also wonder when selling will fully embrace the approach to managing development and performance that professional sports teams all seem to employ. As we have written here before, selling is unique among business occupations in that it is simultaneously a production and performance job. When it comes to the production side of that coin, businesses focus incredible energy to understand and predict what salespeople and teams will deliver in terms of revenue, customers, and profit. Nearly every sales performance review will cover past performance versus plan, current pipeline metrics, and forecast future results – some will even dive into specific accounts and opportunities in an effort to improve the chances of winning. Sports teams certainly do this as well when they consider metrics like plays, yards gained, turnovers, time of possession, and of course points scored and points allowed.

However, if you ever attend team meetings for sports franchises, especially planning meetings among the coaching staff, you will hear another conversation that is practically non-existent in sales reviews – talent assessments and development plans.

For example, let’s suppose the offensive coaching staff for your favorite NFL team is having their Tuesday morning meeting. To be sure, this meeting will include a review of the offensive metrics from the prior week. However, it will likely also include a review of player performance – in fact, each player will likely be graded not just on the basis of WHAT they did (their metrics), but also based on HOW they performed (their skill and behavior). These conversations will likely include an evaluation of the overall development of each player, including next steps to continue their progression toward their optimum performance.

While player development is an integral part of performance management in sports, it is horribly lacking in business … even in the corporate job most analogous to being a professional athlete – the sales position. And while considerable energy may be spent talking about metrics, accounts, and opportunities, unless and until player development becomes an essential part of sales performance conversations, our teams will underperform against their true potential (Please, not Cowboys jokes here).

So, what would a sales ops or sales performance review look like with player development integrated into the conversation? Well we wouldn’t stop talking about pipeline and production, but we would add the topic of player development to ensure managers are dedicating attention to improving the skill of their players and thereby enabling better execution. This would include both qualitative and quantitative items such as:

  • The manager’s assessment of the current proficiency of each person on the team, including top opportunities to improve and development progress

  • Review of coaching metrics such as the number of coaching sessions conducted by managers and the developmental focus for the team

  • Developmental assignments given and completed by the team

Like any performance profession, all else being equal, results will improve when players get better. While it’s troubling how few sales teams actually integrate any player development discussion into their operational cadence, it also represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations that make this shift early. Adding player development to your sales performance conversations can help you gain a sustainable competitive advantage that improves a range of performance metrics including:

  • Sales

  • Margins

  • Customer satisfaction

  • Sales team attrition

  • Forecast accuracy

Want help? You can begin your journey by downloading our Guide to Sales Coaching here. And stay tuned as we will soon release an updated version of our book, with a more complete guide to creating a high-performing sales organization. You can also schedule time to talk with us directly to learn more about how you can integrate player development into your existing sales cadence.

At Axiom Sales Kinetics we’ve spent thirty years helping sales teams coach, learn, and sell more effectively. We offer a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

 

Steelers Season

Dear CEO, How Serious Are You About Sales Performance?

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Today hundreds of CEOs will make a decision to replace their head of sales … again. Despite multiple attempts to select and equip the right sales leader, they will once again find their team underperforming with no clear plan other than replacing the person leading the team. In that regard, the sales function is very much like professional sports. When the owner or GM isn’t satisfied with the results and a change must be made, the head coach gets the axe.

And yet, there are sports franchises and sales organizations that have very little churn at the top and consistently outperform the competition. One such example in the sports world is the Pittsburgh Steelers. While the average tenure for an NFL head coach is 3.2 years, the Steelers last three head coaches have an average tenure of 17.3 years and six Superbowl victories between them (which, as I am a Cowboys fan, pains me greatly). So, what is it that perennial winners know, and do, that others don’t?

Performance Cultures Don’t Just Focus on Performance

Every organization wants to win. They all measure results and they all place high value on winning and are frustrated by losing. However, organizations that excel consistently create a culture that focuses on the behaviors and activities that produce winning outcomes, even more than they do on winning results. They understand that executing the right behaviors in the right way day in and day out will produce better outcomes over time. So, while they emphasize winning scores, they spend considerably more energy defining winning behaviors, identifying the skills and knowledge needed to execute these behaviors better than the competition and coaching their players to improve incrementally over time.

What does this mean for organizations that consistently sell better than their competition? For starters it means the CEO is engaged in defining and reinforcing their sales methodology to make certain it aligns with the overall promise the company is making to its customers. If the company’s core value depends on delivering a better customer experience, the CEO personally understands how the company’s sales methodology contributes to that experience. But can’t the CEO simply hire a great sales leader and leave it to this person to define the methodology? Unfortunately, they cannot! Even the most effective sales leader will need the active participation of the CEO to define and activate a comprehensive sales methodology. The reason for this is simple: optimum sales execution will require coordination with a variety of departments in the business, including marketing, customer care, operations, product, and even finance.  Only the CEO has the authority and perspective needed to ensure all departments in the organization are aligned around the same vision and support the same methodology. While CEO involvement in selecting and deploying the sales methodology is rare, we have seen multiple instances where the CEO actively participates, and in nearly every case the outcomes are considerably better.

Emphasize Leading Indicators

Next, it means the organization must measure performance differently. It doesn’t mean we no longer talk about deals or pipeline or forecasts, but it does mean we measure those things differently, often more objectively, more scientifically, and even more rigorously. However, we also measure the effectiveness of sales execution via artifacts such as customer insights and competency scores as well as the underlying skill and knowledge of people responsible for executing the sales methodology. It means we place as much emphasis in sales reviews on understanding if and how sales leaders are developing their teams as we do on what number they will deliver this quarter.

Only the CEO can affect this change because the questions they ask in their performance reviews with the head of sales will always drive, and even dominate the conversations that happen at each and every level. When CEOs inspect execution, sales coaching, and rep development with the same energy as last quarter’s results, everyone understands the cultural importance of continuous improvement and people become more effective. When they don’t do this, absent a string of incredibly hot products with extremely clear and compelling advantages, they miss targets and change leaders, only to find the same thing happening once again a short time later.

Want help creating a winning performance culture in your organization? You can begin your journey by downloading our Guide to Sales Coaching here. And stay tuned as we will soon release an updated version of our book, with a more complete guide to creating a high-performing sales organization. You can also schedule time to talk with us directly to learn more about how you can integrate player development into your existing sales cadence.

At Axiom Sales Kinetics we’ve spent thirty years helping sales teams coach, learn, and sell more effectively. We offer a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

The Power of Habit Book

Keystone Habits – Three Behaviors That Can Transform a Mediocre Sales Team into World Class Performers

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People often ask us what change they could make that would have the greatest impact on sales performance for their team. I imagine they expect to hear things, “If you better qualify opportunities, you’ll waste less time on deals you cannot win.” Or maybe, “If you have meaningful business conversations, you’ll better understand how to impact your customers’ business.” Or possibly even, “If you help buyers develop differentiating criteria, you can build significantly more value and sell at higher margins.”

While all these things will definitely help INIDVIDUAL salespeople sell more, the most significant change for an ENTIRE TEAM is actually far more fundamental and has the potential to be considerably more impactful. The most significant change any sale team can make is to develop these three keystone habits that have the power to enable a mediocre team to become perennial winners.

What is a Keystone Habit?

In his best-selling book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg coined the term keystone habits, which he defines as “an individual pattern that is unintentionally capable of triggering other habits in the lives of people.” One of the things that is so fascinating about keystone habits is that they often-times do not represent the ultimate change or behavior we are seeking. Rather, keystone habits are enabling patterns that allow us to affect the change we are after.

An example from everyday life is exercise. Duhigg notes, “Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.” The implication of course is clear, if we want to eat less, be more productive, patient, and financially responsible, start by creating a habit of exercise and we will be on our way to affecting the other changes.

The Changes Salespeople Make

We’ve all been part of programs intended to help salespeople make some change that promises to improve their performance. We want them to prospect better, qualify more thoroughly, present in a more compelling fashion, build greater value, negotiate more effectively, populate the CRM with real data … the list varies by company, team, and even person. In each case however, a new habit is needed to help improve their sales effectiveness. So, sales enablement implements training, tools, and programs to affect these changes. Unfortunately, all too often, the desired changes are adopted by relatively few, while the majority of people continue to do the things they do, the way they’ve always done them. The stats are so often cited we’re tempted to accept them as unavoidable:

  • According to ATD, up to 80% of new skills are lost within 1 week of training if not used

  • A study by HR Chally showed up to 85% of sales training fails to deliver a positive ROI

Keystone Habits for Sales

Fortunately, there are three keystone habits for sales organizations that are so powerful as to trigger all manner of other positive changes. These simple, but essential habits form the foundational behaviors for a high-performing, adaptable sales organization.

Habit #1 – Learning

It seems almost condescending to propose that effective sales organizations must develop the habit of learning. However, over thirty years working with dozens of companies and hundreds of thousands of salespeople, it has becoming undeniably clear that most organizations are not in the habit of learning new skills, or growing existing skills, on a regular cadence. Sure, they conduct training sessions. But training events and learning are not the same thing.

In a learning organization, people continually get better as a core part of their jobs, not as an infrequent and separate activity. If learning were a habit, it would happen regularly and any new activity, new product, new strategy, or new market dynamic, could be easily integrated into the normal cadence of the sales organization with a high degree of comfort that the overwhelming majority would be able to apply what they learn quickly.

Habit #2 – Practice

It’s tempting to simply include practice with learning and shorten this list, but that would be a mistake. While practice is an integral part of the learning cycle for new skills, it is too often overlooked as a fundamental habit or discipline in the organization. Most sales teams practice with peers or coaches so infrequently that when they do it sparks a round of complaints that might seem more like teens objecting to chores than professionals mastering their craft. There is no substitute for practicing our selling skills in front of people who can offer meaningful coaching, and there is only one way to make role-playing less painful – do more of it!

Picture a professional sports franchise that doesn’t practice in front of one another, or their coaches and you can quickly imagine them losing regularly. The only reason that doesn’t already hold true for selling is that so few teams are engaged in regular practice that failing to do so isn’t as significant a handicap as it would be in sports. However, this is almost certain to change as the pressure to improve sales execution grows. Forward thinking sales teams should get ahead of this trend and integrate regular practice into their workflow so that they can better execute key selling behaviors and outperform their competition.

Habit #3 – Coaching

We’ve written and spoken extensively in the past about the critical importance of coaching, including in a recent webinar hosted by trainingindustry.com, which you can find here. Coaching is an essential keystone habit for the sales organization because done properly, it will drive the cadence of learning and practice that are so fundamental for the sales team. However, effective coaching must include root cause analysis and the assignment of learning and practice activities in order to promote the adoption of those other keystone habits. When managers revert to feedback instead of coaching, sellers don’t get better, and they don’t value the engagement. For more information on the difference between the feedback and coaching, download our Guide to Sales Coaching here.

Developing Keystone Habits

As Charles Duhigg has noted, developing new habits is not easy. However, for sales organizations that effectively adopt these keystone habits, the rewards are significant. When sales teams routinely acquire new knowledge, practice and refine their skills, and leverage effective coaching, they not only get better at sales engagement, but they also get better at everything else. New products are launched, new strategies implemented, new market conditions embraced, and new programs and tools adopted more effectively when teams have developed the habit of continuous learning and improvement. These keystone habits drive exceptional performance and the possibility of a sustainable competitive advantage

How will we develop these keystone habits? As all habits are formed by cue, routine, and reward, Mr. Duhigg advises that changing habits is best accomplished using existing cues and replacing the routines. How does this apply to our keystone habits for sales? Here is just one example to consider:

Leverage the Opportunity Review

Nearly all sales teams regularly engage in a review of open opportunities. Developing these keystone habits doesn’t require replacing this activity with something else. It merely requires updating the routine with new activities and rewarding the adoption of these new behaviors.

Current Pattern

Cue: Opportunity Review meeting between seller and manager

Existing Routine: Manager asks seller series of questions in order to understand how qualified the opportunity is and makes recommendations about next steps the seller should make to increase their chances of winning.

Reward: Assuming the feedback is useful, increase win rates. Even when that isn’t the case, manager encouragement affords some reward

New Pattern

Cue: Opportunity Review meeting between seller and manager

New Routine: Manager asks seller series of questions in order to understand how qualified the opportunity is and identifies areas where the seller can improve their skill. The manager assigns a learning activity based on the identified root cause of any gaps in the sellers understanding of the opportunity.

Reward: During their next meeting, the manager audits completion of the learning activity. Positive reinforcement is provided whenever assignments are completed and a role-play confirms the seller has improved their skills, providing an additional reward.

Beyond integrating the new habits for sellers, companies will need to create new routines for managers to ensure their coaching includes learning and practice activities that help cement the keystone habits. An important part of this will be measuring coaching frequency and activity for at least as long as it takes to form these new habits. One example for this would be to add a team effectiveness or personnel development item to the normal forecast review most senior leaders conduct with sales managers. This would help to cement the importance of coaching and development in addition to achieve sales objectives.

It certainly takes effort to form these keystone habits, but the potential payoff for organizations that succeed in doing so can be amazing. One organization we saw make tremendous progress in developing these habits was able to achieve 16% growth in revenue per rep. In another case, the Nashville office of a national technology provider consistently out-performed other markets in profitability, total revenue and quota attainment through three different market leaders.

Want to talk more about how your organization can develop these keystone habits, connect with us here to schedule a conversation.

At Axiom Sales Kinetics we’ve spent thirty years helping sales teams coach, learn, and sell more effectively. We offer a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

Do More

What Is Your Sales Enablement Initiative Really Enabling?

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I have a bit of a confession to make. I am a life-long salesperson. In fact, I was raised by salespeople. So, I love hearing about sales enablement solutions that increase the selling time for salespeople. After all, as a salesperson, I hated administrative tasks. And at times, it truly felt my company would rather have me completing reports than meeting prospects.

Had anyone asked younger-me, I would happily have told them that the key to me selling more was eliminating as many administrative tasks as possible. I’m not sure how well that would have gone over with them, but that’s how I felt.

That wasn’t accurate for me then and may not be accurate for your salespeople now.

I had a conversation about this very topic not too long ago with a particularly bright sales enablement leader. She was reacting to complaints from the sales team that they were so overwhelmed with administrative tasks that they had no time to sell, let alone participate in the company’s newly launched sales training initiative.

Her comment to me was this, “The volume of work always expands to fill the available time.”

In other words, people weren’t skipping meetings with customers and prospects because of the plethora of administrative tasks. They either didn’t have enough customers and prospects to meet or weren’t adding enough value to justify securing meetings with target contacts. Therefore, a significant amount of time was “filled” with administrative tasks.

Before you start typing out your comment below about me being an idiot, let me explain further.

Remember that I said earlier that I, too, am a salesperson. And, yes, I’m not too fond of administrative work. Removing administrative burdens for salespeople is a GOOD THING. It just ISN’T THE ONLY THING that will make your enablement initiative a raging success. Consider research from CSO Insights that found over one recent year sales enablement initiatives increased 81%. However, in that same period, only 1/3 of the enablement initiatives met or exceeded the company’s expectations. We’ve all seen countless initiatives that were focused on “giving people more selling time”, but more time to do the same job in the same way, doesn’t necessarily produce better results. If we want our sales teams to have dramatically better results, we need to enable them to compete more effectively, and we need to think more holistically about what it is that we are really enabling. 

In one of our webinars with Sales Management Association, Building a Sales Dynasty, we talk about the four steps companies can take to build a true sales dynasty. We might just as easily have titled it “The Four Keys to Sale Enablement Excellence.” We won’t cover all four characteristics here, though. Instead, we will focus on what may be the greatest point of leverage for your sales enablement initiative – helping people achieve exceptional execution with your key selling models.

Ideal Selling Models

The initiative must start by defining the ideal selling models to enable sales success effectively. This generally includes the following (though the final three are not always required):

  1. Customer Conversation Models – Without commonly understood models for the five essential customer conversations, it is extraordinarily difficult to help salespeople improve their performance. More time to engage customers in the same way rarely produces better results.
  2. Funnel Management Models – Most companies measure the wrong metrics and use them in the wrong way. Every person in the organization should have their own sales success plan that defines what they must generate in terms of leading or predictive sales indicators. Universal funnel standards can actually do more harm than good and should be avoided (see “The Worst Metric in Sales” blog post we wrote).
  3. Opportunity Management – For organizations working with more complex opportunities with longer sales cycles, a model for analyzing the opportunities, sharing information, and building winning strategies is essential.
  4. Account Planning and Management – Some organizations earn tremendous revenue from existing customers. Therefore, the company must have a model for building and executing account plans that help continually improve the overall health of these key accounts.
  5. Partner Selling – For those companies selling through partners, a model for how to work with and sell through them is an absolute requirement.

Not only does this require considerable effort, but it also cannot be done by committee or by simply categorizing a few best practices from your top performers. Top performers achieve success in various ways, some of which may not be scalable across the organization. These models are clearly defined approaches to executing the behaviors that can be repeated consistently across your team. Like so many great athletes, your people will thrive when you combine their natural talents with a model or system that affords them a competitive advantage. Their success is then limited only by their commitment to continuous improvement. 

Coaching Model

Having said all that, we have now reached the sixth and arguably your most important model — the coaching model. The reality, proven every day with sales organizations far and wide, is that the interaction your sellers have with their managers will significantly impact their execution and performance more than anything else you do. That being the case, a top priority for any sales enablement initiative must be to help your managers become outstanding coaches. This is no easy task, as there are a number of obstacles to effective sales coaching. Yet these obstacles present tremendous opportunities for your sales enablement initiative — by removing them and helping transform your seller-manager conversations from feedback to coaching, this model will supercharge every other initiative you launch.

The good news is that sales enablement is growing in importance and influence in progressive sales organizations. Better still, the early struggles with underperforming initiatives create sustainable competitive advantages for organizations that can define and deploy winning sales enablement initiatives. Focus your enablement initiative on helping your managers become better coaches. Then, help your sellers become better at executing your critical selling behaviors. From there, you’ll see what great returns you achieve.

Want to make your next sales enablement initiative as successful as possible? Check out our Trainingindustry.com webinar here for more on the impact sales managers can have. You can also schedule time to talk with us directly to learn more about how Axiom can help you implement sales models like the ones discussed here.

Axiom offers a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

Secret to Success

Are You Developing Transactional Relationships or Relational Transactions?

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Relationships are that hard-to-quantify thing that almost every salesperson knows is key to their long-term success. At the same time, relationships that don’t produce results at some point are no longer considered fruitful. 

The ones that aren’t fruitful are called something else, right? We call those “friendships.” 

And while friendships are certainly wonderful, they’re not necessarily what salespeople are paid to develop. 

So, here’s a question to ask when evaluating your customer engagements: Are you developing transactional relationships or relational transactions 

What’s the Difference?

Perhaps the easiest way to think about the difference is to consider the objective. In transactional relationships, securing the transaction is the objective and the relationship, whatever it is, is in service to that objective. As a results, with transactional relationships, your value is defined by the last order in your interaction. In other words, the value of the relationship is equal to whatever value was delivered by the products and services most recently purchase.

On the other hand, with relational transactions, the primary objective is to build a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. Transactions, if and when they do occur, are based on that foundation. In other words, trust and mutual respect may ultimately lead to transactions, but transactions are not the point of the relationship – they are a biproduct of it.

At the core, the motive of a salesperson who builds transactional relationships is “How do I get my customers to buy?” The driving motivation for salespeople who develop relational transactions is “How do I help my customers make better decisions?”

A good rule of thumb: If we want a relationship that endures past our last meeting, we need to be just as concerned with our customer after placing the order as we were when we were earning that order. We want to be defined by our relationship, not our last transaction. 

6 Steps to Develop Relationship-Based Transactions

A shift in attitude may be essential to developing more relational transactions, but it isn’t sufficient. Beyond wanting to serve customers, we need to demonstrate that commitment by our actions. So, here are six steps we can take to ensure we are building relationships that last and deliver value well beyond our last transaction.

1. Be a trusted partner

It sounds simple, but it’s often overlooked. We need to make it clear to our customers in the first (and every) conversation that we intend to help them make the best decision, even if that means NOT buying from us. 

2. Seek insight, not information

Ask thought-provoking questions about the customer’s business state and gaps, not the questions that every other salesperson asks that scream, “Tell me what I need to learn so I can sell you!”

3. Guide them

Bring a point of view about not only the current challenges or problems our customer faces but the future challenges they should consider. Our perspective is to help guide, not simply to sell.

4. Help our customers define criteria

Help our customers define the criteria they’ll use to compare alternatives when making a decision. Make sure these criteria are based on the positive or negative impact they will make on the customer’s business drivers. Present any recommendations based on their unique requirements, not our standard pitch deck.

5. Be proactive

Be proactive about helping our customer manage the risk with any business decision by helping them feel confident with: 

  • How to identify the best solution among similar alternatives

  • How to best manage any disruption that could happen when implementing something new

  • How to ensure the ROI will meet expectations

6. Demonstrate you’re in it for the long run

Prove to the customer we’re way more concerned about what happens after they buy than we are about getting the order. Engage as proactively after you get the order, and even if you don’t, as you did at the early stages of the relationship.

The Last Word

Relational transactions are built on a promise that extends well beyond whatever product or service we sell. Therefore, these relationships are stronger, last longer, and provide a bigger return for us and our customer than one-off sales that progress no further than the exchange of money for a product. They increase customer retention and reduce our marketing costs. When we focus on the relationship first, more and better transactions will naturally result if and when they should. When we focus on the transaction first, we may win an initial order only to miss out on all the follow-on business and referrals that help trusted advisors consistently overachieve, usually with far less frustration than the transactional sellers around them.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage these and other best practices to build a winning sales team and sustainable competitive advantage? Let’s connect.

Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.