Selling Power Blog

A Sales 2.0 Conference Q&A with Andy Zoltners

At the recent Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Selling Power caught up with Andris (Andy) Zoltners, who was there to present “A Top 10: Insights that Lead to Sales Success.” In addition to being one of the founding directors of ZS Associates, Zoltners is a Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He has personally consulted for more than 200 companies around the world and taught thousands of executive, MBA, and PhD students about sales force strategy; sales force size, structure, and deployment; sales force compensation; and total sales force effectiveness. For more insight based on ZS Associates’s research and expertise, download the first chapter of Building a Winning Sales Management Team, by Zoltners and coauthors Prabhakant Sinha and Sally E. Lorimer. (Note: This interview has been edited for style and clarity.)

Selling Power Editors (SP): At the Sales 2.0 Conference, you said there’s not a sales force in the world that doesn’t have topline revenue opportunity of at least 5 to 10 percent. How can companies tap into that?

Zoltners: First, they have to find where the opportunity exists. That’s different in every sales organization. You have to look at the drivers of success. You have to hire the right people, train them, and manage performance. You have to size and organize the sales force, get the right compensation plan in place, and align territories. The problem for most companies isn’t that opportunity doesn’t exist, it’s that they’re sometimes reluctant to do the things necessary to take advantage of it.

SP: Like what, for example?

Zoltners: This goes back to one of the questions I asked the audience: would you rather have a stable sales force or an adaptive sales force? With an adaptive sales force, I would come in and say, “We’re going to change account responsibility.” Will they ask salespeople to adapt? Are they open? 

SP: So you’re saying the culture has to be open to change. 

Zoltners: Yes. But the other side of this is that management has to make intelligent changes. Eighty-five percent of sales forces have changed their sales-comp plan in the last year. What does that tell you? Getting it right can be a struggle.

SP: Why is that?

Zoltners: Well, [ZS cofounder] Prabha Sinha, Sally Lorimer, and I wrote a book about this years ago [The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation: How to Design and Implement Plans That Work].  But it’s a big book, and some people have told us you need a PhD to read it. (Laughs.) [Incentive pay] is complicated. But if you want to design and implement a plan that really works, you need to get this right, and you need to have alignment among the entire organization. For example, if you have an aggressive finance team that sets unrealistic numbers, that’s going to reduce the effectiveness of your comp plan.

SP: You mentioned during your presentation that there is no magic number when it comes to setting quotas at the territory level. Why is that? 

Zoltners: Companies may set goals too high, too low, or they don’t allocate the numbers appropriately across the entire sales force. The secret is that the goal should not be a single number. A single number is too rigid. There should be a range.

SP: And why is that?

Zoltners: Flexibility. Think about it at an individual level: if a big account moves from Milwaukee to Atlanta, then the sales rep in Milwaukee is saying, “My VP of sales is telling me that 40 percent of my territory just went away, and he still wants me to make my number.” Meanwhile, the rep in the Atlanta territory gets free incentive money. If the goal number is meant to give reps something to strive for, then you’ve just made it meaningless.

SP: ZS Associates has been conducting research since 1983 on sales leadership. If you had to pick, which group is more important to a strong sales team, excellent reps or excellent managers?

Zoltners: You really need both, no question. The issue is that we’re generally more careful at selecting reps than [we are at selecting] managers. We see more training for reps, more coaching. It’s an issue of scale: if you have only five new managers, it’s difficult to put together a training course just for them. But an excellent manager is going to end up hiring excellent reps. That’s why the link between sales force productivity and the quality of frontline sales managers is so strong. Because the manager selects, develops, manages, and leads the team.

SP: What’s the definition of an excellent rep?

Zoltners: They know their products, [and] they have empathy for the customer. They execute the selling process well. To me, success in selling is not about the numbers or the hard metrics. It’s about the soft stuff – people. Revenue comes from people. Some of the best sales forces in the world haven’t had the best products. And some of the weakest sales forces I’ve seen have had great products. You might be making your numbers, but you have an average sales force.

SP: Can you elaborate?

Zoltners: Look at insurance companies. Many insurance companies make their numbers but have as much as 60 percent turnover among the sales force.

SP: Is turnover in this case a sign that there’s room for improvement?

Zoltners: High turnover is usually an indicator of a problem. In this case, existing salespeople do not share their accounts, and new people do not have enough opportunity to be successful.

SP: In your research, you’ve said that many companies tend to retain poor or under-performing managers for “too long." What constitutes "too long"?

Zoltners: One day is too long! Evaluate and replace sooner. 

SP: Sounds simple. Why is it so difficult?

Zoltners: Because they’re buddies. The company says, “He’s done so much for us. We should give him another chance.” They don’t want to make their valued employees sad.

SP: So what’s the solution?

Zoltners: You make ’em sad.

SP: What role does technology play in creating a successful sales culture?

Zoltners: I’m a meat and potatoes person. The precedent that sales can really sell better with all this technology needs to be established. You have to be smart about how you use technology. If you’re overzealous, it can end up costing you money.

SP: Would you say technology alone isn’t the answer? That it’s more about how people use technology?

Zoltners: It’s about getting the best people to engage in the right activities. You can’t ask for anything better than that.

For more insight based on ZS Associates’s research and expertise, download the first chapter of Building a Winning Sales Management Team, by Zoltners and coauthors Prabhakant Sinha and Sally E. Lorimer.

Why You Should Step Up Your Sales 2.0 Investments

Sales 2.0 isn't a buzzword; it's become a professional discipline. It's not a passing fad but a massive shift in the global business culture. It's not about sales or marketing tools but a business transformation that delivers better results.

Today, Sales 2.0 plays a vital role in selling. And as the old ways of selling are fading away and salespeople and sales managers are educated about the increased risk of becoming victims of change, I want to reassure old-school salespeople that the core of selling will never change. That core is the ability to create, expand, and enhance relationships, face-to-face and online.

The good news: Sales 2.0 has not made B2B salespeople obsolete. In most cases, it has made them a lot more productive and effective.

What is Sales 2.0? It's the use of best-practice sales processes enabled by technology to improve speed, accountability, collaboration, and customer engagement. Sales 2.0 is a more efficient and effective way of selling and buying.

The economic pressures in our business environment demand that sales organizations become ruthlessly efficient. But Warren Buffett reminds us that efficiency is not enough: "We are tempted to see where the arrow of performance lands and then draw a bull's eye around it." We need greater effectiveness, which means we need to stop trying to improve processes that don't deliver value.

It means that we deliver greater value in the context of the sales rep's world. The equation is simple: deliver more value to the sales force so that it can deliver more value to the customer. Sales 2.0's mission is to create the right results in the most economical way.

As more ROI reports emerge, business leaders sit up and take notice. Last year, Brainshark reported that its $3,600 investment per sales rep in Sales 2.0 tools was instrumental in a 35 percent year-over-year increase in sales. Just last week, Ken Powell, VP of sales enablement at SunGard stated, “In 2013, our investment in Sales 2.0 solutions is over $4 million, and we project that this will translate into an additional $100 million in revenues.”

With the right set of Sales 2.0 tools, science can become part of the sales process, allowing companies to create a culture of measurement in which value takes center stage. Sales managers can enjoy productivity gains and increased sales while making fewer decisions based on hunches and more decisions based on science. Salespeople benefit from a level playing field, where their professional sales talent pays off in greater dividends.

In its latest Sales Performance Optimization survey, CSO Insights found that Sales 2.0 companies actually overachieve compared to less efficient organizations. In Sales 2.0 companies, a higher percentage of salespeople make quota, and more salespeople close the deals that they forecast. If you want to explore how your peers are leveraging Sales 2.0 tools, check out our new site, www.salesopshop.com, where more than 1,000 sales leaders and sales operations managers collaborate to win. 

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Definitive Metrics of Sales Performance

Today's blog post is by Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly Corporation, the industry leader in sales compensation automation.

One statistic I shared at the Sales 2.0 conference last April was that US companies spend about $800 billion a year on sales compensation – three times more than they spend on advertising and $100 million more than the government spends on national defense.

Even though the cost of compensation dwarfs national advertising spend, companies tend to constantly analyze ad performance but seldom give their comp plans the same level of scrutiny. Businesses as a whole simply don’t do a very good job of measuring, iterating, and optimizing their incentives and compensation.

Well, why not? Why would otherwise savvy businesspeople not track their compensation plans to gauge how well they motivate employees to achieve company goals?

Because, until now, there simply hasn’t been empirical data available to inform or measure compensation plans.

Traditionally, there have been two approaches to analyzing incentives, neither of which is entirely satisfactory:

1. Academic research, which tends to focus on single firms that grant researchers access to their internal information. This provides a snapshot of plans and performance but not a continuing view that would account for business changes.
2. Experiential design, which is based on the combined knowledge of consultants and employees about strategies that have worked in the past. That’s helpful information, to be sure, but it’s also subjective and not forward-looking.

The good news is that empirical data is no longer the missing leg of a figurative three-legged stool. Which ­­brings me to my topic for next month’s Sales 2.0 conference: “Real Insight on What Drives Success: The Definitive Metrics of Sales Performance.”

As the only 100 percent cloud-based, multitenant compensation software solution in the marketplace, Xactly is in a position to provide exclusive data based on an analysis of seven years’ worth of sales-performance management. Armed with these terabytes of information, we’re developing insight and benchmarks to help companies align their sales compensation with their sales strategy.

I’ll be sharing more on this topic at the upcoming Sales 2.0 Conference on April 8-9 in San Francisco, but here are a few statistics to give you an idea of the magnitude of our number crunching. We’ve analyzed compensation data from

• more than 500 companies,
• more than 100,000 sales positions,
• billions of calculations over the last seven years.

(For the record, the data is aggregated and anonymous, so no person or company is identifiable.)

We’ve always touted the advantages of automating sales compensation over calculating it manually on spreadsheet, but we also understand that automation is only part of the picture. Organizations can end up with complex calculation tools that prepare timely and accurate payroll but still lack any meaningful analysis or actionable information to inform their strategic decisions. 

That’s the gap that our ever-expanding data set will fill. By accessing this information, companies will be empowered to keep up with their peers by tapping into performance-management benchmarks. They can streamline processes to follow accepted standards and reward their teams competitively.

In short, the data we’ve compiled will provide the critical information companies need to make strategic management decisions and incent right.

I look forward to sharing more on April 9 at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

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10 Critical Sales Management Reports

Today's post is by Seema Haji, Director of Product Marketing at Birst. She is responsible for leading marketing direction and competitive positioning for Birst. Seema has 10 years of experience as a developer, evaluator, buyer and marketer in the Business Intelligence space from her tenure at Actuate Corporation, Yahoo! and Citibank. She has an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. In addition to her passion for driving Birst's SaaS-based business analytics solution, she has a keen interest in sustainability management and eco-friendly living.

 

 

A lack of powerful analytics and good sales management reports are keeping many sales leaders from making the best decisions possible for their companies.  

SFA applications are the most widely deployed among all apps in CRM systems today. Birst commissioned a survey earlier this year on the state of Sales Force Automation business analytics. The results weren’t pretty – only 19% were satisfied with the analytics provided by their current Sales Force Automation (SFA) apps; and 86% of users experienced challenges with their apps.

The survey had other interesting results:

• 74% of SFA users require technical staff for in-depth analysis of their sales data,
• 68% use Excel as the primary tool to analyze their SFA data (more than any other tool), and
• 82% must augment the built-in SFA analytics with additional tools.

While sales managers love real-time visibility and confident sales forecasts, there is still an untapped gold mine sitting in SFA databases. This is where business analytics can help push your organization to the next level of effectiveness. Birst’s Salesforce Reporting and Analytics helps sales managers analyze critical SFA data to get a comprehensive view of the pipeline and change analytics so they can make better leadership decisions.

For example: using Birst, sales leaders can create a single, holistic view integrating their sales data with financial bookings, ERP data, and any other third party data – this allows them to compare committed and forecasted sales, plus see the overall cost of leads that converted to closed/won deals. Sales leaders can also use Birst to analyze what has changed in the pipeline, and compare those changes to the status of that same data last month/quarter/year. They can also find out if they have enough pipeline to meet targets and what might happen if deal sizes or close times change. Birst integrates with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM (Siebel CRM) and other popular CRM applications.

There are currently 10 sales management reports that Salesforce.com is not able to produce that can dramatically impact how well sales managers understand what is happening with their pipeline and forecasts. You can learn more in this free white paper download.

Most sales leaders today base their sales strategies and decisions on dated information that can be months old. As a result, actions can often come too late to make a difference. Organizations that fail to deliver real-time, interactive diagnostic capabilities to their salespeople fail to maximize sales effectiveness.

Learn more -- download this free report today: 10 Critical Sales Management Reports that Salesforce.com Can’t Generate (and 10 Reasons to Care). 

 

5 Ways You Can Use Data to Motivate Reps

Today's blog post is by Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly Corporation, the industry leader in sales compensation automation.

 

 

The data you already collect is your company’s secret to creating a competitive environment where salespeople thrive and departments collaborate.

Here are five ways we at Xactly have seen this work:

1) Deliver real-time results with individualized reports.

When salespeople have access to their up-to-the-minute progress toward quota, they're motivated to work harder to reach that next accelerator or bonus—especially if it’s in a location where they spend a lot of time already, like Salesforce.

2) Post results in a public place—and publicly recognize your top performers.

Like athletes, salespeople are naturally very competitive people. The more you publicly recognize your winners, the harder your team will work to win. For example:

• Send out a simple results dashboard to your team every day via email, like Cascade does—you’ll probably see incredible results.
• Display contest results on TV screens near your sales cubicles or offices. We do this at our San Jose office, so we know how hard everyone works to be at the top of the list.
• Post news of closed deals on Chatter. It’s like giving a virtual trophy.

3) Customize reports to view results by product, service, and SPIF.

Dive deep into your analytics to better understand what you’re doing well and what you can do better. Analyze data across multiple periods—months, quarters, years—and also by product, territory, role function, or even internal contest.

4) Use your data as a tool to train people.

Data means nothing if it doesn’t give you insight. Find out what your best performers do differently than the rest; then share these best practices in team meetings. Look at each rep’s performance individually, and use that insight to improve your sales coaching.

5) Give both sales and finance teams what they want.

Finance wants controllable costs. Sales wants to earn a huge bonus. With the right incentive rules, you can make both departments happy. Virtually test new incentive plans to make sure you’ll meet forecasts—while offering motivating rewards to your top reps.

You’ve worked to get your data. Now it’s time to make it work for you.

An $80,000 Mistake (and What I Learned about Comp Plans)

Today's blog post is by Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly Corporation.

Note: hear Christopher Cabrera keynote on June 7 in London at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference. Email larissa@salesdottwoinc.com for more information.

 

Would you brush your teeth with a toothbrush duct-taped to a blender?

This is the question I posed to an audience of sales and marketing leaders last month at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I wasn’t being flip.

While many of us are out there selling cutting-edge products, we still somehow justify motivating our teams with a tool from 1982 (Excel).

I’m not knocking Excel. It’s a great tool. We use it at Xactly every day. But, Excel was not designed for managing the commission payments for a sales team, any more than a blender is meant to safely power your toothbrush.

You are creating real problems when you use Excel to motivate a sales team of any size. Gartner estimates that errors can amount to 10% of commissions. How much money is that for you—$10k a week? $100K?

The math is too big; the equations too complicated. The system is too slow to truly reward and actually encourages communication breakdowns. When you try to turn Excel into a sales motivator, you create real business problems.

Consider an example I shared at the conference: Back when I was a sales manager, I was mistakenly paid $80,000 instead of $8,000 in commissions. When I reported the mistake, my manager said to me: “Wow, Chris, do you realize we would have never caught that?” Turns out, my employer overpaid three of us $72,000 each and didn’t realize it. Combined, that’s more than $200,000!

And just imagine all of the incorrect payments they didn’t catch over the years. These errors happen all the time. They cost companies millions. But this isn’t the only cost. Salespeople who don’t trust their paychecks aren’t motivated to try for incentives. Why should they if their pay is essentially random? They may even waste time tracking their commissions.

But more and more companies are eliminating the sales roadblocks -- like errors -- created by running commissions in Excel. When they swap Excel for automation, they tap into the science of human psychology—the desire to compete and win.

Research from CSO Insights and the Aberdeen Group even shows that companies that use new incentive solutions sell more, more efficiently. Xactly’s customers, for instance, see 146% revenue growth and 36% shorter sales cycles once they ditch manual compensation processes. What these leading companies understand that others don’t (yet) is that the science of effective motivation can be built into incentive compensation tools.

To see what I mean, consider these not-so hypotheticals. Would your sales reps be more motivated (and capable) to outperform quota if they could:

• Track their performance against goals every minute of the day?  
• Know exactly how much they’d get if they closed a potential deal?  
• Trust the accuracy of their payments?

What about your sales managers? Would they be more effective if they could compare sales reps’ performance by territory, product, and margin? All with the click of a button?

We all know the power of human motivation. When sales leaders ditch the thing that stands between incentive programs and real motivation -- Excel-driven errors -- they create a company culture that encourages top performance, healthy competition, and accelerated revenue. So why are you trying to force 30-year-old technology to do something that it was never meant to do?

Publisher's note: Join me on June 7 in London and hear Christopher Cabrera’s keynote, "The Science of Sales Performance," at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference. 

Are You A Leader of Change in Your Business?

Today's guest post is by Jeffrey Hayzlett, Best-Selling Author, Global Business Celebrity, and CEO of The Hayzlett Group. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffreyHayzlett. 

I had the pleasure of keynoting recently at DocuSign Momentum 2012 in San Francisco to a group forward-thinking change agents. For those sales leaders who haven’t heard of DocuSign or recognized the impact eSignature can have on your business -- watch out. There was a whole ballroom full of business leaders who get it; these folks understand the need to increase speed-to-revenue, drive sales, simplify workflow and process, and to change.

And change is tough. Here's a tidbit I shared with the crowd (this is also the dedication in my book, Running the Gauntlet): "To the naysayers, opportunists, and obstructionists who stand in the way of driving change and progress in any organization, take note: WE WILL BEAT YOU!"

Driving change can sometimes feel like you’re running the gauntlet. You come up against obstructionists, backstabbers, and opportunists who do their best to stand in the way of change.

People who don’t like change are going to fight it. Whatever they can do to resist change, they will -- because change makes them uncomfortable.

As a leader of change, you need to create tension, constantly seek ways to improve your business, increase sales and speed, and learn new technologies. Failure to adapt and change in sales or any business is a surefire way to sabotage your own success.

So adoption of eSignature is a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t you want to do things faster, better, more efficiently? No more paper. No more chasing a wet ink signature. Instead, adopt a totally legal, legitimate, and trackable way to continue on driving change in the gauntlet of business.

In my business I look for problem solvers, not problem seekers. And I found myself among a group of problem solvers at DocuSign Momentum 2012. Innovation is always a key driver for any business leader, so show initiative by introducing innovative ways to drive your business. Adapt or die!

Publisher's note: Want to learn more about how you can fill orders faster by getting sales contracts signed electronically in minutes or hours? On Wednesday, June 6, I'll host a live Webinar showcasing tips from experts at DocuSign and Yamaha Corporation. To join us, register here. 

Information Is a Deposed Emperor without Clothes

In the movie Wall Street, the lead character, Gordon Gekko, said, "The most valuable commodity I know of is information."

A substantiating example was how Nathan Rothschild reportedly used messenger pigeons during the Napoleonic Wars. Because he received information about Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo before others who relied on communication delivered on horseback, Rothschild made millions overnight in London's stock market.

But sheer information no longer has intrinsic value. Every day, we feed more information into a giant, global brain. Everyone with a browser can access the same information at the same time.

Such information access has dramatically changed how people buy. Customers no longer listen to companies; they listen to their peers. In fact, buyers complete at least 57 percent of the buying process before contacting a company representative. (SOURCE: Corporate Executive Board)

While buyers are armed with more information than ever before, many salespeople are in the dark about

1. customer budgets, authority, needs, and timetables;
2. sales triggers, or events that may trigger a purchase;
3. customer business models and strategic objectives.  

Only 13 percent of customers believe that a typical salesperson understands their business issues and can articulate how to solve them. (SOURCE: Forrester)

It's no wonder; the inability to communicate a value message is today's biggest roadblock to achieving quota. (SOURCE: SiriusDecisions)

This is the big elephant in the boardroom. Information is a deposed emperor without clothes. The new business trump card is insight.

It’s been said that you can't get to the right answers unless you ask the right questions. The same goes for insight. Here are some questions your executive team can ask to gain insight and get sales results that are out of sight:

• How does your company collaborate and share insight? Explore a sales-enablement solution (Qvidian or SAVO).
• How do your salespeople find what's relevant to a prospect who has visited your Website? Examine behavioral marketing applications (Eloqua or Silverpop). 
• How do you help your salespeople engage customers in a conversation that is centered around value as seen through the customer's eyes? Get serious about sales coaching.
• Are your salespeople still talking at customers through a well-rehearsed pitch? Improve your message management.  
• How do you reward the right sales behaviors that contribute to a better bottom line? Get better results with incentive compensation management (Callidus or Xactly).
• How do you deliver relevant social and corporate information to salespeople so they can win more new customers? Test-drive new lead-management solutions (InsideView or Reachable).   

Successful sales organizations boost revenues through better processes and technology. Salespeople make money by turning information into insight.

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Capture & Use Social Insights to Gain a Competitive Selling Edge

I'm convinced that social insights are the key competitive differentiator for impacting revenue cycles today. 

Today we get social insights from information and data shared on social networks. But really social insights are nothing new to any experienced sales leader. Many sales professionals remember walking into a prospect's or customer's office and looking around to get a sense of what kind of person they'd be talking to. Were there photos of family on the desk? Sports trophies on shelves? Degrees on the wall? 

People carry their accomplishments, hopes, fears, and dreams around with them. These are the kinds of things that great salespeople excel at uncovering. Context clues -- what the person wears, how the person talks, etc. -- can help you figure out what is most important to this individual. These clues can help you establish trust and rapport. 

Today all of this information and more is readily available to you via a simple LinkedIn search. Your prospects and customers might be on Twitter right now, sharing details about themselves and their lives that can help you create a meaningful connection.

Reps who use social insights to uncover business concerns, personal interests, career history, common acquaintances, and more are better equipped to make connections with prospects that ultimately lead to more sales. Sales teams that can access a deeper level of knowledge beyond names, titles, and contact information automatically become more competitive by collapsing the sales cycle. The thing that amazes me is that many sales leaders and their teams have yet to tap into the rich resource of social insights to learn and listen to uncover opportunities.

I believe that sales leaders who act immediately to capture and use social insights will gain an automatic edge over the competition. Tomorrow I'll be discussing the power of social insights in more detail during my webinar, "How to Impact Revenue Cycles" with Ralf VonSosen, Vice President of Marketing at InsideView. He'll be sharing the compelling results that companies have been getting by incorporating social intelligence into their lead-to-revenue process, including explosive growth in call-to-opportunity ratios, true sales opportunities, and close rates.

Register now to join us and learn how your team can start seeing similar benefits today. 

 

My Thoughts from the Sales Management 2.0 Conference

At the Sales Management 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia, I talked a lot about how automating the sales process can drive higher revenues faster and more efficiently. In fact, I continue to be amazed at the number of Sales 2.0 tools and solutions that continue to emerge to make life easier for B2B sales teams. 

I firmly believe that, to succeed, sales leaders need to constantly be experimenting with and adopting new tools for their sales teams. But do tools alone create better sales teams? Of course not. Why? Because salespeople continue to fall into the same old traps:

• They talk all about themselves and their products and fail to uncover customer needs. 
• They run from one opportunity to the next without consulting with their sales manager or tapping intelligence that already exists within the sales organization. 
• They reinvent the wheel every time they need to write a proposal or reach out to a prospect. 

Inevitably the sales organizations that provide the best sales tools to make teams more effective are the ones that win more. They continually train their salespeople and help them seamlessly integrate process with technology.

At the same time, these sales leaders never lose sight of the need to train and coach sales reps on the ground-level selling skills.

No other department in any company can do what sales does; the value of its function is unique. The sales team has the rare ability to build rapport, to create relationships where none existed, and to persuade executives to make the changes and decisions that will help them run a better business.

All paths related to the sales cycle -- technology, process, selling skills -- lead to one final destination: the customer. The customer is the reason we are in business. They dictate our actions and reactions. They drive the conversation and tell us where we need to go next. 

Yet, as I told the audience on Monday at the Sales Management 2.0 Conference, only 13% of customers believe a typical salesperson can demonstrate an understanding of their business issues and solve them. This number should make every sales leader sit up and take notice. What is the level of customer understanding at your company? And what actions will you take to make sure you're in synch with their needs? 

This Thursday during a live webinar, I'll be talking about one area sales leaders can leverage to build a better sales organization: CRM. I'm excited to share ideas that can help you put the customer back where they belong: at the heart of your selling strategy. I invite you to register now for this webinar and join the conversation.

And I hope you'll consider joining me on April 2-3 in San Francisco, where I'll host the next Sales 2.0 Conference. For my money, there is no better investment of your time than to take the time to network with other sales leaders. Everyone needs consistent exposure to new ideas that can help them meet the challenges and realities of selling to today's customer. That is why I continue to dedicate my time to these events -- there's nothing I enjoy more than bouncing ideas off of other top-notch sales leaders and industry experts. There is always something new to learn about how to make a better customer experience in a digital age.