Selling Power Blog

The Brits Boast about Their Content-Marketing Prowess - But Not So Fast...

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have recently published their report, “Content Marketing in the UK: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends.” According to this report, marketers in the United Kingdom believe that their content-marketing effort is more effective than that of their peers in the United States and Australia and that they are leading the way in this regard. 

Their belief appears to be supported by CMI and DMA’s findings that marketers in the United Kingdom currently use “a wider range of content-marketing tactics than their international counterparts” and plan to increase their content-marketing budgets by a wider margin.

CMI and DMA report that content marketing is nearly universally adopted in the United Kingdom:

• Ninety-four percent of all UK marketers use it.
• B2C marketers in the United Kingdom using content-marketing strategies total 97 percent.
• UK B2B marketers using it total 95 percent.

In contrast, according to the report, B2C marketers in North America and Australia are less likely to use content marketing than their B2B peers.

The margin by which content marketers in the United Kingdom intend to increase their budgets as compared to marketers in North American and Australia doesn’t seem to be so impressive, however:

• Sixty-four percent of UK marketers say they will increase their content-marketing budget within the next 12 months.
• More than half of marketers in North America (54 percent) say they will increase their content-marketing budget.
• In Australia, 61 percent of marketers intend to allocate more funds to content marketing.

Social media use is universal:

• Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are the most widely used social media by all marketers everywhere.
• Overall (including in the United Kingdom), marketers use an average of four social-media platforms…
• whereas North American B2B marketers leverage the reach of five platforms.

It appears that, despite the overwhelming adoption of content marketing and their intent to allocate more funds to advance their efforts, the two biggest challenges that UK content marketers face (delivering enough content and producing engaging content) are not new, nor are they specific to UK marketers.

While this research is an accurate reflection of the past, it ignores the emerging trend of employing emotional intelligence in marketing. I see more and more smart companies quietly changing their approach about content from logic to emotion. B2C companies are at the leading edge of this trend. Red Bull has done a great job of encouraging its customers to fly through the air (by base jumping, kite boarding, flying in wing suits, etc.) to drive its slogan “Gives you wings” into reality. Red Bull saved millions in marketing dollars by capturing and distributing content generated by customer advocates.

Here is another example: Joseph Tripodi, chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola, stated in an interview that Coca-Cola’s customers generate seven times more content than the company generates. Tripodi is less excited about impressions of a metric and more excited about customer expressions. He said that of the 140 million online mentions of the brand, only 20 million were created by his company. As of yesterday, Coca-Cola had 61 million likes on Facebook.

Traditional corporate content creators tend to get carried away with painting an embellished picture of reality (which often fails to lead to customer engagement). Companies are far better off investing less in content and giving their customers a paintbrush and canvas (via social-media platforms) and encouraging them to paint the true picture: the image of the brand as it is reflected in their hearts and minds.

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Seven Keys to Success

Today, salespeople carry smartphones, tote lightweight tablets, and are dialed into their organization’s network from, well, almost anywhere. No wonder that selling is now, more than ever, less a transactional endeavor and more an exercise in cultivating lasting relationships with customers. But despite the ubiquity of digital sales tools, reps who base their sales effort on a time-tested principle of work/life balance are most often the sales superstars. Here’s a list of some time-tested keys that will give you the best chance for success.

1. Work harder and play better.
Successful people know that nothing worthwhile comes easy. Hard work is important, but it is equally important to have fun. Go to any successful start-up company, and you’ll see employees blowing off steam on ping-pong tables, throwing darts, browsing books on a shelf, or playing trash-can basketball. Frolicking at work isn’t frivolous. Dispensed in small doses, it’s a powerful success medicine. Don’t be a workaholic; be a “workafrolic” instead.

2. Cultivate curiosity.
Successful people are not just curious about their chosen field, they are curious about EVERYTHING. They continually think, explore new ideas, ask dozens of questions, and always try to figure out how things work and how they could be made to work better. Curiosity is the most powerful business-improvement and personal-success engine.

3. Expand your endurance.
Push yourself mentally and physically. Successful people know how to generate and maintain positive energy 24/7. They strive to be physically fit, and at the same time they work on their psychological fitness. 

4. Turn failure into fertilizer.
Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he found a filament that would glow in a vacuum tube, which lead to his invention of the light bulb. Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, and failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” 

5. Focus.
Successful people begin each day with written goals they want to achieve. They know that the onslaught of incoming emails, calls, and texts will distract them, but each time they get sidetracked, they go back to working on the next item on their list. People who start a new task every three minutes end up doing in an hour 20 small tasks that merely contribute to maintaining the status quo. It is far better to invest your complete mental focus on two or three tasks per hour and create steady forward momentum.

6. Innovate.
Successful people know that having innovative ideas is not enough. What counts is how many new ideas you can implement successfully. What holds people back is not the difficulty of implementing their ideas, but what people say when they start sharing their ideas with others. Oracle founder Larry Ellison said it best: “When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you that you’re nuts.” 

7. Manage disappointment.
Successful people realize that reaching success often depends on how they manage the inevitable disappointments that unexpectedly impact their lives. When people get disappointed, they often withdraw, and their anger turns inward. Successful people transform disappointment into a journey of self-discovery, where they reconnect with their inner strengths. Disappointment well managed will become the cradle of ambition.

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Who Should Be Responsible for Sales Enablement Content - Sales or Marketing?

Today's blog post is by Jeff Ogden, award-winning B2B marketing expert, president of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers, and creator of the very popular and syndicated online TV show Marketing Made Simple TV.  

 

What is a Buyer Persona™ Buyer personas tell you exactly how and why a representative buyer makes the decision to buy the products, services, or solutions that you market. While buyer personas may include other details, the 5 Rings of Insight are their most overlooked and essential aspect, clarifying decisions for persuasive messaging, content marketing, product or solution launches, campaigns, and sales alignment. Priority Initiatives Success Factors Perceived Barriers Buying Process Decision Criteria The Five Rings of Insight and the ebook is owned by the Buyer Persona Institute.

When Gerhard Gschwandtner asked me that question in our recent video interview, I was dumbfounded for a moment. Sales? Marketing? Whom?

My first instinct was to answer yes, because marketing and sales have to work together.

I believe the lines separating sales and marketing need to end. He asked how those groups could unite. I told him those leaders need to get together and spend some quality time. Gerhard joked, “Are you saying a few beers can bring these teams together?” Yes, Gerhard, marketing and sales leaders are just people. If they spend quality time getting to know each other, things will go swimmingly. That means a lunch meeting or even a few beers after work.

In this guest post, I want to explore how sales and marketing can work together to create effective sales enablement content.

How to Create Truly Useful Sales Enablement Content

If one thinks about it, the role of content is to answer buyer questions needed to facilitate a purchase.  Only after you answer their questions can buyers become comfortable enough to sign with you. That means we need to first think about the questions that need answering.

Where can we learn these questions? We should talk to salespeople and even do some unstructured interviews of won and lost deals.  (Note: Download a free e-book on Buyer Personas here.)

Let’s use an example to illustrate: say the company trying to win a sale is “Acme Financial Solutions.” Acme offers a SaaS software product to enable marketing leaders to close faster.  A senior salesperson with Acme – let’s call him “Tom” – has a meeting with a VP of finance at a large financial services firm in New York City.

Tom meets with the VP and shows him a demonstration of the financial software. Then they sketch out on a whiteboard how the financial processes will change. The VP is impressed. But he says to Tom, “I’m concerned about our ability to successfully implement this software. I’m not sure we have the right talents in-house or know how to make the needed changes to use your software.”

Tom does a song and dance and tries to assure the buyer that Acme will help his company through these changes. Acme has done nothing to arm Tom for questions like this; however, if Acme had thought through the question ahead of time and the salespeople have been asked this question before, then the company could craft content to answer the question.

Let’s put Tom back in the meeting with the VP of finance. He’s again asked about the need for the right talents and processes. Tom pulls out an iPad and pops up a video. In this video, an existing Acme client talks about the implementation and what was learned about training and process change. Tom’s prospect has an answer from a trusted source and signs on the spot.

Conclusion: Sales and Marketing Need to Work Together

How do sales and marketing become one and create truly useful content like Tom’s?

I think there’s no secret formula; it requires people who genuinely care. People who care spend time talking and really listening to the point of view of the other person. If both sales and marketing teams feel the other has its best interest at heart, the icy distrust will thaw.

Next, sales and marketing need to come up with a list of buyer questions. These come from past sales experiences and unstructured buyer interviews. (Download a free e-book on Buyer Personas here.) Sit down for a meeting and get these questions documented. Once the questions are compiled, then start thinking about how best to answer those questions.

Perhaps you could record a video or audio interview of an existing client. Or you could create some other form of useful content. No matter what, sales and marketing can create great content – together.

A few pints of good beer can solve everything, I think.

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Secrets to Developing Successful Sales Managers

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

Back in November, I wrote here about how sales managers who are on the cusp of hitting quota sometimes hang on to low-performing reps in the hope of eking out even a few more sales.

Obviously it’s not good business to keep poorly performing sales reps on the books. But the underlying issue ­– and perhaps the more important one ­– is that first-line sales managers have a huge impact on company performance, yet they’re often overlooked for training and career development. They may get a workshop or two when they’re new to the manager role, but after that, the training emphasis shifts to the sales staff.

At Xactly, we’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because of a Webinar series we’re conducting with the management experts at ZS Associates. Andy Zoltners and Marshall Solem of ZS have some keen insight into problems that arise at the manager level.

One such problem can be traced to the structure of the typical sales career path. Got a sales rep who knocks it out of the park every quarter? Paid his or her dues, put in the time, deserves a promotion? There’s your next sales manager! Trouble is, great reps don’t necessarily make great managers.

That makes sense when you think about the characteristics each position requires. A top-notch sales rep, for example,

• wins through personal effort,
• is customer-centric,
• sets a personal agenda,
• and is focused on results.

The traits of a good manager are completely different. These managers

• win through leading others,
• focus on both customer and company,
• balance the demands of many stakeholders,
• and act strategically.

Sales managers also have to maintain a balance among three roles: they’re people managers, business managers, and customer managers. When the company changes its strategy or new regulations come into play, it’s up to the manager to communicate to the field. When the field reports on changes in the marketplace, the manager communicates with the company on how it needs to adapt. Not everyone can balance the competing needs.

Promoting good reps who aren’t well suited to management is a classic lose-lose situation. The star seller most likely will be replaced by someone who isn’t as strong. And ZS research has found that performance deteriorates over time in territories run by weak managers.

So what can a company do to ensure a strong team of first-line managers?

• Hire for characteristics. Train and coach competencies.

Characteristics	Competencies
Integrity	Market knowledge
Empathy, listening skills	Business savvy
Social skills	Hiring skills
Competitiveness	Region planning and management skills
Assertiveness	Negotiation skills
Decisiveness	Experience

Ideally, a first-line sales manager will possess all of those characteristics and competencies alike (although that’s asking a lot). But if you have to make a trade-off, go with the characteristics. Market knowledge and planning skills can be taught; integrity and decisiveness can’t. Or, as ZS’s Solem puts it, “You can’t send a duck to eagle school. If you want an eagle, you have to hire an eagle.”

• Give sales managers the support and training they need to be effective and efficient, including the following: 
  • Data and tools: dashboards and metrics, tools for territory goal setting or territory realignment, and tools for budgeting and expense management.
  • Processes and systems: processes to help manage performance reviews, hiring, and goal setting, so all managers operate in much the same way and don’t have to make up processes on their own.
  • People: administrative staff and regional analysts to help managers understand the business, and a “traffic cop” to manage requests from headquarters for field time and manager time.
• Create a career path for sales reps that lets them advance without becoming managers. This could mean setting up different levels of responsibility, from junior rep to senior rep to key-account exec assigned to global accounts. Seasoned salespeople could be given extra internal responsibilities, such as leading task forces to address issues within the organization, or coaching and mentoring new reps.

Some salespeople assume the management mantle seamlessly, but don’t assume everyone can make the transition. Use these tips to keep management problems at bay and your top sellers doing what they do best. 

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The Sales-Performance Puzzle: How to Solve It

This is the month in which many sales organizations are busy with the Big Sales Kickoff. As the sales leader, you orchestrate a fast-paced show delivered by your company’s best platform talent. The CEO’s keynote is inspirational, the CMO’s presentation is aspirational, the product manager’s demo rocks, and your keynote is densely packed with bold and optimistic predictions and tough challenges. As the sales leader, you are the merchant of hope, and your salespeople are swallowing your message hook, line, and sinker.

But after the team heads for the airport, you may be left with a nagging question: what impact will this kickoff have on your sales numbers? Here is my guess:

1. Retention of information

Twenty percent of your salespeople will absorb 80 percent of the content and then use half of it with customers. Eighty percent of your salespeople will absorb 20 percent of the content and use one-third of it with customers.

2. Impact on motivation

Eighty percent of your salespeople will feel recharged and optimistic about the company and their future, and 20 percent will continue shopping for better opportunities.

3. Acquisition of selling skills

Ninety percent of your salespeople listened to some of the selling skills you shared during the kickoff meeting, but fewer than 10 percent will try to apply the new skills, and after experiencing some failure they’ll revert to their old behavior.

If you don’t believe my guesstimates, consider the solid numbers uncovered by ES Research: according to ES Research’s sales-training surveys, between 85 and 90 percent of sales training has no impact after 120 days. Of the $5 billion US companies spend yearly on sales training, more than $4.25 billion are wasted.

Last week I interviewed John Doerr, a sales-training expert. John is co-president at RAIN Group. I edited the one-hour interview to the most essential nine minutes, and I highly recommend that you watch them, since he shares uncommon insight into solving the sales-performance puzzle.

If you are short on time, you can skip to the end, where I summarized the key points in a few PPT slides (that you can download from our new Website, www.salesopshop.com). To watch the video, click on the image below.

Please feel free to comment below, or tweet your questions using #salesopchat.

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Selling with 360-degree Visibility: Dream or Reality?

Today's blog post is by Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo, a company that digs insight out of the many corporate data repositories to help salespeople look smart when they deal with customers.

 A sales professional’s greatest asset is knowledge. The more you know about a prospect, the more relevant you are to your prospect and the easier it is to close a deal – and then a bigger deal. But faced with information fragmentation and a proliferation of information clutter, sales teams often fail to effectively and efficiently mine the knowledge they need to make better selling decisions; instead, they constantly reinvent the wheel. The long-promised, 360-degree view of the customer was never quite delivered, mainly because there is no such a thing as “the” 360-degree view that can be captured in a single system.

The “cloud” fuels this problem of fragmented information. When salesforce.com brought cloud computing to the forefront of selling professionals’ minds, it was – and still is – a revolutionary tool due to its scalability, flexibility, and freedom to collect and track sales activities and house many parts of an account. But the proliferation of cloud-based applications and their ease of adoption also add systems of knowledge to an already crowded picture of applications, databases, and online resources – other systems where knowledge can be lost. Cloud platforms such as Salesforce are themselves scattered a bit, requiring users to look in many different areas – and click and scroll a lot – to see the information they need. Then they have to remember it while they look for more information.

In sales, power equals relevance to prospects’ or customers’ exact needs and situations and an ability to challenge their views, if necessary. For sales executives to be highly relevant and credible challengers and perceived as bringing added value, it takes real-time and comprehensive intelligence. It starts with understanding the prospect’s context – and that context is multifaceted, with information about it stored anywhere and everywhere – certainly far beyond the scope of CRM systems. Add to the equation all of the tools your company has created to ensure that your sales executives can be effective. Where does all of this information reside, and how does sales discern which content is most appropriate and relevant for each prospect?

Information about your prospects and customers plus all sales tools and customer/prospect interaction reside in a multitude of systems and formats: social media, CRM, financial systems, engineering, service, communities, email, call transcripts, Websites, and more. Add to that examples of similar customers and their products and history, the right presentations, product literature, blogs, and all customer/prospect communications and interaction. Then add knowledge from colleagues and even former colleagues – people who have expertise about that prospect or customer or about the applicability of your products to that prospect. Next add other sales execs who may be selling into the same company at the same time across the world.  Don’t forget products from your company the customer may already own and his or her experiences with them.

How can a single sales executive know all of that for each customer during each encounter? Until recently, one of the biggest pain points that sales agents faced was having to leave a CRM such as salesforce.com to access information from multiple other systems, in addition to running around the company to reach people who possess the right information.

Advanced indexing technology is the way forward. In this model, fragments of information are assembled on demand and served up to users. Take a look at how Google and Yahoo! have transformed the consumer world in aggregating, consolidating, and unifying into one index information from the world’s Websites. Now think about the same paradigm but across the enterprise IT clutter.

Advanced indexing technology can perform securely in the same manner within the vast variety of systems – email, databases, CRM, ERP, social media, documents. The technology is available to securely index those sources, unify that information in a central index, normalize the information, then perform mash-ups on demand. Think of a world in which every document a sales executive needs on any platform is instantly organized, indexed, and recommended at the right time and for the right prospect or customer. Think of a world where every sales executive gets the complete and best contextually relevant information for the prospect’s needs and situation. 

Sales and CRM teams around the world have used this technology to their advantage:

• CA Technologies is a global software company with 400 products and 13 million documents relevant to its sales and CRM teams. CA is able to index, correlate, and utilize relevant information from these systems instantaneously, allowing its marketing teams to solve cases 15 percent faster.
• Tokyo Electron is a global manufacturer of high-tech semiconductor products. When its field service teams need to solve a complex case, they’re able to index information across multiple systems instantaneously. They increased their post-sales revenue without any additional travel or personnel costs.
• L’Oreal equips its sales and customer service agents in the field with the ability to index customer information across millions of documents. As a result, they’re able to see all relevant information about a customer or prospect, allowing them to close deals faster and keep customers happy.

While many technologists still chase the impossible dream of integration, we are leading the way with a federation of information through advanced indexing technology so that we can help salespeople benefit from 360-degree, instantaneous visibility of all relevant data. 

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Will You Set Smart Goals for 2013?

We cannot expect to become the directors of our lives if we fail to choose a meaningful direction.

As we approach 2013, we can choose to sit on the sidelines and watch other people score or take charge of our lives by pursuing our goals. Goals are difficult concepts to grasp; many people don’t see themselves as capable of changing, growing, and achieving. They see goals like statues: cast in bronze and placed out of reach.

I suggest viewing goals more like a river that flows from the present moment to a rich land filled with amazing opportunities. Instead of focusing our attention on the two obvious points, the present and future, we need to look at the emerging road between these two points.

Goal setting doesn’t amount to simply creating a narrative about what we want to get out of life or what we want to give back. We need to decide on the quality of our journey. We need to choose a road that challenges our capabilities and our will.

Sometimes people attach so much meaning to their distant goals that they obsess about them while ignoring their need to feel good in the here and now. They overrate the value of the trophy and ignore the meaning of the trip. They tend to forget that success is not a vague destination that resides only in our imagination but a journey into a forever-expanding and precious present. If we can’t expand our awareness to match the richness of the here and now, we’ll never get a chance to claim the fortune we imagine in the distant future.

To become the director of our own life, we need to…

know who we are and take inventory of our talents,

know where we are and scope out our future,

and decide on our goal and the quality of our journey.

One more important thing to remember is not to be influenced by the noise on the sidelines, such as talk about the “fiscal cliff,” the “European debt crisis,” or the “growing economic uncertainty.” Pessimism is misuse of the imagination. Think of the two words “smart goal” as acronyms with two meanings. The logical meaning is SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based. The emotional meaning is GOAL : Guts, Optimism, Attitude, and Loyalty.

With a little effort, we can shape our future in the image of our goals. But without a set direction for 2013, we won’t be able to direct our lives, and we’ll continue to repeat what we know hasn’t worked for us in the past. Take a moment now to write down your number one goal for 2013. Carpe diem leads to Veni, vidi, vici. 

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Remembering Zig Ziglar – America’s # 1 Motivator

This morning we learned that Zig Ziglar passed away at the age of 86.

Zig Ziglar has been a positive thinker and professional motivator for many decades. His electrifying speeches had a reputation for drawing standing ovations and leaving audiences spellbound. And he relished every single word of his famous punch line, “You can get everything in life you want if you help other people get what they want.”

During our first interview I realized that Zig Ziglar was more than a motivator. He was a person with a strong, well-established guiding philosophy, one that had enduring value for everyone. Ziglar was his own best success story. It began in Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was born one of twelve children. His father died when he was five, leaving his mother with five kids too young to work.

He became one of the most successful cookware salesmen of all time but quit knocking on doors when he recognized his ability to motivate others. Here is a transcript of my first interview with Zig that was originally published in Sept 1982.

Q: In one of your speeches you mentioned that negative thinking is as common as the cold. Did you find a cure for negative thinking?

Ziglar: If you feed your mind with positive thoughts, if you are selective about the things that you choose to read, look at, or listen to, then you are taking effective action against negative thinking.

Q: So you are saying that there is a direct link between negative thinking and negative input and that people can become more selective about the input?

Ziglar: Absolutely.

Q: What is your definition of success?

Ziglar: I believe that you're successful when you've dealt with the physical, the mental and the spiritual man successfully. If I made millions and destroyed my health in the process, or if I become the best at what I do but neglect my family, I wouldn't call that success.

Q: One of your claims is that your attitudes in life determine ultimately how successful you become.

Ziglar: Yes. Dr. William James said the most important discovery of our time is the realization that by altering our attitudes we can alter our lives. There is also a Harvard University study that points out that 85 percent of the reason people are hired or get ahead in their jobs is directly related to their attitudes.

Q: I once read a magazine article about motivational speakers that stated, "Speakers are superficial on the subject of motivation - like cheerleaders at a high school rally. Thin on content, heavy on performance." How do you respond to that?

Ziglar: I think they are right on the button. A lot of people do leave without any real meat. Excitement, yes, but nothing they can chew on the next day.

As you know, the Bible is my great source, because God's plan deals with this dilemma: He never makes a promise unless he gives you a plan. This translates into the principle that motivation without direction is very frustrating. You need to have a plan in addition to the motivation. Motivation without a goal doesn't get you anywhere. Personally, I never make a promise in a book, a speech or a recording unless I give a plan so my reader or listener can achieve the promise.

Q: What is your theory of self-motivation? How do you develop it?

Ziglar: When I build a fire in my fireplace, it will burn for a while. Then I notice that there are no flames. It has died down. I get up and take my poker and shake up those logs. All of a sudden, we've got bright flames. Now, all I did was just poke them, which created some motion. The motion creates a partial vacuum and new air is pulled into the fireplace. With an additional supply of oxygen, the fire ignites, and now we've got a flame. If I hadn't done some poking, there would have been no flame.

Now, this business about all motivation being self-motivation is only partially true. You can choose among many different sources to rekindle your motivation. In other words, the environment you select and the people you associate with become large contributing factors.

Q: Do positive input and the positive attitude need to be supplemented with a sound business plan and professional skills?

Ziglar: Absolutely. Positive thinking is an optimistic hope, not necessarily based on any facts. Positive believing is the same optimistic hope, but this time based on a sound reason. Here is an example. It would be positive thinking if I said I could whip George Foreman. It would be an idiotic action if I tried to do it.

Q: I've heard many sales managers express doubts about the lasting value of a motivational seminar.

Ziglar: They're absolutely right! Motivation is not permanent. Neither is bathing. But if you bathe every day, you're going to smell good. Fifteen minutes a day of motivation from a good audiocassette or a book can make a tremendous difference in your life and give you a motivational lift every day.

Q: You said once that life is simple but not easy, and that too many people are looking for quick and easy solutions.

Ziglar: Right. I firmly believe that the best work is often done by people who don't feel like doing it.

Q: Why do you recommend that salespeople listen to your books on tape 16 times to completely absorb the full message?

Ziglar: There are several university studies revealing that two weeks after you've learned anything new, unless it's reinforced, you only remember about 4 percent of it. That's the first reason. The second reason is that while we are listening we may experience a certain mood, and our minds will seek out messages that relate to that particular mood. On another day, let's say you just made a sale; you'll be in a different mood, and a whole new range of messages of the same recording will become clear in your mind. So by listening 16 times, the odds are that you will have absorbed the entire content.

Q: Let's say I've listened 16 times to your tapes on motivation. Do I know then how to motivate myself?

Ziglar: Yes.

Q: Do I master the skills sufficiently so that I become independent of your recordings?

Ziglar: Only if you've been practicing the things we've been advocating. It's like driving a car. You don't learn to drive a car by watching.

Q: Can I graduate in self-motivation, ever?

Ziglar: I don't think so, and I don't think I've graduated, because I constantly read and constantly study. I think you could draw an analogy with eating. You can't graduate in eating. You need to continue to make choices about your input. The same is true with self-motivation. You need to continue to make choices about what level of self-motivation you want to maintain.

Q: Many salespeople have a tough time in this economy. What thoughts can you offer to approach these tough challenges more positively?

Ziglar: A good friend of mine, Calvin Hunt in Victoria, Texas, said, "You know, Zig, it's an absolute fact that when we are in an economic slump, 50 percent of all salespeople literally slow down rather than speed up their efforts. They are not motivated to do something. They lose that enthusiasm.

"Now," he continued, "when that happens, it simply means that if business is down 20 percent, but 50 percent of the salespeople are not nearly as active, your own personal prospect list is considerably higher than if there was no recession."

Q: And the winners still keep winning.

Ziglar: Absolutely. It's their discipline, their commitment to maintain a high level of motivation and their sense of direction that gets them to the top.

Tomorrow: Zig’s Keys to Sales Success and his most memorable quotes

Are Your Managers Hanging On to Bad Sales Reps?

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

 

One of the benefits of collecting detailed data is the insight you can glean about your company's training needs. Armed with information that clearly highlights each field rep's strengths and weaknesses, sales managers can devise training plans that are tailor-made for each individual.

Great plan!

But while so much coaching advice focuses on field reps, another group has been all but overlooked: the sales managers themselves.

This year, Xactly enlisted researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to help us analyze some of the 200 million transactions we handle each month,  and some interesting patterns emerged when we looked at sales managers and their relationships to field reps. In the coming months, we'll report on our findings in more detail.

We're still interpreting the data, but our hypothesis is that many managers, if on the borderline of attaining their quotas, tend to keep low-performing salespeople on the books for too long. Those managers would rather keep underperformers on the books to generate even a few sales rather than the guaranteed zero sales they'd get if they fired the bottom tier.

That can have worrisome implications for company leadership. It doesn't do your company any favors to have bad salespeople representing you. They can tarnish your hard-earned reputation, blow solid leads, anger potential customers, and lose a lot of deals.

How did we come to this supposition? Through a lot of digital legwork. Our extensive study looked at data from

• 22 million transactions
• 7,492 sales managers at 244 firms
• 61,092 of their immediate subordinates
• 134 million events on which an individual is credited
• 5,897 distinct incentive plans

Here's some of what we found regarding sales managers:

• When managers were on target to hit their quotas, sales-rep turnover was 22.2 percent. If the managers are on track, there's no benefit to keeping salespeople who aren't up to snuff.
• When managers were clearly going to miss their quotas, turnover of sales reps was 18.6 percent.  If there's no advantage to keeping poor performers, managers will go ahead and cut them loose early.
• When managers were on the margin of making quota, when every little bit counts, sales-rep turnover was only 5.6 percent. The sales managers held on to bad reps if they considered them essential to achieving their own quotas.

The message here? You want to monitor your poor performers to determine if you should be coaching them or letting them go. But along with that, be sure to monitor the managers who might be protecting them. You don't want to waste good leads on bad salespeople.

This is just one facet of the data MIT is analyzing with Xactly. Look for more as we develop it further and create benchmarks beyond single companies. Our use of the most current technology, multitenant SaaS, allows us to gather this information across companies and industries.

We'll use this information to help us – and you – learn more about quota attainment and quota-setting trends, and learn more through benchmarking.

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What's Ahead for Sales Organizations in 2013?

How clearly do you see the road ahead? When we are driving down the highway, we notice that, the faster we go, the more the view begins to blur – yet the dashboard is clear and bright. This also applies to sales leaders. While the speed of change accelerates, many sales leaders become confused by the rapid shifts in buying behaviors. While some customers act as if they’re in a boom cycle, other customers react and prepare for tougher times in the road ahead.

As we plan for 2013, salespeople demand more clarity of vision from their sales leaders. An overarching vision has three elements:

1. A guiding vision. It begins with an accurate appraisal of the present. Salespeople want to know the answer to these questions: Where are we now? What are our strengths? What makes us vulnerable? What threats are we facing?

2. A guiding fiction. Nobody can predict the future, but effective leaders have an uncanny ability to direct followers to imagine and find the best opportunities in the market. Uncertain times demand leaders who can stimulate the imagination so that their followers can clearly focus on winning more business month after month. The best leaders are merchants of hope.

3. A guiding process. Salespeople need a continuously improved and accelerated process for everything from generating leads to closing the sale. Successful sales leaders need to constantly realign people, process, and technology. 

In many companies, there are as many sales processes as there are salespeople. World-class sales organizations follow a process that’s based on A) the know-how of their best salespeople and B) how customers want to buy. Many sales leaders believe that their well-thought-out sales process reflects the customer’s journey.

While the economy continues to challenge, confuse, and surprise decision makers, effective sales leaders ignore the noise on the sidelines and get busy improving sales productivity across the organization. According to a survey performed by the SalesOpShop, sales leaders’ top two priorities for 2013 are 1) topline growth and 2) improved sales process. To achieve these goals, sales leaders need to become more innovative when aligning people, process, and technology. The challenge in most organizations is that people are often too slow, processes are often too old, and technology is often too complex. To meet that challenge, we need to invest 60 percent of our effort in helping people change, 30 percent in improving our processes, and 10 percent on implementing simpler and better technology. The key to winning in 2013 depends on expanding the innovative capabilities of the organization.

Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge, because knowledge tells us what was, whereas imagination tells what will be. What will be in 2013 depends on adaptive and creative sales leaders, who drive people’s capacity to change and lead them to execute on a customer-focused process that’s accelerated by the best technology available. Your success will also hinge on what you believe you can achieve. 

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