Reprinted with permission from the May 2007 edition of Selling Power Magazine
Connect the Entire Selling Chain and Eliminate the Gap between Sales and Marketing
This article is based on a conversation with Robert Petrossi and Daniel Petrossi, founder/chairman and president/COO, respectively, of Naples, Florida-based Sales Research Institute (SRI). Founded in 1991, SRI is a leader in selling chain management system design, training, and implementation. Its clients include Motorola, HP, and General Electric as well as such emerging growth companies as GBS and Resun Corp.
Trying to solve an isolated problem in sales, such as your team's cold-calling or closing skills, is a little like playing that old whack-a-mole game. No sooner do you eliminate one problem than a new one rears its head. Fix the new one and a third pops up. Then, with your focus elsewhere, your team's old habits from that first problem reappear. Eventually, you realize all the "moles" are interconnected at a deeper level and you'll never be rid of them unless you dig down into the game and do some serious rewiring.
Understanding this principle (even if not quite in those terms), the leaders of a global diversified technology company knew better than to simply throw resources at fixing a single sales gap of which they were made aware in late 2004. Instead, they recognized that the gap might be one of many symptoms of a deeper problem; that perhaps their struggles with issues like getting more face time with customers and trying to close the chasm between sales and marketing might all somehow be connected.
They were right. By bringing in the people at Sales Research Institute (SRI) to take a holistic approach to connecting the entire selling chain, this $20-billion-a-year company has reduced call preparation time, made face-to-face contact time with customers more productive, shortened the sales cycle, and expects to close more than $80 million in additional sales. And that's just the start of it. Here's the background.
No "How to Sell" Information
When a leading sales expert was working with the technology company on a separate issue, he noticed something striking: a significant gap in the information the company was providing to its reps when training them to sell its products. The training materials, he observed, did not go deep enough and weren't specific enough to ensure their reps targeted the right prospects with the right questions and the right information every time.
THE ROAD TO MARKET
More than 90 percent of the technology company's business is done through channels with heavy concentration in big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and Lowe's. These channels are developed and nurtured by account teams that are led by directors. They usually include sales reps who call on individual stores as well as analysts who do regular data analysis on product performance at these stores. The remainder of the company's sales are done by field reps selling face-to-face and business-to-business.
"We were very good at telling salespeople what to sell - features, advantages, benefits - but we were less good at telling them how to sell and who to sell to," explains one executive at the global corporation. By "how to sell," he means specific sales steps - who to talk to, what to talk to them about, key questions, and so on. In other words, the company would tell its reps to ask questions, but it didn't give them the specific questions to ask that were most likely to lead to success. Or it told them to identify prospects, but didn't detail what kind of prospects were most likely to purchase each product. "We were giving them basic selling skills and then we were essentially saying to them, 'Now go do what you do' and expecting them to perform," says the executive.
Recognizing the problem once it was pointed out, the company dug a little deeper to get at its best practices for closing sales - and discovered another problem. In analyzing two of its major business units to look at sales successes and failures, executives learned that no one fully understood why each sale was won or lost. Which meant the factors leading to success couldn't be duplicated and the factors leading to failure couldn't be eliminated - because no one knew what they were.
Shortly thereafter, they realized that perhaps they weren't quite as efficient on the "what to sell" side of things as they could be, either. They struggled, for instance, to manage the flow of information about their products. As one of the company's marketers noted, "No sooner would I send a shipment of product binders to the mailroom than I'd see a new piece of information I would have included if I had had the chance." The result, as another executive put it, was that the information sales reps needed "was all over the place: in the initial product binder, in emails sent out later, in notes from telephone conversations with marketing. Good reps knew where to find the information, but our core reps struggled."
Link the Chain
Robert Petrossi, SRI's founder and chairman, recognized the underlying issue of all these symptoms as fragmentation of the selling chain. At most organizations, he explains, the links in the selling chain exist not as links but as individual elements - product development, marketing, sales, sales support, partners, and distributors. Yet successful sales require collaboration among all these organizations. Thus, if there's no process in place for seamlessly connecting them, management will continue to struggle with myriad nagging - and on the surface, seemingly unrelated - challenges such as those detailed above. Other symptoms can include challenges with selling value over price, increasing new-hire ramp-up time, and selling a constantly changing product and solution portfolio, among countless others.
"During the past several years almost every dollar of operational efficiency has been squeezed out of the supply side of the customer value chain," says Petrossi. "This daunting reality is forcing companies to focus on the last, untapped area to improve profitability and accelerate revenue growth - the demand or 'sell side' of the customer value chain."
Linking the chain, says Petrossi, makes the individual pieces exponentially stronger than the sum of their parts. And the way to make that link is by using a series of electronic documents called Sales Guides.
A Guide to Guides
Sales Guides consist of 15 product-specific "how-to-sell" templates. They are created with the input of all parts of the selling chain, and they reside on an Internet-based Selling Chain Portal, so they are constantly accessible for review and comment by everyone in the selling chain. They include such information as:
Description of offering - a one- to two-page summary of the product or service, main customer benefits, typical commission/benefits the sales rep will reap by selling it, general sales cycle information, and how easy or difficult it is to sell the offering.
Customer benefits - a detailed grid that breaks out key customer problems, a look at the specific impact of the solution in solving that problem, and who in a prospect's organization, by title, would care about each issue.
Competitive landscape - a chart ranking individual product capabilities as they compare to the capabilities of competitive products. At a glance, users can see such critical information as their "silver bullets," or areas where their product is unmatched by competitors, as well as vulnerabilities.
Two-minute drill - essentially, a script for the first five minutes of an initial sales call. The idea is that reps can take two minutes to read through it before going in to see a new prospect and thus feel more focused and ready for that call.
Value questions - a grid of questions designed to be asked in certain situations that the organization has found to be most thought-provoking for prospects and most likely to move them to a positive decision.
Sales Guides work because they bring together all the critical information needed during the entire selling process in a single location where it can be viewed and commented on by everyone in the selling chain. Moreover, the guides are "living" documents, which means they evolve constantly to keep up with changes in the product, customers, and marketplace. Thus, when a competitor rolls out a new capability in a competing product - or a new product altogether - a single update to the portal instantly reflects those capabilities in the "Competitive Landscape" page. When your reps review the sales guide before a call, they'll see the new information and can alter their pitch accordingly. The same is true for every piece of information on every page of the guide.
With hundreds of constantly evolving products being sold by more than 10,000 reps around the world; with the departments involved in the selling process arguably operating more as individual units than as a linked chain; and with no process for developing quality "how to sell" information, the global technology corporation agreed to test run these guides. The company selected two very different business units, one with about 400 sales reps and another with 60 and both based in the U.S., to undergo the test.
Once this decision was reached, implementation was fairly straightforward. SRI's Laurie Hayes conducted "train the trainer" workshops to teach key employees how to create and update the guides. Since the guides are product-specific, each product was assigned a Sales Guide owner - someone responsible for putting together a mastermind group to develop the guide, then overseeing that development and, eventually, the upkeep of the guide. The mastermind groups typically included the marketing manager, product manager, top sales rep, and a technical support rep.
As each group completed its product guide, they rolled them out to everyone in the selling chain. With the initial roll-out, they provided training on how to use the guides and how to provide feedback and make suggested changes. Then the company took a hard look at whether the guides would work in the field.
STRUCTURE OF THE SALES ORGANIZATION
The global company detailed in this article consists of 37 different business units with sales forces ranging in size from about six reps on the small end to more than 400 reps in the largest unit. All told, the organization employs more than 10,000 sales representatives worldwide.
The sales structure at each unit varies depending on the size and nature of the business, but here's how a typical unit looks: 10 field reps report to one area manager. Area managers report to a regional manager, of which there are three or four across the U.S. The regional managers report to a national director. At the smaller organizations, the area manager reports directly to a national manager or director. Finally, some of the business units employ channel sales managers who, depending on the organization, might report to an area or national manager.
Compelling Results
The results of putting all the how-to-sell information in a single place accessible to everyone in the selling chain have been compelling for the global technology organization. According to one executive, Sales Guides users in one unit close one additional application per month compared to nonusers, which equates to about a 25 percent increase in closure rate. Today, more than 2,000 of the company's sales reps are using the guides; when they are fully rolled out, they are expected to add $80 million to the company's sales in the U.S.
Part of that boost stems from the ability to more accurately target potential customers. Now that the organization has a clearer understanding of its unique value propositions (UVP) and "silver bullets" for each product, it better understands its ideal prospect for each product. Which means sales reps are spending their time in front of the right people more quickly and more often. As one company official put it, "When we can quickly identify who our best prospects are, we stop going after everybody."
Sales reps are faster and more efficient in other ways as well. For instance, one rep, due to call on an account he doesn't normally call on, turned to the online guides for his precall planning and accessed the product, market, and customer information he needed to make a knowledgeable presentation. "After going through the guide, I had much more confidence going into the account," he said. Another sales rep, one of the newest in the company, says she now has less need to call marketing or laboratory people with questions - most of what she needs is in the guides, which has saved time all around as well as accelerated her ramp-up.
At the same time, the guides have steered the company away from some costly mistakes. In the past, they, like many organizations, occasionally released a product that wound up falling flat in the marketplace. Salespeople would spend months trying to close sales to no avail, then come back and complain that no one needed the product. Inevitably, there would be a battle between marketing and sales that eventually culminated in the product being killed. "It was always a double whammy," says Petrossi. "Not only were their reps not selling the new product, they weren't selling the things that could be sold because their time was spent pushing the new product."
Now, the company pre-assesses any new product by running it through the "how to sell" test while it is still on the drawing board. Using the Sales Guides, the product development team can line up strengths and weaknesses against competitive products. If they see a would-be product is light on strengths with no clearly identifiable UVP, it kills the product before that product ever makes it off paper. Or if a product looks great in terms of strengths and "silver bullets," but there's no clear "who to sell" information because the product doesn't solve a compelling problem for anyone, again, it gets the axe. All of which means sales reps never spend time pushing products no one needs.
And that old gap between marketing and sales? Today, the company would respond with, "What gap?" With everyone operating from the same "how to sell" pages, there's no longer a tug-of-war between the two departments. As one market development manager put it, the format of the how-to-sell information helps the company refine its thinking about the positioning of its products, which in turn helps it lead with the correct key messages. The guides, says the manager, enable the company "to go beyond 'What's the product?' and concentrate instead on 'Who's the customer?' and 'How do we win?'" Which, in the end, is exactly what sales needs to succeed.
- HEATHER BALDWIN
>>Contact us for more information.