Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

2. I’m too busy to coach deals.

3. I’m ahead of quota. They won’t fire me.

4. I’m a veteran. That stuff is for rookies.

5. I handle the big account. They won’t fire me.

6. If I take time to do that and don’t make my numbers, they’ll fire me anyway.

7. Let’s see if my manager has the guts to insist on doing this.

8. I have too much administrative work and no time to coach.

9. Why do we need strategy sessions? We talk to the reps all the time.

10. We’ve tried this before. This too shall pass.

New Metrics — New Accountability

So what does the future hold? One of the best practices to making processes stick is creating new sales metrics — other than just revenue. Focusing on revenue only as a measurement is like driving in the rear-view mirror.

What is needed are metrics that measure accounts, deals, and salespeople along the way and spot out-of-control performance while there is still time to make changes. Metrics have not been an area of focus, outside of training departments, for the last few years. Salespeople respond well to being measured against goals. And metrics drive visibility and accountability, which ultimately drives discipline.

A great book for illustrating the potential effects of new metrics to achieve greater productivity is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.

He writes about how Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s baseball organization brought new thinking into how to evaluate which factors predict success for a player. This enabled the team to get high performers for less money and build a perennial winning team without the superhigh payrolls that don’t always ensure success.

The “gut-feel” metaphors and stereotypes used by the major league scouts were replaced by new criteria. Beane and his Harvard economists had analyzed what really predicted success in baseball performance — walks taken, onbase percentage, and slugging percentage. They challenged established statistics such as errors — how can you have a statistic based on something you were supposed to do? They saw that the best way to avoid an “error” is to not try, or to be in the wrong place, or to have poor range.

The effect on the scouts and the rest of the league is a classic story of resistance to change management and the difficulties of challenging the intuitive, gut-feel, but untested factors that baseball scouts have used for years.

The power of new metrics changed baseball thinking and performance forever.

As we discussed in the section on technology, a critical best practice is to tie the methodology and customized best practice sales cycle back into the forecast.

New metrics are needed during the coaching phase. There are questions that coaches need to ask salespeople that will challenge assumptions, find blind spots, identify competitive counterstrategies, and drive toward a more successful sales plan.

We have recently implemented with some of our clients a coaching feedback system called Sales Prophet — an analysis of the analysis — that gives a manager’s confidence rating of the major questions in the sales plan as a result of the strategy session. The sales executive can then see how and why the forecast has been adjusted by front-line management. This results in fewer surprises and greater confidence in the forecast, as well as a greater win ratio.

As a result, there is also a watershed shift in accountability. Rather than seeing who has filled out forms, the question becomes which managers have strategized and coached their deals? And if not, why not?

Metrics drive visibility and accountability, which ultimately drive discipline.

Coaching and Forecast Follow-up Metrics

The Internet has created the possibility of getting greater feedback on the pipeline at a minimum of expense and time from the field reps.

While a good coaching session is the foundation of forecast accuracy, a manager needs to separate coaching and forecasting techniques. Coaching must be value-added. It needs to provide new ideas to help qualify, advance the strategy, gain access, challenge assumptions, or brainstorm new ideas. Coaching should expose blind spots for the rep’s benefit — not expose his or her shortcomings. These sessions could take an hour or some could take a day depending on the size, importance, and complexity of the deal.

Forecasting reviews should be quick and very focused. They should be driven from the key question areas just discussed: Why will you win? When will it close? What is the source of urgency? What has to happen between now and when it closes? Forecast reviews should take no more than 30 minutes per opportunity. If nothing has changed, five minutes.

A manager should be able to take truthful answers and create a consolidated forecast to pass along. Based on the estimated close date of the opportunity, we have helped a number of our clients track the effectiveness of the coaching session and the progress of the deal. First, we can find out if the deal closed at all, if it closed faster than expected, if it closed for more or less than the expected amount, or if we qualified out.

We can ask if the new sales process or technology was helpful or not and, if so, how. We also can determine whether a strategy review was conducted by the sales manager and if it was helpful or not. (This involves more accountability and visibility for the front-line sales managers.) This is also an opportunity for the reps to say where they need help and more follow-up training.

Deal-Tracking Survey

One of the new metrics introduced at Apple to help determine the effectiveness of its training initiative was an Internet survey of over 400 deals that had been coached in strategy review sessions. The beauty of the survey was its efficiency. The survey consisted of a half-dozen questions that branched further only under certain conditions. It didn’t take much time to complete.

Rather than just ask why they won or why they lost, it prompted the sales reps about how well they understood the elements of their sales process in the deal. For example, how well did they understand the decision-making process? Did they understand the client’s strategic issues? Did they detect a pain that was a source of urgency?

It also asked if the reps had conducted a strategy session with their managers, and if so, was it helpful?

With this metric, managers were able to see that their win ratio when they used the process was significantly higher than when they didn’t. They also identified specific areas where salespeople needed more training, which could be done by e-learning modules or reviews.

A very useful outcome was that managers learned that their people weren’t qualifying out of enough bad deals. They rewrote their qualification criteria to focus on their more winnable deals.

The last outcome was to identify which managers were conducting strategy sessions and which were not. Interesting phone calls followed. Greater visibility had pushed accountability to the front-line sales managers, where it belonged.

Performance Reviews — More Than Just Deal Competence

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is reserving employee performance feedback for the typical annual review.

I am still amazed at how many companies don’t consistently use performance reviews at all and how many sales organizations use the standard one provided by HR as a way to review salespeople. Based on the effectiveness of most canned reviews, one can understand why.

The best practice is to write performance reviews for salespeople that include the skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to execute your best practices sales cycle. Otherwise, reviews usually are a waste of time.

But there is more to overall performance than deal competency and personality. In addition to competence and chemistry, many salespeople fail because of a lack of commitment, lack of character, lack of communication skills, or lack of cognitive ability to think quickly on their feet.

Deal competency alone may be less than half of overall sales competency, and this can only be measured by observation by sales managers and documented in a performance review designed specifically to measure performance in the field. Figure 9–2 presents a useful diagnostic tool for identifying performance problems in both deal management and the other important elements of overall performance.

Written tests and training session “smile sheets” only measure awareness and acceptance. Assessments on behavioral “smile sheets” only measure awareness and acceptance. Assessments on behavioral traits and other things just measure potential. Win-loss reports and numbers just measure deal competency. Only a manager can tell whether the salesperson is competent, as well as committed.

Salespeople become unmotivated because their goals are out of reach, they have lost belief in the company, they have lost belief in the products, or maybe they have personal distractions or have lost confidence all together.

We find that a large number of salespeople fail because of a lack of character. They are not trustworthy. They think selling is a manipulative game. They are not honest with their clients, they are not honest with their managers, and they are not honest with themselves.

Some of them have other businesses on the side. Some of them are not honest with their managers about where they stand in their deals. Some of them set expectations too high, hoping they’ll be gone by the time the price has to be paid.

In order to build trust with a client, a person first has to be trustworthy. It’s not a matter of what they do; it’s a matter of who they are. This goes back to the hiring profile and can only be identified after the hire by performance. Obviously, a 360-degree assessment is even better because teammates and customers sometimes will spot this before the sales manager will.

Numbers alone are not always adequate. A sales rep can make his or her number and still lose a lot of business based on the territory’s potential. I’ve seen hot markets where a chimpanzee in a three-piece suit could make quota.

Conversely, I’ve observed one of the best salespeople I know do everything right and still struggle for a year. A good performance review spotted the problem (we had changed his territory twice — he had been setting up deals that other salespeople closed). Performance observation saved a future star who went on to become an extremely successful performer and manager.

What about Motivation?

To me, there are two sources of motivation— inside-out and outside-in. One lasts; the other doesn’t. I think real motivation comes from inside:

• A quality solution or product that they feel really helps a customer — one that the customer will thank them later for selling to them.

• A solution that can win. It doesn’t have to be superior; it just has to have relative strengths that they can focus on the right prospect without stretching the truth. It must be one in which they can have contagious conviction. Salespeople have to have a playable hand. They can only make up so much gap.