The Sales Execution Blog

Once there was a CIO who read a magazine.  He saw an ad for a new server tool that would revolutionize his business.  The ad said “Simplify Your Server” and featured a picture of a server tower falling into a rippling pool of water.  The CIO saw other ads and he began to hear some buzz about this new tool from colleagues.  But the CIO wasn’t certain exactly how the tool would solve his problems. 

Then one day the CIO got an email from a salesperson for the server tool company.  The salesperson asked for a meeting.  The CIO said yes, he’d like to learn more.  He had many questions. 

The CIO got some of his staff together in a conference room and was ready to meet with the sales person.  The salesperson arrived with rolling briefcase filled with information packets.  He handed them out to the staff and CIO.  He hooked up his laptop to the projector and began to talk in a polished, clear voice about the features of the product and the common problems it solved.  The salesperson talked about all of the ways the tool simplified server functions.  The CIO jotted down some questions he had.  He could see the common problems the tool solved, but he wasn’t sure if the tool would address his unique problems. 

The sales person droned on and the CIO began to look at his watch.  He had a meeting with the CEO.  He slipped out of the meeting as the salesperson continued to flip through power point slides.

The CIO was still interested in the product, so he put the salesperson’s information in a letter tray on his desk to get to later when he could sort through it and determine whether or not it would be helpful. 

A few weeks later he was contacted by another company that promised to simplify his server tools.  The salesperson asked for a brief meeting.  The CIO reluctantly agreed.  The salesperson came in with a small shoulder bag and began to ask the CIO about some problems he might be having with his company’s servers.  The CIO said, yes, those were the kinds of problems he was having.  The salesperson continued to ask several critical questions and the CIO was increasingly interested in what he had to say.  Then the salesperson took out a pad of paper and began to sketch some diagrams, incorporating what the CIO had told him about his problems.  The salesperson showed him how his company’s tool could solve the unique problems the CIO was having and the potential business impact for the CIO’s company. 

The CIO said that he would talk to the CFO and in a few months they had purchased the tool along with up-front consulting services and a long-term support plan. 

The first salesperson’s packet of tables and information sat on the CIO’s desk, until he cleaned the desk, and threw the packet in the trash. 

Sales messaging is a word thrown around a lot these days and like any other term its usage defines it.  But that said, we believe sales messaging is at its core something really simple – the conversations between salespeople and customers.  When salespeople meet with customers they are presenting your company, they are explaining what you do and how you do it, and they are doing that on more levels than just the words they say. 

Are your salespeople talking to someone in the front office or the corner office? 

Do your salespeople serve your customers as a good product rep or do they provide insight and develop a solution to a business problem?

Do your salespeople lead conversations or give presentations?

Do your salespeople listen actively?                               

Are your salespeople comfortable with improvisation?

The answers to these questions say something important about your sales messaging.  Unlike “messaging” (the ideas, concepts, capabilities, positioning a company tries to present to the marketplace), sales messaging converts strategy and messaging into something salespeople will actually say in a customer meeting. 

Sales managers’ interactions with their salespeople is critical to increasing pipeline visibility and improving the quality of pipeline data within SFA systems. Sales managers have the ability to provide an accurate lens for executives to look through and see what will likely happen in the future. Unfortunately, first line sales managers often deliver a blurry image that results in loss of pipeline data integrity.

The real challenge is that sales managers tend to evaluate their salespeople’s individual opportunities and pipeline health in an ad hoc fashion that is inconsistent across the regions. While some managers may have an excellent pipeline management approach, other managers may be taking a different approach or be leaning too much on a salesperson’s gut feeling about their opportunities.

A practical step for increasing pipeline visibility is to sharpen the focus of sales managers’ interactions with their teams by establishing a cadence of weekly, monthly and quarterly sales review meetings. In those review and planning meetings, sales managers will ideally ask their teams a consistent set of probing questions to evaluate opportunities, elevate the opportunity strategy and validate where an opportunity really is in the customer’s buying process.

Here are a few example categories and questions for an effective opportunity review meeting:

Opportunity Qualification

• Where did we enter the customer buying process?
• Have we worked with the customer to define the evaluation process?
• Can we change or influence the evaluation process?
• Can we win this opportunity?

Business Value Assessment

• What are the customer’s business / technical issues driving them to ‘do something different’?
• What are the compelling strategic, financial or personal drivers for doing something now?
• How will our solution address the previous 2 questions?

Solution Assessment

• What is the value proposition of our solution?
• What is our unique business value to the customer?

Organization/Relationship Analysis

• Do we have a ‘Power Sponsor’?
• How do you know they are a ‘Power Sponsor’
• Who are the other individuals involved in the decision process?
• Who must we neutralize? How?
• Who is our coach?

Competitive Analysis

• What are the competitors’ strategies and what traps will they set?
• How will we neutralize them?
• What traps will we set?

Action Plan

• What is the customer’s defined buying /approval process? Timeline?
• What are the potential risks and delays?
• What is the specific closing action plan?
• Is there a complete Evaluation Plan in salesforce.com for all identified issues and next steps?

(Note that these questions should be developed by the sales leadership team based on each company’s unique selling environment, solutions and typical customer buying process. Other key sales review meetings include the forecast review, business plan review and account review.)

We are often asked ‘What does an opportunity review have to do with pipeline visibility?’ It has everything to do with pipeline accuracy and visibility. Through careful evaluation of each opportunity, the pipeline can be scrubbed and the lens into the future made more clear based on the realities of each opportunity across the selling team’s pipeline.

With an accurate assessment of the pipeline, sales can develop focused strategies for closing top opportunities, manufacturing and/or services will know where to allocate focus and resources, and senior management can more confidently use the sales pipeline to make projections beyond the current quarter.

Clearly understanding your customer’s buying milestones is essential to pipeline visibility. Without clearly understanding where your salespeople are in the customer’s internal buying process, you can’t know if a particular opportunity is merely possible, probable, or a sure close. Assuming salespeople and their managers are managing the pipeline based on clearly defined customer buying milestones, we have seen numerous organizations significantly increase their ability to assess the pipeline well beyond the current quarter.

Here are a few examples of customer buying milestones that provide more concrete evidence that real progress is being made in a sales cycle:

1. Customer acknowledges a business need and agrees to evaluate a business relationship with Acme Solutions
2. Customer confirms opportunity priority, internal business case, funding and agrees to a ‘Needs Analysis’
3. Customer confirm our recommendation will meet their requirements
4. Customer may or may not generate an RFP
5. Customer confirms Acme Solutions is on the short-list
6. Customer confirms their support for the Acme Solutions proposal
7. Customer approves proposal and price
8. Contract is executed

‘Customer’ as outlined in the milestones above may represent an executive sponsor, decision maker(s), key stakeholders and or a selection committee.

Based on a defined customer buying process and typical buying milestones, the pipeline of opportunities can be rendered visible by sales managers asking their salespeople focused questions based on these verifiable customer actions. The content of these questions must be consistent and a ‘critical few’ questions must be asked on a regular schedule. In part 2 (next week) we will talk about how to implement a cadence of sales review meetings to improve the effectiveness of interactions between managers and reps in light of the customer buying process.

Several years ago we were engaged by the senior sales executive of a high growth supply chain software company. His company was transitioning to a new portfolio of products and a sales strategy focused on executive buyers. Marketing had created messaging for this strategy, but the sales team was not converting the messaging into successful executive meetings and targeted sales results.

The sales executive decided to join customer meetings to see what was really happening in the field. What he found was a team whose only messaging consistency was no consistency at all. Most salespeople were making up their messages and presentations on the fly. Given the company’s legacy, it was not too surprising that the messaging was still product-oriented and not appropriate for solution-oriented conversation with customer executives.

The sales executive realized he had to find a way to ensure key sales messages were consistently communicated by the organization. A key element of his solution was the development of sales-oriented messaging tools that his top sales performers developed in collaboration with marketing. Due to the direct involvement of top-performing salespeople in creating and validating practical sales messaging tools, the broader sales team ultimately embraced the new messaging.

Are your sales people delivering consistent, compelling messages in customer conversations?