How the Rift Between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. This post, the last in a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.
It’s no secret that sales and marketing executives don’t always see eye to eye. In a recent Corporate Executive Board survey, sales executives’ top terms for their marketing colleagues included “paper pushers,” “academic,” and perhaps worst of all, “irrelevant.” On the other hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as “simple minded,” “cowboys,” and flat out “incompetent.”
Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative. Management has long called for sales and marketing to bury the hatchet, but the requests often lack urgency and are generally met with indifference. Yet much of the sales support marketing provides falls short because it’s focused on teaching customers about the supplier’s business, not the customer’s. Don’t take our word for it.
Sound familiar? So what’s the alternative? 1. 2. 3. 4. Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. By Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson | 8:17 AM October 14, 2011 This blog, the third in a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.
Its conclusions are based on data from a global study of more than 6,000 sales reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries. One of the age-old stereotypes in business is the pushy salesperson. But what if we told you that the real issue in sales today isn’t that salespeople tend to be too pushy, but that they’re not pushy enough? In our first post in this series, we introduced you to a special type of high-performing sales rep called the Challenger.
What does this look like in practice? First, as we discussed in last week’s post, Challengers use proprietary insights to change the way customers think about their business and that highlight the suppliers’ unique ability to create value. Why do most reps fear tension? Second, most reps adopt a passive posture because senior management has told them to. The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. By Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson | 8:06 AM October 7, 2011 This post, the second in a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.
“What’s keeping you up at night?” This one question is probably asked by more sales people in a given day than any other. But while it seems innocuous — maybe even the right thing to ask a customer — it’s a question that simultaneously prevents sales while also destroying customer loyalty. To understand what makes this question so destructive, we need to first understand where it comes from. As a result, companies have poured money into teaching their reps to ask better questions. But what if customers don’t know what they need? In our previous post we described a type of rep we call a Challenger. What does this sound like in practice? Today, a conversation with a Grainger rep is very different. No supplier wants to be in the business of free consulting — and Grainger is no different.
These conversations aren’t happenstance. Selling Is Not About Relationships - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. By Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson | 9:29 AM September 30, 2011 This post, the first of a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.
Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic? To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.
We now have an answer, which we’ve captured in the following three insights: 1. Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep’s primary mode of interacting with customers: 2.