3 Steps to Make Your Sales Strategy Actionable. We’ve just hit the mid-year mark, a time when, for many companies, the planning process begins for 2013.
However, in many sales organizations, the plan takes a back seat to the here-and-now. With all the pressing demands from customers, as well as requests from internal stakeholders, we tend to throw our strategic priorities aside just to stay above water. It almost feels like someone has pulled a fire alarm. One member shared with us that over three quarters, sales had received requests to fulfill 77 priorities – that’s a new priority almost every other business day! So what can be done? The key is limiting your sales organization’s priorities, and then building metrics to track progress against those priorities. Step 1: Filter out by alignment with corporate strategy – does the initiative help you achieve corporate objectives (I bet you can get rid of more than half the things sales is asked to do here…)?
The Sales Challenger™ » 3 Ways to Get Reps to WANT to Use CRM. Sales Process. Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Organization. The Challenger Sale. Harvard Business Review: End Of Solution Sales While most professionals are trying to master solutions selling, the best target accounts where their needs are still undefined, individual buyers who are skeptical change agents, called "Mobilizers".
Learn More The Challenger Intro In a world of hesitant, risk-averse, empowered customers, what sales approach consistently wins? To find out, CEB surveyed over 6,000 sales reps across geographies and industries. Watch Now Challenger™ Marketing The new approach to demand generation, based on CEB's book The Challenger Sale, helping marketers stand out in a noisy marketplace. Learn More Best Seller: The Challenger Sale What's the secret to sales success? Order Your Copy Today Interview with Neil Rackham Listen to Neil Rackham, author of Spin Selling, discuss what makes Challengers different and why they are even more important in today’s selling environment. Watch Now. The Sales Challenger™ » The Death of Solution Selling. We believe we are fast watching the death of the solution selling era.
The era of discovering customer needs has passed; the era of teaching customer needs is upon us. If a customer has assessed their needs, you’re too late. That is the fatal flaw with the sales approach that has defined the solution selling era, not to be confused with any specific firm’s methodology. Solution selling, as a sales genre, is predicated on discovering customer needs and aligning your solution to those needs. The theory holds that the best reps show customers how their solution better meets the customer needs than any competitor solution. The Shifting Eras of Sales Over Time Recent advances in how customers purchase are completely undermining this method. In the solution selling hay-day of the 80s and 90s, customers had to involve suppliers early in a purchase consideration.
The amount of information customers have at their disposal has changed dramatically. The Sales Challenger™ » The Performance Management Trend You Haven’t Heard Of. Let’s face it-few things get as many eyes rolling as the topic of performance management.
But it’s time to make this crucial driver of talent performance more fun and engaging…and the way to do that? By making it social. With all the buzz about social media and cloud computing it is easy to miss how social performance management is transforming the way organizations approach talent management processes such as goal setting, awards and recognition, and performance reviews. Vendors in this space (such as Rypple, WorkSimple, and I love rewards) are offering easy to use, interactive platforms and web-based tools that facilitate employee interface and measure productivity in intuitive and fun ways. So why should you consider social performance management? Sales is an inherently social activity. Here are some of the benefits of taking the performance review social: What are your thoughts on social performance management systems? The Sales Challenger™ » Your Best Source of Untapped Customer Intelligence. With more access to information than ever before, it’s become clear that customers no longer “need” supplier input to make informed purchase decisions.
SEC research shows, on average, customers are 57% of the way through their purchase decision before they make first contact with a supplier—which more often than not means the only thing suppliers are left to compete on is price. With that in mind, the ability for reps to get in early and shape customer demand has become a necessity in today’s world of sales. But how does your organization support reps’ efforts to shape demand? We know that high performing sales reps have been doing this on their own for quite some time, but it’s been unclear as to how exactly they’ve been going about it—until now.
Our 2012 research shows that high performers’ success at shaping customer demand is attributed to four distinct behaviors, one of which is conducting non-traditional customer due diligence.