SECTION III: Technique
CHAPTER 5: Technique
Never mistake motion for action.
Ernest Hemingway
Jim Dickie is a partner in CSO Insights, a sales consulting practice that surveys hundreds of sales organizations every year and publishes an excellent benchmarking study. In their 2005 State of the Marketplace Review of 1,040 firms, he says that only 23.3 percent of companies spend more than $2,500 per year training their sales forces. And this includes all types of training.
On average, this represents the expected value generated by one rep in about two hours. And yet 84.5 percent of reporting companies in the study stated that their sales methodology either had a noticeable or significant impact on sales performance. It seems that additional investment in training would yield significant returns. But only a third of reporting firms said that adherence to their sales methodology is either structured or optimized.
Inspect what you expect. Defining a formal sales process and/or investing in sales training has little residual impact if it is not reinforced and enforced. Higher quotas and higher quota attainment do not appear to be the result of defining processes, but of using them.[3]
In Hope Is Not A Strategy, we detailed two sales processes that are best practices in the complex sale: The R.A.D.A.R.® (Reading Accounts and Deploying Appropriate Resources) methodology for winning competitive opportunities and the T.E.A.M. (Total Enterprise Account Management ®) process for managing strategic accounts.
So that this book is fully self-contained, this chapter not only will review but also will focus on advancements, refinements, new developments, and the impact of the up-and-down economy on how salespeople sell in each one of these processes. Rather than address the R.A.D.A.R. process in detail, we will provide a summary here and an in-depth appendix at the end of the book. Because readers have asked for more detail on the T.E.A.M. process, we explore it in more depth here.
We will then focus on best practices in coaching the process and increasing forecasting accuracy.
R.A.D.A.R.®: The Six P’s of Opportunity Management—Summary
The R.A.D.A.R. process is used for managing complex sales evaluations by committees. It brings together the best ideas in consultative selling, competitive selling, political selling, and team selling. It focuses on selling strategic benefits to strategic buyers and technical benefits to technical buyers. This methodology allows salespeople to control the competition, politics, and the decision-making process to increase their chance of winning.
Additionally, R.A.D.A.R. is a dynamic planning process to help you develop strategies and plans early in the sales process and revise them late in the process, when things turn emotional and political. In fact, how well and how quickly you review and revise your plan is more important than the perfection of the initial plan.
1. Link solutions to the prospect’s pain — for greater value.
2. Qualify the prospect — for best resource utilization.
3. Build competitive preference — by differentiating your solution.
4. Determine the decision-making process — for driving strategy.
5. Sell to power — by finding the key to buyer politics.
6. Communicate the strategic plan — for effective team selling.
An opportunity management process is for winning competitive evaluations either in existing accounts or in new-name prospects. Investing in account management is done to make opportunity management either easier or unnecessary by winning the evaluation before it begins.
T.E.A.M.: The Eight “Ates” of Managing Strategic Accounts
When managing large, strategic accounts, you want to maximize the revenue, relationships, and “referenceability” potential based on the account segmentation you have determined is best for your company strategy.
The methodology that follows includes the best practices that we have seen and produces an account management map to effectively sell between the sales. These elements are not sequential but rather form a planning loop—which should be reviewed at least quarterly—and are often executed simultaneously.
Penetrate
Penetrating an account may be achieved in several ways: through winning the first piece of business in a competitive evaluation, as a result of demand-creation selling rather than demand-reaction selling, through another business partner or division, or through corporate headquarters that results in a client-vendor relationship of some sort.
Once you have penetrated the account and won the business, you have to be ready to deliver. The first piece of business is usually based on price, proposal, and product.
Demonstrate
Clients often take credit for successes and blame vendors for failures. You must demonstrate your value by going back to the client and documenting the effects of having chosen your organization and solution. What outcomes, benefits, metrics, and gains have been achieved by having used your firm in the first place? Clients rarely write a paper that describes how wonderful a vendor is. You have to do that yourself. But make sure that you can back it up. And if you haven’t delivered value, then that becomes your strategy — account repair.
Evaluate
Segmenting accounts for future investment is a critical step in account management. It’s a waste of time to try to partner or earn preferred partner status with everyone. Some company cultures are that of a commodity buyer. They always have been and always will be, and it will only change at the top. In this case, you need to evaluate whether you should invest additional resources in this account in an effort to gain preferred vendor status or should you stay on a transactional level.
I once had an opportunity to sell to Pepsi, one of our competitor’s best customers. They called me and said that they wanted a national account agreement with us. I was young and excited and flew out to meet with them. I asked them, “What does it mean to be your partner?”
They said, “You have to offer us the same discount your competitor offers.”
In return for the discount, I asked them if they would put us on a short list for future purchases so we wouldn’t have to fight for every piece of business. I also asked them to promise us a yearly meeting with their IT department. They said “no” to both. They wanted a 50 percent discount just for the privilege to compete.
I walked away.
We decided not to be their partner, but to go after other pieces of the business at the local level. As it turned out, our competitor didn’t spend much time on the account because the discount was so great. We stayed at the transactional level and did fine. If corporate couldn’t help us, they weren’t going to hurt us.
Radiate
If you decide to invest in growing an account, you need to radiate to power sponsors early in the game. Radiate from those who know you and like you to those who need to know you and like you — before the next formal buying process breaks out. Use one executive sponsor to take you to another. Ask each who else in his or her area/industry you can be doing this for.
Unfortunately, too many people either get too focused on delivery of the first project to radiate out or they havethe hall pass and get stuck in their comfort zone, calling on people who are already sold. In addition, sales “hunters” hurry down the road to the next prospect company because what is qualified for long-term account management is not qualified for a short-term quarterly-driven “hunter.” This is why “hunters” usually don’t make good account managers.
