The next wave available to companies is an explosion of sales effectiveness and new efficiencies. Prepare for a 10-year run of sales team upgrades and resets.

This new era of sales enablement is already underway in many companies like Citrix, Fujitsu, Adobe, Boeing and VMware, to name a few, that are investing in re-optimized sales tools and practices for their modern updated sales teams.

There are 4 components* to a revamped sales enablement program:
1. Strategy (where to go)
2. Messaging (what to say)
3. Process (what to do)
4. Leadership (how to coach)

* DSG Consulting, an MXL Partners affiliate partner firm.

The redevelopment and integration of each of these component areas into carefully tailored sales 2.0 manual and automated playbooks is opening up an exciting new frontier in a land filled with opportunity. We’ll break down each component in this SalesNote.

Are you “revamping” enablement of your sales organization?

What if you could provide your salespeople with a selling “system” that enables them to consistently apply your company’s sales best practices to EVERY deal in which they compete. What if? Odds are your win rates would improve and that you’d be able to accelerate new-hire ramp up.

Now you can with Playboox Playmaker, an on-demand sales playbook application integrated with Salesforce.com.

For some time now sales teams have used manual playbooks to codify their best practices and provide sales process guidance. We’ve helped build playbooks for leading technology companies like Yahoo!, Ricoh, Nokia, ServiceSource, Telepacific, Datameer, Fusion-IO and HyTrust to name a few. Increasingly, we’ve heard the request for a way to easily develop and automate sales playbooks. From this was born Playboox.

Contact us if you’re interested in seeing how you can use Playmaker to equip your salespeople to prepare to win and win more often.

Besides, after all the books and training over 15 years, try to find one VP of Sales or Account Executive who can tell you what the 9-Block Vision Processing Model is or even what exactly are “the 9 Boxes.” While brilliant in theory and profound for a past generation, the practical application is often lost in the reality of today’s dynamic sales arena. There’s also a new generation selling in a different era.

While my sales, management and consulting career grew up with Rackham and Bosworth over the past 30 years, today I’m seeing 4 challenges facing salespeople relative to selling methodologies:

1. Shorter Conversations - customer conversations are often brief and on the phone. Reps need to be agile and skilled in the managing of short selling conversations.
2. Blended Conversations – lead generation improvements require clear distinctions between call introduction, qualification and discovery. Reps need clarity of process and conversation flow.
3. Convoluted Questioning – sales call questioning process fundamentals have been lost, forgotten or confused. Reps need talk tracks grounded in simplified questioning fundamentals.
4. Mistargeted Discovery – discovery conversations are often given short-shrift, prolonging or derailing sale cycles. Reps need clear discovery plays or templates that are simple, planned, manageable and trackable.

Do you need a revamping of your “solution selling” methodology?

Over past years we’ve seen sales training change in the following ways:

• It’s not about packaged sales training programs.
• It’s all about custom-built and focused sales training.
• Experienced sales reps need and appreciate relevant training.
• Rookies need, want and seek practical and helpful training.
• Sales Managers want a return to strong sales fundamentals.
• Value Propositions are best as custom sales messaging built for specific target buyers.
• A well-defined, well-taught selling process drives best behaviors.
• Sales Management training is an effective and repeatable sales leadership/coaching system.

Do you have a clear and modern perspective on today’s approach to sales training?

I recently listened to an old recording of these solid fundamentals for success in sales and in life. These resonate with me even after all these years. I realize that I’ve been consciously and unconsciously teaching these to my children and actually anyone else under my charge over my adult lifetime. These principles permeate my professional sales training, coaching, mentoring and sales management sessions.

They’re classic, never out of fashion, and they work.

As I’ve been greatly impacted by these 5 Principles for Success, I am devoting this issue of our new SalesNote publication launch to these keys.
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1. Think Big
When you think big, something always happens. Many people think small and achieve something less than they really could have achieved. Winners see the possibilities, reach out farther and swing for fences. Big dreams, big thoughts and big goals yield results far beyond the masses.
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2. Know What You Want
Understand what you want to achieve, then set goals to get there. I was taught once and now always say: “There are those that make excuses and those that find a way.” Focus and determination need to chase a goal. One has to know the target before one can hit a bullseye.
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3. Do Your Homework
Knowledge and skill breeds confidence and competence. Get the prep work done and study what needs to be mastered and understood. There’s but a small difference between successful and highly effective people and those who are not: successful and effective people do their homework.
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4. A Positive Mental Attitude
Think yes, never no. Smile, never frown. You are what you think and the attitude you bring to any situation. Certainly problems abound in a broken world, yet you can be a source of peace and light. How you approach these mentally is critical to your own well-being and for those around you.
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5. Value & Manage Your Time
If you waste an hour, you can never replace it. The cumulative effect of competently and consistently performing prioritized activities is profound. Determine all valued actions, then scope their impact and timing. Appropriately manage your schedule. Bottom line: do good things well and often.
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But which ones? Your stragglers, high-performers, or future high-performers? Logic says leave the high performers alone and coach the others. After all, the manager/coach is there to manage and help, right? Watch your logic.

CSO Insight’s 2011 Sales Performance Optimization – Sales Management Analysis rated managers’ ability to proactively identify which reps needed coaching or mentoring. The percentage of firms rating Needs Improvement was 37%, an all-time high, and the Meets Expectations group was at 44%, an all-time low. Firms rating Exceeds Expectations grew to almost 16%.

What does this mean? Means there’s lots of room for improvement. Yes, you’ve got to coach, but do it wisely. The best firms (effective sales management) coach to metric bars and performance analytics set by their top performers, then proactively identify (dashboard visibility) players that need help. The coaching is objective and helpful, not belittling or damaging. High-potential players develop; weaker ones become clearly identified for a new opportunity, elsewhere.

Interesting also that there is a correlation between rep turnover and effective coaching visibility. There was a 10% higher turnover rate for Needs Improvement vs. Exceeds Expectations firms.

Better coaching environment; lower turnover.

The problem catches up to you eventually. Wide variations of a team’s sales messaging (direct, phone or email) will leave openings for the competition to exploit if they’re better at this than your team.

There are 3 keys to effective sales messaging:

1. Audience Specific Targeting
2. Clarity of Market Trends, Audience Objectives and Challenges
3. Short and Long Sales Talk Tracks, Questions and Visuals

In the absence of effective control of these, any sales team will “roll their own” – that is, they will create their own versions of scripts and emails and anything that they believe they need to be successful. Sometimes what they create is worthwhile; many times it can be quite ugly. Multiply this across an aggressive and frustrated sales team and you have a recipe for confusion internally and in the marketplace.

The fix takes work and involves (re)alignment or sometime wholesale (re)creation. It’s critically important though to avoid an ad-hoc sales organization.

Do you have an ad-hoc messaging, ‘roll your own’ sales team?

Meet or Exceed Expectations- Effectively present Features and Benefits = 67%
- Differentiate from Competition = 69%
- Align Solutions with Customer Needs = 68%
- Generate Accurate Bid/Proposal = 85%

Needs Improvement- Understanding Customer Buy Process = 40%
- Effectively Cross-sell/Up-sell = 47%
- Sell Value/Avoid Discounting = 42%
- Forecasting Accurately = 54%

This data shows that salespeople, for the most part, know their products, but are lacking in areas not typically emphasized in training across sales teams.

In more and more organizations, the need for an effective Sales Leadership System is clear if not obvious. It is possible and desirable to have a process-driven sales management structure that runs with machine-like efficiency and as effectively as the most well-designed technology system.

There are 4 key requirements associated with an effective sales leadership system:

1. Sales Process Redefinition – over-hauled, clarified and aligned with Sales and Marketing, no lip service any more
2. Sales Strategy Reinforcement – clarified customer targets, audiences, messaging, playbooks and gameplans
3. Sales Metrics Discipline – consistent visibility and measurement metrics, reliable, streamlined pipeline/forecast management
4. Sales Review Cadence – acceptable and sustainable pace and form of rep/team reviews, coaching, planning per month or quarter.

Not easy or quick to roll out. These take time, care and experience to institutionalize a best-practice sales leadership system. Tough to do if your driving Sales, Marketing or the whole company. It’s like orchestrating a complex symphony while you’re playing first chair violin. Let’s discuss your 2011 plans.

How’s your sales leadership system?

Every selling stage can be dissected into a bullet list of action steps, tactics or strategies. Additionally, specific collateral documents, templates and sales tools come into play at various points along the process.

For instance, at Stage 1—Lead Generation, salespeople are tasked with following up leads inbound from marketing campaigns or websites, or initiating targeted contacts on their own. There is typically some live preliminary lead qualification beyond common lead scoring or form fields. A well-managed sales and marketing team will coordinate specifically what a rep should be doing and document those actions. These are grilled into the sales rep at sales meetings or training sessions. A playbook can be developed for different types of field reps (inside teams, outside direct, etc.) as well as for different product lines (upsell items, renewals, new business sales, etc.).

At Stage 2—Discovery/Qualification, there is ample room for error and inconsistency as reps need to further qualify the opportunity and execute a professional discovery or information gathering sales call. By document-ing the specific qualifying and probing questions as well as referencing various helpful sales tools for the rep to utilize, sales management ensures that their team is conducting the right effort at the right time. This continues throughout the rest of the sales cycle.

An enterprise software company’s sales team was comprised of inside reps, outside reps and market development/lead generation reps. There were inconsistencies in the quality of customer meetings as reps
often generated a proposal (Stage 4) after a single conversation (Stage 1) with the customer/prospect. While sales were closing in some cases, some implementation issues cropped up because the reps had failed to fully scope out the tailored application and use case of the software solution. What was missing was a more detailed discovery/qualification conversation or meeting (Stage 2) and then a planned proof-of-concept (POC) or pilot/trial that solidified the success of the solution but also further developed the customer relationship and growing engagement. The reps were guilty of short-circuiting the appropriate sales process, a common problem in many of today’s sales organizations. This problem was alleviated by ingraining through sales training the importance of good sales cycle management and crystallizing the correct actions, tactics and tools.

As noted earlier in the CSO Insights research, approximately two-thirds (63%) of firms fall into the category of Random or Informal when it comes to adhering to a specified sales process methodology.2 One-third (37%) are Formal or Dynamic when it comes to effectively following some documented sales process.

But today’s marketplace landscape requires more than simple documentation and training. “Sales Process 2.0″ is all about the dynamic interactivity of sales stages, steps, actions, collateral beyond the printed page. There are some exciting new technology solutions that have taken the concept of “Playbook” to new and powerful levels through the automation of a documented selling process and the just-in-time serving up of the appropriate tool, script, or action-step to guide the new or experienced salesperson. When these tools get implemented across sales organizations around the world, then sales effectiveness will meet sales efficiency and produce consistent sales excellence.

Do you have a Sales Process Playbook?

2. CSO Insights, Sales Performance Optimization Report, 2009.