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When we combine the #1 issue for CEOs with today's economic downturn, what emerges are Twelve Rules of B2B Sales Productivity. Each by itself is a path to improved sales productivity. The most productive firms are those who live by a combination of all twelve:
Rule 1: focus on outcomes. Being busy isn't productive. Busy is about activities and inputs. Productivity is about outcomes.
Rule 2: give Sales Reps more time for selling. Automate away time-consuming tasks. Automatically report sales outcomes. Give Reps sales templates that get valuable information to prospects quickly.
Rule 3: enable repetition. Structure the sales process with clear exit criteria for each pre-sales milestone. Make best practices the easiest practices and they'll be the most repeated practices. Practice makes perfect.
Rule 4: measure prospect behavior. What people say matters less than what they do. The inflection in a prospect's voice can be misleading. Their behavior never is.
Rule 5: being helpful to prospects creates competitive advantage. For prospects, help is elusive and hard to find. Service them in timely, helpful, ways and they'll engage with you. Use measures of prospect behavior to do so.
Rule 6: detect trigger events. Use systems that detect triggers such as early stage business problems, prospect product research, and prospects' interests within the sales process.
Rule 7: help Reps invest their time and effort wisely. Give Reps feedback that lets them reach out to the right prospects, for the right reasons, at the right time.
Rule 8: conversations count. Deliver information and help to prospects in ways that yield synchronous communications. The more your prospects get to know and trust you, the higher the odds they'll do business with you.
Rule 9: good conversations count more. Measure prospect behavior in ways that disclose the outcomes of conversations. A Rep sends a prospect detailed answers to their questions (an input). Has the prospect read those answers? If so, how quickly upon receipt? These are desired outcomes. They are, also, leading indicators of the scope and pace of future sales.
Rule 10: speed matters, more than ever. Disseminate leading indicators quickly to your sales team. If your ability to sense and adapt to sales realities is faster than your competitors', you have an enormous advantage.
Rule 11: learn from patterns. Use aggregated metrics, based on prospect behavior, to see the effects on outcomes of small changes in sales practices. Make mistakes well, by making and correcting them fast. Learn more to earn more.
Rule 12: expect uncertainty. It's the new norm.
These rules are my blending of our own experiences with the observations over the past year of pundits such as Neil Rackham, Jeffrey Gitomer, John Monoky, Verne Harnish, Chet Holmes, Victor Cheng, Greg Alexander, Jim Cecil, and Victoria Medvec. The wisdom is theirs. The blending is mine.
John Cousineau
Informed Innovation in B2B Sales Productivity
Posted April 26, 2009
Categories:
General
Comments
Dave Dodds
John - these are on the money.
I am reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - he has some real wisdom (as you put it) on rule 12. Nassim is Deans Professor at the Univesity of Massachusetts and has dedicated his academic life to the study of "uncertainty". If you read it, you might be convinced that uncertainty was always the norm, but being empirical beasts we failed to recognise it.
Nice to see the strands of Neil Rachkam in your work, "Rethinking the Sales Force" remains one of my most valuable texts.
Could you consolidate the 12 rules to less - I find people can only focus on 4 or 5 guiding principles in this area, perhaps with 2, 3 or 4 of your points under each principle.
Thanks again
John Cousineau
Dave - Thxs for your feedback. Like the suggestion to consolidate but fear if done the complexities of what makes it such a hard problem to solve will be missed. I'd rather simplify the user's interface to the problem than simplify my description of it. Sales productivity is a really complex, hard, problem to solve. Hopefully these rules will help paint a picture of how it can be done. - John
Barry Carver
I agree and appreciate your type of thinking. I suggest you explore tool like Voice2insight as it help with several of the items note such as items 1, 2 & 3.
Thanks
Geoffrey James
These are all excellent points. This should be required reading for today's sales managers.
John Cousineau
Barry - thanks for your feedback + suggestion. There are many valuable tools that can help address these rules. Yours looks like it could be a valuable part of the puzzle.
Geoffrey - flattered by your admonition. The move to solving the challenges of B2B sales producivity begins with reading + thinking about the issue. It's a start. Hopefully some of the above will seed the thinking required.
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