Shifting The Curve
I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management. At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.” Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve. There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance. Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.”
These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of the organization, of sales strategies, and of performance management. In reality, top executives must continue to shift the curve to the right, continuing to raise the bar on performance. We have to look constantly at improving sales performance, effectiveness, and efficiency. We must look at constantly improving and innovating, enabling each sales person to continue to grow in their abilities and in their contributions to the business.
Whether it’s “shifting the curve to the right,” or “raising the bar,” it’s critical for sales executives to focus on this. Nothing stays the same–what we do must continue to evovle and change. It’s critical to have a clear picture of where we are moving the organization, and how we will achieve it. It’s critical to have a establish and execute a plan to “move performance to the right.” Our goals, strategies, structures, and sales deployment strategies will shift and change. Our processes, systems, tools need to change to support our goals. Our hiring profiles, our performance expectations, our metrics, our compensation and incentive systems will change.
Outstanding performance today, may be just OK tomorrow, and unacceptable the day after. Today’s “A’s,” may become tomorrow’s “B’s” unless we are coaching them and developing them to support our future needs. Likewise for “B’s and C’s.” We can’t afford not to address these performance issues today, because they will become bigger challenges in the future.
- What are you doing to shift the curve to the right?
- What does this mean for your strategies, organizational models, priorities, and programs?
- What does this mean for the skills and capabilities of your people? Do you have the right people? Do you need different people? Have you changed your recruiting profiles? What are you doing to prepare your people to shift to the right?
- Do you have the right processes, systems, and tools to support this shift and your people?
- Do you have the right performance expectations, metrics, and incentives?
- Do your people understand the “shift?” Do they understand their role? Do they understand your expectations? Have they bought into it?
- What are you doing to coach and develop your people do drive the shift? What are you doing with those that can’t?
Life and business never stands still. We must constantly change and improve. Are you shifting your curve to the right?
Agenda’s
No, today’s post isn’t about some esoteric view of people’s agendas–how we discern them, how we leverage them. This is a rare post for me–it’s about the simple issue of having an Agenda–for meetings that is.
I’m amazed at the number of meetings I’m asked to participate in that have no published agenda. Sure everyone knows the topic and general issues, though, 85% of the meeting sales people ask to have with me, they appear to have no structured agenda–at least nothing they have communicated with me.
The written agenda is one of the simplest, yet most powerful tools available to the sales person. Yet it is the most underutilized. The written agenda accelerates the sales/buying processes, allowing you and the customer to accomplish more in less time.
Why written agendas:
- They add structure and focus to the meeting, helping both you and the customer keep on track.
- They help you make sure you accomplish what you intended to accomplish. Our research indicates that sales people make 50% more calls than required to close. Largely, this is driven by poorly planned and executed meetings. Imagine how much your customer will appreciate you not wasting their time with extra meetings. Imagine the productivity impact of reducing the number of calls to close.
- They free you up to actually listen to, and engage the customer. You don’t have to keep thinking about what you want to accomplish, you can just refer to the agenda as a prompt, so you actually can take the time to listen to the customer.
- It frees the customer up to actually listen to you. They don’t have to worry, “What’s she here for, what is she trying to achieve?” The agenda is your plan for the meeting, they don’t have to guess, they don’t have to be apprehensive, you’ve outlined what you plan to discuss. They can relax and concentrate on the meeting.
- It’s a demonstration of your respect for the customer and their time.
- It’s a demonstration to your customer that you value your time and want to use it well.
- It’s a demonstration of your professionalism.
What’s a good agenda look like? On those rare times when someone presents a written agenda before or at the outset of the meeting, too often it contains far more than we can possibly accomplish either for the time we have scheduled or for the participants that are involved in the meeting.
A good agenda will have the following elements:
- It will not be a long laundry list of discussion topics. It will have the appropriate number of topics for the time allotted for the meeting and the objectives of the meeting. Generally, for a one hour meeting, I like to have no more than 3-4 agenda items.
- The agenda items are expressed in short, but complete sentences. Too often, the agenda item may be only a few words or a phrase. When you get to that item, you are clueless about what you intended to discuss.
- The agenda will have a few blank lines at the bottom, allowing you or the customer to add additional agenda items, Always! Even if you have circulated the agenda and agreed upon it in advance. There are always things that may arise at the last minute. You want the flexibility to add these if they come up.
- The agenda should express an “Action” or “Next Step” item. this may be a peculiarity that I have, but colleague suggested it to me a number of years ago. It’s one of the most powerful and focusing items I’ve ever had. I always include an “Action” item as the last item on each agenda. I present it as “If we accomplish everything we have agreed upon in this meeting, I would like to suggest this [action] as the next step.” It’s our close–and we’re presenting it at the beginning of the meeting. This simple statement as the last item on the agenda, is very focusing–for you and the customer. They know you have a purpose, they know you are serious about accomplishing something in the meeting. Successfully achieving this in every meeting accelerates the process tremendously.
If you were counting, my typical agenda will contain 6-8 line items (usually 6). the 3-4 key discussion topics, 2-3 blank lines for additional items, and the Action statement.
Should you have a hidden agenda? You can look at this a few different ways.
I’m always asked, “should you publish the agenda in advance?” Too many sales people want to hide their agenda, presenting it at the beginning of a meeting. I always always publish it in advance. I want to make sure the customer and I are aligned on what we intend to accomplish before the meeting. I want to make sure the customer has the right people invited to the meeting. I want to make sure the customer is prepared for the meeting.
Sure you may have additional objectives you have not put on the agenda–I always like to have some stretch goals for each meeting.
Finally, make sure it’s published. If you have a telephone meeting, email it to the participants as a reminder before the meeting–don’t make them search their email archives to find the original agenda. If it’s a face to face meeting, print out copies of the agenda to distribute to all the participants.
Agendas are simple and powerful. Make sure you are using them!
Finally, I have a confession, I did have a “hidden agenda” for this post. I just left a meeting someone had invited me to. It was a face to face meeting, a 30 minute drive from my office (60 minutes round trip). I had suggested an agenda, but the people who invited me to the meeting never got one to me. We had scheduled 60 minutes for the meeting. No agenda was presented, 20 minutes into the meeting, I was confused, wondering what the point was. 22 minutes into the meeting, I decided there was no point, I stood up and left. Do you think those sales people accomplished their goals? Do you think I will permit another meeting with them on my schedule?
Are Your Deals Slipping?
One of the biggest problems sales people face is their deals slipping. We forecast a certain close date, then it slips, and slips, and slips, and …….. Things keep coming up, we push the close date out, then more things come up and we get into this seemingly endless cycle until the deal closes.
Sometimes these slips in close date can’t be avoided. The customer keeps deferring the decision, we have little control over it. But too often, I think these slips are the result of bad deal strategies — and the sales person is responsible for managing the deal strategy.
Here’s what happens. We tend to look at our deal strategies in terms of “what’s next.” Based on where we are in the sales process and the customer is in their buying process, we identify the next steps or critical activities. As we progress through these processes, things come up, requiring more work, more activities–and the deal slips. We execute those, more stuff comes up, we generate new next steps, slipping the date yet again.
Or we may have thought the deal all the way through. We have a clear plan mapped out, we are executing–then something slips, we readjust our plan, shifting everything back, something else slips, we shift everything again, and the cycle continues. We finally close months after our original projection.
These slips happen because we approach the opportunity planning process all wrong. The slips need to be unacceptable–slipping causes the customer to miss some of their internal deadlines. Slipping creates create opportunity losses for the customer–the benefits they had hoped to achieve reduce with each slip of the close date. It creates havoc within our own companies, we, our managers, and others want some predictability in the revenue streams.
We need to begin thinking of the “targeted close date” as sacred. We need to think of it as immovable. Establishing the targeted close date must be driven by the customer buying process—when do they intend to make a decision, is there a critical deadline or a compelling event that requires a decision by a certain date?
Once we have established the targeted close date, we need to develop our opportunity plans and strategies to fit with that date. The sales and buying processes are the foundation to maintaining the integrity of the close date. We have to look at all the things both we and the customer must accomplish to achieve the deadline we have established.
As things progress through the selling and buying process, new things come up, things change, we have to revise our plans. Rather than just slipping activities, we have to revise the whole plan and schedule to fit within the time left with the original close date. By keeping the targeted close date fixed, we reschedule all the things we must accomplish to meet that date. Likewise, we work with the customer to help them reschedule their activities to continue to meet the close date.
This requires great discipline on the part of the sales person. It’s so easy just to let things slip, to go with the flow. But if we want to maintain the integrity of the targeted close date, we have to continually be looking at and revising the plan so that we re-align everything that needs to be done around that date.
Do you keep the “targeted close date” as sacred?
Do you continue to revise your plan and help the customer revise their plans to maintain the integrity of that date?
There’s always a lot of discussion in the Sales 2.0, CRM worlds about compliance. Millions are invested in new systems–supposedly. There’s a great urge to make sure people are using them, so compliance has become a key topic of discussion in lots of places. Basically compliance is measuring, “are people using the system?”
Compliance — at least the way it’s commonly used is absolutely worthless! Reporting on who has signed into the system, how many times they’ve logged in and all the related measures are meaningless. While some of the vendors would claim it’s important, the goal of CRM is not system utilization.
CRM is supposed to help sales people be more effective and more efficient. It’s supposed to help them better manage their opportunities, territories, and time. It’s a tool, properly utilized, that can help sales people perform at the highest levels possible. So if sales people aren’t using the system, if compliance is low, the reasons are probably pretty simple. The system is not helping them to be more effective or efficient, or they don’t know how to use the system to be more effective and efficient.
Continued beatings and warnings from management about compliance, continuing to measure it doesn’t solve the root problem. It doesn’t address the issue of improving effectiveness. Sales people can make the compliance needle go up–simply by logging on and doing nothing. Or they can enter garbage into the system.
Having said that, I can’t imagine being a highly productive sales person without leveraging CRM to it’s utmost. Most sales people simply have too much going on and too little time to be efficient without a tool. At even the simplest levels of contact, activity, and calendar management, it helps the sales person keep track of things. The first thing I do every morning is look at my calendar and to-do list to know what I have to get done–what prospecting calls, to who, about what. The next step on a deal, something I have to complete, a follow up. It’s all there, I don’t have to remember it.
But managing our deals, pipelines and territories are much more complex. Are some deals slipping away from me? Are they lingering–or have I ignored them? Am I missing an opportunity to move something forward? Am I chasing enough deals–sure, I know all the deals I’m closing, but what’s the state of my funnel? Am I reaching out and touching past customers, am I staying in contact with everyone? Do I have upsell, cross sell opportunities?
Increasingly, sales is a collaborative team sport. We rely on others to help us do deals. How do we keep track of what’s going on? How to we manage the execution of our deal strategy across the team, how do we share changes and what we need to do across the team, how do we stay in sync, maximizing every moment we spend with the customers?
Or systems are getting increasingly social–they enable me to do more, to ask more questions. Has something changed with my customer that might present and opportunity? Has someone moved, are there new people to meet, who’s there that I should be meeting, who are they?
Many of the systems have rich analytic embedded. A week ago, I sat with a sales person, he was leveraging the data in his CRM system to give me a deep analysis of his territory. He could look at trends, he could look at specific customers or prospects, he could look at histories–or the absence of history. We used this analysis to develop a prospecting plan–one that would have extraordinary payoff, because we could identify those customers and prospects that might have a higher propensity to buy this new product line. He could identify, target, and begin to reach out to them.
No sales professional can survive without leveraging these tools everyday. They enable us to manage our time, maximize our impact, free us up to think, plan, strategize, and execute.
So compliance isn’t the issue. Compliance should be 100% period! If it isn’t it’s because the sales people don’t see the value. They don’t understand how they can leverage the tools to maximize the results they produce in their territories. They don’t understand how to use these tools to make them win more deals, more quickly.
Mandating utilization, mandating compliance, setting compliance goals is about system utilization. It makes IT happy, it makes vendors happy, it make management happy because they can claim the investment in the system was good. Utilization is not the point of any of these tools.
The fact there are endless discussions about compliance means we have missed the opportunity and are focusing on the wrong thing. Helping sales people be better, helping them to be more effective, more efficient is what it’s all about. If they don’t see this, then you’ve missed a huge amount of opportunity. If you and your vendor aren’t helping your teams understand this, then you have wasted a lot of money on whatever system you’ve implemented.
Don’t waste your time at looking at who’s logged on, don’t track utilization data, it’s meaningless. If your people aren’t using the system, if compliance isn’t 100%, then something is wrong–and it’s probably not the sales person.
