Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

• Название: Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
• Автор: Rick Page
• Жанр: Маркетинг, PR, реклама

A master of the complex sale and a bestselling author, Rick Page is also one of the most experienced sales consultants and trainers in the world. Make Winning A Habit defines the gap between what companies know to do and how they consistently perform.

Page clearly identifies five “Ts” of transformation: Talent, Technique, Teamwork, Technology and Trust. These five elements, when fully developed and integrated into the sales and marketing organization, begin to create the habit of winning over customers in every industry. Stories of successes-and failures-from members of prominent companies help you apply the five “Ts” to your company's culture, and point the way to more effective plans for motivating employees, building and coaching winning teams, and improving hiring processes.

Then, with the use of Page's assessment scorecard, you can compare your company with some of the strategies and practices of the best sales forces in the world. Designed to gauge your organization's effectiveness and further develop breakthrough sales growth, this scorecard highlights your strengths and weaknesses, helping you bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

You'll also learn about:

The “Deadly Dozen” (pains sales managers feel today) and how they can kill business

A ten-point process for identifying and hiring nothing less than “A” players

The 8 “ates” of managing strategic accounts and how they will maximize revenue and elevate relationships

How to identify and correct the six most common areas of poor individual sales performance

With Make Winning A Habit, you'll discover the obstacles between you and the consistent sales performance you can achieve-and find the tools to not only make success a habit, but one that will keep growing with your business.

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Awareness

New awareness is important to personal growth. Reading and training are essential. By definition, a system cannot change itself from within. It takes outside forces. But you can’t get competitive advantage from awareness alone. It comes from speed of reaction and execution.

For many people, personal growth and development after college often stagnate or are limited to gaining the skills and knowledge needed to perform their current job. For salespeople, however, the competencies required to perform in today’s market have escalated because they now need to sell to all levels of their client organizations.

Whether a salesperson is a vice president or not, they need to be conversant with and knowledgeable about Clevel issues. However, many salespeople have not developed the necessary strategic literacy in their industries.

Skill

I play golf often and have some skills. I’ve read almost every book on golf, so I have awareness. I birdie some, par some, and have eagled a few. But Tiger Woods does consistently what I do occasionally (I know, he does some things I’ll never do) because he has the discipline to practice incessantly — with his coach — to develop his superior natural physical talents (which I will never have) to their fullest potential. Without this discipline, though, he might be just another trunk slammer, fighting to stay on the tour.

This is also the difference between best-in-class sales organizations and the rest of the pack. The leading sales forces do consistently what others do only some of the time. In the complex sale, the stakes are huge, and the difference between the winner and the loser is often a very close margin.

Habit

Competitive advantage comes with making skills a habit — a permanent, consistent behavioral change at the individual and organizational levels. From awareness to habit is really a two-year process of guided practice.

During the first year, you’re telling them. During the second year, you’re making them realize that this isn’t just the “theme of the month” and that it’s here to stay.

Sometimes salespeople decide to just wait a year until the sales manager either gets fired, taking his new processes with him, or fails to follow up. It will take two years of consistent pressure on your part before all your salespeople are finally convinced that the new process is here to stay.

They will begin to get on board when they see others winning using the process. They will make it a personal habit when the company makes it an organizational habit. Every time you don’t insist on an activity, strategy session, sales plan, principle, or standard, the cloth of discipline begins to tear.

Making It Stick

Greatness can be nothing unless it’s lasting.

Napoléon Bonaparte

An equal challenge is how to make such a process or technology stick with salespeople, who have short attention spans and would rather talk than write. Sales forces have stared down implementations and used passive resistance to outlast scores of multi-million dollar CRM and training initiatives.

Formula for Failure — What Won’t Work

• Declare that, “We have a sales problem.”

• Implement CRM as a fix.

• Hire a big consulting firm to define your sales cycle (be sure to spend seven figures and take a year). Display the results in a large binder.

• Buy what looks or feels good or what came with your new CRM system.

• Pay less than competitive rates to recruiters.

• Make the form or CRM input very comprehensive (i.e., long), and ask everyone for input.

• Run your training at your sales meeting; make sure that it’s the first time your managers have seen it.

• Train your own trainers to save money.

• Hope for adoption, make threats, use guilt, and cheerlead for results.

• Use revenue as the only metric.

• Excuse veterans from compliance.

Management Commitment: They’re Watching You to See If You Are Still Watching Them

This is obvious, of course, but what does it mean? Beyond the customary announcements of top management, it means consistency of execution. Busy salespeople will wait to see if this is just another “theme of the month.”

It may seem unnecessary to emphasize that managers must actually attend and help to lead training sessions, but we have seen organizations where this expectation clearly was not set. Every salesperson is watching his or her manager during any rollout for body language, faint praise, passive resistance, or cynicism.

Every failure by management to reinforce the process will cause the fabric of discipline to begin to tear and competitive advantage to slip away. I once passed one of my managers in the hall and asked him about an action item we had agreed on months earlier. He said, “You don’t forget about these things, do you?” It was one of the best management compliments I ever received.

Fortunately, the new Web-based tools allow managers to see who is actually using the process on a daily basis. The Fort Hill Company, founded by Cal Wick, has built software so that managers can track action item completion and training follow-through by individual, complete with dashboard and graphics.

“You need to check-up periodically and let them know that you are looking. A quick e-mail or some online feedback will put them on notice that you are checking and that you expect execution,” Wick says.

According to Wick:

Up until now, most training programs concentrated exclusively on what happened in the classroom. What happened afterwards was a “black hole.” In fact, what usually happened was something like this: Sales training put on a course to teach new skills and approaches to optimizing the sales process. In the concluding session, attendees were asked to write a goal for applying what they had just learned. They did. Then they put it in their notebooks, put the notebook on the shelf, and went back to doing what they had done before.

Technology is changing that.

As with the other technologies we discuss, a followthrough system alone is not a solution. To maximize the value of follow-through management technologies, managers and training professionals need to pay attention to what is going on. They need to use the system to track behavior and provide encouragement, recognition, or correction as necessary.

When that is done, postcourse follow-through technology increases the impact of sales training and the value companies realize as a result.

Moreover, adoption needs to be incorporated into comp plans and performance reviews of all managers for it to really stick.

One of Cal’s clients, AstraZeneca wanted to increase the amount of coaching its sales managers did, so it ran a program called “Breakthrough Coaching” but did nothing to ensure that managers followed up on what they had learned. Not surprisingly, not much changed in the field.

So the company went back to the drawing board and developed “Breakthrough Coaching II.” The big difference this time was that the company put a rigorous system of follow-through in place to make sure that what was taught was used.

Every manager who attended the program was required (1) to set two goals for improving their coaching and (2) to report on progress five times over a 10-week period. Area and regional managers had access to the follow-through technology so that they could see who was doing what they were asked and who was getting results.

The change was dramatic. Salespeople were polled three months after their managers had attended the program.

• 48 percent reported increased frequency of coaching interactions with their managers.

• 59 percent experienced a shift to a more coaching style of interaction.

• 61 percent felt that their managers were more effective or much more effective as a result.

One summed it up this way: “I am now receiving coaching even when the situation is positive. I used to feel like I only received coaching when I needed to improve on something. I feel like my manager is more in touch with what I am doing.”

If you want something to stick, you have to make sure that it is reinforced. The real work begins when the course ends.

It Takes One to Two Years — Do You Have That Long?

Our first step as managers is to expand our time focus. For an individual, research shows that it takes about 21 days to form a habit. For an organization, it takes one to two years of consistent and persistent reinforcement to create organizational habits.

You can get awareness in two hours through a book or a speech. You can start to build skills in a two-day training program. But it may take two years for your salespeople to figure out that you’re going to stay with this and for them to actually see the results when they use it versus when they don’t.

Real World and Relevant

A successful class alone will not ensure adoption. But a bad one will ensure failure. Word of mouth on the first class will make or break the effort.

The first step toward making a new process stick is to make the training relevant. Canned programs won’t work anymore. The best training actually involves working live deals in class. Similarly, in technology rollouts, salespeople have to see how it helps them with their everyday jobs.

If you use a case study, salespeople will never see their flaws. However, if you have them working their own deals, they see their own flaws — no one has to point them out. This self-discovery of pain creates the curiosity required to start developing new habits.

In our workshops, the first thing we do is add up the dollar volume of all the opportunities/accounts we’ll work in class. Then we discuss how we’re going to create better strategies and action items to make that either a bigger number or increase the probability of reaching that goal.

The transformation is startling. All of a sudden, it’s no longer a training class. It’s actually working on live deals — their competitors, their products, their issues, and their pipeline — and giving them something they can use at 8:30 tomorrow morning. When we focus on deals that are relevant to them, we have very few prisoners in class.

Tailored to Your Unique Sales Process

Before training begins, it is important to define your unique sales cycle and potential action items—built and designed by your people and owned by your managers. This not only makes the process of technology relevant, but it also gains the buy-in of front-line managers, who are the key to adoption.

The worst thing you can have is a sales manager, with arms folded, passing judgment on a new program while you’re training the troops. How can such a manager object to a process he or she designed?

Usually front-line sales managers, especially the intuitive ones who are not process-oriented, are hungry for a process to make their people more independent and to give them a coaching tool to keep deals in control. Tying the methodology and their sales process together by phase relates to what they do every day. Real deals mean that the results can be seen immediately. The question that must be answered by the reps is, “Was it worth my time?”

Keep the Tools Simple

The next step is to make any account management or opportunity management planning tool extremely concise. Processes that require salespeople to fill out a 12-page form are destined to fail.

If the integrity of the logical work flow of the tool is not preserved, or if there is excess redundancy, when the tool is integrated with your CRM, you can almost guarantee a failed CRM and a failed methodology.

In a pivotal meeting for us a few years ago, for which I will always be grateful, Phil Wilmington, then senior vice president of worldwide sales for PeopleSoft, said, “We need a one-page sales tool.”

I said, “Well, you have the author and owner here. Which of the six P’s would you take out?”

He looked at it and said, “None of them. I’ve got to have them all in order to win.”

“Well then, we don’t have a methodology issue. What we have is a management issue,” I said.

The challenge was discipline. But we did take the razor to our process and drove it down to one page of output and three simple input screens.

It has to be simple, but it also has to be effective. A blank piece of paper is simple, but it’s not powerful enough to help you lead a team. And a 12-page document certainly would be complete, but no salesperson is going to slow down enough to use it.

Successful, Credible Instructors — No “Facilitators” Allowed

The next step is to have credible instructors. People who stand up in front of experienced salespeople have to have walked in their shoes, or they will not earn the respect of those people. Lightweight “facilitators” without experience or worn-out salespeople whose experience is not current will not be credible.

In today’s marketplace, any instructor has to be involved in sales and have the executive presence to be able to customize the process to the client. Unbelievably, there are legions of sales trainers out there who have never carried a bag or covered a territory. There are ex-product reps out there trying to teach competitive hunting, and there are hunters trying to teach account management. There are ex-reps out there training who have never coached a deal.

Obstacles to Adoption

The character and discipline of an organization are defined by the excuses it allows. And people have no shortage of reasons why change is not needed or why they don’t have time for it.

Top 10 Most Common Adoption Subversion Excuses

1. We’ve had a new sales manager every two years — I can wait this one out.

2. I’m too busy to coach deals.

3. I’m ahead of quota. They won’t fire me.

4. I’m a veteran. That stuff is for rookies.

5. I handle the big account. They won’t fire me.

6. If I take time to do that and don’t make my numbers, they’ll fire me anyway.

7. Let’s see if my manager has the guts to insist on doing this.

8. I have too much administrative work and no time to coach.

9. Why do we need strategy sessions? We talk to the reps all the time.

10. We’ve tried this before. This too shall pass.

On to the Fourth Generation: Perpetual Advantage

New Metrics — New Accountability