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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Sustaining advantage requires continuous improvement and change, not a static solution in which strategy can be set and forgotten.

Michael Porter

Speed has become an important element of strategy.

Regis McKenna

Execution, rather than awareness, is at the heart of making winning a habit. Speed and consistency of execution and innovation are the path to sustainable competitive advantage (see Figure 9–3).

Feedback from all these sources and metrics should cause sales forces to continuously evaluate personnel, sales messages, product offerings, value propositions, and customer loyalty. If these are well implemented and used effectively, the result is a move from inconsistent, up and down results to perpetual advantage.

We discussed in an earlier chapter how Col. John Boyd revolutionized military thinking and maneuver warfare. His acronym for competitive cycle speed in a fighter plane and then a military unit was the OODA loop. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and act, and it changed everything.

Winning pilots or winning generals get information faster than the opponent, process it faster, and react more quickly according to principles to gain an advantage in every situation. It isn’t the plan but the speed and effectiveness of the adjustment process that gives them the advantage.

Speed and accuracy of information drive speed and accuracy of strategy, which drive competitive advantage. The battles of Napoléon, Nelson, Jackson, and Patton, as well as many marketing campaigns, all teach us this lesson from history.

New technologies can enable the right metrics and adjustment processes without requiring additional input from sales reps to slow them down.

If you can measure in less than one year which salespeople can drive a complex sale, if you can detect and correct deals that are out of control at each phase of the cycle, if you can improve messages in response to the competition within 48 hours, if you can improve your sales cycle model and hiring profile with every win or loss — then you and your sales organization can get ahead, stay ahead, and achieve perpetual advantage. Somebody’s going to do it right first. Will it be you?

Summary: Trail Map to Transformation

1. Establish realistic expectations with upper management.

2. Assess your individual and organizational pains.

3. Compare these pains with your vision — identify your performance gaps.

4. Prioritize your initiatives:

• Build a management team that shares your vision.

• Upgrade quickly those who can’t or won’t improve.

• Define your own best sales cycle model.

• Build a new hiring profile for reps; repeat upgrade.

• Re-examine your messaging positioning.

• Train on the methodology using your unique sales cycle and live accounts.

• Only then automate your process, giving reps what they need to win.

• Build your methodology into your forecast, performance reviews, compensation, and hiring profile.

5. Execute change while selling; you can’t stop to rebuild.

6. Document some quick wins to build belief and trust.

7. Reinforce coaching discipline to make winning a habit.

8. Introduce new metrics for accountability, continuous improvement, and perpetual advantage without slowing the reps down.

Transformation Scorecard Best Practices, Transformation Importance Execution Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) Agree, but we never do this We sometimes do this We often do this We do this consistently Individual We conduct sales-specific performance reviews for salespeople that include the specific skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to execute our best practices sales cycle. Opportunity Management Training is relevant and involves working live deals in class. We have a coaching feedback system from strategy sessions that is a part of our forecast. We have a presentation and messaging feedback system to measure presentation effectiveness. Account Management We have a closed-loop sales and marketing system that integrates sales, service, marketing, and design. Managers attend and help lead training sessions. Managers can track action item completion and training follow-through by individual. Industry/Market We have a top-management commitment to full integration of all sales processes — training, compensation, rewards, hiring, and tools. Our feedback and innovation processes keep our competition reacting to our initiatives.

Appendix-Review

R.A.D.A.R.® Six P’s of Winning a Complex Sale

As described in detail in Hope Is Not A Strategy, R.A.D.A.R.® is an opportunity management process for controlling competitive evaluations involving politics, strategic solutions, competition, and decision-making processes by committees. This section provides greater detail on the six-P process, so that this book will be complete in itself. If you have already read Hope, this is a review.

Link Solutions to Pain

In fact, how well and quickly you review and revise your plan is more important than the perfection of the original plan.

The first step in the process is to understand the client’s pain (or gain). What problem is the client trying to solve? A dormant pain is a problem clients don’t even know they have compared with an active pain that they have not only acknowledged but for which they are actively seeking a solution.

Active pains already have money budgeted and teams working with vendors to find a solution. But if you can uncover a dormant problem, elevate it to an active pain, and effectively link your solution to solving it, you gain competitive advantage.

When linking your solution to a benefit, remember to ask yourself what the customer is always thinking: “So what? What does it mean to me?” Failing to answer this question leaves the job of linking your solution to the client’s business pain up to the client, which results in a loss of control and perceived value of your solution. You need to make sure to sell strategic benefits to strategic buyers and sell technical benefits to tactical buyers.

Qualify the Prospect

How you qualify a prospect depends on the number of opportunities in your pipeline and your available resources. The first question you should ask yourself when qualifying a prospect is, “Will this business happen for anyone at all?”

Many deals are lost to “No decision.” This is so for two reasons: Either the business pain that you solve is not urgent enough to act upon or there is no political sponsor strong enough to push it through. The pain needs to be strong enough and emotional enough to drive change and create a source of urgency, or else the deal will sit on the forecast.

The next question should be, “Is this a good opportunity for us?” Keep in mind that in many evaluations the client has already decided who they are going to buy from.

Build Competitive Preference

There is a wide range of preference in complex sales ranging all the way from disclosure, where the client is telling you what you need to know to help you win, to the highest level, trust, where they’re buying whatever you’re selling. There is also a spectrum of negative preference, which ranges from skeptical to even open hostility.

The pain needs to be strong enough and emotional enough to drive change and create a source of urgency or else the deal will sit on the forecast.

In the last 20 years, some methodologies also have taught building preference with everybody. We disagree. First of all, there isn’t time. Second, it isn’t necessary. Third, it can actually be counterproductive. Not that we should ever alienate anyone, but based on the decision-making process and the roles people play, we can win the business by focusing our preference-building efforts on the people who have the most impact on the decision.

Building preference in all directions, without a strategy, is a waste of time. Selling to everyone equally not only spreads your efforts too thin, but it can help the competition. For example, the people down on the hostile end of the scale are probably too far gone. The other problem is that they often don’t act hostile. They may be very nice to you, when, in fact, they are taking everything you give them and passing it straight to the competition.

In account strategy sessions, we see people pounding away on these antagonists in the hope of winning everyone’s vote, sending pounds and pounds of literature and wasting sales calls. Based on the decision-making process, if a complete consensus is not required, we may be able to win without their vote. They may not even have a vote.

And don’t confuse access or politeness with preference. Just because they will meet with you and are nice to you doesn’t mean they will sponsor you. The quality of relationships, from the salesperson’s view, is the most frequently misread and overestimated part of a salesperson’s plan.

You need to know not only if people are for you but also how strongly they are for you. When the pressure builds, you need to know if they are going to fold their cards.

To build competitive preference in an opportunity, you have to establish the political point of entry and then effectively differentiate your company and solution and build positive mindshare with key influencers — before your competition does it.

At the account level, building preference in the long run means overdelivering on what you sold them. Then you need to move from loyalty to trust by never giving them a reason to go to anyone else. You have to make your sponsors look good for having chosen you.

Determine the Decision-Making Process

Before you can drive an effective strategy, you have to understand the client’s decision-making process. This is different from the client’s evaluation process. It is also different from the approval process (see Figure A-1).

As most competitive evaluations progress, there is a point where they turn from logical and rational to emotional and political. This is typically because the principals have not reached a consensus and have divided camps. Because they can’t find everything they want from a single vendor, they often can’t agree on what their priorities are. Sometimes the result is a power struggle, where multimillion dollar deals flip in a matter of hours.

We use the metaphor of the canyon and the crucible to describe this dynamic. The canyon is the narrowing list of vendors with only one survivor (it’s not a funnel — gravity, nor large numbers do anything for you). The crucible, as in chemistry, is where political pressure builds, the decision process melts down, and tempers often explode.