The most valuable knowledge doesn’t come from canned speeches or PowerPoint presentations. If you want to know what works in real life, ask the managers who have brought their organizations to the pinnacle of sales success. That’s what Selling Power did. On October 26, 2005, we invited 150 of the top sales professionals in the country for an interactive event to create solutions for greater sales success. It would be impossible, in a single article, to capture the energy and excitement of the conference or encapsulate the 2,000 years of sales management experience that was gathered into a single room. However, we were able to harvest 30 top strategies that you can put in place – today – in order to create a more effective sales organization that yields higher productivity, higher sales and greater customer satisfaction.                    

HOW TO RECRUIT TOP TALENT
Strategy 1: Define your ideal candidate. Study your best sales reps and determine the characteristics that differentiate them from the average ones. Find out what drives your best reps to be the best and to outperform the pack. Discover what talents, such as the ability to quickly establish trust or dynamic relationship skills, that are crucial to success in your unique sales environment. Then, when interviewing a candidate, ask questions that will reveal whether that candidate has what it takes to be successful in your organization. – Alan Cervasio

Strategy 2: Always be interviewing. It’s absurd to expect the perfect candidate to walk through the door, right when you happen to have a job opening. When you’re caught short-handed, the last thing you want is to make a job offer to whomever happens to be available at the time. Rather than wait until your moment of greatest need, interview candidates all the time, even if you don’t have any job openings, but if you keep in touch with the best candidates, you’ll have an entire network of potential top sales reps whenever you have an opening. – Rick Tippett

Strategy 3: Ask questions that delve into character. The standard interview questions always elicit the standard interview answers. Rather than have a dialog that sounds like it’s lifted from a job-hunting book, focus on a couple of areas and dig deep. Rather than asking “what was your greatest achievement?” ask the candidate to write down two achievements from grade school, two from high school, two during college and two post-college, with at least one of them business-related. Ask which achievement makes them the most proud. Find out what was satisfying about that experience. Delve into their core motivations. At the end of the interview, you’ll know more about their character than if you spent hours going over the usual territory. – Mary Delaney

Strategy 4: Get HR out of the loop quickly. If you are too busy to meet with a candidate, it says to the best candidates that you don’t care whether you hire them or not. Chances are that top sales reps (or potential top reps) are interviewing more than one company. If they’re the kind of person you want to hire, they’re going to get multiple job offers. Why would they choose a company where top sales reps are “parked” in HR until the sales manager can be bothered to give them an interview? – Mary Delaney
Strategy 5: Hire for attitude rather than experience. Conventional wisdom says to hire reps with sales experience, preferably from your competitors. However, many years of experience can mean that the candidate has one year of bad experience repeated many times over. So don’t focus on what your candidates have done in the past. Instead, focus on their potential future as sales reps in your organization. – Patrick Sweeney

Strategy 6: Don’t hire from competitors. Many sales managers think that hiring a sales rep with a pocket full of clients from a competitor is a better investment than hiring somebody who’s new to your business. But consider this: that candidate was being paid, by your competitor, to build up that client base. What does it say about the ethics of the candidate if he or she is willing to share those client contacts with you? And what do you think the candidate will do after leaving your employ? What’s more, why would the candidates from competitors want to work for you anyway? And if they don’t think their former employer was the best in the business, why were they working for them? – Mary Delaney

HOW TO RETAIN TOP TALENT
Strategy 7: Have a powerful mission and vision. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, your company’s mission and vision statements provide the context for everything that goes on inside your organization. The mission should be inspirational. It must be congruent with the values and beliefs of your employees and encourage them to hold themselves to the highest standards. The vision, by contrast, should be aspirational. It must give employees a general but vivid picture of what they can achieve as part of the team. When employees are both inspired and aspire to greatness, they’re not likely to be looking to leave. – Gerhard Gschwandtner

Strategy 8: Monitor new hires carefully. Some new hires hit the ground running and some fall flat on their face, while yet others start strong, but lose their way. The key to achieving the highest level of success with new hires is a good measurement system. Whether your reps are focused on new prospects, access to decision makers, or pure sales numbers, you must monitor their progress carefully. Keep careful tabs on new hires for at least the first eight months, providing guidance and coaching as necessary to keep them on track. If they’re still having problems after that, you’ll know that they’re not a good fit for your organization. – Rick Tippett

Strategy 9: Assign a mentor AND a coach. Success among new hires is more predictable if you have two people helping each new employee to assimilate and adapt to your unique sales environment. Assign each new hire a mentor who can show them the ropes. Also, be sure that all new hires receive ongoing coaching from a sales executive or sales manager. By laying the groundwork for an easy transition into your organization, you’re far more likely to cultivate and retain high-performing employees. – Alan Cervasio

Strategy 10: Have a stable compensation plan. Some companies change compensation plans quarterly or monthly, hoping to drive short-term sales behavior. However, this on-again-off-again compensation causes sales reps to wonder whether the groundwork they’re laying today might be wasted effort tomorrow. The most effective companies tend to have the same compensation plan year after year. When you implement this, however, be careful that special bonuses and “SPIFs” don’t creep into the system and destabilize your otherwise stable compensation plan. – Jerry Colletti

Strategy 11: Treat sales as a profession. It’s a mistake to think of sales simply as a set of skills. Sales is a profession that requires many years to master. In today’s sales environments, companies create unique sales processes to address a unique set of customers. Specialization is the key to success, so encourage your sales professionals to specialize in a particular aspect of sales. Remember: the key difference between managers and professionals is that managers are generalists, while professionals are specialists. – Howard Stevens

HOW TO WIN NEW CUSTOMERS
Strategy 12: Integrate sales and marketing. Most companies self-rate their marketing from fair to poor. The main complaint, among sales and marketing personnel alike, is that there’s a deep disconnect between marketing and sales. In the most egregious cases, there’s a near total disagreement about basic issues, like the intended market and the target customer. The only way to prevent stovepipes and infighting is to combine market and sales into a single organization – and then make them responsible for each other’s success. – Richard Eldh

Strategy 13: Define your ideal sales lead. You can’t measure how well marketing is generating leads unless you have a clear definition of what constitutes a good lead. In most cases, a good lead will entail much more than just a name and a phone number. Ideally, a sales lead should identify a decision-maker inside a company that’s part of your target market. In addition, the lead should provide enough information about the decision-maker, and the decision-maker’s firm, for the sales rep to get a foothold into the sales opportunity. – Julie Thomas

Strategy 14: Measure demand-creation effectiveness. Studies have shown that about nine out of 10 sales leads aren’t ever acted upon. To make matters worse, even the 10 percent of leads that are followed up, frequently don’t end up closing. Frequently the “conversion rate” is so small that it’s impossible to make an accurate forecast based upon the number of leads that were generated during the quarter. Therefore, if you want your forecasting to be more predictable, you need to monitor your demand-creation activities, find out which ones result in leads that close, and then tune the demand-creation process in order to constantly improve the quality of the leads. – Richard Eldh

Strategy 15: Systematize your demand-creation activities. Demand creation should never be an ad hoc improvisation based upon whatever product you want to sell today. Demand creation should be part of an integrated process that constantly creates leads and which has a measurable effect upon sales effectiveness. To make this happen, demand- creation activities should be broad enough to help sales achieve their goals over the long term, and yet specific enough to be tied to short-term results. Turning demand creation into a system that continually produces leads – regardless of what products are currently being sold – is far more economical and effective in the long run than crafting a short- term, tactical campaign every time you need a short-term boost in sales. – Greg Shortell

Strategy 16: Prototype your product launches. All too often a company will launch a new product line with only a theory – often generated by non-sales “experts” – about how that product can be most effectively sold. Rather than commit your entire organization to a sales push that might be flawed, launch products initially with a small sales team in a limited market area. Have them gather experience selling the product, and figure out what works, and what doesn’t. Tune your sales approach and marketing materials appropriately before you roll out the company-wide campaign. – Greg Shortell

Strategy 17: Re-deploy to sell solutions. An unintended consequence of the Internet is that customers can always find products at the lowest price, turning most products into replaceable commodities. If you want your company to enjoy high margins, you’ll need to move to a “trusted advisor” (aka “consultative”) sales model. This will entail retraining your sales team – especially the reps who were successful selling products – so that they have a very clear conception of the difference between a product and a solution and can translate what your company has to offer into the solution that will help the customer. – Jerry Colletti

HOW TO RETAIN CURRENT CUSTOMERS
Strategy 18: Focus on customer retention first. You’ll find it much easier to gain new customers when you retain the ones you’ve got. For one thing, a low “churn rate” creates a firmer foundation on which to build into new markets. It’s also easier and less expensive to sell to existing customers, rather than to cultivate new ones. Finally, your current customer base, if you do what it takes to keep them loyal, will inevitably spread the good word, providing valuable referrals, and thus producing new growth. – Jerry Colletti

Strategy 19: Turn customers into strategic accounts. If you want a deeper relationship with your customers, you’ll need to show how your corporate strategy meshes with their own. This presents some challenges because now your sales reps must not only be able to sell solutions, but must put them into the larger context of corporate strategy. Ask yourself the following key questions: Can your sales reps effectively present where your company is headed? Is that where your customers want you to go? And are the right sales processes in place to turn that strategy into a practical reality? – Greg Shortell

Strategy 20: Cultivate both “hunters” and “farmers.” It’s not enough to have sales reps that specialize in particular solutions and industries. If you want to increase your customer base while retaining your current customers, you’ll need to have expertise around how to engage your customer at each phase of a long-term relationship. In the broadest sense, be sure to have, and train, “hunters” who search for new business as well as “farmers” who can generate additional and ongoing revenues from existing customers. – Julie Thomas

SUPERCHARGE YOUR SALES PROCESS
Strategy 21: Define the context for your processes. Ultimately, a sales process will be effective based upon the answer to two key questions. The first: “What is the story I’m telling?” It’s very difficult to come up with a unique selling proposition, but without a unique message, you’re just another company selling just another product. The second key question: “What are the rules of engagement?” You need to determine the best method for reaching the customer with that selling proposition. The specific answer varies depending upon what will work in your industry and in your market. But if you don’t have clear answers to these two key questions, failure is inevitable. – Gerhard Gschwandtner

Strategy 22: Create a reproducible sales process. Many sales organizations still operate under the old 80/20 rule that 20 percent of the team makes 80 percent of the sales. Your challenge, of course, is to create a sales process that helps everyone in your sales team to contribute to his or her best abilities. The best way to achieve this is to institute a reproducible sales process that all of the sales reps can follow, and which consistently results in sales. Find out what’s working for the proverbial 20 percent and then systematize it so that the remaining 80 percent can be just as successful. – Michael Bosworth
Strategy 23: Create a comprehensive sales process. A sales process should go all the way from lead generation to support. More important, a sales process should be a mirror image of the way that customers want to buy from you – rather than a model of how your organization would prefer to sell. Furthermore, a comprehensive sales process accounts for the fact that individuals have different skill sets. You may have more than one best salesperson, best prospector or best proposal writer, depending upon the circumstance of the individual sales opportunity. – Jason Jordan

Strategy 24: Make management responsible for milestones. Most CRM systems promise to help sales managers manage their sales process. However, in most cases, it’s assumed that the sales reps themselves will decide when and where an important milestone in the process has been achieved. This is a big mistake because in most cases, busy sales reps just slam information into the CRM system at the end of the month. What’s much more effective is to make the sales manager responsible for entering and tracking the milestones. That way, the manager can more easily compare the differing performance of each sales rep, figure out what works best for each rep, and determine where each rep needs more coaching. – Michael Bosworth

Strategy 25: Measure to motivate. It’s a truism that measurement drives behavior, but it can also motivate your sales reps. Here’s how. Decide what key indicators you want to measure in your sales process, such as sales quotas, at-risk clients, number of calls before closing, expenses prior to close, etc. Then set up your CRM system so that you can share those measurements with the rest of the sales team. For example, sales reps will be more motivated if the top sales numbers are displayed on the initial screen for the CRM system, like the top scores in an arcade video game. Ideally, a sales process should create a mechanism for providing the entire team with positive feedback. – Sean Stapleton

FOCUS ON CUSTOMER INSIGHT
Strategy 26: Make customer knowledge a priority. Many sales managers assume that sales effectiveness determines the overall success of a sales team. Wrong. The single most important characteristic of top sales teams is that they have a deep understanding of their customers. After all, the best sales skills in the world are useless when you’re trying to sell the wrong way to the wrong people in the wrong organization. Most of today’s sales buzzwords – solution-centric, customer-focused, trusted advisor, strategic partner – are really just another way of saying that your sales reps need a deep and useful knowledge of the customers, their goals and their problems. – Jim Dickie

Strategy 27: Gather information throughout the sales cycle. Your sales reps are your best source of information about the customer. Set proper expectations about what information you’d like them to bring into your organization, and how you’d like them to use it. Make sure that it’s easy to add information and act on information, from the salesperson’s perspective, not just from management’s perspective. Over time, you’ll find your organization understanding more about individual customers, and more about the industries in which you sell. That, in turn, will make selling easier and increase the number of sales opportunities that profitably close. – Ian Gilyeat

Strategy 28: Train your managers to be coaches. One of the most important duties of a sales manager is to provide coaching to the sales team. However, it’s really not reasonable to expect sales managers – most of whom have a background in sales, not training – to act effectively as coaches. Unfortunately, many sales managers wrongly believe that coaching consists of telling people what they did wrong – feedback that’s demotivating at best. Coaching is a complex process that is both emotional and time-consuming. Companies that want their sales managers to be good coaches must provide training in how to coach effectively. – Linda Richardson

Strategy 29: Implement customized training. It’s a myth that one sales method – however insightful or sophisticated – can adapt to every sales organization. Off-the-shelf, standardized sales effectiveness training assumes that all markets and all industries are the same. However, if your company has a unique value proposition (and it should) and if your company has a unique go-to-market strategy (and it should), then you’ll need a unique, custom-built, sales training program. – Linda Richardson

Strategy 30: Debrief after every major customer engagement. Your organization can’t learn from its mistakes, or its successes, if the people aren’t willing to examine each customer engagement carefully. A good way to accomplish this is to create debriefing sessions, where everybody involved in the sales opportunity (and nobody else) freely discusses what went right, and what went wrong. During these debriefing sessions, allow attendees to speak freely – without fear of reprisals or negative performance reviews down the line. This form of organizational honesty will allow you to uncover the latent organizational errors that repeatedly occur, and frustrate your ability to make your numbers. – Jim Murphy •

To learn how you may get invited to our next conference, visit our website at www.sellingpower.com/leadership.

Our Experts

Mike Bosworth is the author of the best-selling business book Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets (McGraw-Hill, 1993) and co-author of CustomerCentric Selling (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Quote: “Many companies have not automated a system that’s empowering, so the sales rep just slams the information into the system at the end of the month.”

Alan Cervasio serves as the vice president of global sales strategy and human capital development at Marriott Vacation Club International, which in 2004 and 2005 was recognized by Selling Power as the “Best Service Company to Sell For.” Quote: “The selection process is not enough; once we hire how do we engage and coach?”

Jerry Colletti is the Managing Partner at Colletti-Fiss, LLC, and the author of over 70 publications including Compensating New Sales Roles: How to Design Rewards That Work in Today’s Selling Environment (AMACOM, 2001.) Quote: “A 15 percent growth with a 10 percent drop out rate is actually a 25 percent growth rate – and that is much harder to achieve.”

Mary Delaney is the chief sales officer at CareerBuilder.com, the nation’s largest online job site with over 1 million jobs and over 20 million unique visitors, where she leads a sales force of over 600. Quote: “People come into a job with a full gas tank, but all too often leaders can’t keep them motivated.”

Jim Dickie is a partner at CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in analyzing how companies are reinventing the way they market, sell to, and service customers. He has over 25 years of sales and marketing management experience. Quote: “Much of the information that marketing passes to the sales group is inaccurate or useless.”

Richard Eldh is the cofounder of Sirius Decisions Inc., and was previously executive vice president at the Gartner Group, where he headed a high-risk program that drove $50 million of incremental revenue in just two years. Quote: “A sales force is like a baseball team; you need to specialize types and roles for each individual to play.”

Ian R. Gilyeat is senior vice president of marketing at Direct Alliance Corporation, which provides direct marketplace and channel services to identify untapped markets, stimulate incremental sales, increase customer satisfaction and maximize sales productivity and profit. Quote: “Make sure that it’s easy for sales reps to add information to the system and then act on that information.”

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and CEO of Personal Selling Power Inc., which is responsible for the world’s leading sales management magazine with a circulation of 165,000 subscribers in 67 countries worldwide. Quote: “Organizations fail because they don’t have a clear definition of what selling is all about.”

Jason Jordan is a principal at Go To Market Partners, which helps business-to-business companies build world-class sales organizations through the thoughtful integration of the right processes, skills, tools and metrics to successfully execute their strategies. Quote: “Most star salespeople want to understand process because they don’t know what their process is.”

Jim Murphy is a former fighter pilot, the author of the book Flawless Execution, and the founder and chairman of Afterburner, a consulting firm that’s become one of Inc. Magazine’s “500 Fastest Growing Companies in America.” Quote: “What’s important is not what happens before a mission, but how the mission was executed, and then understanding how the planning and execution led to those results.”

Linda Richardson is the founder, president and CEO of The Richardson Group. An educational psychologist and consultant, Linda has 25 years of sales development and training experience and she teaches sales and management courses at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Quote: “E-learning, newsletters, and ongoing support are good training tools, but nothing can replace the manager’s intervention and coaching.”

Greg Shortell is a vice president of Nokia Enterprise Solutions. He played a key role in building Nokia’s commercial sales organization and establishing the global enterprise channel for the company. Quote: “People only respect what you inspect. If you’re not measuring the performance of the marketing group, you’re missing something important.”

Sean Stapleton is the vice president of national accounts for Who’s Calling, where he manages national sales efforts, works closely with partners and associations, and develops OEM relationships. Quote: “Think of your sales group as an inverted pyramid where the sales manager works for the sales team.”

Howard Stevens is the chairman and CEO of The HR Chally Group, a sales performance consulting corporation providing personnel assessment and research services to more than 2,500 customers in 35 countries. He specializes in sales benchmarking and is the creator of the original sales product lifecycle classifications. Quote: “It’s a mistake to think of sales simply as a set of skills.”

Patrick Sweeney is the senior vice president of marketing at Caliper, an international management consulting firm, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, with offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Spain and Taiwan. Quote: “Lack of the right talent will always inhibit sales growth.”

Julie Thomas is the president and CEO of ValueVision Associates, and has over 19 years of executive sales, sales management and customer service experience. Quote: “Some organizations don’t know where the new growth is coming from and so they attack with a shotgun approach.”

Rick Tippett is the director of national and international advertising for The Washington Post, where he manages the Travel, International, Corporate/Public Policy, Financial/Education, Technology and Entertainment categories as well as the Post’s New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco sales offices. Quote: “Sometimes who’s sitting next to you determines your level of success.”

The IDEA Mint
The Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference was a highly interactive event, with significant audience participation. As part of that process, the event included a contest to see who could come up with the best idea for sales managers. Each participant came up with an idea and shared it with the other participants at that table, who then voted on the best idea. The winner moved to the next round, involving the winners from a row of tables, culminating with a final elimination round, where the three best ideas were rated according to audience applause. Here is the winner and the two runners up:

WINNER: Beth Prunier
VP, CareerBuilder.com
HER IDEA: Expose employees to your thought processes. When they need to make a decision, many managers disappear into their offices, make a decision and then emerge to tell their minions what to do. This secretive behavior always leaves the impression that decision-making is arbitrary and obscure. Rather than being mysterious, think out loud while you’re making your decisions. Show your employees the workings of your mind, and how your decision is based upon what’s right for the company and right for the customer. Even if they don’t like your decision, at least they understand how and why you came to that conclusion.

RUNNER-UP: Tim Young
CEO, X-Sells
HIS IDEA: Create a customer “win-back” program. If your firm is experiencing a high percentage of customer defections, create a program to specifically win back the customers that you’ve lost. Contact them directly, ask them why they’re leaving, ask them what you’d need to do in order to retain them. Best case, the customer will be impressed with your curiosity and concern, and reconsider their decision to leave. Worst case, you’ll learn exactly what’s driving your customers away so that you can make corrections as necessary.

RUNNER-UP: Sean Stapleton
VP, Who’s Calling
HIS IDEA: Buy a product from yourself. When was the last time you bought a product from your own company? This is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to find out how your company looks to your customers. Not only will you get valuable insight into your customer’s experience, but you’ll inevitably discover areas where your sales processes could serve your customers more effectively. Ideally, you should institute a “mystery buyer” program that regularly checks the customer experience, and rewards the team members who do the best job at making the customer happy.