Selling Power 500

The 500 top companies in America – which employ the world’s largest sales forces – depend on more than 21 million salespeople to achieve their revenue goals


http://www.sellingpower.com/magazine/article.php?i=1318&ia=9152#topArticlePages

More Lessons Learned - Time Efficiency

Now that we have a better idea of who our customer is and what the pain is that they feel, our interviews are getting much shorter and more focused - which is great, because our true customers are high-level executives who have limited time and patience. :)

I've found that we're able to get a lot of the information we need from their subordinates, specifically size of the organization and current solutions. It's basically a qualifying activity, which is cool because we're all about sales, so meshing sales and lean start-up is both fun and obviously necessary.

I've pretty much gotten our qualifying down to 2 questions, though our interviews still lack structure because we still don't really know what we don't know! This is a crazy, crazy life to live.

Nail it Then Scale it / Lean Start Up Lessons Learned

We're trying hard to be smart about this whole start-up business. Limit risk. Sell before we build. Allow the market to create what it needs instead of forcing our ideas on it.

But it's been an extremely rough road. We've interviewed somewhere around 35 companies now, and are finally beginning to understand who our real customer is - and who we should be interviewing.

Here's something I've noticed so far - the people we've talked to can be separated into two criteria for being our customer. The first is their position within the company. Front-lines salespeople are not our customer. They're barely even our user. The majority of the early interviews I did were with front-lines people, who validated the concept to some degree, but didn't give it a really strong reaction either way. That made it extraordinarily difficult to understand the feedback we were getting. It wasn't negative... but it wasn't positive. So I felt like we were on to something, but hadn't really nailed it, and had no idea what to change to get to the right answer.

Then we interviewed a couple sales managers, and they were all for it. Some of them. Which led to our second conclusion - size matters.

Smaller organizations are too intimate to need a tool for management. The managers interface with their people every day and know exactly what's going on.

Larger organizations, however, do need a tool for performance management. We've hypothesized the threshold to be at about 10 salespeople. We've interviewed a few that have teams of 7, and they give validation, but not very strong. There seems to be a very strong correlation between size and need, with the largest organizations (300 and 100 salespeople) being the most adamant about the value of this concept.

Why to Mechanize while your team is still small

If you have a small (less than 10) sales organization, you should still Arena Machines because if you wait until your team is bigger, you'll have to force a major culture change on a much larger group of people and get them all to adopt it. If you do it now, it's just a good idea for one thing, and for another, it will aid in disciplined use of the methodology as you grow. No transition needed later. Boom.

5 reasons salespeople hate using CRMs

http://www.yesware.com/blog/2010/09/09/5-reasons-salespeople-hate-crm/

CSO Insights

Turnover is one of the first metrics we look at.  It is a leading indicator of a long list of
issues, including:
• Poorly crafted compensation plans
• Overly ambitious quotas
• Sales management weaknesses
• Sales force morale problems
• Poor training programs
Of course there are industries that accept turnover as a part of doing business.  We
believe that, if anyone analyzed the cost of turnover, they would take extraordinary
measures to avoid it.


http://www.csoinsights.com/assets/files/2012SPO-Sample-Benchmark.pdf

Talent Maximization

Overall, sales leaders ranked talent maximization as one of their five
most pressing issues, second only to ongoing worries about winning
and keeping profitable business. But when asked how well they were
meeting the talent challenge, participants gave themselves low marks,
rating that area fourth out of five in terms of success.

http://www.lmsleader.com/pdf/06-Secrets_of_High_Performance.pdf

Understanding high performers extremely well will also aid in hiring the right people because you'll recognize similar characteristics!

I have a dream

I have a dream...

I dream that salespeople will no longer feel anxious about hitting quota. I dream that salespeople will know exactly what is expected of them, and that they will feel confident that they can perform well.

I dream that salespeople and sales managers everywhere will have access to data which will allow them to accurately predict closings. That they will hold trainings and make changes based on the projected future instead of the unchangeable past.

I dream that salespeople and sales managers will seek out continuous improvement. That they will manage their activities as the most efficient manufacturers manage their factories. That they will be able to identify bottlenecks, areas of excessive waste, low input volume, so that they might create a lean selling organization with as little opportunity loss as possible.

I dream that salespeoples' lives will be simplified, that all unnecessary variability will be eliminated from their day, and that they might have a clear understanding of what to do and how to do it. When increased quotas are met not with panic, but with a spirit of confident determination.

I dream of a day when salespeople aren't only successful, but consciously so. When they know why they are prosperous, when they understand and dominate every step of the sales process. When they can visually see their improvement over time and draw strength from knowing that they are great.

I dream of a day when success is democratized. When leaders and salespeople alike work to expand and fill each salesperson's potential. When the tendency to oscillate between panic and pressure becomes an effort to work in a confident, consistent, and continuously improving method.

I dream of a day when the nebulous world of sales becomes a simple, comprehensible job and allows salespeople to focus their attention on what they do best - save the world.

Day 1

So here's the premise of this diet - people aren't poor, they're stupid. I'm going to prove, with little conviction at this particular moment, that you can eat for $0.60 per day and be totally fine. Yay me!

We'll see how it goes. Peace.

Competitor - SAM

SAM Sales Activity Management, Inc. Very good story.

http://www.salesactivitymanagement.com/consulting

BYU Musa Interview

http://www.byumusa.com/2012/01/30/northrop-grumman/