Sales Enablement, Tops the C Suite’s List of Must-Dos.
As per a recent Forbes Insights New Report with Brainshark, “The Power of Enablement: Bridging the Sales Productivity Gap,” that studied 200 plus US base executives, what topped the charts of priority for the C-level executives, was ‘How to improve sales productivity’ and how ‘Sales Enablement’ was important to productivity. They believe that sales productivity is critical to future growth and are willing to put their money where their belief is, as it has obviously been paying them rich dividends. Sales enablement solutions, as we see, are the top technology solutions they plan to invest in. Scaling up in numbers and the quality of selling across the chain becomes important as organizations grow. As the sales in organization grow, it is not just enough to focus on each sales representative, each account, and even each Key Account manually or through traditional methods and tools. Sales enablement in this situation plays a critical role. As Brainshark CEO, Joe Gustafson says, “You have to tackle sales productivity from two angles: improving efficiency and improving effectiveness.” This happens with Sales Enablement. It’s helpful to go through what this Report reveals. It reveals certain interesting findings of Sales Enablement and top-performing organizations. CEOs look at Sales Enablement Technologies to leverage their content. The two things important to CEOs are Sales Content Analytics and giving the sales representatives easy and instant access to content in the field. With Sales Enablement, organizations can make sure that their sales team always has information and resources at their fingertips. It is like a Content ATM- but accessible across devices. Integration with the organization’s CRM further improves content disbursal at the right time to the right people and in every selling situation. Moreover, it provides the right training for every such situation as well. With Content Analytics, you can measure the impact of content through revenue analysis, white space opportunity analysis and also help in identifying best sales practices. Content plays an important role in Sales Enablement for top-performing organizations. Consistent sales messages: All leading sales organizations provide consistent sales messages throughout the buyer’s journey. Sales enablement helps to scale up in communication and messages; this is how consistency in sales messages is made possible. Value and consistency separate top salespeople from the rest: Selling value over price is made possible with the help of sales enablement solutions, so is the consistency of the salespeople in impactful delivery. Continuous sales coaching and mentoring: Sales managers consistently coach and mentor their sales representatives. This would not have been possible without sales enablement as a key enabler. Performing companies value and harmonize sales and marketing: The Report says that 3/4ths of the top-performing organizations follow a good syncing of its sales and marketing functions. This helps in better utilizing the joint prowess in identifying leads and closing deals. There are multiple takeaways from this Report that a CSO can use. Trust you have already picked those up and are following those.
Social Selling -The Route for Building Sales Effectiveness
Inherent in the term ‘Social Selling’ is relationship building, lead nurturing, lead farming. The way these are termed may differ as per different individuals, but they mean one and the same thing. Using and leveraging social media platforms to identify prospects, connect with them, engage with them in conversations and then build a relationship mapping with them before taking it offline as well. Social media has totally revolutionized the way we sell – yes, even in the more complex B2B industry. It has changed the dynamics of demand and supply in a way that has not been imagined before. In this whole new yet not-so-new world, ‘Who Blinks First’ has also changed – it could be the buyer who hunts the seller or vice versa. A lot indeed can happen over Social Media! You can also use the best SMM panel for more efficient and streamlined social media management. Let’s do a quick sprint on how the Social Media Selling Process works and what one needs to do, to be good at it. Identify the right Social Media Platforms for your product. One quick way of picking the right platforms is to find out – Where is your customer present, online? What are his favorite haunts online when he is wearing his professional hat? It is also important to be aware of his favorite haunts beyond his 9 to 5 garb. Once you know this, you will be able to pick the top 3 social media channels/platforms he frequents. That’s where you connect with him. For instance, for a majority of B2B companies, a professional platform works better – such as LinkedIn. Work on your profile on that platform. Build a good profile. A profile on any Social Media platform needs a lot of working upon. Your profile is the face you show to the public. So while you need to be careful you are not shouting from the rooftops about your accomplishments, you must note all your accomplishments accurately. Being honest and transparent while working on your profile, has its own merits. Do not forget to have a nice formal, professional photograph uploaded. Research your prospects Do some research on the people you would like to connect with. See their profiles, take your time researching, be professional, yet creative and original when you send out that request for a connect. Among the millions on that platform, you need to give him a strong reason to want to accept your request to connect. Keep your connections engaged Keep your connections engaged in conversations. Be regular in updates – this helps your contacts stay updated with the happenings in your company and life Listen, acknowledge and applaud. Do all of these, as the case may be. Do read your contact’s updates. Comment on those acknowledges his accomplishments as you read about them, share an article that may be of interest to him and applaud when the situation demands. These things help you stay visible in his mind and ensure recall at a later stage when you may need it. This also sets the stage for your prospect to develop a ‘liking’ towards you – the first building block of trust and a long-term relationship Take it offline, too. When you have developed a fair engagement mutually, seek a meeting or a phone call with him. This is when you move your purely online relationship to offline. Keep it going. From here onwards, keep up the engagement online and offline. Social Media Selling has made it very convenient to ensure that we skip the cold calling or legwork of the old days and connect with our prospects in no time at all and is now being recognized as a route for building sales effectiveness. It has made it very convenient to form a connect and build a relationship. And if we were to go by Social Media Analytics, these are relationships that have greater chances of converting into hardcore sales. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021.
SAMA’s Annual Conference 2019 – Key Speakers To Look Out For
We are excited to be a sponsoring partner at the Strategic Account Management Association’s (SAMA) Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida on May 20-22, 2019. We are just a few days away and we can’t wait to be there. For those of you who don’t know about the Strategic Account Management Association, it is a global knowledge sharing and networking organization devoted to developing, promoting, and advancing strategic customer-supplier value, collaboration, and learning. Hundreds of key account managers and sales leaders of all levels attend the conference to build their network and expand their businesses. It enables the attendees to connect on the future and the challenges of their industry. The #1 challenge conference attendees encounter remains the same. Aligning the internal organization around co-developing and delivering value to a small number of critical customers continues to vex even the most progressive, customer-centric organizations. That is why SAMA’s 2019 conference revolves around this perpetual challenge and is called “The state of precision: aligning with your strategic customers for extraordinary results. This time around SAMA, we have several influential industry leaders as keynote speakers at the event. Let’s look into who these speakers are and what they will be speaking on. KAI KLATT Head of Sales Tools & Technology – Sales Center of Excellence at Diebold Nixdorf Kai is a specialist in digitizing sales processes and bringing radical innovation to sales performance. He ensures a consistent, value-added, and best practices-driven approach from improvement potential identification to implementation management and continuous improvement to drive adoption and to support sales performance improvements. Diebold Nixdorf has triggered a new approach to SAM as well as highlighted the business impact that this technology-led change has brought to SAM’s results within the company. An esteemed customer of DemandFarm, Diebold’s story will inspire your enterprise to take a similar route to make your account planning & execution ridiculously easy. Kai Klatt will be speaking on “How to leverage technology for strategic account management.” JOHN PINEDA Director at Boston Consulting Group John is an expert in pricing model transformation, monetization of digital platforms, and pricing value to improve core business profitability. He has worked with clients across a wide range of industries including technology, data/business services, life sciences, industrial goods, and financial institutions. He has supported clients in implementing large-scale pricing programs, applying pricing quick hits tactics, and developing new subscription-as-a-service revenue models. He will speak on “Digital Readiness: Changing the way we price and sell innovative digital value.” JONATHAN HUGHES Partner at Vantage Partners Jonathan Hughes is a partner at Vantage Partners, and an expert in strategic sourcing, supply chain management, negotiation, strategic alliances, and organizational transformation. He has worked with leading companies and state-owned enterprises across a range of industries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. He has a particular focus on developing and implementing new strategies that leverage enhanced collaboration – across internal organizational boundaries, and with external business partners. Jonathan’s experience includes deep transformational work at both an enterprise and functional level, with a focus on sourcing, supply chain management, and alliance management organizations. He will be speaking on “Alignment with procurement.” During this session, Jonathan will share insights from a multi-year benchmarking study of hundreds of procurement organizations, along with case-studies from more than 20 years working with procurement. Key topics will include: What makes procurement tick: understanding their goals, metrics, and incentives Why and how to profile procurement within each of your accounts How to speak the language of procurement Procurement hot buttons and how to avoid pushing them Aligning SAM with supplier relationship management programs at customers See You There Do not miss these star speakers as they will transform how you think about SAM and its processes. They will share energetic stories while offering practical takeaways for achieving your strategic goals. These individuals have expertise in implementing the necessary changes to bring better coordination, collaboration, and revenue to their respective organizations. Looking forward to seeing you all at the SAMA Annual Conference 2019.
Sales Representative to Sales Operations – A Good Move?
We understand that this might be a point of view that is subject to argument, but that did not stop us from putting this down, as we believe that this might prove to be a good move. Let’s see why. The Sales Representative has seen, lived, breathed, tasted, every bit of the sales process himself. He has tasted rejection and success, pain and pleasure, respect and denigration; he has seen it all in his role as a sales representative. He knows the process inside out and stands a good chance of knowing what works and what doesn’t. The Sales Representative will understand the challenges and pain points of the sales team and the weak links in the process and systems and process as he has experienced them first-hand. So simply put, he will know how to address them. He will be able to put an operations department in place that takes the routine work off the sales team’s shoulders so that the team can focus on their core strength, sales. The Sales Representative will have an all-around view of the sales-marketing- customer triangle of love and will do his best to keep it in the love mode and not allow it to deteriorate. He will add more value to the sales team’s role and ensure he keeps smoothly running operations so as to enhance the performance and productivity of the sales team. On the other hand, many times, organizations opt for external administrative heads or specialists. Let’s find out why this might not be a good problem to have for the sales team. The non-sales person will never know how the sales organization or department works and the nitty-gritty involved. He will never know the sales departmental processes inside out or how they work, as much as a person who has lived with these processes would know. He would not be able to relate to the real world challenges and problems and the aspirations and inspirations of the sales team. He may be more focused on tactics and not results. He may be more reactive instead of being proactive, which is more a result of not knowing fully how the sales system works. He would still be an outsider to the sales department and may not be readily accepted as one of them soon. Sales and Operations are not being two separate things, and being intricately intertwined, needs a sales representative, a hands-on guy to perform sales operations well. Sales operations are perhaps one of the most important roles in the sales organization and on the sales floor and the person who heads it needs to be chosen from one among the tribe if it were to work smoothly without too much friction.
How to Measure Sales Enablement Efforts?
Efforts. Data. Metrics. Efforts. Data. Metrics. Repeat. Without metrics, efforts don’t work. Without results, efforts don’t count. This is true in today’s data-driven world of sales too. If you look at the Sales top down, you will see that things are pretty measurable. As you travel down the funnel, things don’t seem so clear. We talk about increasing the sales pipeline, about white space opportunities, traffic, leads, warm, hot, cold but once we get to those numbers, no one can tell how to prioritize the projects on hand. This is the Sales Enablement Measurement conundrum. Organizations are uncertain about how to measure sales enablement efforts. How do we measure the alignment between marketing and sales? We have tried to resolve your conundrum here to some extent, using both, qualitative and quantitative methods of measurement. These are at best taken as indicators but will help your sales enablement efforts stay on track. 5 ways to track and measure your Sales Enablement efforts. Track the lead-to-deal rate or lead-to-conversion rate: The Sales Enablement team should be more focused on the bottom end of the sales funnel. This means tracking the lead to conversion rate. This is what will indicate the impact of your sales enablement strategies. Although not entirely, because the conversion rate depends on the number and quality of the leads. Besides this, this can be a good measurement index that also helps to identify trends over a period. Ask yourself the question “Will this project help me close more deals?” If the answer is “yes”, put it on priority. The others can be taken up later or delegated. Measure win/loss rates against key competitors: Sales is a race to the finishing line for every lead to be cracked. Your sales team needs your help and support all the time as they face the toughest of competitors. Monitoring your wins and failures and comparing them with your competitors’ wins and losses, will help you identify the gaps and fill that in. It will help you even further to know where you need to put your energy. Your CRM system will help you with this metric. Amplify your content so that it influences a decision to buy: Content is a universal weapon in the sales arsenal; right from the top end of the funnel to the bottom end. Supply your sales team with the right documents and decks but also, leverage the online medium to publish content through visual media. Then monitor it to see which one is more influential as the buyer is in the last stages of his buying decision. Scaling up online with content is good as you can measure the results of what works and what doesn’t. A good CMS and an analytics tool will help you in this task. This will be a perfect time to go for a sales enablement tool. Also, keep a track of and measure your content production – how many pieces of videos, infographics, newsletters, blogs, etc. produced in what month. This will help you measure the time invested and resultant output from these. Do not dismiss attribution reporting: Attribution reporting helps you to see what content helped influence the buyer in the latter stages of his buying journey. This helps in building more content that was successful and cutting down on content that produced weak results. Sit with your sales team: We mean ‘physically’ sit with your sales team regularly. Maybe for some time, every single day. This helps you to know what content they are sharing with customers, what they are saying to leads, how they are doing their demos. By physically being there, you also absorb the underlying vibes, energy and understand a lot that is unsaid or unseen to the naked eye. The team also finds you more accessible and is more inclined to share feedback openly. This helps them voice their needs when it comes to sales enablement efforts. The above 5 are indicators to measure sales enablement efforts. Share your experiences once you start putting these into practice, or in case you have already done so.
Key Account Retention – The 4 Key Dos
The better your Key Account Management, the better the chances of your Key Account Retention. Key Account Retention is a straight derivative of how you build your relationship with your Key Accounts. It is not a data or a numbers game, but a relationship-building regimen. It is something you work at, for the long haul. There are certain Key Dos for Key Account Retention. We spell them out so that you don’t leave anything hanging loose when it comes to keeping your Key Relationship under a tight fist, yet nurturing it in a way that blossoms and keeps growing into a richer and mutually rewarding business association. The 4 Key Dos Look at KAM as a joint venture A vendor-buyer relationship takes away the ‘joint’ and ‘trusted’ feeling from a relationship. It becomes more of an association that a relationship. But if you work with your Key Accounts for a joint win, make joint plans with clear metrics, you will succeed at super speed in winning your customer’s trust. Joint objectives, joint strategies, joint plans, and joint ownership is the best way to look at your Key Account Relationships. Measure it to grow it Every plan is only so good as it is measurable. Without tangible figures to showcase the success of your plan or otherwise, there is no way you are going to win the trust of your customer. It is best to clearly define the measurable at the beginning of a relationship and measure it periodically as decided. This sets the tone of expectation, ownership, transparency and, therefore, trust. Every plan, every step, every point of value-added, is only as good as its measure of success. Numbers are important, keep them looped into your plan and be open for discussion. Timely reporting is key As support to #2 above, it is important to keep the flow of communication open on both ends between you and the customer. This establishes and nurtures trust because relationships are about being open about everything, including setbacks. Timely and periodical reporting with facts and figures help to keep the strategy on track as also the relationship. Build one-on-one relationships Your relationship cannot happen with an organization. It is built with real people. It pays to understand the hierarchy, the straight lines, the dotted lines and everything in between. It helps to know people at all levels in your customer’s organization and especially those who are influential, seniors, your brand champions and even those who play the devil’s advocate. This way you can build an individual relationship with every person in the customer’s organization who you think is instrumental in building and growing your Key Account. There is no substitute for hard work when it comes to building a one-on-one relationship with your customer’s key people. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021.
What is wrong with today’s Account Planning?
If I were to answer that in a word – it is ‘Static’ account plans. For too long, Account Plans were long-term in nature (3-5 years) with a fixed set of analyses leading its creation. I think business reality today is far more dynamic and unpredictable to really make long-term account plans. Let me elaborate with examples. Manufacturing companies enjoyed a product life of 8+ years earlier. A car model would last 8 years. So a supplier could work with the manufacturer in the design phase and in turn commit order volumes for several years. Today, products have a maximum life of 24 months. The new manufacturing process and technology favor a smart & nimble supplier. So a manufacturer prefers a tactical vendor who has invested in strategic process & tech. Account Management is a more internal strategy and tactical win with a customer. For over 2 decades, IT services companies enjoyed multi-year-billion-dollar deals. So Account Planning was to ensure the relationship with the CIO & cornering maximum pie in the several billion dollars IT budget. With the SaaS way of IT consumption on the cloud, this model has changed. Almost all department heads are IT buyers but want an expert point solution provider with the ability to connect easily with other software(s). No wonder, small, nimble & smart vendors are winning Martech, Salestech, HRtech, and Fintech deals while larger suppliers are saddled with dying legacy systems management. Our beloved highly skilled Account Managers are expected to make their 2019 account plans with archaic mindset & templates created decades ago. They also know that this is a futile exercise since reality in their account changes in 2 quarters. I believe technology can come to the rescue here. Smart Account Planning tools that can help create plans easily that are simple and dynamic. Also, these Account Planning templates should be able to track these plans and nudge the Account Manager for action. I am in no way saying that strategic account management now is only tactical. Perhaps it is more strategic now. The strategy is in thinking of a better solution for the customer that they haven’t thought about. Earlier the strategy was supplying to customers’ defined strategy. Salesforce account planning is a big bonus favoring you to do all these activities inside the CRM. If you’re interested in transforming your sales post the pandemic, explore our blog on Sales Acceleration in Account Management and how it can help you grow your business in 2021.
How To Manage Large Accounts Successfully
While the short-term success of any sales organization relies on the quality of its offering and the individual abilities of sales team members, long-term success is rather different. Indeed, success in this area is less about sales skills and more about the ability to manage relationships with existing clients through key account management. In this article, we look at the best ways to manage those large accounts successfully, so that you build lasting relationships, are able to adapt as their needs change and, ultimately, maximize the lifetime value of customers. Learn More: Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Large Enterprise Account Planning Identifying Key Accounts One of the first steps to successfully managing your large accounts is to identify them and decide which of them constitute key accounts. The precise definition of a key account will vary from business to business, but there should be some shared attributes that separate them from your other accounts. It may be that your key accounts are all your biggest accounts, but this is not always the case. You should consider things like the frequency of business, whether there is the potential to sell them additional products or services in the future, whether there are further collaborative opportunities to work towards, and so on. “Good advice here is to start small,” says Lynette Ryals, writing for the Harvard Business Review. It is easier to add customers to your account management program than it is to ‘demote’ customers once you have told them they are key accounts. Be clear about what defines a key account and stick to that. Understand Your Customers Next, you need to truly understand the people and businesses behind those key large accounts, because the more you know about them, the more personalized your service to them can be. Obviously, you need to know what their business does, but it is also important to understand what the key challenges in their industry are, who their competitors are and what their goals are as well as recent developments and news within the organization. Miller Heiman Group’s Large Account Management Process goes into more detail about enhancing the relationship between the buying and selling organization, helping to unlock the true potential of strategic account management. The aim of the program is to help businesses to analyze relationships and set measurable goals. Of course, technology also has a key role to play, not only in terms of organizing information through CRM systems but also in acquiring some of that information in the first place. Thanks to the internet, a huge amount of useful information is now publicly available and can be used for sales management and sales prospecting purposes. Manage For the Long-Term Finally, it is important that once large accounts have been established and key accounts have been identified, those accounts are managed for the long-term, rather than sacrificed for short-term success. This means maintaining relationships during non-sales periods and using the information you have to spot potential changes in advance. “Key account relationships should outlive the KAMs and all the members that constitute the key account management teams,” says Milind Katti, CEO of DemandFarm. Therefore, it is critical to building account and people knowledge into the system so all internal stakeholders are tuned in and can do their part seamlessly. Crucially, a huge amount of large account management is not actually about making a sale – at least not right now. The absolute key to account management is customer retention and this should be over several years. As a result, the focus should not simply be on today’s opportunities, but also on opportunities in the distant future. If you’re interested in transforming your sales post the pandemic, explore our blog on Sales Acceleration in Account Management and how it can help you grow your business in 2021.
Account Planner – Simple is powerful and beautiful too
Key Account Planning over the decades has become complex and theoretical. Most Account Managers just check the box by filling in the template at the beginning of the year and forget about it. In some companies, I have seen the worse. Good Account Managers (who achieve their numbers) just ignore the templates. Account Planning has been around for years. Did you know that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers? Or that 80% of your future profits are likely to come from 20% of current customers? In other words, building and cultivating healthy relationships with clients is one of the most effective pathways to exponential growth. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that 61% of companies consider strategic account management as the key to increasing revenue, profits, and customer satisfaction. While the importance of account management is unquestionable, its implementation leaves a lot to be desired even today. In fact, 71% of companies believe that sales improved by less than 26% since launching their Account Management programs. This observation made us launch ‘Account Planner Pro’ last month while we already have ‘Account Planner Enterprise’ with all the bells and whistles. Account Planner is simple, beautiful, and thus powerful. This is the easiest account planning ever if you use Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. This is an one pager app inside your CRM where: Zoom in to your account to build an Account Landscape in 60 seconds. Map opportunities to know where your current engagements with the customer are and therefore where are ‘whitespaces’ of growth. Map competition & relationships. Create a plan with revenue goals and activities. Track the progress I promise you that Account Planning was never this easy. Salesforce Account Planning and MS Dynamics Account Planning are at your fingertips. Go ahead TRY – Ask your CRM admin to install
Key Account Management sans Org Chart
What does a 19th-century management tool get to do with modern-day key account management.It is not surprising that the org chart never gets its due. Partly because it is just that – an org chart. How about looking at the org chart as a key account management enabler?Interesting, right?I was as surprised as you are. The current version of the org chart that your business is using may not be equipped to do so. But, org charts do hold that power. If you aren’t using any, even better. You could give a new growth dimension to your existing key account management process. To understand how an org chart software enables key accounts, it is vital to understand the ‘powerful’ role of the key account manager (KAM). The Key Account Manager (KAM) The KAM is the face of the supplier to the key account. Over the many months and years, the KAM gathers many insights across : Business and market environment Relationships amongst the key account stakeholders Context of the relationships with the suppliers Assessment of internal capabilities to deliver towards common goals with the key accounts All this is powerful knowledge that unfortunately resides only with the KAM. If lucky, some of this knowledge will get documented, only to go missing in someone’s hard drive (or cloud).No wonder when key account managers leave organizations, they carry the Key Accounts with them. Not fair. It just doesn’t make sense. A key account management org chart is capable of addressing this shortcoming. And if such an org chart leverages cutting-edge modern technology to integrate with HR and CRM systems, it could go beyond the human prowess of a KAM. A modern-day org chart will not only answer key questions on KAM relationships, it will also show and prompt the necessary business action. No Org Chart, No Key Account Management To help DemandFarm’s audience understand the value of a key account management org chart, an eBook titled “No Org Chart, No KAM” is being released. This eBook covers the following : The Origins of Org Chart – This historical context will help establish the prevalence of the Org Chart as a potent management tool that has transformed business and society. Strategic Role of Org Chart in Key Account Management – It is a misconception that an Org Chart is only an HR tool. The section of the book attempts to provide a new context. Org charts can add valuable insights into the depth of relationships within key accounts. An Org Chart is not enough – A simple key account management org chart on paper or a PPT is a good start. But what is truly needed is a dynamic ever-changing org chart builder that represents hierarchy, influence, power equations, and relationships. KAM Power of an Org Chart – An org chart for strategic account management done well has the power to do better than ‘human’ account managers. It ensures continuity. It institutionalizes key account management. It is after all just an Org Chart. It may be times for a new perspective. Do read the eBook. Also, note that DemandFarm offers Salesforce Org chart and MS Dynamics Org chart