Matt on Marketing

It was a pleasure to hear Matthew Dixon, co-author of The Challenger Sale, speak earlier this week at the InsideView Insider Summit in San Francisco. He’s a high-energy, fast-paced speaker who goes far beyond just reiterating the key points of his seminal book.

In addition to highlights of his ongoing research of sales organizations worldwide, he focused on a few new ideas and trends I wanted to highlight here.

ROI vs. ROPE calculators
Most of us have some form of a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator in the sales toolbox. But Matthew challenged the crowd to think instead about developing a ROPE calculator, which stands for Return on Pain Eliminated. Subtle different but important. Positive return is important, but eliminating pain and waste in the organization can often be a more urgent problem to solve, and deliver bottom-line profit & margin performance more directly & quickly.

IQ vs EQ
Matthew talked about the difference between “book smarts” and “street smarts” and how that relates directly to which sales reps are both naturally good at the Challenger Sale, as well as those that can more quickly trained to execute and master it. From his perspective, emotional intelligence is far preferable, especially when you’re looking to hire and train new reps into a more diagnostic, teach-centric sales model.

The value of constructive tension
I’ve talked and written in the past about aligning your sales process with the buyer’s journey, and how important that is to reducing the friction inherent in most sales processes to help the prospect buy. But Matthew wants more companies to increase the level of tension sales teams create, specifically related to challenging their status quo and forcing them to rethink whether what they’re doing currently is producing the best, most efficient results possible.

Relationship sellers, in his view, focus on reducing constructive tension and therefore end up decreasing the sense of urgency to move forward with a change or purchase. Challenger sellers increase that tension but do it in a way that introduces and reinforces the value for the buyer in alleviating that tension for the good of the organization. Big and important difference.

Love this idea from Kyle Delaney, a solutions engineer with SAP.

At lunch yesterday at the InsideView Insiders Summit, amidst an interesting discussion about field vs. inside sales pros and cons, we narrowed in on the idea of whether video conferencing could approximate some of the values of being in person – body language, ensuring the prospect stays engaged, etc.

One of the downsides of video conferencing, of course, is that prospects don’t always like it. They don’t like the way they look, feel self-conscious, etc.

What Kyle does, brilliantly, is leverage video conferencing in a one-way format. Instead of requiring his prospect to get on camera, he uses his camera only. He starts a GoToMeeting or WebEx presentation with his video camera on, then eventually turns it off.

“It makes it clear that I’m a real person, and helps make an immediate personal connection with the prospect,” he said.

He further took a big white posterboard, put a high-resolution SAP logo on it, and has that behind his desk. It makes his background look extremely professional (even though he’s often calling from his home office).

Simple, smart execution.

Even without the cool background, could you leverage this for your inside sales team? Do you at least have a handful of reps who could test it?

Simple, really. Coming from marketing, it’s rooted in a discipline and culture of revenue responsibility.

We can get far more granular, of course, and talk about creating content for sales that maps to each stage of both the buyer’s journey and their documented sales process. We can talk about going beyond simply passing along sales qualified leads, to also providing sales with messaging, follow-up tools and other support to increase lead responsiveness and conversion.

But that’s getting tactical. It’s doing the fishing, vs. teaching he organization how to fish.

The fundamentals of fishing, and sales enablement specifically in this example, is rooted in revenue responsibility. Get that part right and the rest often falls into place.

So what does that mean? Depending on your company and culture, it might mean tying marketing’s bonus structure to pipeline contribution and/or closed business. It might mean making sales-qualified leads and/or pipeline contribution the #1 measure of marketing effectiveness.

It might also mean taking a hard look at the distribution of responsibilities across marketing. What would happen if you took just one head focused on demand generation, and instead focused that person on sales enablement strategy & tactics? Would lead volume really go down? And if pipeline contribution actually went up, would you really care?

Fundamentally, you could easily argue that generating sales-qualified leads is itself sales enablement. Good leads are certainly more efficient than random cold-calling.

But we all know it goes well beyond that. And a tactical definition of sales enablement that fits all companies – sizes, industries, cultures – would be next to impossible.

So instead, I think the right definition of sales enablement is more accurately a guiding principle.

Revenue responsibility means a melding & blurring of the line between sales & marketing. It means new, seminal books such as The Challenger Sale are textbooks for not just sales, but marketing as well.

It means a focus not on internal execution but customer-cetric alignment. The tactics of sales enablement are delivered internally, but the value is 100% realized in the field and with your prospects.

This also doesn’t mean sales enablement needs to be a department, or even an individual role. Sales enablement is everyone’s responsibility. How does this effort impact our prospects? How will our sales team translate this to our prospects? How will prospects react, and how should our organization respond in kind?

These are the questions that, in part, will define how your organization executes successful sales enablement.

Earlier this week a handful of Seattle-area inside sales leaders got together to hear Paul Leto from F5 Networks and Mark Ippolito from Lenati share their summary and takeaways from last month’s American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) Leadership Summit in Chicago.

As usual, this annual event was three days of amazing content, networking and best practice sharing among inside sales peers. Paul and Mark did a great job condensing three days of great presentations into a fast-paced summary. Here are their slides, which largely are taken from presentations from a wide variety of inside sales leaders and vendors (you can see a list of those companies on slide 51).

Whether you manage inside sales or work with teams that do, this deck is worth a quick flip through.

It literally doesn’t exist anymore. Just like with cold calling, if you think you’re still in a commodity sale situation, you’re doing it wrong.

Let’s say you sell sand. Sand is sand. Everybody has the same sand.

Or do they? Let’s say I want sand for my kid’s sandbox. Is that different than sand you’d sell to someone filling beach volleyball courts?

How much sand do you need? For what purpose? Recreational or industrial? Will you put something on top of the sand, and does that change what kind of sand you need, or whether sand is the right material to begin with?

I can buy lumber at dozens of places around town. Wood is wood.

But I go consistently to the same, family-owned lumberyard near my house for project materials. Why? I always have tons of questions. Dumb questions. And they not only answer them politely, they also nicely correct and adjust elements of my order to make it more efficient and save me money.

Same lumber as I’d buy from Home Depot, and often a little more expensive. But worth it.

Produce is a commodity, right? Apples, bananas, salad fixings. But you know as well as I that some markets get a reputation for better produce than others. Freshness, selection, custom order possibilities, etc. Price is a factor, sure. But it’s one of many.

If you play the commodity game, it’s just a race to the bottom purely on price. If you fail to differentiate, then you really are just like everyone else.

But even if you offer the exact same thing as dozens of competitors, you can still drive preference, differentiation and separation from everyone else.