Practical Eloquence Blog |

Book Recommendation: Sales Growth

By Jack Malcolm / 7.25.2012 / 1 Comment

This week’s book recommendation is Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders, by McKinsey and Company partners Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark.

With a few exceptions, you may not find a lot of jaw-dropping revelations in the book, but it’s well worth reading for the three important services it provides for sales leaders and for the profession of sales:

First, it provides a template of best practices being used by some top sales organizations. They interviewed 120 sales executives from 100 large companies in 10 industry sectors that have “significantly outperformed their peers”. Although this is far short of gold standard for research methods, it’s far better than many similar sales books (and business books in general) that claim to have found the secrets to success, so their prescriptions are worth reading. The five strategies are:

Find growth before your competitors do
Sell the way your customers want
Soup up your sales engine
Focus on your people
Lead sales growth

Each strategy is further broken down into specific practices, and support for their success is provided statistically and anecdotally. They are summarized in a table at the end of the book which compares “good” to “great” practices; in my opinion, the eight pages from 207-214 are more than worth the price of the book and should be taped up in the offices of every sales executive. While few of the strategies will be a revelation to any sales professional, I’d venture to guess that no one is firing on all cylinders on more than one or two.

Second, the book reinforces a growing and welcome trend toward moving sales from an art to a science, by putting data at the heart of it. If we want sales to be more professional and a more respected aspect of business, we’ve got to become more data-driven. In fact, one of the relatively new topics covered in the book is the use of Big Data to support several of the five strategies, and we’re going to see much more about this in the near future. There are several good examples of companies using it to look beyond averages to identify opportunities at a much more granular level, to gain insights from social media, an—most importantly—to provide actionable insights to individual salespeople. As the data crunchers get better at doing the latter, you’re going to see much more demand for it from the field.

Finally, if you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of vainly trying to get your message across to top management, only to have them jump on it when a prestigious consultant says it, you will appreciate the third service provided by Sales Growth. It’s hard to have a more prestigious mouthpiece than McKinsey in your corner. So, if you’re a sales leader and have been trying to get more resources or attention for some of your sales initiatives, make sure a copy of this book finds its way to your executive suite.

Presentations

Four Recurring Themes of Strategic Sales Presentations

By Jack Malcolm / 7.24.2012 / No Comment

All I want is real people who take the time to think clearly about my needs

In researching and writing my new book, Strategic Sales Presentations, I interviewed dozens of senior executives, read hundreds of books and articles on selling, speaking and psychology, and drew on my own thirty years of selling and speaking experience. Despite all these numbers, just four themes kept showing up again and again.

Outside-In Thinking

Think from the customer’s point of view. You are not the star of the presentation; your listeners are. When you practice outside-in thinking, you start from the premise that the quality of the reception is more important than the elegance of the transmission. To paraphrase the late Stephen Covey: Begin with the listener in mind. What do they know and not know? What do they need? How do they like to receive information?

When you follow outside-in thinking, your presentations will be more about them and their business than about your products, you will make your listeners the hero of your stories, and you will listen more even as you speak.

Sales

The “End of Solution Sales”?

By Jack Malcolm / 7.23.2012 / 2 Comments

Same duck, different day?

There is an article in the most recent issue of Harvard Business Review titled “The End of Solution Sales” by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon and Nicholas Toman. Their premise is that customers today are so well informed that they already know how to solve their own problems, so they don’t need sales reps to sell them solutions. Instead, the top performers sell “insights” to customers who have emerging needs or whose organizations are in a state of flux. They then go further, coaching their customers on how to buy.

Dave Brock took exception to their premise in his latest blog post. He offered an eloquent defense of the concept of solution selling, saying that the article is “wordsmithing and positioning”, and that insight selling is just a form of solution selling. As he said, “…if it looks like Solution Selling, smells like Solution Selling, sounds like Solution Selling, then it must be Solution Selling.” So, he lumps the two concepts together and then also throws Consultative Selling into the same pile for good measure.

My own perspective on the debate is that selling insights is different than solution selling, but that solution selling is still far from dead.

Definitions do matter…

I believe it’s useful to distinguish between the approaches,

Productivity

Applying Lean Methods to Personal Productivity: Identifying Waste

By Jack Malcolm / 7.20.2012 / 1 Comment

Of all the topics in lean methods and personal productivity, this is where the greatest payoff comes: identifying and removing waste (muda) in our personal work. In this article, we’ll focus on getting the enemy out in the open, and in the next will look at countermeasures.

There is a huge amount of waste in our personal work.[1] How much actual value-adding work are you getting done in a typical day? Most of us in business, especially American business, take pride in the long hours we work, yet how often do we take stock of just how much time is wasted in a typical workday.

Keep in mind that muda is defined as any activity or input that does not add value to the customer. Reducing waste improves our value to the end customer (even if we are our own end customer), and/or lets us spend less time producing that value—so that we can concentrate on having fun.

Lean principles have a long record of accomplishment in manufacturing, and have identified seven traditional sources of muda.[2] While some of these also apply to personal productivity, I think it will be much clearer if we create our own list that applies to personal work rather than try to apply the same definitions. I’ve come up with seven principal sources of waste in daily work—these are my own opinion, so I am sure there is scope for improvement or modification.

Focus: Distractions have to be at the top of this list because there is so much competing you’re your attention at any one time. A survey by salary.com found that the average office worker spends 2.09 hours out of an 8-hour day on non-work related activities such as cruising the internet, socializing. That’s 26% of your time, but in reality, the total percentage of time has to be much higher, because of switching costs: it takes time after even a short distraction to get fully up to speed when you get back on task.

Searching: This is probably the second most important source of muda in personal work. According to Daniel Markovitz in A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance, a Wall Street Journal survey of 2600 executives showed that they spend six weeks per year just looking for information. Throw in the time you spend looking for physical things (pen, a document you need to sign, your car keys) or electronic (files and documents, passwords), and it adds up very quickly.

Prioritization: this is related to insufficient focus, because when you are distracted you are focusing on the wrong priority. Yet it goes beyond distraction; you may be totally focused on something that does not add value. Maybe it’s because something is urgent, and not important. It may be caused by thinking too short-term. (Is it more important to mow the lawn or to plant a tree? That depends on whether your focus is short or long term)

Procrastination: This is related to distraction and prioritization, but it merits its own category because of the reasons behind it. It may be because you find a task to be unpleasant or difficult. It may be simply ingrained habits and routines. The major cost of procrastination, besides merely time wasted, is the possibility of problems festering and growing when they remain unaddressed.

Technique/skill: As someone who spends a significant amount of time banging away at a keyboard, I am woefully inefficient. I’m constantly typing something wrong and going back to fix it. In this paragraph alone, I’ve already had to backspace and fix seven typos. That’s a small example, but I’ll bet if I did a time and motion study, I would find that it adds up to a big chunk of time. On a higher level, As K. Anders Ericsson tells us (the world’s foremost expert on experts), the majority of professionals quickly attain an acceptable, undistinguished level of competence in their field and then level off. How much competence are you leaving on the table?

Knowledge: Not learning enough, or learning too much. In some cases, it’s about incomplete learning. I’m very guilty of this. I read a lot, but if you forget most of what you read, how much of that activity has been wasted? [3]Or how many times have you had a great idea and then forgotten it because you didn’t write it down? On the other hand, you can stuff your head with unnecessary information. There’s no law that says you have to read an entire book cover to cover. Why not skip over the parts that don’t apply to you?

Underutilization: This is the equivalent of throwing away half-squeezed oranges. We also underutilize our own talent and energies. When we don’t plan a sales call or prepare for a meeting, for example, we leave performance on the table. When we don’t delegate, we may be underutilizing the time and skills of other in our network. What about things we own? For example, software—I’ve purchased applications that I’ve not used, or have only used a small subset of the total available features.

This list is obviously incomplete. None of us lack for ingenuity in finding ways to waste our personal productivity. In the next article of this series, we’ll explore countermeasures to these and other sources of personal muda.

[1] Some interesting statistics are found here.

[2] Motion, waiting, conveyance, correction, overprocessing, overproduction, inventory.

[3] I can’t claim perfection here. To show how bad I am, there has been more than one occasion where I’ve come across an interesting book on Amazon and decided to buy it, only to have Amazon remind me that I already bought it a few years ago. Sure enough, I’ll discover that I already read the book.