Why Selling Internally Is Key To Success for Sales Enablement Professionals

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Tamara Schenk

Selling internally – that’s when sellers complain about processes, templates, specific questions they have to answer to get delivery commitments, necessary invests and so forth…
This is the first dimension of selling internally – already addressed in many articles.

There is a second dimension: Especially in complex selling situations, sales people should also equip their relevant decision makers within the customer’s organization with a shared vision of success, to help them to sell the story and the value of a deal internally – to speed up the process to get a decision and to reduce the risk a no-decision. My friend Dave Brock has written an excellent blog post called “Selling internally” on exactly this dimension.

And there is a third dimension, our topic today: Selling internally as key to success for sales enablement professionals. I mentioned the need to be excellent when it comes to selling internally in half a sentence without going into detail at the Forrester Sales Enablement Forum in Scottsdale this year – and it was tweeted and tweeted and tweeted… Did I hit the nail on the head?

We are running a variety of different strategic initiatives. What’s the most time consuming part of my job? Selling and communicating our visions, missions, projects and initiatives internally (including preparation), followed by execution activities. I made this calendar exercise, when Dan Pink published his new book “To Sell Is Human”. He created the term “non sales selling”, which means exactly these activities – persuading and convincing people, building agreement networks, getting senior executive buy-in to get your initiatives supported with resources, budgets, ideas and innovations and so forth…

Sales Enablement, especially if the discipline is focused on strategy, change and transformation, has a lot to do with selling internally. It’s selling a vision, a shared vision of success from the very beginning until the value is delivered with measurable results.

Our internal customers are front line sales people, first and second line sales managers, sales executives, operations managers, or marketing and portfolio management colleagues, HR business partners, process managers, IT architects and the list goes on and on…
So far so good – it looks pretty much like a complex sale with many stakeholders across different functions and a pretty long sales cycle.

I analyzed a few of our sales enablement initiatives, tactical and strategic initiatives, and how we set them up, how we communicated and how we sold them internally. I would like to start with a few lessons learned – please chime in and add your experiences to the list:

1. Practice what you preach – Follow a GoToCustomer approach:

Address the organization’s problem in the first place (not what you want to do!), consider the different patterns how to solve it, and the different expectations of your impacted stakeholders, design a phased approach how to achieve the future state and the customer’s desired outcomes. Define those desired outcomes with your internal customers as part of a big picture and connect measurable KPI’s to this future vision of success. Additionally, provide a business case, depending on the volume of your initiative and your organization’s policy.

2. Answer the question “Why do we need to change?” – You will need a story!
It’s key to success, especially if your initiative is touching comfort zones and addressing change and transformation. Work with scenarios – first of all, what will happen if we do nothing? Then, what will happen if we change? Where is the difference between current state and future state, how does the transformation look like and how do we measure success? Don’t forget to connect the metrics to your sales leadership team’s top KPI’s. Use research data and analysis and case studies  – data are your best friends. What are other organizations doing, what are world class sales organizations doing? What’s different to your specific situation? Work from the outside to the inside, but never forget to add your organization’s specific color. Every journey will be unique.

3. Focus on the shared vision of success:
Let’s assume, the problem and the impact are agreed, the “why change” question could be answered, create a shared vision of success. This is a story to communicate your vision to different stakeholders, it should include the big picture, the path how do we come from the current state to the desired future state and what’s each stakeholder’s contribution to be successful in each phase. This step is building trust, showing that your approach is well thought through, that you know the upcoming challenges along the transformation. Perfect to ask for specific support in each phase.

4. Define “time” and results:
In case you have a tactical initiative, you might be able to deliver results within one or two quarters, let’s say you set up new sales messages in new content types and you provide the related trainings. But in case you are addressing a change initiative which is changing sales methodologies, sales management methodologies, selling processes, strategies etc., define “time”. You will have initiatives that will last between twelve and eighteen months to achieve the promised future state. You will need senior executive sponsorship over this entire time frame. So, provide defined progress and results in a phased approach to help people to understand that you are on track.

5. Create a clear picture regarding change and transformation impact:
Change and transformation programs have certain curves. Often, the curve makes the situation worse before it’s getting better and better. Your stakeholders have to be prepared, they need to send the right messages at the right time and they need to prove sales leadership. If you change the sales methodology, you will face those situations. To be able to manage those situations successfully, strong and clear messages that are reinforcing the change are key to success.

6. Offer your sales enablement services as a business within a business:
That’s the shift from activities to services. It’s what you could implement after you rolled out successfully a new initiative. As soon as the results are delivered and the impact is achieved, why not designing a sales enablement service (platform, process, content, training, coaches, etc.)? We created such a service for account planning, offering a process, a methodology, content in terms of “how to” guidelines and templates, webinar trainings and dedicated account coaches. A great idea to be implemented after pilots and first projects were successful. Take all your lessons learned during these phases to design a sustainable, mature and valuable service.

I will stop here – I could write and write and write and talk about examples, lessons learned and experiences. But that’s not the purpose right now.
I wanted to initiate a discussion, based on many conversations I had with peers on this issue.

Chime in, share your thoughts and add your lessons learned to the list!

Posted in Sales Enablement, Sales Enablement Challenges, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Forrester Sales Enablement Forum 2013 – Highlights Part 2: The Selling System And Simplicity

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Tamara Schenk

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
–Leonardo da Vinci

Today, let’s focus on the bigger picture, the selling system and the need to think differently to achieve simplicity. We all learned a lot about selling systems and simplicity on our journeys and especially during these two conference days.

Where is sales enablement heading? A few years ago, the discipline became some color, the term was positioned above sales trainings, above portals and technology for sales content. From activity to discipline, from program made to function, from tactical level to a strategic perspective and so forth. Different ways on how to get started were discussed in the first conference. It was about how to come from a fragmented state, from many different areas with “random acts of sales support” to  managed areas.

Last year, the conference focused on four sales enablement perspectives, the HERO perspectives: Holistic (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts), Engineered (how the parts fit together), Reality (How the parts behave), Ongoing operations (continuous and sustained improvement).

The HERO components already pointed the way to a holistic selling system. It was pretty clear that simple frameworks instead of additional complicated layers on existing processes and systems were key to success. The prerequisite though is to deeply understand a system’s complexity and a system’s complicatedness, before simple frameworks can be created. The difference is this: We can reduce complicated things – they are unnecessary and have to be removed to be effective and efficient (think of parallel deal boards to manage risks, isn’t one enough?), but we cannot reduce complexity (e.g. dimensions as customers, geographies, services etc.). Systems are by definition complex, think about the universe. That’s not the problem per se. The challenge is to understand these systems well enough to remove complicated things and to navigate the remaining system with simple frameworks. So, the perceived complexity will be reduced. And that’s great art.

Scott Santucci, Forrester’s Sales Enablement Research Director and Chief Simpletist, discussed the need of selling systems and simplicity in his key note – brilliant as always. Asking simple questions on revenue or productivity – what is it? Would you invest in a sales & marketing corporation for your retirement, given an average ROI of about 2,6% ? Good question.

We are in a “do more with less” economy. So, the activities CEOs demand from their CFOs, their Chief sales and marketing officers, their product and innovation teams, lead often to poor execution – not necessarily from a functional perspective, but from an overall system’s perspective, the CEOs perspective. Many functional driven programs lead to “random acts of sales support”, customers don’t get the value they expect and the costs of sales are sometimes out of control.

The result according to Scott: “The current selling systems cannot support the weight of your business requirements and is holding your organization back from meeting its objectives.” The CEOs don’t see the system’s challenge, because …nobody cares about the selling system in the board room – so far.

Let’s face reality: There are organizations just starting to move from a fragmented state in a managed state, others already have a number of areas in a pretty well managed state. Often, all these areas are cross-functional areas: Some touch sales and marketing, others touch sales and HR, others sales and Finance, but it’s not end2end yet. Now, there is a challenge to achieve the next level, to build an adaptive system, end2end, to integrate different managed states into one selling system, designed backwards from one design point: The customer’s journey including the customer’s currently desired kind of relationship rhythms.

So, there is a lot to do, to fix the plane while it’s flying – our daily challenge as sales enablement professionals. The future selling system has to be very flexible to accelerate the business strategy, very adaptive to changing market forces, and very flexible to optimize resource allocation based on the customer’s currently desired relationship rhythm with our organizations. There are always comfort zone challenges and organizational drags to be mastered, depending on an organization’s culture. Organizational drags are very often silo-driven, comfort zones are often based on silo-thinking and they can only survive in a silo culture.

What are the components and the layers of a selling system? We will discuss this topic here in detail over the next months.

For right now, I’d like to focus on people. That was the core not only of my key note, but also of other presentations and it was also the core message in Scott’s key note. People, the often missing dimension in sales enablement. I don’t mean functions and roles, I mean the human beings behind the role of sales people and sales managers, which is another missing link in the system.

The current transformation is a big shift: Smart companies see the need that only human capital creates ideas and innovation, and that the challenge though is to engage human minds, because – where does value come from? From human minds creating ideas an innovation with intangible things to create tangible results, for customers and the own organization.

What are the characteristics behind a role (sellers and buyers), how can we cluster these characteristics to optimize our resource allocation regarding the customer’s desired relationship model? Scott presented so-called relationship rhythms. Let’s start with the buyers. Mapped to the dimensions “knowledge transfer required” and “scope of offerings/challenges” we can define four characteristics: Procurers (low in both dimensions), managers, leaders and executives (high in both dimensions). Sellers can be mapped the same way: Expediters (low in both dimensions), consolidator, specialists and collaborators (high in both dimensions).

The challenge of a selling system design is now to adjust these findings to the own sales model, to the own account or territory framework. Exactly, what I shared in my key note – how to design a heart of a selling system based on those archetypes, account tiers, growth strategies, comfort zones and business types. The result is not only a clear design point for content, trainings, coachings, demand generation and a foundation for selling system metrics. It’s also an excellent framework for sales managers to optimize resource allocation and to drive change.

Maybe it sounds simple. Doing this is not simple, not at all.

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
—Steve Jobs

Creating simplicity is hard work. Most important – simplification is something different. It leads us in the wrong direction. Simplification is reducing something somehow, not really understanding the system’s given complexity, not being able to distinguish between complexity and complicatedness.

Finally:

  • Simplicity is purity.
  • Simplicity is beauty.
  • Simplicity is art.
  • Simplicity is perfection.
  • Simplicity is plain, noble and elegant.
  • Simplicity accepts no excuses.

This is why it works. Always.

PS: If you enjoyed my thoughts on simplicity, you might also enjoy Dave Brock’s excellent post “Avoiding Simple”

Posted in Go-to-customer, Sales Enablement, Sales Enablement Challenges, Sales Enablement Definition, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Forrester Sales Enablement Forum 2013 – Highlights Part 1: The C-Level Perspective

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Tamara Schenk

I’m back from the Forrester Sales Enablement Forum. It was the third event since 2011 and the first event outside of San Francisco! We were in Scottsdale, AZ, blessed with sun and a really beautiful location, close to the desert.

Sales enablement is growing up, the maturity curve and the number of participants are increasing!

What are the 2013 highlights – apart from learning, sharing, talking, networking within the broader community?

I will share my most important impressions for all those of you who couldn’t attend the conference this year. Part one – today – will focus on the CEO and the CFO view on sales and sales enablement and what does that mean for our approaches.
In part two, I will share the latest and greatest on the selling system, why it’s often not stable enough to support our changing business strategies regarding execution. Additionally, why we need to focus on people and why we need to think differently to create simple frameworks that make a difference – and why it’s really hard work to make frameworks as simple as possible.

First, the CEO view: Forrester’s CEO George Colony made some research with CEOs in Davos. We remember the 2011 results, when he asked them this question “Are you satisfied that your sales force is getting your company to its strategic objectives?“. The answer was “The selling system is not adapting quickly enough to accommodate our changing business strategy.“ Apparently, the CEOs were not pretty satisfied with their sales forces at this point in time.

This year, George Colony asked the CEOs this question: “What are YOU personally doing to ensure that your sales force is getting the company to its strategic goals?“
The answers were interesting – finally we learned a lot. It was a broad range of mixed answers from  it’s all about the product “we build great products“, it’s about selling “I personally follow up on deals…“ and “I personally lead the sales force“, it’s about clear goals, it’s about pushing the vision – something I liked very much.
Additional answers were for instance “I personally tune the comp plan – it’s important because sales people are all coin-operated“.
Then, it’s about focusing on people, for instance “…driving training“.
For me, the people focus is very much related to the idea of pushing the vision.
But what’s the bottom line of all these answers?
The CEOs are all very engaged in many ways – that’s positive. But they don’t see selling as a system, they have many gut feelings about sales and sales people, which are triggers to their different activities, but they don’t have a lot of data and no big, cross-functional view on the entire system. Additionally, there was no answer that stated something backwards from the buyer’s desired outcomes, challenges and problems. These answers were pretty much inside-out.
These are the challenges, we need to tackle.
Apparently, sales enablement missed to integrate the CEOs role and view point in the sales enablement strategies. Furthermore, sales enablement has to make a much better job in defining the overall dependencies, the selling system as a whole and how the system’s efforts map to the CEOs desired outcomes. Consequently, our CEOs need an active role in our sales enablement strategies.

Second, we learned more about another C-level role – the CFO. Forrester’s CFO Mike Doyle enjoyed to talk about the financial view point – what an excellent key note! First of all, he stated that the most common financial statements don’t tell us if we are doing the right things regarding our sales and marketing efforts. Wow! I cannot express how grateful I am for this statement – from a CFO.
I experienced the different languages sales and finance are using, when I created together with Finance a shared approach on how to segment accounts in 2012. It started in the very beginning  with the simple question “what is an account?”. Sounds simple, but simple questions show immediately how different the view points are. Next, how to segment accounts – of course, Finance looks at financial criteria with a certain focus on the past. That’s what can be measured. But sales needs to look at the growth potential – which really matters, but which is not measurable in a way financials can be measured. I presented our sales and finance experiences in my key note, and more detailed in my track session.
So, great starting point! Then, Mike Doyle described the current dilemma on measuring around internal design points such as products and geographies. But the good news are, according to Mike Doyle,  that the financial discipline is much more standardized than sales and sales enablement. Metrics that matter most for a CFO are for instance client/new business profitability, targeted market share, total cost to deliver sales revenue as well as productivity and ROI for total sales enablement. Especially the last two KPIs are a perfect indicator for the overall need of a well defined, cross-functional selling system that covers the entire value communication chain across multiple functions (which is more than sales and marketing!). It’s a broad range from how to get a prospect to how to close a contract including people, structures, processes, procedures, principles, systems and much more.
There are four categories we should care about: Efficiency investments (collateral, demand generation, sales support services etc.) and development investments (training and eduction, coaching, best practices and job aides etc.) as well as variable costs (commissions, incentives, reporting etc.) and base costs (salary, benefit loads, on boarding, infrastructure etc.). Based on these categories, we should be able to identify and to analyze costs cross-functionally along the entire selling system – always together with a finance expert. Then, let’s map the costs to different revenue streams – this big picture will be much more relevant for a CFO and also for a CEO.

So, partnering with Finance should be based on the specific expertise both partners can bring into this exercise – facts, figures, objectivity versus sales strategy, clients, markets and sales enablement strategy. Our challenge as sales enablement professionals is first of all an internal selling effort – to sell our sales enablement vision and strategy to the CFOs. Therefore, we have to design our story around the CFOs problem and his challenges – and that’s overall growth as a primary driver, combined with expanding margins and earnings. Then, let’s use typical patterns and impacted stakeholders to find ways to solve his problems, then let’s develop a shared vision of success based on a phased plan to help the CFO to get a much better answer on the question “are we doing the right things?“.

Let’s go GoToCustomer, let’s practice what we preach. These internal selling efforts are similar for the CEOs and the CEOs – we have to design these conversations outside-in, backwards from these internal customers, their problems and challenges. That’s what we do in general regarding our initiatives. There is a clear need to get the CFO and the CEOs perspective to work backwards from their desired outcomes and the visions and strategies they are communicating – our foundation, which we have to translate into sales enablement execution programs.

Successful companies will start these conversations with their CEOs and CFOs to hone their sales enablement strategies and programs and to make them relevant and indispensable for the C-level. Successful companies will work cross-functionally to overcome collaboration obstacles across the selling system, to make better resource decisions, to achieve better results.

Part 2 will follow soon!

Posted in Go-to-customer, Sales Enablement, Sales Enablement Challenges, Sales Enablement Definition, Sales Enablement Metrics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Breaking Down Challenges And Driving Change One Step At A Time” – Forrester SE Forum March 4-5, Scottsdale

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Tamara Schenk

That’s the title of my key note!
I hope to see you next week in Scottsdale: Forrester Sales Enablement Forum,
March 04 – March 05.

This year’s conference theme is called „Accelerating Revenue In A Changed Economy“.
I love that “sales enablement“, “change“ as well as “changed economy“ seem to be the context. Beyond that, I believe that it’s not only about a “changed economy“, it’s more about a “changing economy“, a fundamentally changing world. We are currently in the beginning to understand what the information age actually means regarding the challenges of the 21st century, regarding the shift from a tangible economy to an intangible economy.

This shift is for instance how to evolve organizations from centralized push principles to decentralized pull principles, from competitive to collaborative principles, from information to  knowledge (“know-how“), from market-share to mind-share thinking, from managing people to enabling people – connected learning as the core of the intangible economy, as the core of a social business.

Of course, these topics affect much more than a selling system. But I truly believe, that we are all well advised to have the big shift and a vision in mind when we are discussing “Accelerating Revenue In A Changed Economy“.
Because a selling system, a value communicating system, is the heart of an organization. Especially in an intangible economy, where value creation and co-creation is based on human capital.

Back to my key note „Breaking Down Challenges And Driving Change One Step At A Time“:

What are we going to do? First, I will share a few thoughts on „unlearning sales enablement as you might know it“ and why the people dimension has a special relevance when we are discussing social selling systems.
Then, I will share different stages along our sales enablement journey. How we started, which challenges and questions we had in the beginning, and how these questions and view points changed over time – from optimizing sales portals and content management to designing sales models and strategic frameworks for a future social selling system.
We will discuss particularly the organizational drags and the comfort zone drags we experienced at different stages along our journey. Discussing these drags with peers, this is what every sales enablement professional seems to experience, in different colors and in different shapes. Those drags can be categorized, but they are always specific, based on an organization’s specific culture.
There are no “one size fits all approaches to overcome them.

Often, it feels like an innovator’s dilemma…
That’s when an organization needs a linchpin, leading with insights, passion, bravery and curiosity – fearlessly.

I will also share what we are doing about it: Why we consider especially the sales manager’s perspective and how we are currently connecting the dots within our GoToCustomer approach to a flexible people-oriented framework. Let’s see, how such a framework could look like!
Let’s see how it can equip people to create and to co-create value in an effective way and how it will equip sales managers to fight the comfort zone drags and the organizational drags – to increase the overall value creation, working backwards from the customers.

See you in Scottsdale!

Posted in Go-to-customer, Sales Enablement, Sales Enablement Definition | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Outcome Selling Part 2 – For Sales Managers: Outcome Selling Skills Mapped To The Customer’s Journey

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Tamara Schenk

Based on our foundation from Outcome Selling Part 1, let’s discuss today what specific skills are relevant for successful outcome selling, building on general selling skills and general knowledge regarding a vendor’s portfolio. Then, let’s map those skills to the customer’s journey – which is especially relevant for the sales managers.

First of all, sales people need business acumen. “Not another famous buzz word!” you might say. So, let’s clarify how the term is defined, let’s check Wikipedia:
“Business acumen is keenness and quickness in understanding and dealing with a business situation in a manner that is likely to lead to a good outcome.”

What does that mean? Business acumen is not about vendors, it has nothing to do with product and solution knowledge and special benefits. Business acumen is the capability to understand a certain business challenges, to understand the complexity of different business drivers and strategic needs, to create different scenarios to solve a problem, to think differently about a business problem, to create and to understand strategy maps, to analyze a given CEO agenda and so forth – with the aim to discover desired and potential customer outcomes and to map a vendor’s capabilities to customer challenges and to those desired outcomes.

Business acumen works from the outside to the inside, it works backwards from the customer’s journey. Business acumen is a “must have” skill set for sales people in order to switch conversations from what services are and what they do (inside-out), to conversations that are focused on how those services could help customers to achieve their desired outcomes. These are conversations designed backwards from the customer (outside-in), focused on what services could mean in terms of value for the customer’s business.

Second, the sellers need industry expertise. It’s about understanding the specific color of an industry’s language, speaking this language, understanding the industry’s core processes and core challenges, trends and innovations on a high level. This high level includes to look at the challenges from the perspective of our customer’s customers. And don’t forget to be up-to-date about the latest gossip within your industry. Using social networks, groups and communities is perfect to remain up-to-date and to build the necessary industry relationships.

“Right, but we are missing a lot!” I hear you…Wait a minute!
I think, we need at least one additional skill, but it’s not about more knowledge on solutions and services, it’s the capability to map and to translate the general value of a vendor’s portfolio into a specific value focused on the customer’s challenges and desired outcomes. Therefore, we need an additional pretty rare skill set, the combination of analyzing and synthesizing. What does that mean? Let’s check again Wikipedia:

“Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it.”
“…the noun synthesis refers to a combination of two or more entities that together form something new; alternately, it refers to the creating of something by artificial means.”

To give you some color on that: Analyzing is understanding all the single ingredients you have in your kitchen, for instance mushrooms, pasta, olive oil, garlic, herbs etc.  Synthesizing is creating a menu and adding something special, such as spinach, nuts and seeds, etc.
This is exactly what we need to do – to create value in a a unique way to help our customers to achieve their outcomes.

Now, let’s have a look how these skills can be mapped to the customer’s journey and what does that mean for the sales managers. To make that pretty simple, let’s distinguish between two phases:

  • The first phase is about making the customers aware of a problem, a challenge and the entire impact of that challenge – in order to create or to reinforce dissatisfaction and the need to change to achieve a future vision of success. This phase is all about “why change”. This is so important because the biggest barrier out there is a customer in a “doing nothing” mode. This happens very often when we try to address a customer with “why you” messages and the customer doesn’t see the whole challenge and impact. So, all our messaging efforts here have to be about “why change”. So, this phase is all about them, the customers.
  • The second phase, when the customer has made a decision to tackle the problem and to start a buying process, then it’s about why you are the best vendor on the planet to help the customers to achieve their desired outcomes. All messaging efforts – based on the already created future vision of success – are about “why you”, why only you as a vendor can offer a specific and unique value to help them to achieve their outcomes.

Mapping those skill sets to the customer’s journey:

  • In the “why change” phase, you need the maximum of business acumen, industry knowledge and analyzing, synthesizing skills, to help the customer to create a unique future vision of success, that’s more attractive and bigger than the current dissatisfaction, the invest and the risk together. The level of required specific solution and service know-how is medium.
  • In the “why you” phase, you need the above mentioned skills still in the background. But crucial for success here is the specific solution and service knowledge, solution design skills, designing step-by-step approaches with the customer, creating detailed business cases and negotiation skills. These are skills you would probably associate with opportunity management.

Why is this so important for the sales managers? It’s important for the question how to optimize the resource allocation. So, sellers with the above mentioned skills for the “why change” phase should be focused on that phase and not be forced to focus on the “why you” phase, and sellers with skills on the “why you” phase should join the opportunity, when the executive owner and the major stakeholder have been addressed successfully and the actual buying process begins.

Especially if a sales organization’s comfort zone is in the “why you” phase, it will be very important to identify the rare “why change” skills within the organization (often they are in many different teams) and to allocate these resources accordingly to increase the overall value for customers and the sales performance.

In a named account strategy, there is an additional challenge – allocating the identified people with “why change” skills to those accounts with high growth potential and ambitious growth targets: Accounts, you have to be successful with new business related growth strategies.

Additionally, sales managers need a coaching map derived from the customer’s journey, mapped to these different skill sets to provide optimal and tailored coaching support for “why change” and for “why you” to scale and to increase both – the value for customers and the sales productivity.

Posted in Go-to-customer, Sales Enablement, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Outcome Selling Part 1 – What Is It And How Do We Tackle It?

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Tamara Schenk

Everyone is talking about outcomes, outcome selling, outcome-based selling, outcome-driven selling, outcomes in general and how to achieve them.

As you might remember, I announced in my „Thank YOU – Let’s Welcome 2013“ blog post a whole series about outcome selling.
Let’s start with part one today. Let’s focus on the term “customer outcome”, why we should care and how do we tackle it.

First, let’s differentiate between outputs and outcomes, let’s see how Oxforddictionnaries define these terms:

  • “Output is the amount of something produced by a person, machine, or industry”.
  • “Outcome is the way a thing turns out; a consequence”

So, outcomes are the results, the meaning of outputs. An election is actually one of the best examples to explain the difference:
“It is the outcome of the vote that counts”.

Let’s translate that into a selling situation:
You might sell the worlds best CRM system to your customers. What’s the output and what’s the outcome? The CRM system and all the customizing and training activities are outputs, nothing more, nothing less….
What the shiny new CRM system means for customers, that’s their desired outcome. And this outcome will be different for many customers. One customer will have an outcome called increasing sales productivity plus 10%. Another customer will define his outcome differently, maybe 15% increasing customer loyalty, and a third one might focus on how to increase revenue with new services in new markets by 20%. The outcome, the meaning, the specific value of our services – of our outputs – might be different for many customers, but you can identify some general patterns that help you to really understand the customers initial problems and their desired outcomes. And be aware – you are executing on the outcome to make your customer happy, not on the output. That makes the difference between a commodity supplier and a strategic partner.

The desired outcome is closely connected to the specific initial problems your customers might have. That’s why it’s so important to really understand these problems, the customers want to solve and how the solved problem gets measured – in the very beginning of the customer’s journey. The customer’s problem is never to buy a new CRM system. The initial problem can be for instance an effectiveness or a growth issue or a customer loyalty issue – just to name a few patterns, that help you to classify the initial business problems.
Why not discussing a few criteria that could help you to identify the desired outcome:

  • WHAT is really the problem, your customer has to fix, the challenges you identified in an account, etc. Look at it from a business perspective, not only from a technical perspective, and figure out how success will be measured.
  • WHY is that a problem right now? Try to figure out all the politics within the customer organization, also organizational changes, new business strategies, mergers & acquisitions, new stakeholders with new ideas and so forth…
  • WHO could be the executive owner of this specific problem? Which role is it, that has to fix that problem, which role is in danger to get fired (OK, that won’t happen so quickly in Germany… but imagine!). This is the role of the executive owner, you need to address with a vision. Then, identify all the impacted stakeholders, that are also relevant to fix this problem. These stakeholders might have different perspectives and probably they get measured differently.
  • HOW do they want to move forward to solve the problem? Look at all the stakeholders…maybe you can do a great job and integrating different view points and align them to a common problem solving path, to a shared vision of success.
  • WHEN does the problem need to be fixed? Pitfall, be careful! “When” doesn’t mean when your famous outputs have to be implemented, “when” means when the problem has to be fixed from a business perspective, measured by the agreed KPI’s. This could lead to a different time line.
  • WHERE are they along their customer’s journey, along their own problem solving process? Did you get access before they were aware of the entire problem and its impact, did you get access right after they got aware of that, but before they discovered possible solutions? The earlier, the better!

Last but not least, let’s be aware that – in general – we cannot create these desired outcomes alone for our customers. In an outcome selling scenario, we are often talking about value co-creation – in a collaborative way.

Next topics will be:
The special meaning of collaboration in outcome selling scenarios, the impact for sales management and sales operations and the impact for sales roles.

I hope, you enjoyed the first part of our outcome series – please share your feedback and your thoughts!

How do you define an outcome, a customer outcome?
How do you tackle outcomes?
What are your experiences with outcome selling?

Posted in Go-to-customer, Sales Enablement | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Thank YOU – Let’s Welcome 2013!

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Tamara Schenk

I launched this blog in October 2011. I didn’t celebrate the first birthday (“wow, already one year on-line?”). But today, I’d love to celebrate the first full year of my blog with you!

Sales enablement – the term is still a bit “under construction”, but the relevance and the meaning is increasing. More and more organizations see the long-term value, see the strategic relevance, the need to be able to quickly execute on changing business strategies, to close the strategy-execution gap. More and more organizations see also the need to design selling systems end2end, from prospect to contract, across all functional silos. More and more organizations see that technology is a great enabler – when the organizational and structural homework is done before. Breaking down the collaboration barriers is still a huge challenge – not only, but especially for sales enablement.

Working on this 2012 review, I’m writing with so much gratitude :-)

Let’s celebrate a few highlights – OUR highlights!
I couldn’t have achieved all these things without YOU! Let me take a moment to express my deepest gratitude for your ongoing support and contribution! Thanks so much for reading, challenging, discussing, commenting, sharing – thanks so much, all my friends, supporters, mentors, challengers, peers, colleagues, collaborators all over the place!

  • The audience of this blog is growing and growing! Thousands of people have seen, viewed, clicked on this web site in 2012, in North America, in Europe, in Asia and in Australia!
  • I was surprised about myself, when I counted my posts in 2012 – I published 20 posts including this one!
  • I had the wonderful opportunity to give a keynote on the state of sales enablement in Melbourne – CSE2012
  • I had a presentation on the gap in strategic accounts at the Forrester Sales Enablement Forum in San Francisco
  • I’m feeling very honored that a few of my posts were published in the Top Sales World Magazine and I’m feeling even more honored that I could be a member of the Top Sales Awards judge panel.
  • I’m very happy that one of my posts was published in the SAP sponsored 21st Century Sales Warrior iGuide.

The blog post highlights in 2012:

There is still a lot of work to do, regarding all the essentials, but especially in a direction, where we need a lot of innovation, creativity, bravery and passion – and leadership. In my opinion, that’s all about how to use GoToCustomer oriented sales enablement approaches and selling system blueprints to drive change in the 21st century. Knowing, that we have to bridge between the information age and the conceptual age, knowing that well-known skills and behaviors from the last century are no longer valuable for customers and no longer suitable for our planet – not only regarding selling?
“Unlearn and Relearn” – that describes the challenge perfectly.

How to design selling systems – no, I should say – buyer enablement systems, that are part of responsible, sustainable, outcome-oriented stakeholder-oriented and customer-centric business models? How to build those end2end buyer enablement systems, how to connect them to other value cycle elements across silos, functions and organizations? And then, how do we measure success internally when we enable customers to achieve their outcomes. What does it mean for our internal performance management systems, when our mottos might change to
“Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle – Re-imagine a responsible enterprise”

My first outlook for 2013, what you could expect to find here:

  • Enable the sales managers first, covering several view points
  • Sales infrastructure and selling systems, buyer enablement systems
  • Driving the general concept of GoToCustomer, as outlined above
  • A special on customer outcomes, what is it, what does it mean for our sales force control systems, our behaviors, our collaboration models, our performance management systems etc.

Yes, writing is an amazing creative activity. Writing, especially developing and growing this blog changed my life, without a doubt. It became a major part of my journey, writing and finally clicking on the “publish” button are definitely feeding my soul…

I’m looking very much forward to 2013 – I want to welcome the new year with you!
Welcome 2013, with all the challenges you might bring to us!
I truly believe that great challenges are always great opportunities, to make a difference, to drive change, to make the world a better place – for all living beings on planet Earth.

Having said this, I want to wish you a healthy, happy and a successful 2013 – whatever success might mean to you. It’s easier with the key to happiness -
Happiness comes from within, as soon as you unlock the unconditional love of your heart, you found your personal key to happiness…
May your visions become true, may you achieve the next steps on your journey.

PS: I’m sure, you want to make a difference – for people who have no access to clean water. Imagine, what a huge difference you can make in people’s lives, just with a small contribution. The camapign has the goal to support 1000 people to get clean water.
Please check out and support Dave Brock’s amazing water campaign.
Thank you so much in advance!

Posted in Go-to-customer, Sales behavior, Sales Enablement, Sales Enablement Challenges, Sales Enablement Definition, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments