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Proprietary & Confidential 1 [email protected]
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White Paper From The PivotalForce
Building A Sales Factory
Redefining The Scope Of Sales Execution
Reinventing The Road Map To High Performance
Proprietary & Confidential 2 [email protected]
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Section 1: Sales Factory – Driving Operating And Market Performance
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write
but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler
Every high tech market has a competitive landscape that spans a mix of powerful leaders, successful
followers, emerging challengers, irrelevant survivors and one-hit wonders. Take a close look at any
market and the competitors often have similar visions, products and architectures. Yet for all the
similarities, there is an enormous gap in operating and market performance.
It’s clear that top companies fire on multiple cylinders. But, it’s is equally clear that there is a
pivotal force that drives high-performance companies. Contrary to the industry’s long-standing
overreliance on technology, sales execution is that force, separating sustained from sporadic
performance and market leaders from market followers.
Yet for all its impact, CEO and board frustration with sales execution spans companies of every
size, stage and market. All-too-often, performance falls short of plan, growth lags key competitors,
market influence is non-existent and ineffective spending consumes capital and kills profitability.
Far too many companies have squandered great opportunities and lots of capital solely because their
sales execution was somewhere south of mediocre. Sometimes, really far south of mediocre.
While there is a unique slant to every company’s sales execution problem, there is also a common
thread. With astounding frequency, instinctual forces dominate the agenda. Great instincts are
irreplaceable but they aren’t enough. High tech vendors also need a structure that defines the
broad scope of sales execution, unifies the equally broad array of strategic, talent and operating and
capabilities and drives sustained execution.
The Performance Levers shown in Figure 1 convert the Strategic Goals into operating reality.
Spanning a career that has produced $2 billon in enterprise revenue and the insight gained working
with the best companies and most talented people in the industry, I’m absolutely convinced that
they are the eight core priorities that change an organization’s operating and market performance.
They span the entire organization, as dependent on executive and marketing leadership as the sales
team. The breadth can seem overwhelming but they aren’t optional and there are no shortcuts.
High-performance sales execution
begins with understanding its scope.
The myopic view that equates it with
deal management and measures it
solely by performance vs. the ops plan
underestimates impact and undermines
the critical capabilities needed for
success. The right scope has two key
dimensions, spanning the Strategic
Goals and key priorities shown in
Figure 1. The goals should be driven
by the broader view that sales
execution is at the core of operating
performance, customer creation, scale
and market leadership.
Proprietary & Confidential 3 [email protected]
The key question is how to make the Performance Levers far less overwhelming and far more
operational. For many vendors, the missing ingredient is a structure that combines the power of
those instinctual talents with strategic clarity and precision execution. That structure is the
Sales Operating Model® (SOM) and it’s designed for B2B vendors that sell products with complex
customer acquisition, retention and expansion cycles.
The SOM, as shown in Figure 2, unifies the four capabilities of sales execution. Go-To-Market
Strategy is at the heart of the SOM, producing an explicit road map that directs the organization.
Talent unites sales and marketing into a high-performance team. Precision Marketing creates the
identity, content, programs and relationships that arm the sales force for victory. Precision Sales
builds an engine to excel at transaction management, highlighted at the far right of Figure 2.
There’s a bigger issue in play than simply fixing sales execution. The SOM transforms the
organization from sporadic greatness to a sales factory. Thinking about sales and marketing as a
factory, while alien to many leaders, is a powerful tool to drive superior, sustained and predictable
performance with the right cost structure. It’s a big job but the market does not reward vendors for
doing most things right, it rewards them for doing everything right.
A critical part of that transformation is responding to fundamental shifts in customer buying
dynamics that have, in turn, had an equally fundamental impact on vendor selling economics. The
sales execution game has radically changed, yet many companies cling to legacy sales models,
designed for a market that no longer exists. Producing the numbers in today’s market is every bit as
much about selling differently as it is selling better. The structure, breadth and innovation of the
SOM provides the road map to do both. To be clear, the SOM does not mean bureaucracy, nor does it confuse process with purpose.
Rather, it’s all about creating a pivotal force that combines the right amount of structure with the
vision, technical leadership, creative genius and relentless drive to succeed that are the DNA of the
high tech industry. Call it the intersection of the art and science of selling to deliver game-changing
improvements to the way deals are managed, markets are won and careers are built.
Proprietary & Confidential 4 [email protected]
Section 2: Creating Customers – Acquire Rapidly, Expand Profitably
“There is only one valid business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is
the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence.” Peter Drucker
To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the purpose of sales execution is to create customers. A large and
well-penetrated customer base is at the heart of a high-performance sales organization. Everything
a vendor does, from building products to creating market awareness and managing deals, should be
done to drive the rapid acquisition and profitable retention of a large customer base.
Customer creation should be an obsession for every high tech vendor. Bookings, revenue, margins
and market share all flow from an engine that continually and profitably identifies, engages,
acquires and upsells a large customer base in a clearly defined target market. While that is
seemingly obvious in principle, it is surprisingly absent in practice. Many vendors don’t establish
customer creation as a strategic goal and acquisition and penetration rates are not measured.
Compounding the challenge, the customer creation game has changed. Driven by powerful market
forces such as technical innovation, disruptive business models, shifts in IT strategy and reduced
rates of budget growth, customers have reengineered how they evaluate, purchase and deploy
technology. As a result, sales cycles are more complex, transactional patterns radically different
and costs as a percentage of GAAP revenue far higher.
The key takeaway from Figure 3 is that customer creation is not a single event. Instead, it spans
eight distinct stages, each requiring equally distinct vendor deliverables. The pivotal force that
makes it all possible is customer acquisition, which for most vendors is a huge challenge. The four
stages of customer acquisition, shown on the right side of Figure 3, make it complex. Prospect
inertia and tenacious competitors make it difficult. Shifts in customer buying dynamics make it
expensive. But that doesn’t matter. Market leaders make customer acquisition a core competency.
At the core of the shift is a lifecycle
that redefines customer creation. In the
not-so-distant past, customer creation
largely equated to winning the initial
deal. The ‘big bang’ model with large
upfront contracts, long deployment
cycles and high switching costs
provided a platform for long-term
account control. But, as shown in
Figure 3, today’s lifecycle has distinct
acquisition, expansion and retention
stages. The ‘big bang’ model has been
replaced by a multi-year transactional
cycle with a series of larger and more
profitable deals, representing both
threat and opportunity to every vendor.
Proprietary & Confidential 5 [email protected]
Customer acquisition is the growth engine, adding new logos in the short-term and building a large
installed base to be developed in the long-term. The SOM has three key principles that drive
customer acquisition:
1. The customer lifecycle is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model: The communication programs,
product packaging and coverage models that are needed to acquire a new customer differ
from those that retain and expand the relationship.
2. The emerging ‘consumerization’ of enterprise selling is changing the game: Vendors must
build a rapid evaluation, purchase, deployment and value creation model that accelerates
time to contract, successful deployment and expansion deals.
3. Create a Transformational Value Proposition: Every prospect has architectural and political
barriers that impede new vendors and the trite “we have the best product in the history of the
western hemisphere” is seldom enough to win the initial deal. Vendors need to create a
compelling value proposition that makes the deal a ‘no-brainer’ to sign.
Customer retention and expansion, shown in the left side of Figure 3, is the vendor’s profit engine.
The big payoff occurs when the initial scope is expanded, the solution footprint diversified and
architectural standards established. But it’s far from automatic, requiring a foundation of successful
deployments, proactive communication campaigns and a coverage model that smothers the account.
Spotlight: Category Leadership – Expand Category To Accelerate Growth
High tech vendors should never underestimate the importance of being in a category. The market
budgets and purchases in categories such as ERP, database, servers, routers and consulting services
and has no money for ‘next-generation’ anything. Scaling the business requires competing in a
‘must-have’ category that users can intuitively link to and analysts can measure.
The category in which to compete and the role the vendor wants to play are ‘bet the company’
decisions. The three options are to differentiate within an existing category, redefine its ground
rules or create a new category. Across that spectrum, every vendor has an opportunity to
evangelize on the category’s impact, which is massively different from a sales pitch. Establishing
thought leadership will increase category relevance and accelerate adoption rates, creating a
powerful, but often underestimated, growth lever.
Having been a part of many early-stage
markets, I know that an ill-defined
category is a dominant factor in the
‘Wall of Adoption’ that slows growth
and sabotages business plans. Having
been a part of four category creation
efforts (three were successful), I also
know that shaping a category is a huge,
but doable effort, with a reasonably
repeatable road map that is shown in
Figure 4. The key lesson learned is it’s
not a category until analysts say it’s a
category. That requires a potent mix
of vision, vocal customers, content
and a strong ecosystem.
Proprietary & Confidential 6 [email protected]
Section 3: Strategy By Design, Not Default
“Strategy is about making choices. It’s about deliberately choosing
to be different." Michael Porter
When a company misses plan or loses market share, the usual assumption is that they have a sales
execution problem. It took a while but I finally figured out that what looks like a field execution
problem is often a strategy problem. Or, more commonly, the lack of a strategy that drives
sustained operating, market and capital performance.
I see this problem in vendors of every size, stage and market. Every company has sales reps, deals
in the pipeline and a CRM system. Throw in a web site, positioning statement and a few webinars
and vendors think they have a strategy when, in fact, it’s often nothing more than a mishmash of
loosely-connected activities. To use an American football analogy, it’s like a quarterback calling
the ‘everybody out for a pass’ play – the team is certainly busy but it’s also misdirected, misaligned
and unproductive.
Strategy is at the heart of the SOM. It starts with bringing clarity to the often confusing question of
what actually constitutes a go-to-market-strategy. It is not simply a goal (e.g. “our strategy is to be
the market leader”) or a financial plan. Rather, it is an explicit and differentiated road map that
produces financial and competitive advantage. Strategic clarity is achieved when the plan is
communicated to, aligned with and embraced by the team.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the strategy/execution path linkage. I am convinced
that there is no such thing as a good strategy that is poorly executed – there are simply good
strategies that produce desired results and bad strategies that don’t. That’s why the SOM is
unmistakably execution centric – or, more accurately, precision execution centric. I don’t use the
term as a hollow buzzword, but with specific criteria that are absolutely required to build a sales
factory. It must be strategy driven, aligned with a complete set of programs and tools, guided by
relentless consistency and supported by an institutionalized review process. A bit wordy perhaps
but each component plays a key role in winning the execution war.
The Go-To-Market Strategy Model is
shown in Figure 5. It unifies the
Strategic Profile and Ops Plan with
the execution path, spanning selling
and marketing strategies. Effective
strategy starts with aligning goals,
market attractiveness, execution
capabilities and the ideal market.
Assessing execution capabilities and
gaps is a key, but often overlooked
step. The high tech industry does not
lack for audacious visions but unless
execution gaps are identified and
obliterated, the goals are often more
delusional than audacious.
Proprietary & Confidential 7 [email protected]
Section 4: Building The Right Team – Much More Than Just The People
“Culture is what people do when no one is looking.” Lou Gerstner
Having had the privilege of working with several great companies, I learned that there is no
substitute for talent. Without exception, every high-performance company that I have worked for,
consulted with or competed against has a common thread of relentless commitment to building an
‘A’ team. The compelling visions, creative positioning, great products and perfect business controls
mean nothing unless the right team is in place.
Great talent doesn’t magically happen – it must be recruited, developed, aligned, compensated,
managed and led. High-performance companies hire the right people in the right jobs at the right
time. That means they tailor the team to the company’s stage, size, market, culture and leadership.
Talent isn’t always portable. We’ve all seen people produce big numbers at one company but fall
short of plan at others, often because the skills and traits that drive success vary significantly across
organizational and market maturity.
Spotlight: Building The ‘A’ Team
Culture plays a key role in building an ‘A’ team and has a huge impact on both organizational and
individual performance. Strong cultures are created by design, rooted in the DNA of the company
and continually reinforced by compensation, performance management and a unified leadership
team. They create a powerful competitive advantage in the form of a more talented, unified and
aligned team that delivers far better operating performance.
Contrary to cynical opinion, culture is not about holding hands and singing kumbaya. The reality is
market leaders usually have demanding cultures. With astounding consistency, they have high
expectations for every member of the team, creating what I call a culture of consequences in which
performance is both rewarded and celebrated and failures are rapidly fixed. In turn, that drives a
predatory nature, creating an expectation of ‘100% market share.’ Quite simply, these companies
expect to crush competitors, win every deal and dominate every market.
Falling into the category of great
lessons, Dave Dyer, one of the best
sales execs in the industry, taught me
that there is a big difference between
hiring ‘A’ players and having an ‘A’
team. Great teams are much more
than just the people – they are
created by everything that surrounds
them. Figure 6 shows the key factors,
spanning alignment, culture, training,
performance expectations, leadership
and compensation that combine to
drive productivity and performance
to far higher levels.
Proprietary & Confidential 8 [email protected]
Section 5: Precision Marketing – Fixing The Weakest Link
“The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of
your products, more often, for more money.” Sergio Zyman
A core principle of the SOM is that marketing is an essential part of building a sales factory.
Superior, sustained and predictable performance, with the right cost structure, demands that high-
priced sales team are sent into battle with the tools needed to crush competitors, win deals and
dominate markets. Even the best sales force cannot overcome dreadful or non-existent marketing.
Unfortunately, marketing – both strategic and tactical – is underfunded, ignored and mangled by far
too many companies. Candidly, there are good reasons why CEOs and Boards don’t trust or fund
marketing. All-too-often, it is disconnected from revenue generation, weak positioning kills the
brand, a hodgepodge of demand generation programs increase costs but deliver no leads and metrics
are non-existent. But, there is never a good reason not to fix marketing.
It’s impossible to build a great marketing organization without budget. Vision and strategy are
occasionally free but content, ecosystems and demand generation cost money. I stress this because
marketing is often underfunded, inevitably leading to low sales force productivity, false starts and
missed operating plans. If budget is tight, fund marketing by delaying an ill-timed sales force
expansion until the company is ready to support and sustain the attack.
Market Insight
The marketing value chain begins with building deep market insight. Many companies are ‘vision-
heavy but insight-light’, meaning they rely far too much on the leader’s vision and passion and not
enough on understanding solution requirements, user perceptions, category maturity, market size,
competitive landscape, analyst views and trends.
The essence of differentiation is solution positioning, packaging and selling messages within the
context of broader market forces. That insight can only be gained outside the company, listening to
customers, prospects, analysts and the ecosystem and studying the competition. Building deep
market insight is neither complex nor expensive but it does require a rigorous and continuous
process and the willingness to occasionally challenge the proverbial ‘sacred cows’.
The goal of marketing is to create the
identity, content, relationships and
programs that arm the sales force for
victory. There’s no doubt that vision
and creative genius play a key role but
they aren’t enough. When instinctual
talents are combined with the right plan
and skills to produce a broad set of
tools, marketing is transformed into an
output machine. As shown in Figure 7,
that’s what Precision Marketing is all
about with insight and differentiated
strategies driving the four components
of a world-class Marketing Platform.
Proprietary & Confidential 9 [email protected]
Spotlight: Market Prioritization – Invest In Lucrative And Winnable Markets
Market prioritization is a critical strategy that focuses the organization and optimizes investments in
lucrative and winnable markets. Its importance and granularity are often underestimated, resulting
in a market definition that lacks clarity, consistency and alignment with the company’s strengths.
Spotlight: Positioning Architecture – Create An Aura Of Leadership
The #1 CEO complaint that I hear is “no one knows who we are,” an often lethal problem that is
always rooted in weak positioning. To be clear, I think positioning in the high tech market is really,
really bad. All-too-often, it is complex, utterly forgettable, ever-changing and poorly differentiated.
Creating positioning is really hard work. It’s tough to balance audacity and credibility, simplicity
and substance. And, building consensus – a vital step in creating a One Company, One Message
identity – always presents a unique set of challenges. But, it is not optional. The market simply
will not invest the time to understand how a poorly positioned solution, from a company they have
never heard of, in an irrelevant category, will deliver value.
The goal of positioning is to craft a
compelling and differentiated identity
that creates an aura of leadership.
That’s a tall order in markets that
suffer from information overload and
skepticism. But it’s a critical growth
lever. Users want to buy from leaders.
The ecosystem wants to partner with
leaders. ‘A’ players want to work for
leaders. As shown in Figure 9, there is
an architecture to create category,
solution and company positioning,
which spans and unifies the story,
content, solution packaging and field
selling messages.
As the old saying goes: in the battle
between the bear and the alligator, the
terrain determines the victor. Market
prioritization gives every company the
opportunity to define its terrain in the
form of a tightly and completely
defined target market. Figure 8 shows
the six components that go far beyond
simply identifying a target industry or
size of company criterion. A critical,
but often ignored step, is a market
database that is the foundation of
customer creation and one of the
organization’s most valuable assets.
Proprietary & Confidential 10 [email protected]
Spotlight: Demand Generation Strategy – Arming The Sales Team With Leads
Great positioning is the front end of the solution to the CEO’s “no one knows who we are” concern.
Part 2 is a Demand Generation Strategy that converts the aura of leadership into awareness, interest
and preference. Erratic or non-existent demand generation sabotages performance, leaving vendors
without an identity, an ecosystem lacking the incentive to partner and a sales force facing a constant
uphill battle to build its pipeline.
Demand generation is a potent combination of message, content and delivery to truly engage the
market. Boring messages won’t cut it and simply creating awareness is not enough. For most
companies, demand generation requires a transformation built on four major principles:
1. Culture of continuous communication: Engaging the market is as dependent on culture as it
is creative genius. Sporadic and event-driven business promotion programs are useless and
must be replaced by continuous communications from both the marketing and sales teams.
2. Unified and sequenced communications platform: Establishing a strong and differentiated
market position absolutely requires a communications platform that unifies the message,
sequence, frequency, delivery mode, call-to-action, desired response and follow-up.
3. Audacity: Demand generation is not for the faint-hearted. Companies need big goals, an
audacious message and passionate conviction to put the company on the map.
4. The ecosystem matters: Establishing a strong market position in today’s crowded IT market
is not a solo sport. Analysts, SIs and technology and channel partners play a key role in
delivering the message through every channel and to every touch point.
Marketing Platform
The Marketing Platform creates an output machine that arms the sales team with tools to build large
pipelines, accelerate sales cycles and increase win rates. This machine runs on content. Studies
show that 60% of B2B buying decisions are made prior to vendor meetings, which means buyers
are collecting information from diverse sources and forming vendor perceptions long before the first
PowerPoint is shown. The Marketing Platform creates and distributes content to ensure those
perceptions are both accurate and positive.
The Marketing Platform, as shown in
Figure 10, creates and distributes
content that is rooted in clarity (fluff is
out!!), intrigue and graphical appeal.
Selling content must be tied to and
improve the customer lifecycle. The
digital platform is at the center of a
vendor’s identity, spanning web and
social systems. MarComm drives
continuous outbound communications
and Lead Gen creates demand and
intercepts active evaluations. Strong
analyst/ecosystem relationships are a
vital factor in driving high engage and
win rates.
Proprietary & Confidential 11 [email protected]
Section 6: Precision Sales – It’s All About Transaction Management
“This isn’t the professional golf tour. We don’t get paid
to come in second.” Rick Page
The SOM is clearly focused (some have said ‘obsessed’ is a better word) with arming the sales team
for victory. Hiring an expensive sales force and not creating the tools – or worse yet, expecting
sales reps to build their own – is guaranteed path to undermine revenue and bookings productivity.
Factories are fueled by ‘raw materials’ and the sales factory is no different.
Selling Strategy
Selling strategies are all about the when and the how – when is the market ready to be attacked,
when is the right time to expand the sales team, how is the target market defined and covered, how
to drive and accelerate performance. The when issues often represent the most important decision a
high tech vendor faces because it requires the biggest capital commitment. Hiring and supporting a
sales force is a big bet and should be made only when the market, product and organizational
capabilities are ready for prime time.
As shown in Figure 11, the SOM has four core selling strategies that drive and unify field ops.
Each has multiple components with several viable options that must be tailored to the vendor’s
goals, market forces and capabilities. Strategy is a White Paper unto itself so in the interest of
brevity, I will offer a summary:
1. Sales Model: The sales model is the blueprint for how the organization attacks the market
and manages transactions. Key components include target market definition, organizational
structure, roles, channels, transactional ownership and the quota and comp models.
That should not be taken as a get-out-
of-jail-card-free for the sales team.
Virtually every sales organization can
take their game to a higher level. Rick
Page, a friend, mentor and high tech
industry sales legend, gives a great
reminder that sales is all about winning.
Precision Selling, shown in Figure 11,
is the pivotal force that makes winning
a habit. It is the road map that aligns
powerful instinctual forces with talent,
strategy and sales ops to excel at
transaction management. An engine
that continually builds a large pipeline,
increases win rates, expands customer
penetration and produces reliable
forecasts is the ultimate game-changer.
Proprietary & Confidential 12 [email protected]
2. Revenue Model: The Revenue Model defines the pricing position and structure, multi-year
bookings, revenue and cash flow cycles, sales rep productivity model and product-line
discounting.
3. Sales Methodology: Ask ten people what a deal methodology is and you will probably get
eight different answers. I define it as a framework of insights, steps, resources and selling
tools that improve transaction management. It’s important to stress that it is not a rigid
sequence of events, but rather, a framework that transforms deal management from ‘one-off
wonders’ to an execution engine.
4. Target Addressable Market (TAM) Expansion: Top performers are continually looking to
expand into new and bigger markets. The six TAM expansion options are to compete in
new market segments, industries or geographies, broaden channels, increase the solution
footprint or change the solution linkage to a higher value business or technical issue.
Spotlight: Total Market Coverage – The #1 Growth Lever
Total Market Coverage (TMC) combines demand generation programs and the sales model with
relentless and proactive territory development efforts to create a pipeline that supports the operating
plan, build relationships with High-Value Targets and establish a lead position in the early stages of
every deal. In my experience, this is sales execution’s #1 point of failure, with vendors falling into
one of three TMC categories – oblivious, erratic or systematic.
The impact of weak pipelines – which are too small, with the wrong prospects and fluctuate wildly –
often takes a backseat to the more visible win rate metrics for active deals. But, ‘opening’ deals is
a far bigger challenger than closing them and it offers far more upside. To illustrate, a company
with 5% market share and 67% deal win rate engages only 7.5% of their market. Said another way,
92% of the market’s total spend happens without their involvement, and in many cases, without
their knowledge. Pipeline expansion programs are an often underestimated, but potent growth
lever.
There should be no doubt that world-
class TMC requires a systematic
approach. As shown in Figure 12, it
is built on the fundamentals –
coverage models, segmented account
lists, marketing programs, continuous
communications and relentless activity
– from both the corporate and field
sales teams. Most importantly, create
a compelling reason-to-meet that is as
important as the compelling reason-
to-buy. Develop a potent message that
opens doors and give it to the market
multiple times and through multiple
touch points.
Proprietary & Confidential 13 [email protected]
Spotlight: Deal Management – CS6X Methodology
In no area of sales execution is there a smaller margin of error than deal management. There is often
a razor-thin difference separating success and failure across the trifecta of great deal management –
winning the deal, at the expected price point and in the expected timeframe.
The reasons for that small margin of error are varied. External barriers abound in the form of
demanding customers, tough competitors, mercurial ecosystems and economic headwinds. There is
absolutely no reason to compound the challenge by managing every deal as a ‘one-off’. While deal
management is far from a rigid process, there is a cadence, an essential group of insights,
deliverables and relationships that are vital to consistently win enterprise deals. The sequence and
importance will vary but the requirements will be astoundingly consistent.
The key principles behind the CS6X Methodology are:
1. Forget about scripting sales cycles: Sales methodologies often fail because they are a weak
response to a poorly-defined problem. Attempts to enforce a rigid selling cycle or script
everything the sales team does simply won’t work for enterprise deals. Rather, the focus
should be on building the insights, tools and resources that win each of the six sales.
2. It’s the plane you don’t see that shoots you down: CS6X is rooted in the paranoia that deals
are lost or incorrectly forecasted far more often because something is missed than because it
is done poorly. Create and institutionalize a structured deal planning process for every high-
value deal, with coaching and input from both sales management and the account team.
3. Perfect Deal Knowledge creates the separation: Deals are won or lost in the Discovery
phase, we just happen to get the news much later in the cycle. Total insight into the
prospect, project and power base improves qualification, win rates and forecast accuracy.
4. Broaden evaluations beyond the ‘product bake-off’: Technology dominates too many
evaluations. It’s ‘strategy 101’ for prospects as they seek to commoditize the buying process
and most vendors are happy to play along since showing off functionality and architectures
is the DNA of the industry. But, it’s the other sales that determine the winner – vendors
must broaden the evaluation criteria and their differentiators across each of the six sales.
No White Paper is complete without
an acronym or two and mine is CS6X.
It is a sales methodology driven by
the market reality that enterprise
deals should be viewed and managed
as six distinct sales. CS6X is a very
broad topic, and in the spirit of full
disclosure, I can’t give away all my
secrets in a free White Paper. As
shown in Figure 13, CS6X starts with
an often overlooked sale – the vitally
important Discovery step – followed
by five distinct sales, focused on
multiple Buying Centers, that convert
a pipeline into qualified opportunities
and closed deals.
Proprietary & Confidential 14 [email protected]
5. Broaden coverage across all Buying Centers: In my experience, the biggest deal
management change in recent years is that more Buying Centers – departments, economic
buyers, users and external influencers – impact vendor selection than ever before. Decision
making now fragments across the prospect’s organization and increasingly goes far beyond
the IT department. The lack of insight into and support from a key Buying Center is often
the difference between winning and losing deals or, just as harsh, a forecasted deal that is
delayed and slides into the next quarter.
Sales Operations
Sales infrastructure becomes increasingly important as the organization scales. Establishing a
strong Sales Operations function is a key part of improving both performance and predictability. It
covers territory and quota management, SFA systems, forecast management, training and contract
processing.
The right level of infrastructure varies. Early-stage companies often benefit from an operating
environment with a liberal dose of ‘creative chaos’ as they experiment with the best formula to
build or expand market momentum. Regardless of size or stage, clearly defining SFA system usage
and definitions will improve reporting and forecast accuracy.
A Final Thought – Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast
The good news is sales execution is fixable. Rapidly fixable. The better news is we’re not facing
monumental complexity. That’s not to say it’s easy. Obliterating historical weaknesses,
recognizing that fundamental market shifts have changed the game, challenging the sacred ‘art of
sales’ doctrine and the discipline to add the right amount of structure present significant barriers.
But, there should be no doubt that clinging to legacy sales models is a guaranteed path to being, at
best, an irrelevant survivor. Producing the numbers in today’s market is every bit as much about
selling differently as it is selling better. With no claim of objectivity, I believe the structure, breadth
and innovation of the SOM provides the road map to do both.
I’m often asked what is the best way to implement the SOM. My answer is always the same –
think big, start small, move fast. I recognize that the SOM can be overwhelming, in large part
because sales execution itself is overwhelming in scope and impact. I hate to admit it, but figuring
out easy solutions to mission-critical challenges is above my pay grade. For most companies, the
key is to ‘think big’ – define organizational goals, identify the priorities, build an execution road
map – but ‘start small’, getting early and quick wins. Then ‘move fast’ to the major priorities that
will transform the organization into a sales factory.
The instinctual forces that drive the ‘art of sales’ and the ‘art of marketing’ will always be an
essential part of high-performance sales execution. But, the pivotal force is created when they are
combined with the structure of the SOM, delivering game-changing improvements to the way deals
are managed, markets are won and careers are built.
John Keenan
214.620.6280