Overcoming Pains Organizations Inflict on Themeselves

by Michael Pearce, Interim Management Executive

There are a host of pains organizations inflict on themselves that present clear and present dangers to their very viability. Among those we often see are:

• Goals and objectives that are out of sync with job descriptions and employee expectations

• Compensation plans that don’t reflect the will of the organizations executive leadership

• Management who believes it is their prerogative to manipulate sales compensation plans, changing quotas, territories and commission schedules mid-stream

• Sales automation/CRM systems that are installed to provide management reporting with sales productivity as a by product

• Few understand the complicated nature of channels, how to avoid conflict, and how to motivate organizations they don’t own, yet many businesses just can’t grow organically fast enough. Effective committed channels are a necessity.

So what can companies do?

• They must learn to hire for a season. Recognize that a significant percentage of employees will move on within a few years. Call it out confront it and embrace by designing the job description accordingly, and eliminate confusion and contention. Hire the very best for the tasks at hand. It’ll require a bit more thought and planning, but it’ll be worth it.

• Dedicate themselves to serving their employees and to making them successful; not managing them for compliance, rather leading them for significance; leading them rather than directing them

• Embrace technology. Many managers are digital immigrants leading digital natives. They resist it and demean it with comments like “I’ll never text”. We must immerse ourselves in it, admit our fears and frustrations, and join the ranks of the next generation who takes all this technology as a matter of fact and can’t understand why their management doesn’t.

• When we employ systems we must think first of the impact on the employee. Implement a CRM to make the sales people more productive, and have management reports as a byproduct. It’s the only way they will embrace it and the data will be accurate and timely.

• Hire scientifically. Success at a previous company is no guarantee of success with the next. It can no longer be acceptable to give an employee 9 months or longer to see if they will succeed. Thai’s as much as 1/3 of their tenure. They must be positioned to contribute much quicker.

• Build support tools like the company web site that personalize the web experience, allowing the inquirer to truly understand how your products and services can met his unique needs, and build it a way that leaves a thumb print behind so more and more can be turned into customers. It’s not the number of web hits that counts, it’s the number of customers that are generated.

• Have a mission statement that is meaningful, measure ideas against it, reward innovation, and create the opportunities that demand transformation versus incremental improvement.

• A soft economy can be the best time to gain market share. It’ll take a non-traditional approach, but embracing a win/win mentality, a servants heart for employees success, an acceptance that each employee really wants to make the best decisions possible, combined with an ability to accept effort and failure will help turn a business, even where the economy is having a negative impact, into a consistent winner.

Michael Pearce is an experienced interim management executive and has worked with several leading companies such as Citicorp, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Singer and EMC. His expertise is in building high performance sales teams and generating revenue and margins with repeatable, dependable, and predictable results. You can contact Mr. Pearce at michael.pearce@oneaccordpartners.com or at 425.830.4156. He also blogs at http://michael-pearce.blogspot.com/.

Photo by papalars

Reset the Revenue Funnel for Revenue Forecast Accuracy

by Chuck Besondy

In case you didn’t notice your customers are buying differently today than they did last year. The differences could be subtle or obvious, but if you observe closely you’ll see that the process they follow to make a buying decision–the buyers’ journey’–has changed.

If your selling process and sales funnel structure haven’t adapted to the buyers’ journey the efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts will be down and so will the accuracy of your revenue forecast. This is what I call the new “Funnel Economics”.

Here are the major variables in a sales funnel (which I am now going to refer to as the revenue funnel because it should be co-owned by marketing and sales).

1. Stages of the buyers’ journey
2. Lag time between stages
3. Leakage rate at each stage
4. Advancement rate at each stage
5. Number of meetings required in each stage
6. Number of meetings that each sales person can expertly handle in a week
7. Number of available sales people
8. Average revenue per order

Any change to any of these variables has an impact on how many deals get closed in a period of time. The marketing and sales effort required to generate a level of revenue last year is very different from what it takes this year.

If you’re still trying to plan and forecast based on last year’s funnel structure, you’re not just flying blind you’re flying with the wrong instruments.

Reset your revenue funnel by analyzing and observing the customer’s current buying process and behaviors. Dial in the new metrics into your revenue funnel and monitor carefully over the next several months. The accuracy of your revenue projections will improve. What’s more, you’ll have a more realistic preview of what type and level of activities are necessary to achieve a certain revenue outcome.

Chuck Besondy is a principal at One Accord Partners and is co-author of Leadership on Demand: How Smart CEO’s Tap Interim Management to Drive Revenue. You can read more about Interim Sales and Marketing Management by Chuck Besondy at his blog The Sales Funnel Fanatic.

Photo by Jake Rome

Seven Keys to Entering the North American Marketplace

The affluence, consumer culture, established distribution channels, and technology adoption of the U.S. market attract the interest of astute businesspersons worldwide. However it can be intimidating to consider such an expansion initiative when one already has a full day of problems to solve.

While there are no guaranteed success formulas to entering the North American marketplace, there are a number of key factors OneAccord has found to be important. You may be familiar with a number of them in the operation of your small- to mid-sized business. By going through this process, you can work consciously through critical decision points where competitors make implicit assumptions (they “don’t know what they don’t know”)!

1. Recognize the distinct distribution options you have in bringing products and services to this marketplace. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, in terms of capital investment, profit margin, and ownership of the customer and any associated credit. Go direct to customers, by establishing a North American office or by outsourcing or contracting out North American sales/service. Or go indirectly, through distribution/reseller partners and/or OEM partners.

2. Target your offering at a specific industry “vertical”, rather than a horizontal approach. This is the most effective way to bypass the competitive “noise” in the marketplace. It is easier to reach those buyers who you want to hear your story. For example, if you are in the CRM software business, you’ll be more effective with a “CRM for Real Estate” product than offering “CRM for small business”.

3. Make sure your value proposition is clear and concise. The end customer of your product or service must be able to tell another person, so it has to be simple. Based on your distribution choice above (1) you are likely to have another important customer constituency — your prospective partner must be compelled by their own clear and concise value proposition. If they are any good, they will have other things competing for their attention!

4. Create a 12-24 month plan/timetable. Go into detail, identifying specific persons with the right skills sets and the right connections and give them responsibility. Also identify specific activities to be accomplished in the marketing/sales/partnering/product development realm. You’ll find that specificity, early in the process, builds confidence internally and with your partners, and often illuminates hidden concerns. Don’t worry — change is inevitable and can be managed.

5. Determine criteria to measure the success of your plan. You might set your benchmark based on number of new customers, revenue level, or a profitability target. Commit to regular monitoring and course-correction, so you don’t look up one day and wonder where things went wrong. What gets measured gets managed.

6. Prepare to make the appropriate investment to manifest your plan. There is truth in the old saying, “it takes money to make money.” Having gone through the planning process, you now recognize that your expansion plan can never come into being with a couple lucky phone calls. Establishing a significant business in North America is possible, and will take a concerted effort.

7. Be conservative in your planning. Things always take longer and cost more than you originally expect.

Paul Travis is a Partner with OneAccord Corp, a professional services firm serving companies as a catalyst for revenue growth. The firm’s International Business Development (IBD) Practice exists to accelerate the successful entry by companies worldwide into the North American market, and vice versa. Mr. Travis welcomes your questions via aul.Travis@OneAccordCorp.com”>Paul.Travis@OneAccordCorp.com or at +1 (206) 910-2222.