What's Killing the Traditional Sales Funnel?

by: IDC's Kathleen Schaub, VP CMO Advisory Service

B2B Buyer behavior is undergoing an extraordinary sea change triggered by Internet technology.  Tech marketing and sales teams haven't caught up.  They still rely on a 112-year-old sales funnel model. To remain a winner, you need to adapt your customer creation process to the way customers really buy.

The Internet tsunami had radically changed B2B Buyer behavior. 

Before the Internet, the B2B buyer making a complex decision had few sources of information. Vendors leveraged that knowledge gap. The sales person was the primary gateway to information the buyer needed to decide – a tremendously powerful position. Fast forward to today. The Internet and social media have triggered a turbulent change – the rich dialog has shifted on-line - and away from the sales person. 

As a result, the B2B Buyer in a complex sale is now an expert with very different behavior and expectations than in the past. 

• Buyers are constantly on-line. IDC research shows that IT buyers find online search and the vendor websites more valuable sources of buying information than face-to-face conversations.
• Many times, buyers know more than sales people. 55% of buyers think sales people are only somewhat prepared or not prepared for initial meetings.
• B2B buyers, who are life-long consumers, bring buying expertise to work and expect concierge service.

The Internet tsunami has massively changed IT Buyer behavior. Yet, we’ve seen surprisingly little change in the traditional marketing and sales funnel.

The Empowered Buyer is Killing the Traditional Sales Funnel 

The traditional sales funnel is 112 years-old and bears the unmistakable marks of the industrial-era. Buyers are treated like widgets that sellers manufacture into a product called a customer.

But today's empowered Buyer is far from a widget. The industrial-era funnel is out-of-touch with reality – and the results show up in poor funnel health. Conversion rates are unsustainable. It takes over 1000 targets to get one sale.  Time to convert is lengthening. The average time to create a large B2B tech customer has lengthened by 15% in the last year.  

Symptoms of a sick funnel show up inside tech vendor companies, too. Sales and marketing teams bicker over leads. Companies lack data to judge performance and predict the pipeline. Sales people don’t have the tools needed to sell, in spite of the fact that they have access to a tonnage of content. Prospects fall out of the pipeline and no one knows why.

A New Customer Creation Framework

To ensure that prospective buyers want to become customers, tech companies need a new framework that better aligns with the way buyers buy today.  This framework should maintain what is valuable about the industrial-era funnel. For example, the graduated stages of the traditional funnel are a practical tool for measuring progress. To meet the needs of the 21st century tech buyer, this new framework, which IDC calls the Customer Creation Framework (Figure 2), must advance from tradition in three important ways:

• Buyer-centric: Act like a Concierge Replace the manufacturing mind-set with a service orientation. Act like a concierge who delights guests with information and support services that guide them through their "Buyer's Journey". 

• Integrate Marketing and Sales Instead of the hand-off between marketing and sales silos, the IDC Customer Creation Framework calls for an orchestrated collaboration between the two functions. Since the new Buyer never, ever, goes off-line, marketing, as the owner of the company’s digital dialog, can never disengage, can never hand-off. The sales team cannot simply wait for the “good leads”. Sales people must be adaptable, prepared to serve the Buyer at whatever stage he happens to be at. Marketing must be more active enabling the sales conversation.

• Smart: Data-driven The entire customer creation process contains data that can be harvested to use as a feedback system. By analyzing this data, barriers and opportunities will be revealed. Companies can then use marketing and sales tactics like knobs and levers to tweak the behavior and outcomes of the pipeline. 

This is an exciting time for marketers and sellers. Changes in Buyer behavior enabled by the Internet may be killing the traditional sales funnel. However, these same changes are opening up opportunities. Companies that transform their Customer Creation process into a buyer-centric, data-driven, well-orchestrated pipeline will see success. Our job at IDC is to help you with that transformation.

More Good Advice From BtoB Technology Buyers to Increase Sales Productivity

Throughout each year, our Sales and CMO Advisory Practice teams collect valuable insight from BtoB technology buyers through focused studies, surveys, in-depth interviews and panel sessions. Why?  Because that is the source of some of the greatest ideas for improving our sales and marketing success. . . from small improvements to big, groundbreaking ideas. This past summer I reviewed the results of our 2011 Buyer Experience Study where we learned that buyers want to reduce their buying cycle by 40% and how to do that. 

I'd like to share some more recent insights from a buyer panel that we just held in October to refresh our connection with the buyer and their feedback about their interaction with our own sales teams and marketing outreach efforts.  The quotes represent what our CIO panelists had to say:

• Buyers still like to buy from trusted people: "Just as vendors will follow good buyers from account to account, we (buyers) will follow good sales reps from vendor to vendor."
• Just in case you've missed this piece of advice before. . . "Trusted advisors don't sell products, they solve problems."
• Marketers and inside sales teams, watch out for the quality of your lists!. . ""Apparently I got on a mailing list as someone that's investigating a cloud solution. I got at least 20 calls yesterday from cloud consultants I never heard of!"
• Sales team, watch your pricing strategies! . . .. "After going through an entire RFP selection process, we called the losing vendor with the bad news. They said they would match the winning bid, which meant they were willing to substantially cut fees in the face of competition instead of giving a real bid up-front. This did not please me!"
• What's your strategy for shifting accounts into different sales models across your organization? "A vendor switched our account rep midstream and moved us to an enterprise-class account. The result was a doubling of their price. One week later, after several phone calls to set the record straight, the price was back to the original model. Needless to say, we did not do business with them again."
• CIOs and IT are striving to become trusted advisors for their internal LOB customers; and as technology vendors we need to help them achieve this status: "There is growing awareness and ability for LOB to go directly to the cloud and implement low-cost solutions and then request integration, security services, and so on from us, the CIOs; and we need to better connect with our internal customers earlier on in the process in an intelligent way."
• And if you think that means you need to go around the CIO as part of your sales process, watch out!. . . . "As CIO I want to trust vendors not to go around us and sell directly to LOB and exacerbate the rogue IT problem."
• And finally. . Here's another reason why IDC research indicates that over 1/2 of sales reps show up to their first prospect visit unprepared: "We will take the time to educate account managers on our business but don't want to do the same for every product line rep that wants to sell." (refer to Bldg. the Intelligent Sales & Mktg. Org.)

Any of this sound familiar?  Have your own stories to share?  Please feel free to comment below, or contact our team directly to learn about strategic, operational and tactical solutions for these challenges. (mgerard@idc.com or izvagelsky@idc.com or gmurray@idc.com) Clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service should contact us directly for additional details about the above meeting.

Advice for Sales Executives. . . Sincerely, "your CEO"

What can sales and sales operations executives learn from a panel of 2 CEOs and 1 Chief Sales Officer? A lot! I recently attended a CEO panel session for sales sponsored by NETSEA (New England Technology Sales Executives Association). The panelists included Bill Hewitt, CEO Kalido; Stephen Orenberg, Chief Sales Officer Kaspersky Lab; and Patrick Morely, CEO Bit9. Here are some of the highlights from the meeting including quotes from the panelists [with my commentary in brackets]:

• Help your CEO to sleep better at night: (and it may help you keep your job as well)
• "I'm already tracking the deals. . . it's what I don't know that concerns me." [Keep your CEO in the loop. . . be it good or bad news!]
• "My best sales executives provide visibility, consistency, honesty & transparency to me regarding our sales activities, pipeline, forecast, etc."
• "I just want the reality of our situation. Give me time to react, such as adding monies into specific programs."
• Sales' "Credibility Factor": [Understand your CEO's expectations of you as a sales executive (i.e., in addition to "exceed revenue and/or profit targets"), and build your credibility]:
• "We get our weighted reports, forecasts, etc; however, it is still very much a mix of art and science to really assess what's going on. (e.g., I discount my sales teams' forecast by 30%. . . I call it the 'credibility' factor.)"
• "As a CEO, I look at Salesforce.com every day to assess our standard metrics." [A sure way to ensure that your sales team actually uses your sales force automation system]
• "I need to know if my sales executive can analyze new situations across their group as well as across the market, understand how sales needs to change and then drive that change." [Have you asked your CEO about their expectations of you as a sales executive? Do you know how much you invest in sales? Are you allocating your investment correctly and demonstrating this strategic intent to your CEO? Do you have a next generation sales operations team in place to help drive strategy and productivity?]
• Creating a culture of sales across your organization
• Trip reports: "Our reps log all sales visits in a standard report format and make them available for the entire company to review." [Admittedly "sales 101ish" by the CEO, but certainly a great way to get customer insight into marketing and product development. Sales operations at larger organizations may wish to mine this type of information to improve sales productivity and effectiveness.]
• "We're planning to leverage Chatter to improve sharing of sales insight across the organization." [IDC defines this as "Social Business for Sales"]
• "Our VP sales has concept deal dissections. Every Friday a sales person has to speak for 15-20 min. about a deal (won or lost) start to finish; and it's not just sales at these meetings. (e.g., VP engineering)"
• Value of sales methodologies?
• "Sales is about listening, not selling. . and it's not about the specific sales model. [Agreed, however, there does need to be a consistent sales model used across the organization including a standard taxonomy, processes, etc. unless you're a small company. CLICK HERE to participate in IDC's 2011 Sales Methodology Survey]
• What steps can sales reps take to pursue CEOs?
• "I get 15-20 solicitations a day. . most have done no research on me and it's obvious. Tim Haller of Sales Gauge is someone that I've turned to for teaching my reps how to prospect."
• "Reps try to get a hold of me, but why aren't they going to my functional leads whom I depend upon for these recommendations/decisions?" [Check out IDC's annual buyer experience insight.]
• Marketing & sales alignment around lead management: [check out IDC's upcoming lead management webcast]
• "We have an unrealistic expectation that marketing will deliver an enterprise deal to us on a 'silver platter'! First, it takes many touches by different parts of marketing and sales to win a deal; Second, I don't care where the lead came from."
• "Sales and marketing sit down in the middle of every quarter to plan campaigns and lead generation expectations."
• Value of lead scoring: "For enterprise sales, it's too complex in many cases to depend entirely on lead scoring process (i.e., buyer behavior, human dynamics and organization behavior play a big factor here).

Best-in-Class Sales Organization Strategies for 2012

IDC's Sales Advisory Service recently completed its annual Sales Productivity Benchmarks Study just in time to help sales organizations plan for 2012. Companies in this study include many of the largest technology companies in the world with the most complex sales organizations imaginable. $260B in revenue is represented by companies in IDC's updated Sales Productivity Benchmarks Database with an average revenue of $5.8B. This study serves as an opportunity to track the most important trends occurring across large sales organizations, as well as enabling companies to benchmark their sales investment and sales productivity indicators with best-in-class companies.

Key findings from this year's study include:

• 6% increase in sales investment: Overall, sales program and staff budgets are expected to increase 6% by the end of the current fiscal year, compared to an increase of only 3.8% last year. This 6% closely tracks IDC's expected increase in global IT spending for 2011 of 7.0%.
• Field support is increasing: Buyers want to reduce the sales cycle by 40%. Best-in-class sales organizations are striving to improve sales productivity to meet these buyer needs, and one successful response is to ensure enterprise sales teams have sufficient internal and external support. IDC's people-to-program key performance indicator(KPI) shows the percentage of total sales spend that is directed towards people has increased, with the main part of that increase driven by greater investment in field sales support. (IDC's Sales Support Staff KPI = 42% for 2011 versus 39% in 2010)
• Maturing sales operations teams are driving increased productivity: This is not "your father's sales operations function". Today's best-in-class sales operations(SO) team is responsible for sales strategy, productivity and automation: A much broader, more strategic role than in prior years. (refer to IDC's Next Generation Sales Operations Team for additional insight) IDC resource allocation guidance is for total SO staff to represent approximately 8-12% of total sales staff, with centralized staff representing approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of total SO staff.
• Data management and analysis must be improved across sales. High performing sales organizations are taking concrete steps to improve the quality of their data as well as their team's ability to analyze and interpret key trends and insight from this data. This includes tracking of sales investment and staff allocations versus market share and growth opportunities; improving alignment of marketing and sales assets and other information important for sales enablement; and cleaning up their sales pipeline data and scorecards including related customer information. Next-generation sales operations teams should lead this effort. Output from IDC's 2011 Sales Productivity Benchmarks Study can help provide the foundation for this analysis as well as providing important benchmarking information (e.g., identifying opportunities to improve sales productivity) Figure 1 below provides a small glimpse of this type of information. (click here for IDC's combined sales and marketing benchmarks webcast in December)

• Resources should be better managed for a complex sales strategy. With a focus on the largest, most complex sales organizations, IDC can clearly see the challenges and best practices in place by the best sales organizations. And a common thread amongst these companies is a laser focus on identifying where the greatest opportunities are for sales productivity improvements, and then deploying the correct strategies and resources in response to these challenges. For example, with sales reps continuing to struggle in their ability to better leverage their time and companies' resources, best-in-class companies are focusing on making their sales managers better coaches and improving their sales enablement capabilities.

These are only a few of the findings uncovered by IDC's 2011 Sales Productivity Benchmarks Study. Clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service should refer to IDC's 2012 Sales Investment and Productivity Planner for additional information, or contact Irina Zvagelsky at izvagelsky@idc.com or Michael Gerard at mgerard@idc.com with any questions.

The Enterprise Customer Creation Process – Why should Sales Care and What to do about it

Traditionally companies have constructed their customer facing processes and systems on a departmental or functional basis. Each area – marketing, sales, finance, service, provisioning, support, etc. – made independent decisions about the people, process, technology and data it needed to accomplish its objectives. Unfortunately, this has left many companies with an inability to understand or in some cases even identify their true customers. The result?. . . An inability to optimize revenue and poor customer satisfaction. Case in point, here's what one buyer indicated at an IDC Sales Advisory Service Buyer Panel: “I get at least 2 to 3 calls per week from the same vendor from different sales people, not knowing that the other one called. Do you have a CRM system?” The reason is that there's no overall connection for the entire customer relationship from an organizational as well as a data perspective.

To address this problem, large enterprises are starting to define customer creation as an enterprise process. This has transformative implications for every customer facing function, application, data repository, and business process. One of the critical features of an enterprise customer creation process is customer data standardization. Customer/prospect data must come into and flow through the process in a way that enables transparency and immediacy to all the relevant decision makers. You cannot manage the customer experience without knowing what becomes of a lead, how it performs in the sales pipeline, what kind of deal results, how profitable the relationship becomes, in addition to all the account and contact attributes that accumulate throughout the process. All customer facing functions, in particular sales, need visibility into the whole customer relationship in order to make decisions that have optimal impact on business metrics like revenue and margin growth – instead of departmental KPIs like lead and call quotas.

Companies will need to implement new data standards, governance policies, and infrastructure in order to get there. Sales operations is in a great position to drive impact in this area across the organization: If not leading the charge from a strategy and execution perspective within sales, then at least representing sales and the customer to communicate the importance of this effort to executive management. Companies will have to apply these standards to all customer facing activities. The buying process for customer facing applications will become a multi-functional activity with sales and marketing influencing back end implementations and conversely, finance, fulfillment, etc. influencing technology decisions at the front end. This has big implications for how technology solutions will be sold as the industry consolidates and repositions to reflect the changes on the buy side.

For more details on this subject as it relates to improved sales pipeline management and customer management throughout the buying cycle, please come to our upcoming Sales Leadership Board meeting in Boston on October 25th and 26th. Contact Michael Gerard at mgerard@idc.com to inquire about attending this highly interactive session. Also see the new IDC report Best Practices in Customer Data Management. You may also contact me via email at gmurray@idc.com.

Posted by Gerry Murray

The Customer Cloud: The Killer App for the Social Enterprise

The old two-step marketing and sales model for customer creation is dead. Today we have a three part model: Socializing, Marketing, and Sales – with socializing taking on increasing importance and marketing being redefined in the process. That’s a good thing for customers but it makes the market more competitive for sellers. Companies have to seek out and engage with both existing and potential customers in radically new ways outside of explicit business contexts with resources previously not thought of as customer facing.

This activity is going on today at a furious pace, but it is highly fragmented. With the introduction by Salesforce.com of Data.com and the social ready rebuild of Database.com at Dreamforce, as well their Chatter and CRM capabilities, customer interactions will come together in what is emerging as the Customer Cloud – the first killer app for the social enterprise.

The Customer Cloud will evolve into the source of record for all account and contact data because it can provide the Holy Grail of the customer creation process – the unified customer record. As a result, it will be the centering point for all customer interactions. It is definitive because:

• It is self-regulating – contacts update their own data via social tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. greatly improving data accuracy and timeliness
• It is real time – individuals have a vested interest in updating their social profiles asap
• It has practically infinite scalability and reach.
• It is equally available to all customer facing functions from marketing to sales, as well as fulfillment, finance, service and support, etc.
• It provides insight into relationships – account contacts can be sustained and expanded even in the face of departures, and corporate hierarchies can be better understood and tracked.

A unified customer record provides the basis for breaking down the discrepancies, decay, and dysfunction that currently plague (or prevent the implementation of) enterprise customer creation processes, especially in B2B. It offers companies the potential to coordinate all of their customer facing activities around a single source of information – the lack of which has been the Achilles Heel in all previous efforts in CRM, data warehousing, and other valiant attempts to unify customer facing functions.

Thus at Dreamforce, the announcements of Data.com and the social data readiness of Database.com are major strategic milestones for Salesforce.com. With the addition of the Radian 6 social monitoring last year, this neatly rounds out a very strong play for leadership in the battle to deliver the Customer Cloud and provide the customer facing infrastructure of the future that will be build upon it.

[posted by Gerry Murray, IDC Sales and CMO Advisory Service Analyst]

Do You Have a Vertical Sales Strategy?

The first question of course is does your specific company need a vertical sales strategy, followed by the question of how deep should this strategy go across your organization? If you are amongst the many BtoB technology companies selling in a rapidly maturing market, you'll want to do all that you can to differentiate yourself from the competition. And ensuring that your sales (and delivery) teams bring industry-specific knowledge to their prospect meetings will certainly help this process.

Based upon IDC's recent technology buyer experience study, the average sales person received a grade of B to B- in their ability to understand and address buyers' industry-specific needs. The top three complaints by buyers about their vendors' sales teams include:

• "They market (and sell) their products and services as tailored to my industry, but they are not."
• "Their sales force is not knowledgeable about my industry."
• "Their implementation teams, or non-sales employees, are not knowledgeable enough about my industry."

Establishing a vertical sales strategy is certainly no simple task, and its effectiveness will depend upon significant investment and support by the entire organization. A couple of places to start:

• Collaborate with product management and marketing to identify the industries for which you will get the highest return for developing and executing a vertical marketing and sales strategy. (sales operations should facilitate this process for the sales organization)
• Identify the target accounts and segments to pursue by region/territory.
• Allocate and align sales resources (and channel partners) based upon these established targets and their location, either leveraging the existing sales coverage model or establishing a new, vertically-oriented sales coverage model if warranted.
• Add staff with industry-specific expertise, in the sales organization as well as in other parts of the organization, to speak customers' language and best understand and meet their needs. (training your government sales person to be a pharmaceutical industry sales person is typically not a wise decision)
• Enable the sales organization to support this new vertically-oriented approach. (e.g., industry-specific training, vertically-oriented marketing and sales assets, customer profiles, access to industry subject matter experts)
• Collaborate with marketing for execution of local campaigns targeted at specific industries. (e.g., sponsor local industry events, host breakfast briefings with industry-specific analysts to bring value to buyers while providing the opportunity introduce them to your sales teams)

Please do provide any comments on this topic below or reach out to me at mgerard@idc.com for additional discussion on this topic or to participate in our upcoming sales and sales operations research. Additional information on vertical sales strategies as well as sales investment and staffing allocation benchmarks are available for clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service.

Buyers Want to Reduce the Buying Cycle by 40%. What Should Sales Do?

IDC's Sales Advisory Service recently completed its annual Buyer Experience Study which assesses what is and isn't working for technology sales teams, and gathers feedback from buyers as to what (and how) sales strategy needs to change. This study includes information collected from 339 companies across a variety of industries, including manufacturing, finance, government, healthcare, business or business professional services. Just under 1/2 of participants were directly involved with IT buying decisions exceeding $250k over the past 12 months and 54% of participants are at the director level or higher.

Here are some highlights from our research, including several steps that sales should take to help reduce the buying cycle length:

• IT Buyers' Time is Extremely Valuable:  About 60% of IT buyers indicate that they will likely spend 46+ hours per week on work-related activities in the next 12 months. More specifically, 24% of buyers' time is spent on post-purchase IT product or solution-related activities. Thus, Technology sales organizations need to optimize the value that they bring to the average IT buyer during their infrequent interactions. Those companies that accomplish this goal will certainly have a competitive differentiator in this difficult economic environment.
• The Size and Complexity of Buying Teams are Increasing: On average, 4-5 people are involved in influencing the vendor short list and in making the purchase decision. Sales must have a good understanding of who these individuals are, and ensure that they cater to their specific needs (e.g., identify and target these individuals as part of account planning – clients should refer to IDC's Best Practices in Account Planning, leverage of internal company knowledge and experts to best meet client needs – think sales enablement and leverage IDC's Sales Advisory Service's database of best practices, frameworks and benchmarks in this area).
• Vendor Information is of High Importance to IT Buyers:  22% of IT buyers value product demos and proof of concepts the most. Both marketing and sales need to collaborate on developing the most relevant and valuable content for their prospects. Additionally, sales representatives play a key role in delivering the right information to the buyers' teams.
• Buyers Wish to Reduce Their Buying Cycle Length by 40%. Even though IDC found that 2/3 of the delay is a result of IT buyers' own buying processes, there are still actions that sales can take to help reduce the length it currently takes for their customers to buy from them. (click to enlarge the below chart) Technology buyers are expecting their vendors' sales teams to:
• "Be prepared with information for my needs and not stats about the company"
• "Follow up — it really helps to push the project along and to make sure that it's not getting bowled over by other initiatives and then just put on the back burn. Help keep the project in the forefront of the company's mind."
• "Come to the table fully prepared to answer all technical questions. That may require inclusion of technical personnel in the initial sales meetings."
  

• Are Your Sales Teams Leveraging Social Collaboration to Reach Prospects? 20% of buyers have been contacted by sales reps through Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media applications. Research shows that independent party blogs/communities are the most highly valued by IT buyers, with vendor blogs/communities not lagging far behind. These findings indicate that technology buyers do value social media channels, and IDC expects this trend to expand. Therefore, technology vendors should continue to increase their investment in social media from the marketing and sales perspective. IT buyers are also looking at sites like YouTube for product demos, LinkedIn to check references, and follow vendors on Twitter.

Clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service should contact us for a full, customized overview of this study. Sales Advisory Service clients can also access additional frameworks, sales benchmarks data and best practices recommendations and case studies to address their greatest sales challenges at www.idc.com/salesadvisory.

A Lesson in Sales Transformation at the Recent Sales 2.0 Boston Conference

There's no doubt that sales organizations are in a constant state of flux, however, how many of these organizations are changing for the better? And what foundational elements can we establish to create a more agile sales organization that can react to internal and external forces.  In past blog posts I've mentioned the need for a next generation sales operations team, sales intelligence and sales enablement competencies as well as greater investment in talent management. Gerhard Gschwandtner's recent Sales 2.0 conference in Boston provided some great insight into key elements necessary for developing a more agile sales organization. Here are just a few highlights from this valuable conference:

• Kevin Purcell, ESSN Americas Sales Transformation Leader, Hewlett Packard (ESSN – enterprise servers, storage and networking)
• Yes, HP does have a group dedicated to sales transformation!
• Helpful framework: Hiring – On-Boarding – Measuring – Motivating – Managing – Rewarding
• On-Boarding: (clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service should refer to a recent best pratices study in preparing sales managers to be coaches)
• "I asked my top sales performers what worked best for their 30-60-90 day on-boarding plan"
• "We've created a buddy system to help new reps get on-board."
• On-boarding training: 30 day period, 3 components: "Know your company" (HP history, culture, ); "Know your customers and market" (who are they, what products & solutions best fit them); "Know your role" (your comp. plan, sales methodology)
• Measuring & Managing:
• 5 sales metrics: get a letter for low marks & you need an improvement plan; 3 letters and you're out
• Field Advisory Board to get feedback on the organization
• Rewarding: top 5% selected on quota and behavioral criteria (not just quota); for example, recommended by a sales leader; don't overlook other reward methods (e.g., email from sr. sales mgr.)
• Chuck Penfield, VP CRM On Demand, Oracle
• Again, focus on customers' needs: "For every customer that complains, 26 others didn't bother to complain."
• A demo of what Oracle's sales teams leverage as part of their customer view: High churn potential, update of active projects, basic market and company information, recent customer interactions, live chat potential with subject matter and product experts, ability to post meeting notes right in iPa
• Keith Hontz, VP Sales Line of Business Solutions, East Region, SAP America
• "Customers are driving the conversation": Keith rightly points out that buyers know more about our companies than ever before prior to that first sales call; and we need to better engage with them.  "Sellers have to adapt to new buyers"
• "Sales insight - providing transparency and real-time information for better decisions": SAP provides a holistic 360 degree account view for their sales teams, including: purchase history, marketing activities, service record insight, customer satisfaction details, etc. "It used to take 50 emails by sales to get the insight they now receive with our 360 degree account view."
• Sales collaboration: SAP provides an interactive, collaboration workspace for their sales teams leveraging SAP StreamWork
• Anytime, anywhere access to sales intelligence for its sales force: SAP has rolled out 3,500 iPads to date to their sales force with >15,000 more to go. No doubt there's significant process infrastructure required to support this effort.

Please do provide any comments on this topic below or reach out to me at mgerard@idc.com for additional discussion on this topic or to participate in our upcoming sales and sales operations research.

Is Your Sales Organization Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling is one of the most common untapped strategies for increasing revenue across organizations. And becomes all the more important when over 50% of sales reps aren't making their quota.[2010 IDC Sales Advisory research] Cross-Selling is a very lucrative way to help sales reps boost their numbers and is something that all sales organizations should consider as part of their sales strategy. However, finding the right balance and incentives around cross-selling for sales teams is often a difficult and challenging endeavor. Based upon IDC's analyst expertise and interaction with best practice sales organizations, several key success factors include:

• Assign a team direct accountability for your cross-selling strategy. This will ensure that there is one group specifically responsible for this initiative, thus, decreasing the risk of it being overlooked.
• Obtain and leverage executive sponsorship of this program. Ensure that metrics (i.e., adoption, number of referrals, closed deal value, conversion rates, etc.) are rolled up on a consistent basis to the higher ups within the company. Even more, make it known to the sales organization that these metrics are being reported on. Sales people, being competitive in nature, will surely not want to be on the bottom of any list or stack rank that is going to be seen by their boss's boss and others above.
• Promote cross-selling across the entire organization, not just reps. Offer incentives to entice other people within the sales organization (i.e. engineers, implementation specialists, etc.) an opportunity to submit referrals that would fall into the cross-selling bucket and reward these individuals upon deal closure.
• Provide product maps as part of your sales enablement process. How can sales reps properly cross-sell if they do not have an idea of what products/solutions goes with what other product/solution? Moreover, how far are reps going to get in the sales cycle if they do not know the right questions to ask if they think a particular product/solution is in play? If you need to and it makes sense, make the product map industry specific. You must also have a cross-selling page on your sales enablement platform. Here, marketers and program organizers can post these product maps and other useful information to help enable the sales organization to cross-sell.
• Advertise the rewards of the program publicly and recognize top performers. If you are a sales rep, imagine hearing, "Last year, someone got paid $30k for cross-selling." If you have competitive and motivated sales reps on your team, their initial thought will be, "How can I do that?" Of course the program organizers may decide to put a limit on the amount that can be paid-out for cross-selling. If that's the case, make it known to the organization at large how many people reached that limit over the course of a set time period. Additionally, it may be necessary to set a minimum to award incentives, both for reps and their managers. An example of this minimum could be that reps have to have 5 cross-selling referrals completed during the course of a fiscal year. Likewise, sales managers will get an award if at the end of the year, their entire teams meets the 5 referral minimum each.
• Make cross-selling part of your sales culture. This is easier said than done and is a large endeavor to take on. However, with the factors indicated above, including proper organization, advertising, executive sponsorship, etc., it can be accomplished.

Sales Advisory Service clients can access additional frameworks, quantitative data and best practices recommendations and case studies to address their greatest sales and sales operations challenges at www.idc.com/salesadvisory.

By Irina Zvagelsky