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.