Selling from a Point of View

The Business Value Hypothesis

Over the years, I’ve learned that the difference between an average sales conversation and a great one always comes down to one thing: perspective.

Most enterprise sellers show up ready to listen and respond. The best ones show up with a point of view or perspective — a belief about what’s happening in their customer’s business, why it matters, and what could change.

That belief, framed as a Business Value Hypothesis (BVH), is your testable theory about how you can create measurable impact. It’s not a pitch deck or an ROI calculator—it’s a thoughtful, human conversation starter.

The Business Value Perspective

A great BVH has three parts:

1. The problem you see that’s holding the customer back

2. The impact you anticipate—what that problem is costing them

3. The change you propose to make it better

It’s your best, most educated guess—and should always be open to challenge.

When you come to a conversation with a hypothesis instead of a script, something powerful happens.

You shift from “Tell me your pain points” to “Here’s what I think might be happening—does that fit?” The dynamic changes instantly. You’re no longer just asking questions—you’re making a deposit in your Relationship Bank Account and earning the right to have a real, strategic dialogue.

Discovery

A thoughtful BVH leads you directly into discovery. Not the kind of discovery that most sales people practice — the pointed closed end questions of how much, how long, how big — which customers hate (because they know their answers are being used to shape a proposal.

Instead, the thoughtful BVH leads you into facilitated discovery, where the sales person helps the customer discover different ways of solving problems. This is “co-creation” rather than selling. This provides a platform for you to explore the assumptions that shaped your business value hypothesis, and is a learning process for both seller and buyer.

But building a great BVH takes more than analysis. It takes three deeply human qualities:

• Curiosity — the willingness to dig below the surface, to keep asking why.

• Empathy — the ability to sense not just what your buyer says, but what they feel.

• Authenticity — the courage to show up as yourself, to be honest about what you see and what you don’t know.

When those three are in balance, something special happens. The conversation becomes co-creative. You’re not pitching anymore—you’re helping the buyer make sense of their world.

In my experience (and backed up by extensive research) most deals die from indecision, not competition. Buyers fear making the wrong choice. A strong Business Value Hypothesis lowers perceived risk, making it safe for the customer to act by showing that you understand both the business challenge and the emotional risk of doing nothing.

If you want to stand out in 2026, start building and testing your BVHs. For now, one per key account is enough. Refine it, test it, learn from it.

Because selling from a point of view isn’t about being right—it’s about being real.

Find a deeper discussion on the Business Value Hypothesis here.

Selling is all about connecting with people!

 Complex enterprise sales isn’t about delivering the slickest demo or having the lowest price. It’s about people. People with competing agendas, personal ambitions, and informal networks that rarely show up on the org chart.

If you’ve been in the field long enough, you’ve lived this. You’ve had a “champion” who assured you that they were the decision maker — only to discover the real decision was made three levels up, influenced by someone you’ never met. Or you’ve been blindsided by a detractor who torpedoed the deal after months of development and progress.

I’ve been there too. And the painful lesson I’ve learned is this: you can’t win complex opportunities if you don’t understand the web of influence that surrounds them.

The influence map brings clarity to this complex set of relationships. They’re not just a nice-to-have visual.

They’re a discipline — a way of bringing clarity to the chaos of enterprise decision making. I’ve been building influence maps as a key part of my account planning and opportunity development/review processes for many years.

And when combined with the Relationship Bank Account (RBA) and the Business Value Hypothesis, influence maps become more than tactical tools. They become the foundation for orchestrating deals with intention.

What Is an Influence Map?

An influence map is a visual representation of the power dynamics, alliances, and motivations in an account or opportunity.

It goes beyond the org chart:

• Org chart = reporting lines

• Influence map = how decisions actually get made

An influence map should tell you:

• Who has budget authority (economic buyers)

• Who owns technical approval (evaluators)

• Who has hidden influence (trusted advisors)

• Who advocates for you, who sits neutral, and who resists

• What personal goals and fears shape each player’s behavior

In short: it’s the political map of your deal.

Why Influence Maps Matter

Complexity Demands Clarity

Enterprise opportunities often involve 6 – 10 stakeholders, sometimes more. Without a map, it’s guesswork. With a map, complexity becomes navigable.

Politics Are Real

Every company has both a formal structure and an informal one. Decisions rarely flow top-down in neat lines. They zigzag through friendships, alliances, and rivalries. Influence maps expose the truth.

Risk Lives in the Shadows

Most deals aren’t lost to competitors. They’re lost to no decision or a last-minute veto, usually based on perception of risk and whether they trust the sales person to deliver on their promises. Mapping neutral parties and detractors early lets you strategize before it’s too late.

Time Is Precious

You don’t have time to build relationships everywhere. Maps show where to double down —where deposits into the Relationship Bank Account will have the greatest impact.

Real World Experiences

At Oracle, my division built influence maps the old school way – talking them through while sketching them out on a white board, and then transferring them to PowerPoint for future reference. While this sometimes seemed time-intensive, the group input was incredibly valuable, with individual members of the team contributing from their own perspective and experience.

Occasionally team members would disagree on an individual’s role or the strength of the relationship, and the ensuing conversation would always prove valuable. We would generate many WWWs (Who/What/When action items) that would help to clarify our position and strength within the account.

 

More than once, through this process, we identified gaps in the influence map – functional roles in the evaluation or acquisition process that we knew existed, but that we didn’t have individuals associated with those roles. We would tag those roles with “John” or “Jane Doe” and people would take action items to identify the person, begin to build a relationship with them, and to report progress back to the team.

In another case, I facilitated an account planning process for a team in another division which leveraged an online influence mapping tool, Revegy. After kicking off the session, I went to the white board to begin building the influence map. The team reminded me that they use Revegy and suggested that we simply pull up the existing map and review it.

I declined, suggesting that the interactive building of the map, however repetitive it might seem, typically provides new perspectives. Forty-five minutes later, after building a new influence map from scratch, we compared it to the version in Revegy, and to the surprise of the team, they were quite different.

The Relationship Bank Account Connection

Here’s where the RBA ties in. Every stakeholder on your influence map represents an account you hold with them. You make deposits — small gestures like remembering their birthday, forwarding an article, or connecting them with a peer. And sometimes you make withdrawals — asking for a reference, pushing for a meeting, requesting internal support.

An influence map shows you where to invest your deposits strategically. Advocates still need deposits to stay strong. Neutrals can often be moved with consistent deposits.

Detractors? Sometimes deposits help — but sometimes you need to stop investing there and redirect your energy elsewhere.

And the influence map contains both your rating of the current relationship and the direction it’s moving. This provides a comprehensive view Without an influence map, you’re making deposits randomly. With it, you can be intentional with your time and focus.

Building an Influence Map

Step 1: Start with the people you know

With a new influence map template begin adding people you know. Use LinkedIn, company sites and or intelligence tools to identify additional people and their reporting lines. This is your skeleton.

Ask other sales people to identify people and roles in previous deals and how they progressed.

Step 2: Identify Stakeholders

Include everyone who touches the decision — economic buyers, evaluators, procurement, legal, users, executives. Don’t forget “shadow influencers” who have no formal role but carry weight.

Step 3: Go Beyond Titles

Ask: Who actually sways decisions? Who has credibility? Who is risk-averse? Who has scars from a past vendor failure?

Step 4: Map Relationships

Use arrows or lines to show influence. Make some thicker for stronger pull. Add emotional indicators: green for advocates, yellow for neutral, red for detractors.

Step 5: Capture Motivations

Write notes on each person’s goals, fears, and career ambitions. “Wants visibility with CFO.” “Conservative, avoids risk.” “Aspiring VP, wants a win.” These details matter.

Step 6: Simplify Where Possible

In even the largest deals — even eight and nine figure ones — there’s no more than a handful of people above the line.

Using Influence Maps in Opportunity Development

1. Call Prep: Review the map before each meeting. What’s the goal with this person? What message will resonate?

2. Discovery: Gaps jump out. Haven’t met legal? Missing CFO perspective? The map shows where you’re blind

3. Multi-Threading: Avoid over-reliance on one contact. A healthy map shows coverage across functions and levels

4. Champion Validation: Influence maps test champions. Can they actually move the deal Or are they just friendly?

5. Detractor Strategy: Decide whether to engage, neutralize, or route around detractors

6. Forecasting: A map makes pipeline reviews grounded. “We’re close” means less without showing the influence web

A Tale of Two Deals

The Win

Recently one of my coaching clients engaged a global bank for a security solution. Our first assumption was that the CIO’s office held the decision. However, the influence map told another story: the COO held the purse, the risk director whispered in his ear, and the CISO’s technical team carried credibility but no budget.

By shifting strategy — building deposits with the COO around operational resilience and making the risk director feel like an insider — the client was able to build sufficient support to win the deal.

The Loss

On the flip side, another coaching client chased a large insurance company without fully mapping influence. While she had a great champion in IT, she spent little time fostering relationships with individuals in procurement and compliance. Months later, the deal died quietly in the hands of a compliance officer she’d never met.

The lesson? Every un-mapped influencer is a hidden risk.

Making a Game of Influence Mapping

Mapping influence isn’t just tactical. It’s mental. It requires:

• Curiosity: Asking who else matters, even when you think you know

• Humility: Accepting that your assumptions might be wrong

• Patience: Building deposits over time, not forcing the deal

• Detachment: Recognizing that some people won’t support you — and that’s okay

Without the right mindset, maps become static drawings. With the right approach, they become living strategy.

Influence Maps as Coaching Tools

For Managers

• In pipeline reviews, ask: “Show me the influence map.”

• Use maps to spot single-threaded risks early.

• Coach reps on detractor engagement strategies.

For Enablement Professionals

• Provide templates (org chart plus influence layer)

• Coach reps on how to build the map

• Teach reps how to color-code and annotate

• Run role-play sessions: “Here’s your map — how do you win?”

When managers and enablement leaders insist on maps, it creates a culture where political acumen is as important as product knowledge.

Competitors Are Mapping Too

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your competitor is also mapping influence. They’re making deposits into their RBAs with the same stakeholders. Sometimes they’ve been doing it longer.

This means two things:

• You need to spot competitor influence early. Who mentions “we’re already talking to Vendor X”? That’s a red flag

• You need to decide whether to flip a stakeholder, neutralize them, or outflank them

Winning isn’t just about building your map — it’s about disrupting the other side’s.

Metrics That Matter

How do you prove influence mapping works? Track these outcomes:

• Win rate improvement on deals with maps vs. without

• Cycle time reduction (mapped deals move faster)

• Coverage health: number of functions and levels engaged per deal

• Reduction in “no decision” outcomes.

Numbers give leaders confidence that this isn’t “soft skill work” — it’s pipeline protection.

Exercises You Can Run with Your Team

30-Minute Map Sprint

Each rep picks one live deal, sketches the map, and presents it. Teammates identify gaps: “Who in finance cares?” “Where’s legal?”

Detractor Role Play

Assign someone to play a red stakeholder. Rep has to win them over or neutralize them in a role-play call

RBA Overlay

Take the map and mark where you’ve made deposits. Where are you under-invested? Where are withdrawals overdue?

These exercises make mapping experiential rather than academic.

Action Plan

Here are five actions to take this week:

1. Pick your top opportunity and build a draft map

2. Validate it with your team — SEs, managers, partners and even coaches inside the target company

3. Identify one hidden influencer and plan outreach

4. Run a detractor play. What will it take to shift or neutralize them?

5. Block 10 minutes weekly to update your map

Conclusion: Clarity Over Chaos

In enterprise sales, the path to “yes” is never linear. It’s messy, political, and human. While influence maps don’t eliminate that mess, they do bring clarity. They make the invisible visible.

For me, influence maps are more than a tactic. They’re a way of reminding myself that deals are won by coalitions, not individuals. They connect directly to the Relationship Bank Account — guiding where to invest — and to a bigger game, demanding the mindset to stay curious, humble, and patient.

If you’re not mapping influence, you’re gambling. If you are, you’re orchestrating. And in enterprise sales, orchestration beats luck every time.

So grab a whiteboard, draw the map, and let the real selling begin.

Building Trust, Creating Value, Winning Together

 

Sales with Purpose: Creating Cultures of Trust and Growth

Many say sales is a numbers game. For me...the longer I do this work, the more I’m convinced that at least for complex enterprise sales, it’s a people-and-purpose game...and the numbers follow.

And frankly it's just as true for selling shoes at LL Bean. I know, I've done it.

In a recent conversation (Thoughts on Selling podcast #65) with fellow sales transformation leader Tracy Linne, we dig into what it really takes to build sales organizations that don’t just hit quota once, but learn, adapt, and sustain performance. The thread running through it all: purpose that people can feel, and cultures built on trust.

From “Fixing” to Building What Sticks

Tracy calls herself a fixer. Not the Hollywood version, but instead the kind who lands, diagnoses, and helps leadership rebuild the system so it actually works. Sometimes that means building a go-to-market engine from scratch: new motion, new people, new process, new tech. Other times it’s a turnaround: the company is ten years in, stuck under $10M ARR, tired of heroics and misses, and ready to get honest about the gap between how they think they sell and how customers actually buy.

The move that separates a real fixer from a fire drill? Day-one clarity and day-one candor. Those first 90 days are about calling things the way they are, aligning a founder or exec team around reality, and co-creating a path forward that the whole org owns. Not “my plan” -- our plan. Without that shared purpose, everything else becomes motion without momentum (kinda like a pinball ricocheting around the board).

The Pillars (In the Right Order)

We all know the trio: people, process, technology. Most teams nod along, then skip straight to buying tools. The truth is, tech simply amplifies whatever culture and process you already have. If you’re misaligned, tools help you fail faster.

Tracy’s hierarchy is both blunt and on-point:

1. Customer first. What problem are we solving, for whom, and how do they know it’s solved?
2. Team second. Do we have the right people, in the right roles, playing to their strengths?
3. Everything else flows from there.

That order forces hard conversations about how you sell, who you sell to, and how your team needs to evolve. It also stops a lot of unhealthful "tool-flavored" debates.

Selling as a Team Sport

One simple shift creates outsize impact: treat sales like a team sport. Bring product, marketing, finance, and execs into real deals—not to crowd the rep, but to widen context and shorten cycles.

Run key workstreams in parallel rather than in series (security, legal, procurement, internal champion enablement), and you’ll often shave 20–25% off cycle time while improving deal quality.

The side effect is powerful: when more eyes are on the work, the forecast gets honest. Wins and risks are socialized early. The org learns what “good” looks like...and what sandbagging and wishcasting look like too.

Pricing, Positioning, and the Courage to Change

One theme we both keep running into: companies trying to sell enterprise-impact solutions as low-ticket “velocity” plays because investors want quick logo acquisition. While It may feel good in the short term, this approach will eventually kill you. If your product actually solves a cross-functional, high-pain problem, price it and position it to match. Yes, you’ll add 45–60 days and need an extra signature. You’ll also drive retention, expansion, and profit -- and stop replacing yourself every year.

While that decision takes nerve and alignment, the market rewards clarity of value.

Measure What Matters (and Separate It)

Many CRMs still tie stage to probability. Move to Stage 3? Auto-jump to 60%. It’s convenient—and misleading. Uncouple them. Let reps state their confidence independently. Then obsess over conversion rates by stage and time-in-stage. That’s where you find the real friction: messaging gaps, misread deals, or process debt that slows everything down.

When you fix conversion and velocity, you don’t just close more -- you waste less. A dollar spent on adding MQLs never beats a dollar spent improving stage-to-stage flow.

Personalization That Actually Helps

Intent data is useful. Personality data can be a force multiplier. Tracy uses tools like personality modeling (e.g., from public profiles) to tailor conversations and follow-ups to the human beings on the other side of the Zoom room. Analytical operator? Lead with structure, outcomes, timelines. Relationship-first leader? Start with trust and context.

No tool replaces curiosity!

One of my favorite coaching moments: a coaching client, an enterprise rep for a large tech company, studied two stakeholders’ LinkedIn pages and noticed they’d each been at the client company for over twenty years.

She opened the meeting with a simple, human question: “You’ve each been here over two decades -- what keeps you here?” That launched a twenty-minute conversation that led directly to an introduction to the CDO. Tools surface signals. Curiosity turns them into connection.

AI Won’t Replace You — But It Will Expose You

Yes, AI is changing the stack. It will automate more “busy work” than most teams expect. Early-career sellers worry about being replaced. My take: AI is a ladder, not a trapdoor. If you let it handle the repetitive parts, you can climb toward the work only humans do well -- listening deeply, diagnosing honestly, crafting narratives that mobilize organizations, and negotiating with empathy and backbone.

If your idea of prep is copying and pasting a bot’s summary without understanding the business, the person, or the politics? AI will expose that, fast. The bar is going up, not down. And...if you bump into a prospect without warning, you will have to be prepared to "wing it." No time to pull out your phone and consult with ChatGPT!

The People Pillar You Can’t Ignore

Here’s the leg of the stool most leaders underinvest in: a data-driven view of your team. We measure leads, pipeline, win rates -- everything but the humans doing the work. You can (and should) blueprint your team with light-lift assessments that reveal behavioral strengths, coaching gaps, and role fit. It’s not about labeling people; it’s about placing people.

Thinking about a reorg? Don’t rearrange boxes on a hunch. Use data to inform who thrives in complex net-new versus who excels in expansion vs. who belongs in customer leadership or enablement. Then pair that with real coaching. (Yes, leaders coach. Or they develop someone who truly does.)

The Daily Reset -- and Ownership

Culture isn’t a slide; it’s a daily practice.

The most practical advice both Tracy and I share with reps and managers is simple: start your day with purpose. Whatever sets your mindset — workout, writing, quiet time — do it consistently. It changes how you show up to the first call, the forecast review, the tough conversation. And if yesterday went sideways? You get a reset every morning. Use it.

Ownership looks the same at every level. Reps who embrace sales as a profession — not a stopover — lean into feedback, get curious about the craft, and build what I call a relationship bank account with customers and managers alike. Funny enough, the shortcut to career longevity isn’t gaming the comp plan; it’s making your manager look good by being reliable, honest, and proactive. That builds a reputation you can’t buy.

Five Moves to Build a Culture of Trust and Growth

1. Tell the truth early. Diagnose your current state with candor. Align the exec team on reality before you chase the future.
2. Reorder the pillars. Customer → People → Process/Tech. Buy tools last, not first.
3. Run deals as a team. Parallel the workstreams, shorten cycles, and make the forecast a shared artifact rather than a solo performance.
4. Measure the middle. Separate probability from stage. Obsess over conversion and time-in-stage. Fix bottlenecks with surgical changes.
5. Personalize with purpose. Use AI and personality insights to augment — not replace — human curiosity. Earn trust by speaking each buyer’s language of value.

Purpose isn’t a poster stuck on a breakroom wall; it’s the thing that keeps people moving when change gets uncomfortable. Trust isn’t a feeling; it’s the compounding effect of a hundred honest actions -- how we scope, price, forecast, and follow through. When you put those two to work, growth isn’t a surprise. It’s the natural byproduct of a culture you built on purpose.

Time to focus

 

The middle of a pro cycling peloton is a chaotic, unnerving place.

The speed, the sounds, the wild colors, the constant jockeying for position, the talking/yelling/swearing, the unanticipated/unseen bumps and cracks in the road, other riders literally bumping your shoulders and elbows and hips and knees and handlebars...

It's an exhilarating and yet terrifying place, not for the faint of heart. You cannot be distracted by the commotion. You must focus on the goal and the interim steps to that goal.

Kinda like enterprise sales.

And just like enterprise sales, if you just "sit in", riding along with the flow of the peloton, you're falling behind. You're losing ground!

You think you are keeping up...because you only see what's immediately around you. What I didn't realize, as a first time bike racer years ago, that competitors constantly move up along the sides. They take the opportunity to improve their position even as the main group is largely static.

Again, just like enterprise sales...if you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.

Now that the parade laps of the first half are over, it's time to focus. Even in the tumult of the peloton, the rider must focus on the larger task at hand...getting to the finish line safely, before the competition arrives.

The pro racer has two primary advantages:

• Many months of preparation and practice, on top of years of fitness and skill building

• A manager in the team car providing overall leadership and encouragement and as-needed coaching

The manager in the team car has a full map of the course in front of them. They see how their individual riders and the team as a group are doing. They have an increasing set of realtime data on each rider and metrics on the market (I mean course) to review.

The manager coordinates team tactics from the team car. They provide food and water (and sometimes cola!) to the riders, and as needed, the sales engineer (I mean team mechanic) will provide technical services.

Reps - Time to focus

Now, as we dive into the second half of the year, it's time for sales people to focus. Focus on the workstreams and initiatives that offer strategic impact for your customers and prospects. Show up with a strong point of view or business value hypothesis and share it with the key stakeholders.

And ignore everything else!

Sales managers and leaders - Time to ensure that your team is focusing

Many reps tell me that they find it difficult to make time for selling, even for the direct preparation and support activities that ensure effective selling. It's up to you, their manager, to ensure that your reps can focus. Take everything off their plate that doesn't directly contribute to effective customer engagement.

Help them find ways to work processes in parallel. Will this Q4 deal require a CSA or contract addendum? Do we need a business partner to own implementation? Lets get working on it now.

Would an executive briefing help accelerate internal adoption and support? Lets get it on the calendar now for early Q3, and start planning and prepping. (I hate to point this out...but...Q3 will be over before we know it!) Are we holding that executive briefing at the customer site, at headquarters, or at our EBC?

In parallel, what other activities will help strengthen the relationship, build our engagement and support with key stakeholders? Fall is a great time to take customers to a ball game, or out for a fancy dinner. Invite the spouses/partners and don't talk about business at all.

You have the experience to know what helps to ensure/accelerate a deal. Be prescriptive. Tell your team what to do, how to be successful.

With your reps so focused on the task at hand, you as the manager must make these suggestions and help drive them to completion. Provide a resource to coordinate local events. Focus on what works in your region. Dinner in NYC is great. Quail hunting outside of Atlanta has done wonders for team building...in that region! Renting Laguna Seca for a day works in central California...

As the team leader, you must ensure that the team works together towards their singular goal.

Ask this question repeatedly: "Is what you are doing right now critical to the success of the team? Will it make the boat go faster?"

In one of my favorite business books, Will It Make the Boat Go Faster: Olympic-winning Strategies for Everyday Success, by Ben Hunt-Davis MBE and Harriet Beveridge , Ben discusses the challenges of the 2000 British crewing team.

While the team experienced setback after setback, they continued to focus on the basics that ultimately ensured success:

• Singular focus on the goal

• "No problem" attitude

• Team first, all-in, all-together approach

• Practice, practice practice

• Prepare, prepare, prepare

• Deal with the unexpected and move on

As the leader, you must ask this same question.

As a sales person managing your territory and important individual opportunities, you must also ask this same question.

And then...for my coaching clients, I will ask the follow-on question — What must be true?

If this resonates with you, if you want help with rep or team productivity, lets talk...

Empower your sales manager to drive more revenue!

 

To increase sales velocity, most organizations either invest in marketing (buy more leads) or invest in sales (hire more sales people). The sad truth is that both of these tactics are wildly ineffective. While more leads may put additional MQLs into the top of the funnel, there's no guarantee that these leads will convert to SQLs or eventually customers. And similarly, hiring more sales people takes time and effort -- three to six months to recruit an inside sales person and bring them up to speed, twelve to eighteen months to recruit and enable a good enterprise field rep. By then your successor will be facing the same challenge! And...more sales people don't guarantee more revenue. It just doesn't work that way! You have a better option! Improve conversion rates and velocity at each stage of your sales funnel! No additional marketing investment is needed. No new sales headcount required...just a focus on skill and process improvement. And the ROI for this investment is dramatically higher! Given my background of 20+ years in enterprise (and early stage) sales enablement, you might expect me to suggest investment in sales enablement as the obvious approach. Years ago, as a newly minted CRO of a $20M professional services organization, I did not invest in enablement. I did something different...related, but different. And revenues grew by 75% in 18 months. While good sales enablement is a critical foundation for improving sales productivity, you cannot turn around an ineffective sales enablement function in less than eighteen months. Short term revenue acceleration requires focused process and skills improvement and coaching by the sales manager. The fastest route to increased revenue velocity is to empower your first line sales manager The job of the first line sales manager is to ensure the success and effectiveness of the sales team. Yet, in most organizations, first line sales managers spend most of their time not empowering their direct reports. Instead, they are burdened with managing up, conducting pipeline reviews, selling (acting as heros "saving" their reps), and dealing with administrivia. What a waste... In the meantime, their direct reports receive no coaching or timely feedback on their tactics, habits, techniques...they just keep doing the same thing that hasn't been working in the past. Oh, and by the way, the rep's manager is the primary reason why a rep will stay with (or leave) a company!

Steps to take First, this approach requires a shift in mindset, a focus on coaching and deliberate practice. How much of that happens in your organization today? Sales leadership must send a strong signal that coaching is the single most valuable activity for sales managers to undertake. Not pipeline inspection...coaching.

Too many sales managers are former lone wolves...they were great at selling, so they must be great managers. Wrong. Ted Lasso never played (European) football, yet he was a great coach! Assume that your sales managers need help in developing their coaching skills. Invest in a coaching workshop and ongoing support to ensure that they are indeed coaching and that their coaching skills improve over time. Measure the time they spend actually coaching. It should be 20-30% of their week...every week. Use your CRM data to identify where individuals and teams need coaching...and deliberate practice...focus. If early stage conversion rates are weak, focus there. If negotiation skills are lacking, focus there. Assume that discovery skills can be improved through skill building.

Professionals practice. You're a sales professional, not a sales amateur Devote time for deliberate practice. Professionals in many fields (and most athletes!) practice their craft and skills before they enter the operating room or step onto the field of play. To be good at what you do, you must practice. You must focus on the skills that make you good, and you will benefit from immediate, in-the-moment feedback. If you don't practice, you'll have to think your way through a difficult sales situation. And by then it's too late. Why don't sales people undertake deliberate practice? Role playing is uncomfortable. Ya. So is lifting weights or doing windsprints or practicing your keynote speech. Practice takes time away from selling time. Sure... Your sales people must build the "muscle memory" so they can pivot with the customer or deal with a challenging objection. They must build the muscle memory so that challenging selling situations go smoothly, that nothing rattles them, that the customer truly understands that they are on their side, helping them to achieve their strategic business goals.

Account planning as a team sport

 

Many organizations consider account planning as an opportunity to inventory opportunities. Others view it as a way of monitoring sales activity without getting too involved. A successful completion of the process results in a planning document being filed somewhere. A survey conducted by the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) found that, even within their membership, a few years ago a mere 11% of account plans were “effectively executed.” That’s a pretty dismal completion rate, given that these plans should be the primary pathway to better customer relationships and higher revenue generation! And I don’t have any evidence that this percentage has grown in recent years. Savvy sales leaders, on the other hand, view account planning as a co-creation and alignment process, a continuous mix of discovery, conversation, hypothesis building/testing and value creation. For field reps and KADs/SAMs alike, good account planning, as an ongoing process, is a fabulous way to engage the customer, solve real problems and maximize your opportunities within an account.

Customers don't know what they don't know It's your job as the external expert to help customers learn new things, "to see around corners" as one executive at a key account requested of my team. We talk with customers across industries and have a very different perspective of what's possible.

It came as a surprise to one operations leader at a major airline that he could receive realtime notification of operations issues, rather than the overnight batching of data that populated his dashboard each morning. While we may take that capability for granted, he wasn't aware that this was possible. He simply didn't know what he didn't know. Once he became aware of this new possibility, he moved quickly to incorporate both realtime and strategic operations monitoring.

Inputs and outputs Great field reps work with their technical counterparts, CSMs (if any) and others to identify the strategic opportunities and challenges for their accounts. Conversant in their customers' business operations, they build business value hypotheses on how the customer can more effectively achieve their desired business results. The process involves a lot of inputs, analysis and outputs. But...it is not a linearprocess...it's a continuous process, similar to discovery. And the goal is enrollment...enrolling the customer in believing that these larger goals are possible, and getting stakeholder buy-in. With that buy-in and commitment, anything is possible.

Great account planning is a team sport The team includes not only sales, sales management and leadership, technical consultants, SMEs and other vendor personnel, but also customer stakeholders.

Without the active participation of the customer, we're not conducting account planning, we're building empty hopes that likely don't align with the customer's goals, time frames, priorities and investment strategies. To have real impact, we must align with their goals and priorities. Sometimes we can help shape those goals and priorities. Budgets will follow. But...if they're not at the table while we conduct our planning, alignment and buy-in is simply not possible. And effective governance of the process ensures that this is not a one-time touch point, but an ongoing exchange of ideas and joint investments that lead to better business results for both parties. Suspect that your account planning could be more productive? Lets talk...

For those on annual sales cycles, mid/late Q2 represents a critical turning point. 

It's officially time to shift our primary focus from building net new pipeline to developing and managing our qualified opportunities.

Of course...we never stop engaging with prospects about new opportunities. However...as many organizations, both seller and buyer alike, operate on a calendar year for transactions, we must pivot to focus on developing existing opportunities in our pipeline.

Step one is to continue qualifying those opportunities and moving them forward with velocity. Use these questions to determine the fate of an opportunity - up or out!

• Is the opportunity real?

• Does a compelling event exist?

• Has the customer committed appropriate resources to evaluating the proposed approach, to building an evaluation plan, to building an implementation plan?

• What is the priority of this initiative relative to others on their plate?

• Are there stakeholders not deeply engaged in the conversation?

• Does the customer have the bandwidth, staff and expertise to conduct a successful implementation?

• Is there an agreed on path and timeline for moving forward? Is this validated and modified regularly?

At some level, do you have a meeting of the minds?

Are you engaged with the "right" stakeholders? Have you met them F2F? Are you texting with them?

Do you have agreement on the potential business impact and the proposed solution?

A meeting of the minds!

The next step is to ask this question:

What else must be true for this opportunity to be CLOSED/WON?

By asking this question you will uncover issues, new stakeholders and influences that don't show up in the linear evaluation.

Step three is to work backward from the Go Live date - the "by when" the solution must be up and running, in production, without the old platform, application, system or services running in parallel.

• When must the solution be stood up, implemented, validated?

• How long will it take to implement?

• How long will the contracts/agreements take after a formal "GO" decision is made? Are you managing this work in parallel with technical evaluations?

• How long will the proof of concept take (if one is needed)? What resources are needed? Are they committed? Have you helped the customer to draft a good set of evaluation/success criteria?

The sales manager/sales leader perspective

Y'all know that sales people have happy ears...that when a customer says "maybe", the sales person hears "absolutely!"

As manager or leader, you must bring your experience of successful engagement flow to the opportunity review with the rep. Not every rep thinks ahead, covering every nuance of the path required.

Your opportunity is to provide coaching rather than inspection. Coaching is useful, welcomed, appreciated. Coaching provides a foundation for future success.

Inspection, on the other hand, is feared, hated, reviled. It has little to offer the rep, other than an exhausting set of questions that seem only to fuel additional visibility for management. Nothing for them. Nothing to actually help the rep move the opportunity forward.

And...inspection is destined to fail. Reps don't know what they don't know. In fact, you as manager don't know what you don't know.

You don't know that while your rep has been talking to the technical lead twice a week for the past six weeks, they've only talked with two of the business stakeholders once. That the sales engineer hasn't checked in on the POC in a month. That the tone of the conversation with another key stakeholder has changed.

You believe that the influence chart, built in Salesforce or PowerPoint, gives us full visibility into the strength of the many relationships.

Relationships aren't that simple.

They're multi-threaded. They wax and wane. They run into blocks, challenges, disagreements, breakthroughs. Connections form, strengthen, weaken and break all the time!

It's the strength of the relationships that determine the outcome of an opportunity.

If only we had accurate intelligence on the state of our conversations and relationships with customers,

If only we could look at the scope and tone of the conversations in email and on Zoom calls, and then correlate them to SFA records, we'd have a much better view of the strength of an opportunity.

With that comprehensive view of opportunities, both successful and failed, we could build a highly prescriptive model of what good looks like. This could become a coaching tool to help reps focus on the activities and relationships that matter. And it would dramatically improves our confidence in forecasting and managing those opportunities,

Hey Lee, is this possible?

I've been thinking about these sources of conversation, relationship and revenue intelligence for a long time.

It's all there...in Salesforce or Hubspot, in email, in the transcripts of Zoom meetings...

And yes, it's now possible to aggregate, correlate and leverage that information to improve your pipeline quality, to boost your CLOSED/WON rates, to improve both sales team effectiveness and efficiency.

Curious? Lets talk...