aenima

Principal Account Manager

You’re Doing Sales Wrong

You bring value to your clients by knowing things about their business that they don't already know, NOT by knowing your product and services.

To young sales reps starting their career journey, your success and speed to move into true enterprise sales will depend on your deprioritizing 'number of touches' and 'perfecting your pitches' and instead, placing the highest value on knowing your customers intimately.

As a rule of thumb:

You cannot sell into a company whose services and value you could not sell.

😡 rant

✍️ Sales advice

😎 Sales Skills

17 comments

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Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

This correlates to my general crankiness toward KPIs that don’t align with actual sales success.

aenima

Celebrated Contributor

Principal Account Manager

Yup. Most sales KPIs are written by inexperienced and untalented sales managers who feel the need to regulate individuals rather than enable productive activity that serves their clients.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

It’s all in aid of being able to “measure” success, so they need data points. To be fair, understanding the activities of your best reps can help guide the training of new or underperforming reps, but I’ve found that the KPIs are rarely used that way. After all, if your best rep is doing 10 calls a day, surely 20 is better - which leads to micro focus on the wrong things. Sigh.

aenima

Celebrated Contributor

Principal Account Manager

I don’t think it’s proving success. I think in most cases it’s justifying their job. What’s odd to me, is that calls/emails/etc are all IC tasks — there is little to no value in managing what ICs are doing. The value a manger brings is the very fact they aren’t bogged down by IC tasks, allowing them the time to focus on field enablement and go to market strategies.

I think sales people are egotistical and always full of excuses when they come up short. When I was the Director of Growth, I looked at my job as eliminating every excuse a sales person could have.

What’s funny is my sales reps were always wanting to bring me into deals, unsolicited by me. Versus most sales managers… reps keep them away from their deals with a 10-foot pole.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I’m fortunate in that I will not hesitate to bring my manager in. She’s fantastic and I enjoy watching her work her magic. Glad your reps had the same confidence in you.

IndianaShep

Politicker

Director of Sales and Marketing

Can you please log your complaint to the CRM? That would be greeeaaaattt.

nomdeguerre

Executive

Account executive

When a measure becomes the goal it stops being a good measure. I don't think there is anything wrong with having lagging indicator goals, as it shows you what you are doing is working. The problem is that most sales organization spends every day talking about how we improve our KPIs, what they fail to understand is that you can't actually improve those KPIs because they are outputs, what you need to focus on are the inputs. Meaning the actions and behaviors that drive the outputs.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

I would agree. Organizations often fail to improving the parameters that can improve the overall success.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Too true

bandabanda

Tycoon

Senior AE Mid Market

Completely agree. It’s gotta be a peer to peer or consultative conversation to earn their trust and eventually their business.

Just curious, what do you sell?

aenima

Celebrated Contributor

Principal Account Manager

I help a large federal agency apply cloud computing to their mission. My background is in data centers and networking.

IndianaShep

Politicker

Director of Sales and Marketing

Love the parting thought. Basically the only value that comes out of the Challenger model. Don't @ me. :)

Maximas

Tycoon

Senior Sales Executive

I guess I would agree with that.

aenima

Celebrated Contributor

Principal Account Manager

I guess I appreciate your agreeableness.

Jaytea

Catalyst

N/A

Love this post

Xthanthus

Good Citizen

Professional Territory Manager

I would add that the value you bring is in solving their pain.. discovery is all about figuring what that pain is and then making your service/good the solution to help heal the wound.

aenima

Celebrated Contributor

Principal Account Manager

I’ll make one minor correction to this: solution selling is a bad term because it forces sales reps to treat discovery myopically. Solution selling is simply leading the witness, where you ask questions that are, at the end of the day, self serving. They aim to show your product value, not for you to truly understand their business.

Discovery should be ongoing without a sales cycle to drive it. My goal is to know things about their business that they don’t know, unrelated to my product or service.

That makes them shit their pants.

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aenima

You’re Doing Sales Wrong

17 comments

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